The Age of Lincoln and the Art of American Power, 1848-1876

by Nester, William

  22. Speech, November 13, 1847, in The Papers of Henry Clay, ed. James F. Hopkins, 10 vols. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1959–92), 10:361–77.

  23. Frederick J. Blue, The Free Soilers: Third Party Politics, 1848–1854 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973); Jonathan Halperin Earle, Jacksonian Antislavery and the Politics of Free Soil, 1824–1854 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).

  24. Kwame Anthony Appiah, introduction to Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave” and “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl” (New York: Modern Library, 2004).

  2. YOUNG LINCOLN

  1. John Scripps to William Herndon, June 24, 1865, in Herndon’s Informants: Letters, Interviews, and Statements about Abraham Lincoln, ed. Douglas L. Wilson and Rodney O. Davis (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 57. For the most detailed book on Lincoln’s younger years, see Albert J. Beveridge, Abraham Lincoln, 1809–1858, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1928). For the best book on his psychological development, see Michael Burlingame, The Inner World of Abraham Lincoln (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994).

  2. Abraham Lincoln to John Johnston, January 13, 1851, Lincoln Works, 2:96–97.

  3. Abraham Lincoln to Andrew Johnston, April 18, 1846, Lincoln Writings, 287–88.

  4. Abraham Lincoln to Albert Hodges, April 4,1864, Lincoln Writings, 807.

  5. For the best book on this period of his life, see Benjamin P. Thomas, Lincoln’s New Salem (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1954).

  6. Wilson and Davis, Herndon’s Informants, 372–73. See Harry E. Pratt, “Lincoln in the Black Hawk War,” Bulletin of the Abraham Lincoln Association 54 (December 1938): 2–13.

  7. Lincoln’s First Public Address, March 9, 1832, Lincoln Writings, 221–24.

  8. For the best books on Lincoln as a lawyer, see Albert A. Woldman, Lawyer Lincoln (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,1936); John J. Duff, A. Lincoln: Prairie Lawyer (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1960); John P. Frank, Lincoln as a Lawyer (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1961).

  9. For the best book on this period of his life, see Paul Simon, Lincoln’s Preparations for Greatness: The Illinois Legislative Years (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971).

  10. Resolutions by the General Assembly of the State of Illinois, Note 2 of Protest in Illinois Legislature on Slavery, March 3, 1837, Lincoln Works, 1:75.

  11. First Debate, Ottawa, August 21, 1858, Lincoln Works, 3:29.

  12. Eulogy on Henry Clay, July 6, 1852, Lincoln Works, 2:126.

  13. Daniel Walker Howe, “Why Lincoln Was a Whig,” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association 16, no. 1 (Winter 1995): 27–38. For Clay’s most comprehensive biography, see Robert V. Remini, Henry Clay: Statesman for the Union (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991).

  14. Eulogy on Henry Clay, July 6, 1852, Lincoln Works, 2:126; Gabor S. Boritt, Lincoln and the Economics of the American Dream (Memphis: Memphis State University Press, 1978); William Nester, The Hamiltonian Vision, 1789–1800: The Art of American Power during the Early Republic (Washington DC: Potomac Books, 2012).

  15. For the best book on the Springfield years, see Paul M. Angle, “Here I Have Lived”: A History of Lincoln’s Springfield, 1821–1865 (New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1950).

  16. William H. Herndon and Jesse W. Weik, Herndon’s Lincoln, ed. Douglas L. Wilson and Rodney O. Davis (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006). See also Wilson and Davis, Herndon’s Informants.

  17. Notes for a Law Lecture, July 1, 1850, Lincoln Writings, 329.

  18. Thomas F. Schwartz, “The Springfield Lyceum and Lincoln’s 1838 Speech,” Illinois Historical Journal 83 (1990): 45–49. For leading works on Lincoln’s political philosophy, see James G. Randall, Lincoln the Liberal Statesman (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1947); Richard Current, ed., The Political Thought of Abraham Lincoln (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967); John Thomas, ed., Abraham Lincoln and the American Political Tradition (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986).

  19. “The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions,” January 27, 1838, Lincoln Works, 1:108–15.

  20. Abraham Lincoln to James Shields, September 17, 1842; Memorandum of Instructions to E. H. Merryman, Lincoln’s Second in the Lincoln-Shields Duel, September 19, 1842; Abraham Lincoln to Joshua Speed, October 4, 1842, Lincoln Writings, 273–74, 274–75, 276–77.

