The Last Best Hope of Earth: Abraham Lincoln and the Promise of America. By Mark E. Neely Jr. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993.
When looking at the mountainous stacks of books on Abraham Lincoln, one can find titles on just about any portion of his life. Volumes that cover such particular aspects as his early life, his personal life, and his assassination have been written by recent scholars to the point that much of Lincoln’s time out of office has had great treatment. With books about every facet of Lincoln’s life, Mark E. Neely believes that the most important portion of his life, the war years, has been underrepresented in modern scholarship. It is for this reason that he concentrates on Lincoln’s role as a war president in his book The Last Best Hope of Earth: Abraham Lincoln and the Promise of America. Originally an accompanying volume to the 1993-94 Huntington Library exhibit on Lincoln, this fascinating work helps the scholar and layman alike delve into the public life of Abraham Lincoln. Neely believes that Lincoln’s abilities as a strong war time president not only helped hold the Union together, but also cemented his reputation as a great man and president.
The author dedicates the first two chapters to Lincoln’s pre-presidential career. Dwindling little on his early childhood, Neely does point out the future president’s determination instilled in him by hard work and his adversity to picking up and moving to easier homesteads. These early episodes in his life help build the image of the “down to earth” frontiersman who pulled himself up by his own bootstraps; an opinion that Lincoln not only conjured as a political image, but believed himself. However, Lincoln was far from egalitarian – Neely demonstrates his vicious partisan politics throughout this work.
Neely finds that his subject’s stubborn demeanor helped solidify his political aims at an early stage in his career. Always a proponent of internal improvements in his home state, Lincoln quickly fell in line with Whig politics in the 1830s. Although the majority of the Illinois State Legislature condemned the Federal government for attempting to abolish the slave trade in Washington D.C., he was one of the few who registered a dissenting opinion. Neely points out that Lincoln’s earliest stances were anti-slavery, even if he did not follow through with them. The ability to step back from key issues for political gain is an attribute that most historians do not bestow upon Lincoln often, Neely finds him to be a shrewd politician.
The author believes that Lincoln’s effectiveness as commander and chief was related to his patience and politics. Although without military service worth mention, he quickly became involved with the affairs of the military. However, generals such as George McClellan found him lacking in military insight, and Neely sees Lincoln’s politics played the greatest role in determining his war objectives. Always willing to admit mistakes, by 1862 the President finally could articulate his war objectives effectively. As in his political life, Lincoln learned ruthlessness in his command of the war. Neely claims that Lincoln took no advice about the war, and solely dictated military strategy for the war. Despite no prior military experience, Lincoln – in the author’s eyes – became a thorough strategist.
Neely believes that Lincoln was not a reformer by nature; indeed his stubbornness helped contribute to his political ability. When it came to emancipation, the author uses his fourth chapter to detail the progression Lincoln made from his 1860’s platform to the 1862 proclamation. In the initial phases of the war, Lincoln looks to congress to help buy slaves from the border states. Frustrated by Union incompetence, Lincoln began to use expanded executive power to achieve his objective of emancipation. Neely believes that the President became the sole mover and shaker of emancipation, taking the task securely into his own hands. The author spends the next few chapters dealing with the politics of race and war. Again, Neely finds that Lincoln expanded his powers as necessary to keep the Union together; all the while the objectives of emancipation and military victory blurred together.
Although an interesting synthesis of Lincoln’s words and scholarship on the 16th President, this work is not without its faults. Foremost, Neely blatantly ignores the personal and professional life of Lincoln. He seems to believe that the political and personal spheres of life do not correlate at all. Without a look at personal motivation, how can scholars really understand why Lincoln did anything? Neely himself relates some of Lincoln’s political abilities and opinions to portions of his private life, but only opens this realm to his readers long enough to make his points. Still, The Last Best Hope of Earth: Abraham Lincoln and the Promise of America stands as an interesting biography that any student interested in Lincoln would benefit from reading.
Dan Vogel Texas Christian University.