The Age of Lincoln (review)

J A N U A R Y 2 0 1 1 63 The Age of Lincoln. By Orville Vernon Burton. New York: Hill and Wang, 2007. 420 pp. $32.95. ISBN 978-0-8090-9513-1. In The Legacy of the Civil War, Robert Penn Warren memorably described the Civil War as “our only ‘felt’ history” because it continues to live in our imaginations. Orville Vernon Burton echoes this sentiment at the conclusion of The Age of Lincoln when he observes that “the war is with us still, as myth and reality both” (p. 369). Few would dispute the prominent place that the war and its aftermath have occupied in the imaginations of generations of Americans, yet a consensus on the causes and meaning of the war has been elusive. For Warren this lack of agreement further illustrates the enduring significance of the war and the complicated nature of the various meanings associated with it. Perhaps best known for his monograph that examines how the community of Edgefield County, South Carolina, struggled with the transition from slavery to freedom, Burton widens his lens considerably in The Age of Lincoln by offering a synthesis of nineteenth-century America that attempts to separate myth from reality. The result is a rich, original narrative that captures much of the complexity of this epochal era. For Burton, a struggle for freedom shaped and defined the nineteenth century. Millennial perfectionism and democratic egalitarianism ultimately could not be peacefully reconciled with the institution of chattel slavery that was supported by the well-entrenched racism pervading the entire country. Burton’s narrative is essentially a tragic story, for while he celebrates the triumph of Lincoln’s expansive view of human freedom that prevailed in the Civil War, he laments the failure during Reconstruction to make biracial democracy a permanent fixture in American society. Burton also argues that the forces of industrial capitalism destroyed another key aspect of Lincoln’s vision: the level playing field or the right of all men to have an equal opportunity to prosper. Lincoln, according to Burton, “inadvertently unleashed the worst as well as the best angels of democratic capitalism,” and by the end of the century robber barons had acquired much of the wealth and effectively crushed attempts by workers to acquire their own fair share (p. 5). Burton’s exploration of the nineteenth century is wide-ranging and based upon an impressive array of both primary and secondary sources. The book is divided into fourteen chapters, and after an opening chapter that offers an overview of the intellectual, social, economic, and religious currents that shaped the early part of the century, the next four chapters focus on the causes of the Civil War. In addition to discussing the origins T H E A L A B A M A R E V I E W 64 of the abolition movement and the importance of religion to both opponents and supporters of slavery, Burton concludes that Preston Brooks’s caning of Charles Sumner did more than any other event in the 1850s to “propel the nation toward civil war” (p. 52). “Bleeding Sumner” provided the fledgling Republican Party with a potent symbol to rally around while supporters of slavery admired Brooks for defending southern honor and culture against northern aggression. Burton undermines his case for the centrality of Sumner’s caning when he makes an assertion, reminiscent of James G. Randall and the Revisionists, that the prospect of slavery spreading into Kansas was nothing more than an “abstract concept ,” because everyone at the time realized that climate and geography prevented slavery from being viable in the western territories (p. 76). Certainly Lincoln did not view the expansion of slavery into the territories as a mere abstraction, as Burton points out in his discussion of Lincoln’s response to the Dred Scott decision. Burton offers a succinct yet persuasive interpretation of Lincoln’s antislavery convictions and concludes that Lincoln’s opposition to slavery was genuine and based upon a firm belief in the principles of the Declaration of Independence. Lincoln’s views on racial equality defy neat categorization, for Burton believes Lincoln’s philosophy of statesmanship was a complex combination...