1. society
2. unrest and war

The Journal of the Civil War Era
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volume 5, number 2 june 2015
Contents
Editor’s Note william blair, 193
Tom Watson Brown Book Award
ari kelman
Remembering Sand Creek on the Eve
of Its Sesquicentennial, 195
Articles
cathal smith
Second Slavery, Second Landlordism, and Modernity:
A Comparison of Antebellum Mississippi and
Nineteenth-Century Ireland, 204
d. h. dilbeck
“The Genesis of This Little Tablet with My Name”:
Francis Lieber and the Wartime Origins of
General Orders No. 100, 231
millington w. bergeson-lockwood
“We Do Not Care Particularly about the Skating Rinks”:
African American Challenges to Racial Discrimination
in Places of Public Amusement in Nineteenth-Century
Boston, Massachusetts, 254
Review Essay
scott reynolds nelson
Who Put Their Capitalism in My Slavery?, 289
Book Reviews, 311
Books Received, 343
Notes on Contributors, 346
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The Journal of the Civil War Era also is
available electronically, by subscription, at Project Muse.
Loathing Lincoln: An American Tradition from the Civil War to
the Present. By John McKee Barr. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 2014. Pp. 484. Cloth, $35.95.)
As Abraham Lincoln drew his last breath, Edwin Stanton somberly observed, “Now he belongs to the ages.” So does Lincoln’s reputation, which has ebbed and flowed with the shifting tides of popular and
scholarly opinion about the Civil War itself. Each generation has tried to
forge its own “usable Lincoln,” an amalgam of contemporary historical
scholarship, political debate, popular culture, and—increasingly—ideological intrigue. Between the Civil War era’s centennial, which produced
Thomas J. Pressly’s seminal Americans Interpret Their Civil War (1954),
and the war’s sesquicentennial, which has brought us John McKee Barr’s
Loathing Lincoln, this evolving “Lincoln image” has undergone unprecedented scholarly scrutiny. Arguably the finest historiographical treatment
of Lincoln’s shifting academic persona is Merrill D. Peterson’s Lincoln in
American Memory (1994). Barry Schwartz’s two-volume examination
of evolving popular views, Abraham Lincoln and the Forge of National
Memory (2000) and Abraham Lincoln in the Post-Heroic Era: History
and Memory in Late Twentieth-Century America (2008), reaches well
beyond scholarly histories and biographies to assimilate monuments,
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fiction, poetry, portraits, caricature, politics, and films into a more inclusive and diffuse “collective memory” of the man and his meaning. A newly
fashionable, and often whimsical, journalistic approach takes readers on
a personal journey of discovery across the American landscape in search
of an elusive “real Lincoln,” from Jan Morris’s Lincoln: A Foreigner’s Quest
(2000), to James A. Percoco’s Summers with Lincoln: Looking for the
Man in the Monuments (2008), to Sarah Vowell’s Assassination Vacation
(2005). Through it all, this multifaceted “imagined Lincoln” has remained
a fallible yet robustly unifying figure—a venerable, if supremely malleable,
American icon.
Now, Loathing Lincoln takes us on a less familiar and more sinister
journey through America’s collective memory, exposing the darker side
of the scholarly, popular, journalistic, and political uses—and misuses—
of the Lincoln image. Barr limits his study to exclusively negative representations of Lincoln, which he views as ideologically charged attacks on
the essential values that Lincoln espoused and that Union victory in the
Civil War solidified. Leaving aside Lincoln’s admirers and even his wellmeaning critics, Barr explores what Don Fehrenbacher dubbed, a generation ago, the “anti-Lincoln tradition” in American culture. By definition,
Barr’s “Lincoln loathers” seek to discredit him as part of a broader effort
to repudiate what he stood for—emancipation, equality, opportunity for
all, national unity, an activist state, and a more inclusive society. While the
familiar Lincoln image portrays him as a potential source of unity, Barr’s
subjects threaten to polarize and divide. “With few exceptions,” he writes,
“loathing for Lincoln has meant loathing for an expanded notion of freedom and equality” (332). Too many of Lincoln’s defenders, at their own
peril, have dismissed his detractors as an irrelevant fringe whose contrarian views scarcely merit scholarly attention, let alone a concerted response.
By contrast, Loathing Lincoln’s paramount virtue is Barr’s determination to take the Lincoln haters seriously, exposing their dissent as a carefully
constructed “alternative narrative” whose oversimplified but internally
consistent version of events represents a parallel history of America that
appeals to a mounting audience at both ends of the ideological spectrum
(329). At every step of his analysis, Barr relentlessly searches for Lincoln
baiting across a broad spectrum of popular media—books, book reviews,
newspaper editorials, letters to the editor, memorials, newsletters churned
out by religious institutes and conservative think tanks, grade school textbooks, public opinion polls, and television commentary. Diving into every
debate, he confronts each on its own substantive and intellectual terms
and marshals the relevant evidence to offer an effective rebuttal.
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He concludes that the bulk of Lincoln detractors are conservatives,
who view Lincoln as the “Great Centralizer,” fomenting a war and ending slavery merely to establish an overbearing federal government whose
primary mission was the suppression of states’ rights and individual liberties. Meanwhile, a growing minority of liberals see him as a reluctant
and even cynical emancipator who abandoned the former slaves, forswore
civil rights, and set the stage for America’s emergence as an imperialistic power. In a comprehensive effort to expose and refute its increasingly
sophisticated appropriation of the Lincoln image, Barr methodically traces
the elaboration of the anti-Lincoln tradition from its roots in the Civil War
through five distinct periods of history, during which its architects have
altered their arguments to address contemporary political, social, and
intellectual issues. The early twentieth century, for example, brought a
shift from the Lost Cause to a new concern with American imperialism as
one of the Civil War’s legacies. Between the world wars, southerners turned
from political to constitutional arguments that appealed to a broader
national rather than narrowly sectional constituency. With the rise of the
Republican Right, Lincoln bashing entered the mainstream of American
political debate, prompting Barr to caution that “attacking and altering the
image of Lincoln today is a long-term strategy for changing the nation’s
historical narrative, its orientation, and the nature of American political
culture” (14).
Barr’s thoughtful reassessment of the anti-Lincoln tradition is thorough, tenacious, and timely. Above all, Loathing Lincoln opens a critical
window into an increasingly potent and popular dimension of the Lincoln
image that Civil War scholars have for too long preferred to keep shuttered.
Kenneth J. Winkle
kenneth j. winkle is Thomas C. Sorenson Professor of American History at the
University of Nebraska–Lincoln and author of Lincoln’s Citadel: The Civil War in
Washington, DC (W. W. Norton, 2013).
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