The Age of Lincoln
“The Age of Lincoln offers a major reinterpretation of nineteenth-century American history from the age of Jackson to the Progressive era. Professor Burton portrays Lincoln as a product of his time and the Southern yeoman culture in which he grew up; and in turn he shows how Lincoln’s ideas, so essential for Northern victory in the war, affected the way Americans defined themselves in the postwar generation. Filled with fresh insights, The Age of Lincoln should open a new era in Civil War-Reconstruction scholarship.”
David Herbert Donald, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and author of Lincoln
Distinguished historian Orville Vernon Burton suggests that, while abolishing slavery was the age's most extraordinary accomplishment, it was the inscribing of personal liberty into the nation's millennial aspirations that was its most profound.
America had always perceived providence in its progress, but in the 1840s and 1850s, a pessimism accompanied a marked extremism. Even amidst historic political compromises, the middle ground collapsed.
Burton shows how the president's authentic Southerness empowered him to conduct a civil war that redefined freedom as a personal right to be expanded to all Americans. In the violent decades to follow, while the extent of that freedom would be contested, its centrality to the definition of the country would not.
Praise