Abraham Lincoln, Constitutionalism, and Equal Rights in the Civil War Era [Paperback]

This striking portrait of Abraham Lincoln found in this book is drawn entirely from the writing of his contemporaries and extends from his political beginnings in Springfield to his assassination. It reveals a more severely beleaguered, less godlike, and finally a richer Lincoln than has come through many of the biographies of Lincoln written at a distance after his death. To those who are familiar only with the various retouched versions of Lincolns life, Abraham Lincoln: A Press Portrait will be a welcomeif sometimes surprisingaddition to the literature surrounding the man who is perhaps the central figure in all of American history.

The brutality, indeed that malignancy of some of the treatment Lincoln received at the hands of the press may well shock those readers who believe the second half of the twentieth century has a monopoly on the journalism of insult, outrage, and indignation. That Lincoln acted with the calm and clarity he did under the barrage of such attacks can only enhance his stature as one of the great political leaders of any nation at any time.

The American mind has long been divided over whether Abraham Lincoln was a tyrannical megalomaniac bent on trampling constitutional restraints to restore the Union and free the slaves or whether he was in fact a Henry Clay conservative Whig operating strictly within constitutional parameters. Two recent collections suggest persuasively that Lincoln was indeed operating carefully and very consciously within constitutional limits, albeit with a definite agenda to expand those limits (as Garry Wills and others have suggested), to embrace Jefferson's grander vision of human rights expressed in the Declaration of Independence. This volume of essays by Belz (Univ. of Maryland), an eminent Lincoln constitutional authority, explores in an intriguing interdisciplinary methodology Lincoln's constitutional orientation in prosecuting the war, freeing the slaves, and providing a blueprint for Reconstrl¢