  21. David Herbert Donald, Lincoln (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), 68.

  22. Abraham Lincoln to Mary Owens, May 7, 1837, Lincoln Writings, 228–29.

  23. Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006), 93.

  24. Announcement of Political Views, June 13, 1836, Lincoln Works, 1:48.

  25. Isaac Cogdal interview, in Wilson and Davis, Herndon’s Informants, 440.

  26. Abraham Lincoln to Mary Owens, May 7, August 16, 1837, Lincoln Writings, 228–29, 230–31.

  27. Abraham Lincoln to Mrs. Orville Browning, April 1, 1838, Lincoln Works, 1:118–19.

  28. For the best books on his marriage, see Ruth Painter Randall, Mary Lincoln: Biography of a Marriage (Boston: Little, Brown, 1953); Ruth Painter Randall, The Courtship of Mr. Lincoln (Boston: Little, Brown, 1957); Jean H. Baker, Mary Todd Lincoln: A Biography (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987).

  29. Donald, Lincoln, 85.

  30. William H. Herndon and Jesse W. Weik, Herndon’s Lincoln: The True Story of a Great Life, 3 vols. (Chicago: Belford, Clarke, 1889), 2:213.

  31. Abraham Lincoln to John Stuart, January 23, 1841; Abraham Lincoln to Joshua Speed, January 3, February 3, 13, 25 (two letters), March 27, July 4, 1842, Lincoln Writings, 247, 255–57, 257–59, 267–69, 270–71, 271–73.

  32. Abraham Lincoln to Samuel Marshall, November 11, 1842, Lincoln Works, 1:305.

  33. Donald W. Riddle, Lincoln Runs for Congress (New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1948); Paul Findley, A. Lincoln: The Crucible of Congress (New York: Crown, 1979).

  34. Handbill Replying to Charges of Infidelity, July 3, 1846, Lincoln Writings, 1:382–84.

  35. Carl Schurz, The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz, 3 vols. (New York: McClure, 1907).

  36. Herndon and Weik, Herndon’s Lincoln (1889), 3:586.

  37. Beveridge, Abraham Lincoln, 2:359.

  38. For psychological studies of Lincoln, see Richard Current, The Lincoln That Nobody Knows (New York: Hill and Wang, 1958); George B. Forgie, Patricide in the House Divided: A Psychological Interpretation of Lincoln and His Age (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979); Michael Paul Rogin, “The King’s Two Bodies: Abraham Lincoln, Richard Nixon, and Presidential Self-Sacrifice,” Massachusetts Review 20 (Autumn 1979): 553–73; Dwight G. Anderson, Abraham Lincoln: The Quest for Immortality (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982); George M. Frederickson, “Lincoln and His Legend,” New York Review of Books, July 15, 1982, 13–16; Charles B. Strozier, Lincoln’s Quest for Union: Public and Private Meanings (New York: Basic Books, 1982); Richard N. Current, “Lincoln after 175 Years: The Myth of the Jealous Son,” Papers of the Abraham Lincoln Association 6 (1984): 15–24; James Chowning Davis, “Lincoln: The Saint and the Man,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 17 (Winter 1987): 25–35; Gabor S. Boritt, The Historian’s Lincoln: Pseudohistory, Psychohistory, and History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988); Burlingame, Inner World of Abraham Lincoln; Allen C. Guelzo, “Abraham Lincoln and the Doctrine of Necessity,” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association 18, no. 1 (Winter 1997): 57–81; Gabor Boritt, ed., The Lincoln Enigma: The Changing Faces of an American Icon (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).

  39. Speech at Springfield, Illinois, June 16, 1858, Lincoln Writings, 429.

  40. Allen T. Rice, ed., Reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln by Distinguished Men of His Time (New York: North American Publishing, 1886), 575–76.

  41. Abraham Lincoln to Mary Lincoln, April 16, June 12, 1848, Lincoln Writings, 313, 315.

  42. Abraham Lincoln to Mary Speed
, September 27, 1841, Lincoln Works, 1:261.

  43. William J. Wolf, The Almost Chosen People: A Study of the Religion of Abraham Lincoln (Garden City NY: Doubleday, 1959); Hans Morgenthau and David Hein, eds., Essays on Lincoln’s Faith and Politics (Lanham MD: University Press of America, 1983).

