Lincoln's Moral Vision
Author : James Tackach
Publisher : Univ. Press of Mississippi
Page : 216 pages
File Size : 29,51 MB
Release : 2002
Category : Presidents
ISBN : 9781617034176
Lincoln's Moral Vision
Author : James Tackach
Publisher : Univ. Press of Mississippi
Page : 176 pages
File Size : 32,32 MB
Release : 2002
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9781578064953
Book Description
On March 4, 1865, Abraham Lincoln gave his Second Inaugural Address, the final great speech of his three- decades public career. Delivered a little more than a month before the end of the Civil War and forty-one days before he was assassinated, the speech reveals Lincoln coming to terms with vital moral and political issues with which he had grappled during his political life. This book traces how the speech addresses three critical issues that obsessed him: slavery, race, and religion. Although in early life Lincoln developed a personal distaste for slavery, he never embraced the abolitionist cause. Before his presidency, he endorsed a "middle position" on slavery, arguing that it could remain legal in the South where it was entrenched, but not be allowed to spread to new territories. On the matter of race Lincoln was a man shaped by the prejudices of his time and place. Before the Civil War he advocated no civil rights for blacks and often asserted that whites should hold a superior position in American society. In religious perspective Lincoln was a skeptic, even accused by one political opponent of being an infidel. But during the political turbulence of the 1850s and during Lincoln's presidency, his positions on these three burning issues shifted dramatically. The profound changes in Lincoln's thinking are evident in the Second Inaugural Address, in which he condemns slavery as a grievous national sin that prompted a just God to deliver upon the United States a fierce punishment in the form of a devastating civil war. This book argues that the Second Inaugural Address was Lincoln's resolution of the moral and political issues of his time and is the key document in Lincoln's entire literary canon. James Tackach, a professor of English at Roger Williams University, is the editor of Slave Narratives and The Battle of Gettysburg and the author of books for young adults, including The Trial of John Brown: Radical Abolitionist and The Emancipation Proclamation: Abolishing Slavery in the South.
Lincoln's Tragic Pragmatism
Author : John Burt
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 818 pages
File Size : 17,65 MB
Release : 2013-01-07
Category : History
ISBN : 0674070534
Book Description
A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice In 1858, challenger Abraham Lincoln debated incumbent Stephen Douglas seven times in the race for a U.S. Senate seat from Illinois. More was at stake than slavery in those debates. In Lincoln’s Tragic Pragmatism, John Burt contends that the very legitimacy of democratic governance was on the line. In a United States stubbornly divided over ethical issues, the overarching question posed by the Lincoln-Douglas debates has not lost its urgency: Can a liberal political system be used to mediate moral disputes? And if it cannot, is violence inevitable? “John Burt has written a work that every serious student of Lincoln will have to read...Burt refracts Lincoln through the philosophy of Kant, Rawls and contemporary liberal political theory. His is very much a Lincoln for our time.” —Steven B. Smith, New York Times Book Review “I'm making space on my overstuffed shelves for Lincoln’s Tragic Pragmatism. This is a book I expect to be picking up and thumbing through for years to come.” —Jim Cullen, History News Network “Burt treats the [Lincoln-Douglas] debates as being far more significant than an election contest between two candidates. The debates represent profound statements of political philosophy and speak to the continuing challenges the U.S. faces in resolving divisive moral conflicts.” —E. C. Sands, Choice
Lincoln's Virtues
Author : William Lee Miller
Publisher : Vintage
Page : 538 pages
File Size : 21,12 MB
Release : 2003-02-04
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 0375701737
Book Description
William Lee Miller’s ethical biography is a fresh, engaging telling of the story of Lincoln’s rise to power. Through careful scrutiny of Lincoln’s actions, speeches, and writings, and of accounts from those who knew him, Miller gives us insight into the moral development of a great politician — one who made the choice to go into politics, and ultimately realized that vocation’s fullest moral possibilities. As Lincoln’s Virtues makes refreshingly clear, Lincoln was not born with his face on Mount Rushmore; he was an actual human being making choices — moral choices — in a real world. In an account animated by wit and humor, Miller follows this unschooled frontier politician’s rise, showing that the higher he went and the greater his power, the worthier his conduct would become. He would become that rare bird, a great man who was also a good man. Uniquely revealing of its subject’s heart and mind, it represents a major contribution to our understanding and of Lincoln, and to the perennial American discussion of the relationship between politics and morality.
