Lincoln's Defense of Politics: The Public Man and His Opponents in the Crisis over Slavery.

Lincoln's Defense of Politics: The Public Man and His Opponents in the Crisis over Slavery. By Thomas E. Schneider. Shades of Blue and Gray Series. (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, c. 2006. Pp. xvi, 224. $39.95, ISBN 0-8262-1606-4.)

Thomas E. Schneider's book, Lincoln's Defense of Politics: The Public Man and His Opponents in the Crisis over Slavery, is part of the Shades of Blue and Gray series, edited by Herman Hattaway and Jon L. Wakelyn and published by the University of Missouri Press. The series is specifically designed to attract a broad audience of readers.

Schneider maintains that the decision to emancipate the slaves while saving the Union elicited more than a little debate among politicians of the era. The book is, according to Schneider, "as much about those I call Lincoln's opponents as it is about Lincoln himself" (p. viii). He divides the book into sections that examine Lincoln's political opponents (most notably, Stephen Douglas), slavery apologists, and abolitionists. He concludes the work with an analysis of the sixteenth president's views on freedom, politics, and the Constitution.

The book is ambitious. Schneider seeks to analyze, in a relatively short space, the views of men as disparate in ideology as Frederick Douglass, John C. Calhoun, Henry David Thoreau, and George Fitzhugh. Schneider's discussion of Fitzhugh is especially nuanced, as he examines the proslavery advocate within the context of history and John Locke's second treatise on government. To Fitzhugh, the abolitionists were Lockeans because "they took Locke's criterion of consent to the furthest limit" (p. 82). Lincoln, too, fell into this category, but, according to Schneider, there was a difference: Lincoln accepted consent, "but he did so in full awareness of its complex and ambiguous character" (pp. 82-83). As Schneider observes, "Lincoln was sustained by a view of human capability for self-government that was at once more sober and more generous than the view held by either Fitzhugh or the reformers he criticizes" (p. 83).

In the end, Lincoln differed substantially from all the critics Schneider analyzes because he distinguished between abolition and Union: "His extinctionalism is distinguished from abolitionism by having as its primary object not the abolition of a vicious institution but the preservation of a wholesome government--a government that southerners, too, valued, even if they were slow to apply the principles on which it was based" (p. 177).

Schneider's book is a very good intellectual and political analysis of the main currents of thought prevalent in late antebellum and wartime America. He demands his readers grapple with ideologies perhaps more familiar to nineteenth-century Americans than twenty-first-century Americans. He succeeds in providing a portrait of Lincoln as politico and reformer, roles other historians have not always associated with the Civil War president. Schneider's book will appeal to Lincoln scholars and buffs alike.

MARY A. DECREDICO

Bucknell University