  44. Goodwin, Team of Rivals, 56.

  45. Farewell Address at Springfield, February 11, 1861, Lincoln Works, 4:190.

  46. Noyes Miner, “Personal Recollections of Abraham Lincoln,” 46–48, quoted in Richard Carwardine, “Lincoln, Evangelical Religion, and American Political Culture in the Era of the Civil War,” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association 18, no. 1 (Winter 1997): 51.

  47. Handbill Replying to Charges of Infidelity, July 3, 1846, Lincoln Writings, 1:382–84.

  48. Abraham Lincoln to Oliver Morton, February 11, 1861, Lincoln Works, 4:194.

  49. Abraham Lincoln to Albert Hodges, April 4,1864, Lincoln Works, 7:282.

  50. Abraham Lincoln to William Herndon, July 10, June 22, 1848, Lincoln Writings, 320, 316. For a critical account of Lincoln as a self-made man, see the chapter “Abraham Lincoln and the Self-Made Myth” in Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It (New York: Vintage, 1989), 119–74.

  51. Herndon and Weik, Herndon’s Lincoln (1889), 2:306.

  52. Handbill Replying to Charges of Infidelity, July 31, 1846, Lincoln Works, 1:382.

  53. Lincoln’s First Public Address, March 9, 1832, Lincoln Writings, 224.

  3. UNCLE TOM’S CABIN

  1. Forrest Wilson, Crusader in Crinoline: The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1941), 484–85. See also Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, an Annotated Edition, ed. Philip Van Doren Stern (New York: P. S. Erikson, 1964).

  2. Joan D. Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 211–15; Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin: A Norton Critical Edition, ed. Elizabeth Ammons (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994).

  3. Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in America (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Slave-holding Republic: An Account of the United States Government’s Relation to Slavery (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton, Slavery and the Making of America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).

  4. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, ed. William Peden (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1955), 162, 138.

  5. Alexander Keysar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 336–41.

  6. Aileen S. Kraditor, Means and Ends in American Abolitionism: Garrison and His Critics on Strategy and Tactics, 1834–1850 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1969); Gerald Sorin, Abolitionism: A New Perspective (New York: Praeger, 1972); Lewis Perry, Radical Abolitionism: Anarchy and the Government of God in Antislavery Thought (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1973); Ronald Walters, The Antislavery Appeal: American Abolitionism after 1830 (Baltimore MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976); James Bremer Steward, Holy Warriors: The Abolitionists and American Slavery (New York: Hill and Wang, 1976); Richard Sewell, Ballots for Freedom: Antislavery Politics in the United States, 1837–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976); William Wiecek, The Sources of Antislavery Constitutionalism, 1760–1848 (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1977); John R. McKivigan, The War against Proslavery Religion: Abolitionism and the Northern Churches (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1984); Edward Magdol, The Antislavery Rank and File: A Social Profile of the Abolitionists’ Constituency (Westport CT: Greenwood Press, 1986); Jean Fagan Yellin and John C. Van Horne, eds., The Abolitionist Sisterhood: Women’s Political Culture in Antebellum America (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1994); Stanley Harrold, The Abolitionists and the South, 1831–1861 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1995); Julie Roy Jeffrey, The Great Silent Army of Abolitionism: Ordinary Women in the Antislavery Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); John Stauffer, The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2002); Richard Newman, The Transformation of American Abolitionism: Fighting Slavery in the Early Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Michael D. Pierson, Free Hearts, Free Homes: Gender and American Antislavery Politics (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Eric Burin, Slavery and the Peculiar Institution: A History of the American Colonization Society (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005); Timothy Patrick McCarthy and John Stauffer, eds., Prophets of Protest: Reconsidering the History of American Abolitionism (New York: New Press, 2006).

  7. Henry Mayer, All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998).

  8. William Lloyd Garrison, Selections from the Writings and Speeches of William Lloyd Garrison (New York: New American, 1964), 110.

  9. Louis Filler, The Crusade against Slavery, 1820–1860 (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1960), 18.

  10. Patrick Rael, Black Identity and Black Protest in the Antebellum North (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002).

