Abraham Lincoln and His Times: A Legal and Constitutional History

Much has been written about Lincoln the wartime leader, Lincoln the emancipator and Lincoln the orator. Anastaplo (The Amendments to the Constitution: A Commentary), who teaches at several Chicago universities, tackles Lincoln the constitutional scholar. What, wonders Anastaplo, can close study of Lincoln's presidential addresses, messages and proclamations reveal about the complex matrix of thought that provided the ethical and legal foundation for Lincoln's public actions? Drawing not just on Lincoln's statements but also on the writings of philosophers (ranging from Aristotle to Theodore Parker) whom Lincoln is known to have read and respected, Anastaplo vividly reveals the 16th president's interpretation of the values expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. Covering some of the same ground traversed in Garry Wills's Lincoln at Gettysburg, Anastaplo casts a slightly wider net by giving equal interpretative attention to the Gettysburg Address, the Emancipation Proclamation, the two inaugural addresses, the ""House Divided"" speech and Lincoln's statements during his famous debates with Stephen A. Douglas. All this makes for a remarkable portrait of Lincoln as a political philosopher whose thinking was always more subtle than his back-country myth implied. (Dec.)