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The Not-So-Grand Review: Abraham Lincoln in the Journal of American History

[...]Thomas asked Stephenson to drop any thoughr of printing the exchange in the Review.9 An even more egregious misreading of a major Lincoln book occurred in the March 1960 issue of the Review, when Maurice G. Baxter wrote a short joint review of Harry V. Jaffa's Crisis of the House Divided:...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The Journal of American history (Bloomington, Ind.) Ind.), 2009-09, Vol.96 (2), p.400-416
Main Author: Guelzo, Allen C.
Format: Article
Language:English
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Summary:[...]Thomas asked Stephenson to drop any thoughr of printing the exchange in the Review.9 An even more egregious misreading of a major Lincoln book occurred in the March 1960 issue of the Review, when Maurice G. Baxter wrote a short joint review of Harry V. Jaffa's Crisis of the House Divided: An Interpretation of the Issues in the Lincoln-Douglas Debates and the edition of Lincoln's and Douglas's campaign speeches in Ohio in 1859 that Jaffa edited with Robert W. Johannsen, the noted biographer of Douglas. The significance of Lincoln lay primarily in his conviction that the rights of the people in a popular government could be legitimately asserted only when those "were rights which they must first respect themselves" as expressions of natural law that were universally binding no matter what the majority willed.10 That was an extraordinary assertion when Crisis of the House Divided was published in 1959. Since the 1940s James G. Randall's disenchanted interpretation of the Civil War as the product of "a blundering generation" of irrational and incompetent politicians and generals had dominated Civil War historiography, and Carl Sandburg had shaped the popular image of Lincoln as a folklore everyman, not a political philosopher. According to Jaffa Lincoln had achieved a "synthesis" of secular Jeffersonian liberalism with "Hebraic and Christian" religious ethics that could provide the liberal democracies "objects of faith as well as cognition. [...]it was the rumors circulating in the winter of 1 857-1 858 that Douglas and the East Coast Republican leadership had struck an alliance, which would have given Douglas a free pass to reelection to the Senate in 1858 and a Republican presidential nomination in 1860, that gave Lincoln his most agitated moments in the run-up to the 1858 senatorial contest.
ISSN:0021-8723
1945-2314
1936-0967
DOI:10.1093/jahist/96.2.400