Benjamin P. ThomasRezensionen

Good details on the various biography-writers of Lincoln.

Well written biography. Lacking in all policy matters outside of the Civil War though. Would be nice to know more economic policies of Lincoln.

The connection of Oneida County, where I live, to abolitionism has fascinated me. This region, now considered (unfairly) as rather unremarkable, was in the mid-19th century a hotbed of social and cultural reform. Rev. George Washington Gale, who preached at our little village church, was the nation's instigator of the Manual Labor educational movement that provided higher education for students who could not afford tuition in exchange for their labor that offset costs of education. Gale founded the Oneida Institute of Science and Industry, a pioneering model of the Manual Labor method that flourished; it became one of the first to admit blacks in the student body. Gale went on to Illinois where he and others from Oneida County founded Knox College. Gale also introduced the famous evangelist Charles Grandison Finney to the upstate NY region from which Finney's renown spread far and wide.

Theodore Dwight Weld became an acolyte of Finney's He was educated at the Oneida Institute under Beriah Greene who had replaced Gale. Weld took up the charge of spreading the message of the Manual Labor model across the country with the support of the Tappan brothers' "Society for Promoting Manual Labor in Literary Institutions". He traveled thousands of miles across the country extolling the merits of Manual Labor. Later, he moved on to the Lane Seminary in Cincinnati with other students of the Oneida Institute where, after a contentious fight with the seminary's trustees over promoting abolitionism, Weld and his fellow students departed Lane for the newly formed Oberlin College.

Weld became a leading light in the mid-century's abolition movement, one of the "immediatists" who lit the fires of fervent abolitionism throughout the nation. Weld was inexhaustible in orating and writing and is squarely in the pantheon of leading lights of the era's causes. While working in Washington, he became a close ally and aide to John Quincy Adams, the scourge of the "Southern Slave Power" in Congress.

For Weld, freedom for the slave was not the only desired end, that full civil and social equality of Blacks was a paramount goal. Weld, in productive collaboration with his wife, Angelina Grimke Weld, and sister-in-law Sarah Grimke recognized the importance of women's rights in a just society. Weld is also well-known for his campaigns for the temperance movement.

This out-of-print book published in 1950 provides a well-researched and thoughtful analysis of this giant of the abolitionist and social justice movement of the 19th century.

Older work that is still one of the best biographies on Lincoln.

2486 Abraham Lincoln: A Biography, by Benjamin P. Thomas (read 22 Jan 1993) This is considered the best one-volume biography of Lincoln, so I read it. It was published in 1952. I found the chapters on Lincoln's early life absorbing and most enjoyable. The later life has been the subject of so much I have read recently--antebellum years and the Civil War--that it seemed well-trodden territory to me. The book presents a good appreciation of Lincoln, and I concur in its view. An excellent book.½

All the things that contributed to the making of a great man; uninsightful and dull

3748. Stanton: The Life and Times of Lincoln's Secretary of War, by Benjamin P. Thomas and Harold M. Hyman (read 27 May 2003) I have wanted to read this book, published in 1962, for years, and so when I saw it on a college library shelf I decided to. While not uncritical it is pro-Stanton, even when he was serving in Johnson's Cabinet and doing all he could to get Johnson convicted and ousted from the presidency. But certainly during the Civil War Stanton's role was important and beneficial. A book of much interest, though it does not even tell us where he was buried! (But, as in so many instances, Wikipedia does: Oak Hill Cemetery in Washington, D. C.)

C.

This was a book I found in the bargain bin at Barnes and Noble. I think it does a good job of showing how much of the country's burden Lincoln bore and what courage he displayed. Truly a pheomenal man, and probably our greatest President.