Abstract
In the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln’s birth, we justly celebrate his character, ideals, and strategies, finding new depths in his virtues. It is tempting to imagine that the halting and hard-won evolution of Lincoln’s ideas and strategies on emancipation marked the moral growth of white America during the Civil War. But that story, implicit and explicit in many portrayals of Lincoln, embodied in our monuments to him and inscribed in our favorite quotations, underestimates Lincoln’s greatest accomplishment.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
See Gabor Boritt, The Gettysburg Gospel: The Lincoln Speech That Nobody Knows (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006), pp. 191–192.
See Menahem Blondheim, “‘Public Sentiment is Everything’: The Union’s Public Communications Strategy and the Bogus Proclamation of 1864,” Journal of American History 89:3 (December 2002), pp. 869–899.
John C. Waugh, Reelecting Lincoln: The Battle for the 1864 Presidency (New York: Crown, 1997), pp. 11–12.
Valley Spirit, July 20, 1864; Thurlow “Weed, quoted in David E. Long, The jewel of Liberty: Abraham Lincoln’s Re-election and the End of Slavery (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 1994), p. 45.
For the larger context, see Adam I.P. Smith, No Party Now: Politics in the Civil War North (New York: Oxford, 2006)
See Joel H. Silbey, A Respectable Minority: The Democratic Party in the Civil War Era, 1860–1868 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), pp. 239–240.
Michael Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln: A Life (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008).
Valley Spirit, March 8, 1865. A recent study by a political scientist has found that presidents’ words in general have less impact than we might imagine. See George C. Edwards III, On Deaf Ears: The Limits of the Bully Pulpit (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003).
Quoted in George M. Fredrickson, Big Enough to Be Inconsistent: Abraham Lincoln Confronts Slavery and Race (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008), p. 126.
Editor information
Copyright information
© 2010 George R. Goethals and Gary L. McDowell
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Ayers, E.L. (2010). What Lincoln Was Up Against: The Context of Leadership. In: Goethals, G.R., McDowell, G.L. (eds) Lincoln’s Legacy of Leadership. Jepson Studies in Leadership. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230104563_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230104563_2
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-38439-6
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-10456-3
eBook Packages: Palgrave Business & Management CollectionBusiness and Management (R0)