Lightweight Lincoln By Allen C. Guelzo

Lightweight Lincoln

Freehling’s Lincoln is a man almost entirely devoid of intellectual ballast. This is not the Lincoln who described himself as having “always hated slavery.” Nor is there any sense in Becoming Lincoln of Lincoln’s long kinship to 19th-century free-market economics (from John Stuart Mill to Francis Wayland to Henry Carey). When, during the debates with Douglas, Lincoln speaks of an equality that blacks and whites should have in eating the bread they have earned by the sweat of their own brows, Freehling cannot believe that an economic equality — one concerned with earning bread — deserves to be taken seriously.

A Lincoln scholar, whom I greatly admire, Allen C. Guelzo, takes on a fellow Lincoln student with a scathing review.