"We Cannot Escape History": Lincoln and the Last Best Hope of Earth (review)

250CIVIL WAR HISTORY "We Cannot Escape History": Lincoln and the Last Best Hope ofEarth. Edited by James M. McPherson. (Urbana: University ofIllinois Press, 1995. Pp. 176. $27.95.) This slender volume contains nine papers, varying widely in quality, delivered at a 1993 Huntington Library symposium. In his introduction, James M. McPherson examines thoughtfully the way that other nations regarded the American Civil War and the stakes involved. Richard N. Current's "What Is an American? Abraham Lincoln and Multiculturalism " forcefully argues that the sixteenth president would reject the balkanization of the U. S. espoused by multiculturalists like the authors of the 1 99 1 Report of the New York State Social Studies Review and Development Committee. To Lincoln, "an American is a citizen who, regardless of ancestry, believes in the democratic principles on which the Republic was founded" (135). Current might have added that Lincoln would have scant patience with today's "cult of true victimhood." In 1 848 he told his law partner that he should not wallow in the belief that he and other younger Whigs were being victimized by older members of the party: "The way for a young man to rise, is to improve himself every way he can, never suspecting that any body wishes to hinder him. Allow me to assure you, that suspicion and jealousy never did help any man in any situation" (July 10, 1848). Kenneth M. Stampp scrutinizes Lincoln's use of history in the 1838 Lyceum Address, the 1 858 debates with Stephen A. Douglas, and his two inaugural addresses , stressing the tension between historical determinism and free will in his thinking. Stampp generally awards Lincoln high marks for accuracy as a historian. Jean H. Baker favorably and sensibly contrasts Lincoln's benign understanding of America's distinctiveness with the imperialist view of twentiethcentury chauvinists like Henry Luce. Baker errs, however, in stating that Lincoln's racial views offered merely "a restricted economic equality" (41). In his final speech, on April 11, 1865, he endorsed limited black suffrage, a politically risky stand for which he paid with his life three days later. Phillip Shaw Paludan deftly exposes the fallacy in Mark Neely's contention that "as an antislavery man, Lincoln had a natural affinity not for the Constitution . . . but for the Declaration of Independence" (48). In fact, Paludan persuasively argues, Lincoln "was equally committed to the political constitutional system and to the ideal of equality" (48). His "process-based egalitarianism" (57) is particularly relevant to our time, when advocates of racial justice sometimes ignore procedural niceties (e.g., the Georgetown University law professor who urges blackjuries to find innocent, no matter how overwhelming the evidence against the defendants might be, all blacks charged with drug crimes or crimes against property involving no personal injury). William E. Gienapp evaluates Lincoln as a party leader, a manager of the executive branch, a partner with Congress, a shaper of foreign relations and military affairs, and a leader of the people. He judiciously concludes that "in every regard, Lincoln was a superior president" (79). BOOK REVIEWS25I Mark E. Neely, Jr., attacks the interpretation, made most explicitly by Eric McKitrick, "that attributes northern victory in the war in part to the superiority of their two-party political system" (87). In condemning the failure of that system, Neely fails to note that the death of Stephen A. Douglas in June 1 86 1 deprived the Democrats of the kind of leadership that might have made the opposition party far more responsible than it became under leaders like Horatio Seymour and Clement L. Vallandigham. Merrill D. Peterson's "The International Lincoln," derived largely from his estimable 1994 book Lincoln in American Memory, explores Lincoln's fame abroad in the first quarter of the twentieth century, focusing most closely on Great Britain. He concludes that "the identification of American ideals with the Allied cause in World War I . . . consummated Lincoln's international fame" ( 1 59). Harold Holzer's sneering analysis of "the surprisingly hollow legacy of Lincoln's lackluster impromptu oratory" (115) will astonish readers familiar with Lincoln's farewell address to Springfield. Holzer's essay extends an argument he made in his recent wrongheaded edition of the Lincoln...