Order from a Major Online Bookstore
Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine
Save Your Time And Money
| AnyBook4Less.com | Order from a Major Online Bookstore |
|
| Home | Store List | FAQ | Contact Us | | ||
| Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine Save Your Time And Money |
||
 |
Title: Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President (Library of Religious Biography) by Allen C. Guelzo ISBN: 0-8028-4293-3 Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. Pub. Date: April, 2003 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $24.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.11 (19 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: An Important Book in Lincoln Studies
Comment: Thousands of books have been written about Abraham Lincoln. These books have ranged from general biographies, multi-volume biographies, examinations of his political career, his presidency, and his views on slavery. Allen Guelzo, in this excellent book, gives us an ideological look at the 16th president. Most historians have ignored Lincoln as a philosophical thinker and Guelzo tries to open up this aspect of Lincoln's character and thought. Examining Lincoln's moral and religious beliefs and how they evolved, Guelzo portrays Lincoln, not as a religious skeptic or as a Christian Redeemer as other biographers have, but as a seeker. Throughout his life, according to Guelzo, Lincoln is looking for a religious structure that he can believe in, but never finds one that meets his needs. Lincoln continues to sense a feeling of inadequacy as the beliefs from his predestinarian Calvinist background give him a sense that he was not one of the elect. This predestinarian background also makes Lincoln feel that, in Lincoln's words, "events have controlled me." During the Civil War, it is this sense of inevitability and predetermination that guides Lincoln in many of his anti-slavery and reconstruction policies. Lincoln sees himself as a tool in bringing about God's will, even though he doubts that he will achieve salvation.
Rating: 5
Summary: Best Lincoln Biography of Ideas
Comment: I've read, I suppose, 500 books and articles about Abraham Lincoln, but Allen Guelzo's Redeemer President is by far the best on the subject of the beliefs that animated the 16th President. Lincoln's ideas on politics, the economy and social relations -- and especially on religion -- are clearly (but not too simply) described, and Guelzo shows how these developed over time and influenced Lincoln's actions. The book is most satisfying because it presents a convincing portrait of Lincoln as he understood himself, and so makes him less enigmatic -- but no less complex -- than he is usually shown.
Rating: 5
Summary: An Intellectual and Religious Biography of Lincoln
Comment: Biographies of Abraham Lincoln have tended to fall into two broad categories. The first category consists of biographies of the "subjective" Lincoln. These biographies are based largely on the many anecdotes and stories people told about Lincoln's life, typically during the early years in Illinois and concentrate on trying to explore Lincoln as a man (He remains an enigma.)The second category of Lincoln biography is the political. This biography focuses on Lincoln's public actions, typically during or shortly before his Presidency and draws on the lengthy public record available during the Civil War years. This type of biographical approach tends to give short shrift to the personal approach.
In his "Abraham Lincoln, Redeemer President" Allen Guelzo points out these two approaches to Lincoln studies (p.472) and says that his book is an attempt to combine the personal and public approaches to Lincoln. Professor Guelzo, Dean of Templeton Honors Colledge and Professor of History at Eastern Universtiy, writes a primarily intellectual biography; but he tries to explore the degree to which Lincoln's thought formed his political actions.
Professor Guelzo devotes a great deal of attention to establishing Lincoln's political identity as a whig -- an admirer of both Henry Clay and Daniel Webster. From his early days in public life, Lincoln was interested in promoting economic opportunity by encouraging the free market. He supported ambitious programs of public works and public education, to develop transportation infrastructure, (canals, roads, and railroads) and to promote the growth of industry and of a middle class. The whig approach emphasized public virtue, public morality, the value of hard work, and a unified United States. Guelzo effectively contrasts Lincoln's Whiggish beliefs with the agrarian beliefs of the Jefferson-Jacksonian democrats with their commitment to a nation of agrarian, self-sufficient yeomen and farmers. (Lincoln's father was such a yeoman, and Lincoln wanted none of it for himself.)
