Reviews for Lincoln Looks West: From the Mississippi to the Pacific

The average rating for Lincoln Looks West: From the Mississippi to the Pacific based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-03-05 00:00:00 Parry Nando Garry Wills is one of the few people I'd really like to meet and have over for dinner, although his intelligence would make me shrivel. His writing is so thoughtful and erudite. He never ceases to astonish me with his insights. The Negro President exams the election of 1800 through the biographies of Thomas Pickering, the anti-slavery arch Federalist and opponent of Jefferson, John Quincy Adams, and Thomas Jefferson and the impact the 3/5ths rule in the Constitution had on the outcome of the election. The 3/5ths rule, that counted slaves as 3/5ths of a person for purposes of representation, virtually guaranteed that the president would come from a slave-holding state especially, as in 1800, when a tie in the Electoral College forced the election into the House of Representatives. It meant that slave-holders got essentially more than one vote, i.e. 1 and 3/5th votes. I had no idea that people like Pickering and Adams had proposed secession long before the Civil War but for reasons opposed to those that finally resulted in secession. The implications were substantial. The extra representation gave Jefferson the election in 1800 [see my review of Bernard Weisberger's excellent book, ] when the tied Electoral college was thrown into the House of Representatives for decision. The difference was eight votes, precisely the advantage gained the south from the three-fifths clause. That's why Jefferson was called the "Negro" president. In his book by the same title, Garry Wills discusses the enormous impact slavery had on the mindset of our early presidents, twelve of whom owned slaves at one time or another. In fact, a major reason for locating the new capitol in Washington, D.C., was because slave owners (all the early presidents owned slaves) would have been forced to manumit them had they remained in Philadelphia, the original capitol and a hotbed of Quaker abolitionism, for more than six months.

Review # 2 was written on 2016-02-09 00:00:00 Stan Dungca Gary Willis historical analysis knocks my pretty little historical framework socks off. (as he has before in Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America, a rhetorical-historical analysis) We have heard of the Washington and Alexander Hamilton & Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. Yet Willis combos John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, amd Timothy Pickering. Timothy Pickering who we mostly know as a historical footnote. Wills says that while Adam's and Jefferson have weighty importance American history, no one has begun done to do justice to the role Pickering played as a Federalist working to hold back slave power. Oh may I read that historical analysis when it comes into being. I read Negro President: Jefferson and the Slave Power as part of a reading survey of Thomas Jefferson with GR group Nonfiction Side Reads. I have left many comments and quotes there. As that group is a private group, that information can be accessed only by those friends. I will, as I often do, record some quotes in the next couple of days will be able to be seen by all interested.