Brenda Wineapple on Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass

Brenda Wineapple | Truthdig | January 23, 2009

Are you ready for Lincoln? With the bicentennial of his birth in sight—to say nothing of last Tuesday’s historic inauguration of President Barack Obama, who happened to launch his presidential campaign from Springfield, Ill.—new books about the 16th president, never in short supply, have been coming down the pike: Lincoln as emancipator, as passive pragmatist (the David Herbert Donald view), as melancholic, as homosexual, as husband, as racist, as Jacksonian, as Jeffersonian, as lawyer, as reader and canonical writer (a fine new book by Fred Kaplan), as reconsidered (the recent, excellent volume edited by Eric Foner), as containing multitudes (George Frederickson’s posthumous insight), and as brilliant commander in chief (the latest contribution of James McPherson). And that’s not all: Still coming are books on Lincoln in 1864 and Lincoln and his Cabinet secretaries and Lincoln and his admirals and Lincoln and Darwin (from the elegant pen of Adam Gopnik) and Lincoln and the Todds, as well as “Mary Todd Lincoln,” by Catherine Clinton, and “The Lincoln Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Legacy,” edited by eminent Lincoln scholar Harold Holzer and published by the Library of America. In addition, a magisterial new biography, “A. Lincoln,” by the eloquent Ronald C. White Jr., will attempt to meld these Lincolns into a whole.

The Birth of a Notion—National “Purpose”

Kevin R. C. Gutzman | TakiMag | January 12, 2009

Under discussion:

Vindicating Lincoln: Defending the Politics of Our Greatest President, Thomas L. Krannawitter, Roman & Littlefield (2008), 376 pages

Hamilton’s Curse: How Jefferson’s Arch Enemy Betrayed the American Revolution—and What It Means for Americans Today, Thomas DiLorenzo, Crown Forum (2008), 256 pages.

Christianity made an epochal change by elevating ordinary people to spiritual equality with the social, political, and economic elite. In the old religion of Greece and Rome, the gods were beautiful, immortal supermen. Roman emperors, the closest thing to gods on earth, often received deification at death; their temporal greatness made them indistinguishable from the divine, and stationed well above the hoi polloi.

Not only did Christianity say that mundane man could ascend to the emperor’s level, but Jesus counseled that He was in “the least of these.” Among the Orthodox, St. Symeon the New Theologian went so far as to advise Christians to steer clear of political authority. The exercise of power over other men required politicians to act in un-Christian ways, whether by making war, by executing malefactors, or otherwise. Rather than bear such a burden, he said, better to avoid it.

The transition to Christianity also radically affected the ancient tradition of biography. Works such as those of Arrian and Plutarch, Suetonius and Tacitus, which had sought instruction and/or entertainment in the lives of the great, yielded place to a Christian tradition of hagiography. From St. Athanasius’ Life of St. Anthony on, the struggle to achieve Christ-centeredness, the saints’ working out of their own salvation, took pride of place. Monks became popular heroes.