The fourth and final volume of J.G. Randall's monumental "Lincoln the President, a multivolume work considered by many to be indispensable to Lincoln scholars. Completed by Richard N. Current using the notes and drafts Randall left at his death, "Lincoln the President: Last Full Measure" describes the key events of Lincoln's administration from December 1863 to April 1865. These include his plan of reconstruction, the Thirteenth Amendment to abolish slavery, efforts for a negotiated peace, and foreign affairs during his last year in office.
Emphasizes the conservative bent that guided the young statesman's remarkable political evolution, revealing a Lincoln who was increasingly driven by his antislavery sentiments and fear for the republic in the hands of the Democrats like Stephen Douglas as much as--if not more than--his own political ambition.
Few politicians have fascinated the American people as much as Abraham Lincoln. The 1990s witnessed heightened interest in the sixteenth president and a flood of books about him that continues to the present. A recent tally indicates that at least 14,000 books and pamphlets have been written about him. The last guide to the best Lincoln books was produced in 1946. Since then several thousand more titles have been published. As a result, anyone interested in reading about him faces a daunting task in seeking out the books that offer the keenest insights into the man and the legend and lore that surround him. Michael Burkhimer's 100 Essential Lincoln Books offers a guide to this vast body of Lincoln literature. He chooses books that are indispensable for both book collectors and readers intent on learning more about Lincoln. The importance of each work is outlined with an emphasis on how it has contributed to Lincoln studies. Burkhimer's criteria for selection are based on the book's originality, sources, interpretations, writing style, and overall contribution. Titles are arranged chronologically in order of their first publication, ranging from 1866 (Francis B. Carpenter's Six Months at the While House with Abraham Lincoln) to 2002 (William Lee Miller's Lincoln's Virtues). The recent resurgence of interest in Lincoln is reflected in that almost one-third of the books described here have appeared since 1990. To further aid the curious Lincoln reader, each title is classified under a general heading, such as assassination, biography, family and genealogy, and reminiscences. Indexes of authors and headings are also included.
The Civil War placed the U.S. Constitution under unprecedented--and, to this day, still unmatched--strain. Neely examines for the first time in one book the U.S. Constitution and its often overlooked cousin, the Confederate Constitution, and the ways the documents shaped the struggle for national survival.
"Dr. Randall, whom Allan Nevins called 'the profoundest student of Lincoln's career,' portrays Lincoln's steadfast liberalism against the background of a blundering generation. Here the unpopular Lincoln is met; the troubled and worried Lincoln made human. The curious friendship between Lincoln and John Bright is traced and the influence each exerted on the other. From these pages Lincoln emerges as a great liberal statesman in all that the term implies" --Back cover.
Now an Apple TV+ documentary, Lincoln's Dilemma, airing February 18, 2022. One of the Wall Street Journal's Ten Best Books of the Year | A Washington Post Notable Book | A Christian Science Monitor and Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2020 Winner of the Gilder Lehrman Abraham Lincoln Prize and the Abraham Lincoln Institute Book Award "A marvelous cultural biography that captures Lincoln in all his historical fullness. . . . using popular culture in this way, to fill out the context surrounding Lincoln, is what makes Mr. Reynolds's biography so different and so compelling . . . Where did the sympathy and compassion expressed in [Lincoln's] Second Inaugural—'With malice toward none; with charity for all'—come from? This big, wonderful book provides the richest cultural context to explain that, and everything else, about Lincoln." —Gordon Wood, Wall Street Journal From one of the great historians of nineteenth-century America, a revelatory and enthralling new biography of Lincoln, many years in the making, that brings him to life within his turbulent age David S. Reynolds, author of the Bancroft Prize-winning cultural biography of Walt Whitman and many other iconic works of nineteenth century American history, understands the currents in which Abraham Lincoln swam as well as anyone alive. His magisterial biography Abe is the product of full-body immersion into the riotous tumult of American life in the decades before the Civil War. It was a country growing up and being pulled apart at the same time, with a democratic popular culture that reflected the country's contradictions. Lincoln's lineage was considered auspicious by Emerson, Whitman, and others who prophesied that a new man from the West would emerge to balance North and South. From New England Puritan stock on his father's side and Virginia Cavalier gentry on his mother's, Lincoln was linked by blood to the central conflict of the age. And an enduring theme of his life, Reynolds shows, was his genius for striking a balance between opposing forces. Lacking formal schooling but with an unquenchable thirst for self-improvement, Lincoln had a talent for wrestling and bawdy jokes that made him popular with his peers, even as his appetite for poetry and prodigious gifts for memorization set him apart from them through his childhood, his years as a lawyer, and his entrance into politics. No one can transcend the limitations of their time, and Lincoln was no exception. But what emerges from Reynolds's masterful reckoning is a man who at each stage in his life managed to arrive at a broader view of things than all but his most enlightened peers. As a politician, he moved too slowly for some and too swiftly for many, but he always pushed toward justice while keeping the whole nation in mind. Abe culminates, of course, in the Civil War, the defining test of Lincoln and his beloved country. Reynolds shows us the extraordinary range of cultural knowledge Lincoln drew from as he shaped a vision of true union, transforming, in Martin Luther King Jr.'s words, "the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood." Abraham Lincoln did not come out of nowhere. But if he was shaped by his times, he also managed at his life's fateful hour to shape them to an extent few could have foreseen. Ultimately, this is the great drama that astonishes us still, and that Abe brings to fresh and vivid life. The measure of that life will always be part of our American education.