Moral Vision
Author : Marvin Olasky
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
Page : 464 pages
File Size : 15,49 MB
Release : 2024-02-13
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 1668047918
Book Description
What makes a leader truly great? Is it simply a matter of management style and personality? Or is it character that matters most? Moral Visions takes an insightful look into America’s leaders of the past to answer these questions and demonstrates that values and moral convictions are critical to the strength of a nation. Supposedly, we learn about the candidates for the highest office through a series of tests called “debates,” which are instead an exchange of soundbites. We can’t know whether an aspirant to the presidency has the ability to ask good questions or only a suave or belligerent ability to answer them. Moral Vision is a human-interest introduction to American history through studies of nineteen leaders: presidents, almost presidents, a tycoon, a crusading journalist, and even a leading 19th century abortionist. Its lessons can help voters sort through the candidates in 2024 and beyond by measuring them against previous leaders—none of whom was faultless. It shows how the deepest views often grow out of religious belief and influence political goals, racial prejudices, sexual activities, uses of power, and senses of service. In his 1789 inaugural address, George Washington pledged that “the foundation for national policy will be laid in the sure and immutable principles of private morality.” Marvin Olasky shows how 19th-century leaders like Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, and Grover Cleveland partly upheld and partly ignored that promise, and 20th-century leaders like Woodrow Wilson, John F. Kennedy, and Bill Clinton tried to “compartmentalize” the private and the public. An extensively updated version of The American Leadership Tradition, Moral Vision is for anyone tired of today’s textbook tendencies to submerge the role of individuals as big economic and demographic waves roll in. History is more than statistics, economics, and group identities. Human beings are more than paper boats riding the rainfall into gutters.
Lincoln and Democratic Statesmanship
Author : Michael P. Zuckert
Publisher : University Press of Kansas
Page : 312 pages
File Size : 20,88 MB
Release : 2020-05-05
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 0700629386
Book Description
Our ideas of statesmanship are fraught with seeming contradictions: The democratic statesman is true to the people’s wishes and views—but also capable of standing against popular opinion when necessary. The statesman rises above conflicts and seeks compromise between parties—but also stands firmly for what is right. Abraham Lincoln, perhaps more than any other political figure in US history, affords us an opportunity to evaluate the philosophical, political, and practical implications of these paradoxical propositions. Asking whether and how Lincoln acted in a statesmanly manner at critical moments, the authors of this volume aim to clarify what precisely statesmanship might be; their work illuminates important themes and events in Lincoln’s career even as it broadens and sharpens our understanding of the general nature of statesmanship. One of Lincoln’s abiding themes was foreshadowed in his Lyceum Address, delivered when he was not yet thirty: the call for the prevalence of a sort of public opinion that he characterized as a political religion. As it relates to democratic statesmanship, what does Lincoln’s political religion have to do with religion per se? How, in his role as statesman as a master of democratic speech, did Lincoln handle the two major issues he faced as a political leader: slavery and the war? In attempting to meet the demand that he use acceptable means to achieve his ends, did Lincoln—can any statesman—keep his hands clean? Are there inevitable transgressions that a statesman must commit? These are among the topics the authors take on as they consider Lincoln’s democratic and rhetorical statesmanship, on occasion drawing comparisons with his contemporaries Henry Clay and Stephen Douglas or even such a distant forerunner as Pericles. Finally, framing statesmanship in terms of three factors—knowledge of the political good of a community, circumstance, and the best possible action in light of these two—this volume renders a nuanced, deeply informed judgment on what distinguishes Lincoln as a statesman, and what distinguishes a statesman from a (mere) politician.
Lincoln and Leadership
Author : Randall M. Miller
Publisher : Fordham Univ Press
Page : 161 pages
File Size : 48,61 MB
Release : 2012
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 0823243443
Book Description
This book examines Lincoln's leadership by assessing his decision-making process and patterns in shaping military strategy, political affairs, and religious interests during the Civil War. In doing so, it shows how Lincoln defined the presidency in wartime, played the role of party chief, and pointed the moral compass of the nation.
