Publisher Description
The larger-than-life image Abraham Lincoln projects across the screen of American history owes much to his role as the Great Emancipator during the Civil War. Yet this noble aspect of Lincoln’s identity is precisely the dimension that some historians have cast into doubt. Redeeming the Great Emancipator enumerates Lincoln’s anti-slavery credentials, showing that a deeply held belief in the God-given rights of all people steeled the president in his commitment to emancipation and his hope for racial reconciliation. Emancipation did not achieve complete freedom for American slaves, nor was Lincoln entirely above some of the racial prejudices of his time. Nevertheless, his conscience and moral convictions far outweighed political calculations in ultimately securing freedom for African Americans.
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“Lincoln scholar Guelzo explores race in America as an element of African American history as affected by Abraham Lincoln and the Emancipation Declaration…A clear, concise look at one aspect of Lincoln, the man and the president.”
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Kirkus Reviews
About Allen C. Guelzo
Allen C. Guelzo is the dean of the Templeton Honors College at Eastern College, where he is also the Grace F. Kea Professor of American History. A former fellow of the Charles Warren Center at Harvard University, he is the author of Edwards on the Will: A Century of American Philosophical Debate, For the Union of Evangelical Christendom: The Irony of the Reformed Episcopalians, and The Crisis of the American Republic: A History of the Civil War and Reconstruction. He is also editor of Holland’s Life of Lincoln and coeditor of Edwards in Our Time: Jonathan Edwards and the Shaping of American Religion.