The great emancipator

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LINCOLN'S EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION: THE END OF SLAVERY IN AMERICA

By Allen C. Guelzo

Simon & Schuster, $26, 352 pages

REVIEWED BY MICHAEL P. RICCARDS

It is hard to believe there is anything more that one can say about Abraham Lincoln -- the most researched figure in American history. Allen Guelzo of Eastern University in Pennsylvania has already given us an award-winning study of the great executive in his "Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President." Now he follows up that volume with an analysis of the Emancipation Proclamation, a book that is really an erudite vehicle for a major study of the slavery issue during the Civil War. Clearly Lincoln is the author's hero, and his analysis of the president's decisions is almost always through Lincoln's eyes, and not those of his critics.

Since the 1960s, the Proclamation has been the subject of a variety of random assaults by revisionist historians, both white and black, who view the measure as a tepid, uninspiring statement that reflected simply the political expediency and the racist attitudes of both the president and his society.

Writing earlier, one famous historian, Richard Hofstadter of Columbia University, set the tone by saying that it had "the moral grandeur of a bill of lading." He maintained that the document was the work of a politician who was more concerned with the ambitions of free white workers, the class from whence he came, than the immorality of black bondage.

Why was it that the author of the majestic Gettysburg Address and the stirring inaugural speeches could not reach similar rhetorical heights in the writing of the Proclamation? It was too bland and too lawyerlike to stir history, we are told -- usually by our contemporaries.