  11. Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave, Written by Himself, ed. David W. Blight (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s Press, 2003); Philip Foner, ed., Frederick Douglass on Slavery and the Civil War: Selections from His Writings (Mineola NY: Dover, 2003); Eric Foner, Frederick Douglass: A Biography (New York: Citadel Press, 1964); Waldo E. Martin, The Mind of Frederick Douglass (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984); William S. McFeely, Frederick Douglass (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991).

  12. David Grimsted, American Mobbing, 1828–1861: Toward Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); John McKivigan and Stanley Harrold, eds., Antislavery Violence: Sectional, Racial, and Cultural Conflict in Antebellum America (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1999).

  13. Avery O. Craven, The Growth of Southern Nationalism, 1848–1861 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1953); William R. Taylor, Cavalier and Yankee: The Old South and American National Character (New York: G. Braziller, 1957); Ronald T. Takaki, A Pro-slavery Crusade: The Agitation to Reopen the African Slave Trade (New York: Free Press, 1971); John McCardell, The Idea of a Southern Nation: Southern Nationalists and Southern Nationalism, 1830–1860 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979); Drew Gilpin Faust, ed., The Ideology of Slavery: Pro-slavery Thought in the Antebellum South, 1830–1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981); Larry E. Tise, Proslavery: A History of the Defense of Slavery in America, 1701–1840 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987); Eric Walther, The Fire-Eaters (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992); Elizabeth Moss, Domestic Novelists in the Old South: Defenders of Southern Culture (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992); Mitchell Snay, The Gospel of Disunion: Religion and Separatism in the Antebellum South (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Leonard L. Richards, The Slave Power: The Free North and Southern Domination, 1780–1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000); William C. Davis, Rhett: The Turbulent Life and Times of a Fire-Eater (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001); Paul Finkelman, Defending Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Old South (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s Press, 2003); Lorman A. Ratner and Dwight L. Teeter, Fanatics and Fire-Eaters: Newspapers and the Coming of the Civil War (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2003); Michael O’Brien, Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810–1860, 2 vols. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Adam L. Tate, Conservatism and Southern Intellectuals, 1789–1861: Liberty, Tradition, and the Good Society (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2005); Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene D. Genovese, The Mind of the Master Class: History and Faith in the Southern Slaveholders’ Worldview (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

  14. C
ohens v. Virginia, 6 Wheat. 264 at 413–14 (1821).

  15. Elizabeth R. Varon, Disunion!: The Coming of the American Civil War, 1789–1859 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 82.

  16. Calhoun and Yancey quotes from James M. McPherson, Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 50; Harvey Wish, George Fitzhugh, Propagandist of the Old South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1943).

  17. James Oakes, The Ruling Race: A History of American Slaveholders (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982), 141.

  18. Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982).

  19. Harvey Wish, ed., Ante-Bellum: The Writings of George Fitzhugh and Hinton Rowan Helper on Slavery (New York: Capricorn, 1960); Davis, Rhett.

  20. David M. Potter, The Impending Crisis, 1848–1861 (New York: Harper and Row, 1976), 124.

  21. Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 72.

  22. James L. Huston, Calculating the Value of the Union: Slavery, Property Rights, and the Economic Origins of the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003).

  23. For the best books on all or part of this thirteen-year period, see Allan Nevins, Ordeal of the Union: Fruits of Manifest Destiny, 1847–1852 (New York: Charles Scribners’ Sons, 1947); Allen Nevins, Ordeal of the Union: A House Dividing, 1852–1857 (New York: Charles Scribners’ Sons, 1947); Russell Welter, The Mind of America, 1820–1860 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975); Potter, Impending Crisis; Michael F. Holt, The Political Crisis of the 1850s (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1978; repr., New York: W. W. Norton, 1983); Mark W. Summers, The Plundering Generation: Corruption and the Crisis of the Union, 1849–1861 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Richard H. Sewell, A House Divided: Sectionalism and the Civil War, 1848–1865 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988); William W. Freehling, The Road to Disunion: Secessionists at Bay, 1776–1854 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Michael F. Holt, Political Parties and American Political Development from the Age of Jackson to the Age of Lincoln (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992); David Ericson, The Shaping of American Liberalism: The Debates over Ratification, Nullification, and Slavery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); Eric H. Walther, The Shattering of the Union: America in the 1850s (Wilmington DE: Scholarly Resources, 2004); Bruce Levine, Half Slave and Half Free: The Roots of Civil War (New York: Hill and Wang, 2005); William W. Freehling, The Road to Disunion: Secessionists Triumphant (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).