The Age of Lincoln

April 30, 2007
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.'s The Age of Jackson appeared in 1945 and has been an enduringly popular work with general readers. Burton, an associate professor of history and sociology (In My Father's House Are Many Mansions), has written an ambitious sequel, or perhaps homage, on the age of Lincoln. Burton's intriguing thesis is that Lincoln's most profound achievement was not the abolition of slavery but the enshrinement of the principle of personal liberty protected by a body of law. Thus he elevated the founding fathers' (and Jackson's) more restricted vision to a universal one. The outbreak and course of the Civil War should be seen in the light of competing notions of what “freedom” meant, rather than (as has usually been the case) as a bloody conflict over black emancipation or states' rights. Lincoln, as Burton convincingly argues, both created his age and was a product of it: he matured in an America struggling with a rising free market and millennial impulses that sought Christian perfection. The ultimate result was the triumph of democratic capitalism. For readers seeking to comprehend the sweeping social, religious and cultural backdrop to the Civil War, Burton's book is a worthy heir to Schlesinger's. 8 pages of b&w illus.