Professor Guelzo traces the beginnings of Lincoln's opposition to the expansion of slavery, in the early 1850's. to his desire to promote the development of upwardly mobile capitalist workers. He tended to see agrarianism as slavery slightly disguised. Lincoln never lost his whig commitments, according to Professor Guelzo, even after the party disbanded and Lincoln became a leader of the Republican party.
Professor Guelzo also studies the nature of Lincoln's religious beliefs and the importance Lincoln gave to religous questions. As is the case with Lincoln's economic rebellion against his father, Professor Guelzo finds the beginnings of Lincoln's religious thought in a youthful rebellion against the Calvinism and predestinarian beliefs of his father. Lincoln found he could not believe in the revealed God of the Bible, although he knew the Bible well. He could not accept the doctrine of predestination, but he came close to it in a secular way. During most of his life, Lincoln was a determinist who believed that people had little independent choice in what they did but acted in response to outside factors which they did not control.
According to Professor Guelzo, Lincoln also tended towards the englightenment of John Locke and towards the utilitarianism of Mill and Bentham. His politics and Presidency, of course, have distincly pragmatic characters. Throughout his life, Lincoln remained outside the fold of organized religion.
According to Professor Guelzo, Lincoln's thought developed as Lincoln confronted at deepening levels the difficulty of the Civil War. The beginning of this development was the 1858 Lincoln-Douglas debates where Lincoln vigourously attacked the morality of holding slaves. Lincoln's thoughts on providence, for Professor Guelzo, were instrumental in Lincoln's decision to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. Lincoln told his cabinet he had made a promise "to his maker" to issue the Proclamation and that he could not do otherwise. (pp 341-42.) Guelzo continues his treatment of providential themes in Lincoln with his discussion of the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural Address.
There is also a great deal in the book that discusses Lincoln's handling of the War, the border states, his generals, and the Army. Professor Guelzo's intellectual and religous themes sometimes get lost in these discussions, and we are reminded that Lincoln was a pragmatist, a leader and a consummate politician.
The picture of Lincoln's religiosity that emerges from Professor Guelzo's study has a distinctly modern flavor. (Professor Guelzo sees it as high Victorian.) Lincoln was a person who sought religous belief but could not find his way to an organized religion of his day. He was not, in his mid and late life, content simply with materialism and skepticism but rather developed his own religious thought based upon a rather loosely defined notion of providence and redemption. As personal as his thought was, it helped shape our nation. Lincoln's life, as Professor Guelzo presents it, seems to be a paradigm of many people today who reject organized religion in favor of a search for what many call spirituality.
On a political level, Guelzo's account of Lincoln stresses that the United States is and has become a unified Nation and that Americans should see themselves, for all their diversity and differences as part of a unified people. I also see the book as a reminder of the value of hard work and economic effort.
Professor Guelzo has written a thoughtful, provocative study of Lincoln the man, the thinker, and the President.
 |
Title: Lincoln's Virtues: An Ethical Biography by William Lee Miller ISBN: 037540158X Publisher: Knopf Pub. Date: 15 January, 2002 List Price(USD): $32.50 |
 |
Title: Power and Profit: The Merchant in Medieval Europe by Peter Spufford ISBN: 0500251185 Publisher: Thames & Hudson Pub. Date: April, 2003 List Price(USD): $39.95 |
 |
Title: Transformations of Love: The Friendship of John Evelyn and Margaret Godolphin by Frances Harris ISBN: 0199252572 Publisher: Oxford Press Pub. Date: April, 2003 List Price(USD): $35.00 |
 |
Title: Jonathan Edwards: A Life by George M. Marsden ISBN: 0300096933 Publisher: Yale Univ Pr Pub. Date: April, 2003 List Price(USD): $35.00 |
 |
Title: American Slavery : 1619-1877 (10th-Anniversary Edition, with a new Preface and Afterword) by Peter Kolchin ISBN: 0809016303 Publisher: Hill & Wang Pub Pub. Date: 01 September, 2003 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
Thank you for visiting www.AnyBook4Less.com and enjoy your savings!
Copyright� 2001-2021 Send your comments
