Frank and Virginia Williams Collection of Lincolniana (Mississippi State University. Libraries)

This sweeping narrative presents an original and compelling explanation for the triumph of the antislavery movement in the United States prior to the Civil War. Abraham Lincoln's election as the first antislavery president was hardly preordained. From the country's inception, Americans had struggled to define slavery's relationship to freedom. Most Northerners supported abolition in the North but condoned slavery in the South, while most Southerners...

"The first comprehensive history of the composition of one of the most famous and iconic speeches in American history, one that persuasively resolves previously unresolved issues relating the speech and enriches our understanding of how the speech reflected Lincoln's evolving ideas"--

After the Civil War the president and the Congress had a unique opportunity to restore the Union on the egalitarian principles of the American Revolution. But from the beginning there was little agreement on how to bind up the nation's wounds and insure the rights of blacks after emancipation. Underlying the dispute was the struggle within the Republican party that pitted Charles Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens against their less radical Republican colleagues....

"Abraham Lincoln was a fatalist who promoted freedom; he was a classical liberal who couched liberalism's greatest deed--emancipation of the slaves--in the unliberal language of divine providence; he was a religious doubter who became a national icon bordering on religion; and he was a rights-oriented liberal who appealed to natural law when confronting slavery" --