In this study of the Emancipation Proclamation, the author reconstructs events that led to Lincoln's momentous decision, its issue in January, 1863, and concludes with how the proclamation's language and the circumstances in which it was issued have shaped American history.
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In this study of the Emancipation Proclamation, the author reconstructs events that led to Lincoln's momentous decision, its issue in January, 1863, and concludes with how the proclamation's language and the circumstances in which it was issued have shaped American history.
Read Less
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William Klingaman's "Abraham Lincoln and the Road to Emancipation, 1861-1865 (2001)gives a good account of President Lincoln's issuance of the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation of September 22, 1862, and the Final Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863. On a closely-related subject, the book also discusses the Union Army's gradual use of African-American soldiers as a means to winning the Civil War.
Klingaman focuses on the changes in Lincoln's attitude towards emancipation and his gradual assumption of a strong leadership role. He also points out that many of Lincoln's decisions were forced upon him by the political and military circumstances of the War. Thus, Klingaman describes how Lincoln's original goal in the War was the preservation of the Union. He resisted pressure from the Abolitionists and from the Radical Republicans to emancipate the slaves in order to avoid antagonizing the border states and those in the North who would not have fought a war to free the slaves. As political pressures changed, and as the North suffered setbacks in the Virginia theatre of the war, the pressures on Lincoln changed. Although the seeds of the Emancipation had been planted earlier, as Klingaman shows, Lincoln used the end Lee's invasion of the North at Antietam as the fulcrum to issue the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation and followed it up with the Proclamation of January 1, 1863. Klingaman explains well how the issuance of the Proclamation helped change the momentum of the War, militarily, politically, and internationally.
This book is not a work of new scholarship but it is valuable and worth reading nonetheless. Klingaman does a good job of emphasizing both the military and political aspects of the War, while many books concentrate on one or the other. I thought the book had particularly good insights to offer on Lincoln's relationship with Union General George McClellan.
Klingaman's Lincoln is primarily a politician and a pragmatist more than a political theorist. Lincoln's backwoods humor comes through well in the book as does his depression and sadness resulting from the heavy weight of his public and private trials. There are effective descriptions of pre-war Washington, D.C. which are followed by further descriptions of the way the city and our nation changed with the industrialization wrought by the War.
There are good textual discussions of both the Preliminary and Final Emancipation Proclamations which emphasize the compromises Lincoln had to make to politics rather than the role of ideas.
Finally, the book briefly discusses Emancipation following the conclusion of the War and points out eloquently how much remained and still remains to be done to bring about racial equality.
This book is a balanced and thoughtful history of the Emancipation for the reader interested in a seminal moment of our Nation's history.