Abraham Lincoln, Philosopher Statesman
Author : Joseph R. Fornieri
Publisher : SIU Press
Page : 250 pages
File Size : 34,68 MB
Release : 2014-06-04
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 0809333309
Book Description
2015 ISHS Superior Achievement Award What constitutes Lincoln’s political greatness as a statesman? As a great leader, he saved the Union, presided over the end of slavery, and helped to pave the way for an interracial democracy. His great speeches provide enduring wisdom about human equality, democracy, free labor, and free society. Joseph R. Fornieri contends that Lincoln’s political genius is best understood in terms of a philosophical statesmanship that united greatness of thought and action, one that combined theory and practice. This philosophical statesmanship, Fornieri argues, can best be understood in terms of six dimensions of political leadership: wisdom, prudence, duty, magnanimity, rhetoric, and patriotism. Drawing on insights from history, politics, and philosophy, Fornieri tackles the question of how Lincoln’s statesmanship displayed each of these crucial elements. Providing an accessible framework for understanding Lincoln’s statesmanship, this thoughtful study examines the sixteenth president’s political leadership in terms of the traditional moral vision of statecraft as understood by epic political philosophers such as Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas. Fornieri contends that Lincoln’s character is best understood in terms of Aquinas’s understanding of magnanimity or greatness of soul, the crowning virtue of statesmanship. True political greatness, as embodied by Lincoln, involves both humility and sacrificial service for the common good. The enduring wisdom and timeless teachings of these great thinkers, Fornieri shows, can lead to a deeper appreciation of statesmanship and of its embodiment in Abraham Lincoln. With the great philosophers and books of western civilization as his guide, Fornieri demonstrates the important contribution of normative political philosophy to an understanding of our sixteenth president. Informed by political theory that draws on the classics in revealing the timelessness of Lincoln’s example, his interdisciplinary study offers profound insights for anyone interested in the nature of leadership, statesmanship, political philosophy, political ethics, political history, and constitutional law.
Forced Into Glory
Author : Lerone Bennett
Publisher : Johnson Publishing Company (IL)
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 49,66 MB
Release : 2007
Category : African Americans
ISBN : 9780874850024
Book Description
Beginning with the argument that the Emancipation Proclamation did not actually free African American slaves, this dissenting view of Lincoln's greatness surveys the president's policies, speeches, and private utterances and concludes that he had little real interest in abolition. Pointing to Lincoln's support for the fugitive slave laws, his friendship with slave-owning senator Henry Clay, and conversations in which he entertained the idea of deporting slaves in order to create an all-white nation, the book, concludes that the president was a racist at heart--and that the tragedies of Reconstruction and the Jim Crow era were the legacy of his shallow moral vision.
Lincoln's Mentors
Author : Michael J. Gerhardt
Publisher : HarperCollins
Page : 598 pages
File Size : 50,32 MB
Release : 2021-02-02
Category : History
ISBN : 0062877208
Book Description
A brilliant and novel examination of how Abraham Lincoln mastered the art of leadership “Abraham Lincoln had less schooling than all but a couple of other presidents, and more wisdom than every one of them. In this original, insightful book, Michael Gerhardt explains how this came to be." –H.W. Brands, Wall Street Journal In 1849, when Abraham Lincoln returned to Springfield, Illinois, after two seemingly uninspiring years in the U.S. House of Representatives, his political career appeared all but finished. His sense of failure was so great that friends worried about his sanity. Yet within a decade, Lincoln would reenter politics, become a leader of the Republican Party, win the 1860 presidential election, and keep America together during its most perilous period. What accounted for the turnaround? As Michael J. Gerhardt reveals, Lincoln’s reemergence followed the same path he had taken before, in which he read voraciously and learned from the successes, failures, oratory, and political maneuvering of a surprisingly diverse handful of men, some of whom he had never met but others of whom he knew intimately—Henry Clay, Andrew Jackson, Zachary Taylor, John Todd Stuart, and Orville Browning. From their experiences and his own, Lincoln learned valuable lessons on leadership, mastering party politics, campaigning, conventions, understanding and using executive power, managing a cabinet, speechwriting and oratory, and—what would become his most enduring legacy—developing policies and rhetoric to match a constitutional vision that spoke to the monumental challenges of his time. Without these mentors, Abraham Lincoln would likely have remained a small-town lawyer—and without Lincoln, the United States as we know it may not have survived. This book tells the unique story of how Lincoln emerged from obscurity and learned how to lead.
