The American Mystery: American Literature from Emerson to DeLillo Book

This brief book gathers together almost all Lincoln's writings through his life, public and private, that relate specifically to slavery or race. That alone makes it valuable, though without Lincoln's complete writings available online, in modern edited form, not essential.

However, the introductory by Dr. Gates, is a superb essay on the subject of Lincoln and Slavery, and how contemporary and subsequent African-Americans have dealt with the subject of Lincoln and Race. It's given me a lengthy reading list to explore in the future, for instance.

There's one particular idea, one way of thinking about Lincoln, that struck me as new and important: Lincoln's own thinking on slavery and African-Americans cannot be handled under the single idea of race, which is how we modern Americans instinctively approach it.

Instead, there are three categories that existed in Lincoln's mind that were capable of being almost completely separate: the issues of slavery, colonization, and the welfare of blacks themselves. Thus Lincoln can be seen opposing slavery from the earliest time in his life, without any implication of racial equality--indeed, an explicit opposition of racial equality until the last years of his life. There could be the ridiculous, sometimes romantic notion, that Americans could pursue their historical destinies and blacks could manage their own without our interference, if only every African-American could be convinced to move to Liberia, or Haiti, or Panama and leave white America to themselves.

It's a very perceptive approach to reading Lincoln's own writings, which fill the rest of the book. On those, Gates lets Lincoln speak for himself, but the chapters give useful headings of the historical context, sometimes with particularly notable passages highlighted.

A useful book. Dr. Gates apparently also narrated a public TV series on Lincoln, which is where his idea for the book arose. I haven't had cable since the mid 90s, but am planning to to look this up on netflix or amazon prime in the future.