Lincoln and the Thirteenth Amendment by Christian G. Samito (review)

“We should not see Lincoln’s career as a straight line leading to emancipation,” Eric Foner once wisely cautioned. But Christian G. Samito thinks Lincoln’s apparent deviations from the straight line never were more than tactical. This brisk new study for the Concise Lincoln Library places Lincoln on a high pedestal. He understood all along, Samito contends, that slavery contradicted the American nation’s most basic principles and endangered its existence. He saw slavery as a cancer that needed to be excised. He was, furthermore, a champion of equal rights.

Samito marginalizes instances in which Lincoln deviated from the straight line, and he recognizes that Lincoln long opposed any interference with slavery in the states where it already existed and even went so far as to accept a constitutional amendment to this effect in his first inaugural address. Samito dutifully discusses Lincoln’s annual message to Congress in December 1862, which offered the slave states a plan for compensated, gradual emancipation extending to the year 1900, with freed slaves to be colonized overseas. But in the end, Samito judges, these “ill conceived” and “expedient” proposals did not show the real Lincoln (25, 38, 41).

Samito’s book necessarily focuses on events of 1864 and 1865, when the Thirteenth Amendment cleared both houses of Congress by two-thirds majorities and became part of the Constitution once it was ratified by three quarters of the states. Having long resisted a constitutional amendment, after his reelection in November 1864, Lincoln became its forceful advocate. The key arena was the House of Representatives, which had failed to reach the necessary two-thirds threshold when it first voted in June 1864, with Lincoln largely on the sidelines. But a second vote on January 31, 1865, had a different result. Samito applauds Lincoln’s leadership and exonerates him from persistent accusations that he used underhanded means; the president relied instead on “moral and political suasion” (102).

Many of this book’s readers will be familiar with Steven Spielberg’s film, Lincoln, which offers a dramatized version of the struggle to reverse the initial House vote. Samito made an “explicit choice” to steer clear of the movie (3). But his account implicitly questions Spielberg’s use of sources. For example, Samito rejects a long-after-the-fact reminiscence that had Lincoln purportedly announcing: “I am President of the United States, clothed with immense power, and I expect you to procure those votes.” Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals legitimized this bombastic fiction, but Samito sensibly decides that such language was “overly dramatic and out of character” (95).

In the end, this book is celebratory—a lawyer’s brief that Lincoln always did everything he could to rid the nation of slavery and secure equal rights. Samito provides a crisp, tightly written case for a Lincoln that modern Americans can feel good about. It will appeal to those who want history to inspire and reassure. And even if Lincoln and the Thirteenth Amendment offers less detail than related books by Michael Vorenberg and Leonard Richards, it stands as one of the three authoritative studies of the subject.

But an honest assessment of America’s bittersweet history requires more nuance. A growing body of scholarship on Atlantic history and the history of the Early American Republic reminds us that slavery was central to the entire New World enterprise, including the United States. Samito, like Lincoln, contends that slavery endangered “the principles imparted by the Founders” (1). It did, but Union mattered more for the Founders than antislavery principles, and so they wrote a Constitution with safeguards for slavery.

Lincoln abhorred slavery and looked forward to its “ultimate extinction.” Yet he revered the Constitution and the Union, and he feared the antislavery cause was stalled. Emancipation, he once candidly admitted, might require a century. Slavery came to a sudden and unexpected end only because white southerners made the rash and suicidal decision to risk a war for...