II. Books
Lincoln’s Hundred Days: The Emancipation Proclamation and the War for the Union by Louis P. Masur (2012)
There have been many recent fine books on the Emancipation Proclamation and its role in recasting the character of the country. Masur (American studies & history, Rutgers Univ.; The Civil War: A Concise History) does not engage that literature so much as extend it with a lucid and learned account of the process whereby Lincoln moved toward emancipation, and once so committed, made it the lodestar of the Union. Masur shows the varied interests pressing on Lincoln to accept emancipation and Lincoln's determination to protect the promise by all means. The hundred days from Lincoln's issuing of the preliminary proclamation to the proclamation itself tested his mettle in the face of military and political reverses and calls for its retraction or expansion. Masur makes much of the importance blacks attributed to the document as their Declaration of Independence and the importance of black soldiers in giving it force. He also provides an insightful review of scholarly, popular, and artistic takes on the document, and even its uses in fundraising. This is now the best work on the proclamation. As its sesquicentennial looms (January 2013), all persons wanting to understand the contingency of freedom should read this book.--Randall M. Miller, Saint Joseph's Univ., Philadelphia from Library Journal 137/13 (Aug. 1, 2012)
Library location: United Library, Call number: E 453 .M285 2012
David Walker was born to a Negro slave man and a free Negro woman in 1785; under the law of North Carolina, as of other slave states, he was therefore free. He made his way to Boston, entered the clothing business, taught himself to read, participated in the abolitionist movement, and reflected much on the condition of his people. In 1829 he shook the South. His pamphlet went through three editions during 1829-1830; both editions in front of us reproduce the third. In 1830 he died under mysterious circumstances; probably, as many have always believed, he was murdered. The Appeal caused consternation in the South not so much because it indicted the slaveholders and exposed crimes against the Negroes, as because it sounded a call to armed resistance. The pamphlet breathes a pride in being black. Remarkably, Walker proclaimed hatred for the whites and yet offered friendship and forgiveness to those whites who repudiated their role as oppressors and accepted the Negro as a brother. Perhaps in no other way does Walker emerge so markedly as a child of the Old and the New Testaments. His God was at once the God of Wrath and of the Crucifixion…. – Eugene Genovese, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ from Science and Society (vol. 30, no. 3, 1966)
Library location: United Library, Call number: E 446 .W17 A6
Garrison's biography is not only an historical, but also an ethical reading-book of the highest order, a well of enthusiasm, of hope and gladness for all who would devote their energies to the happiness of the human race… It consists in great part of passages from Garrison's own speeches, from newspaper articles, and letters, and of contemporary notices, from print and manuscript, by his friends and enemies…it is at the same time a trustworthy, condensed history of the great anti-slavery movement, whose founder and moral leader Garrison was….—G.v.G. from International Journal of Ethics (vol. 1, no. 1, 1890)
Library location: United Library, Call number: E 449 .G24 G2 1885 1969
- Sojourner Truth: A Biography by Larry G. Murphy
Sojourner Truth: A Biography is the life story of a remarkable woman, born an illiterate slave, who escaped to freedom, adopted the name Sojourner Truth, and dedicates herself to a lifetime of advocacy for abolition and human dignity. She was a skilled orator who moved hearts and minds across America as she traveled. Sojourner Truth: A Biography is based upon her public pronouncements, her personal correspondence, journalistic accounts of principal historical actors, and frames the events of her life amid the larger happenings of American social and political history. A handful of vintage black-and-white photograph illustrate this exceptional portrait, highly recommended for both public and college biography collections.—Internet Bookwatch (March 2011)
Library location: United Library, Call number: E 185.97 .T87 M87
- Abraham Lincoln: The War Years by Carl Sandburg
Carl Sandburg has more than fulfilled James Russell Lowell's prophetic comment in 1863 that a history rather than a biography would be required to record the life of Abraham Lincoln. He has written a dual masterpiece, a comprehensive history of the American people in civil war and a comprehensive biography of President Lincoln, skilfully blended and mutually illuminated…He portrays in the man and in the people the conflict of ideas and emotions inherent in the paradoxical philosophy of American democracy. The story is told with epic sweep and with perhaps the deepest understanding of human values underlying the conflict ever brought to bear upon the Civil War era….—Roy Basler, State Teachers College, Florence, Alabama from American Literature (vol. 12, no. 2, 1940)
Library location: United Library, Call number: E 457.4 .S3
- The Antislavery Appeal : American Abolitionism after 1830 by Ronald G. Walters
This book explores the ideas of immediate abolitionists after 1830, with special attention to those assumptions they held in common with their contemporaries. Ronald Walters joins the debate over whether the abolitionists were anti-institutional, and attempts to resolve it by showing that their style - righteous, sectarian, and evangelical - was after all the style of the whole antebellum reform movement….—Robert McColley, University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign from Annuals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences (vol. 436, March 1978)
Library location: United Library, Call number: E449 .W23 1976