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Title: Prelude to Greatness Lincoln in the 1850's by D.E. Fehrenbacher ISBN: 0-8047-0120-2 Publisher: Stanford University Press Pub. Date: 01 June, 1962 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $18.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 5 (1 review)
Rating: 5
Summary: Great and concise look at the turmoil of the 1850s
Comment: In this short, carefully- and concisely-argued book, the author does an excellent job in situating Lincoln within the political setting of the 1850s and in describing the course of events that resulted in his election to the Presidency. This book is largely an answer to those who would contend that Lincoln showed little promise of greatness before supposedly stumbling into the Presidency, where it is acknowledged even by those critics that he rose to the heights demanded by the times. The author certainly admits to the elements of circumstance in Lincoln's ascent. He was a Whig, or a moderate, in a state Illinois that had become increasingly important in national elections.
While it may have appeared that Lincoln was politically dormant in the early 50s, his behind-the-scenes political activity became obvious when he became a key anti-Nebraska activist in 1854. As a Whig, Lincoln lost a very close contest in the Illinois legislature for the U.S. Senate (legislatures elected senators in that era). From 1854 to 1856 it had become obvious that both the Whigs and the upstart Know-Nothings could not deal with the slavery issue, which led to their demise. By 1856 Lincoln had finished second in the running for the Vice-Presidential nomination at the first national Republican convention, and in the process had firmly established himself as a leading Republican in Illinois.
It was the continued Kansas crisis and the Dred Scott Supreme Court decision in March of 1857 and the reactions to them that put Lincoln on the national stage. The court decision had affirmed the repeal of the Missouri Compromise in the Kansas-Nebraska Act under a principle of Congressional non-intervention in territories. But Senator Stephen Douglas contended that his doctrine of popular sovereignty continued to hold. Both Lincoln and most Republicans found the indifference or neutrality of popular sovereignty to the spread of slavery to be repugnant. Thus began a series of exchanges and seven formal debates between Douglas and Lincoln before the elections of 1858.
As a senator from mostly anti-slavery Illinois, Douglas had been forced, at the end of 1857, to denounce the machinations of the proslavery element in Kansas in trying to force their constitution on a mostly slave-free territory. In a shrewd and unprecedented political move, Illinois Republicans nominated Lincoln for the U. S. Senate to counter the infatuation of Eastern Republicans with the newly recreated Douglas. Lincoln fired the first shot in the senatorial campaign with his famous "House Divided" speech where he insisted that a nation divided over slavery could not stand.
One of the more controversial ideas that emerged from the debates was Douglas' Freeport Doctrine. In skirting Lincoln's question of whether territorial legislatures could exclude slavery, Douglas claimed that such a legislature's failure to pass laws that favorably policed slavery was tantamount to formally excluding it. The Democratic illusion that non-intervention and popular sovereignty were benignly equivalent had been exploded. According to the author "Southerners could see the walls closing in on them, and the defection of Douglas vividly dramatized the growing isolation of slave society." Ignoring Dred Scott, the South began to insist on the enactment of positive slave codes for the explicit protection of slavery in territories.
Lincoln narrowly lost the senatorial contest in Illinois in 1858, but the issue of slavery had been discussed on the national stage, as it never had been before. While Lincoln had asked the hard questions about slavery, he remained a moderate in Republican circles, and, as such, perhaps the only Republican that could have been elected President in 1860. It is clear that Lincoln had no intention of attacking the institution of slavery in the South. The Southern demand for slave codes applicable to territories was simply irrational given the fact that it was generally agreed upon that no territories were even suitable for slavery. It is most clear from reading this book that had the extremists of the South permitted Lincoln to exercise the fundamental decency and strength of character that he had, that there would have been no reason to precipitate the destruction of an entire way of life.
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Title: Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War by Eric Foner ISBN: 0195094972 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: 01 April, 1995 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
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Title: The Impending Crisis: 1848-1861 by David Morris Potter ISBN: 0061319295 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 01 May, 1976 List Price(USD): $17.00 |
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Title: The Dred Scott Case: Its Significance in American Law and Politics by Don E. Fehrenbacher ISBN: 0195145887 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: 01 April, 2001 List Price(USD): $22.50 |
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Title: Divided Houses: Gender and the Civil War by Catherine Clinton, Nina Silber ISBN: 0195080343 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: 01 September, 1992 List Price(USD): $21.50 |
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Title: Crisis of the House Divided: An Interpretation of the Issues in the Lincoln-Douglas Debates by Harry Jaffa ISBN: 0226391132 Publisher: University of Chicago Press Pub. Date: 01 February, 1999 List Price(USD): $22.50 |
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