Lincoln's Last Speech

The last two and a half decades have seen a number of fine books about individual speeches by Abraham Lincoln. Louis P. Masur's Lincoln's Last Speech looks, at first, like another distinguished entry on this list, but it is more. With concision, elegance, and nuance, Masur gives a thorough and fair-minded account of the evolution of the national conversation about the reestablishment of federal authority and the reinvention of state government in the seceding states from the Crittenden Compromise of 1860 through Lincoln's assassination in 1865 (and slightly beyond). The book focuses on the twists and turns of Lincoln's thought, but Masur also pays careful and scrupulous attention to the positions of other related historical agents, making clear their inner logic and their legal and political motivations and never reducing any position to caricature or special pleading. He also gives an illuminating sense of how every development during those years struck the newspapers on both sides of the partisan divide and on both sides of the war, and he reveals the thinking of intellectual leaders such as George Templeton Strong, Adam Gurowski, Orestes Brownson, and Frederick Douglass

Art · Art history · Compromise · Conversation · Elegance · George (robot · Government (linguistics · Linguistics · Literature · Newspaper · Pleading · Political science · Politics · State (computer science · American Constitutional Law and Politics · History · Law · Philosophy · Rhetoric and Communication Studies

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