‘Lincoln's monumental life was all about becoming,” announces William W. Freehling in his new biography of the 16th president. By becoming, Freehling means that there was never a single, steadfast Lincoln, always carrying around in his back pocket the principles and plans that eventually became the Emancipation Proclamation. Freehling's Lincoln is a changeling, looking all through his life for the wave (whether political, economic, or professional) that would finally bring him to a successful shore.
This way of interpreting Abraham Lincoln has a strong kinship with the Progressive biographers of Lincoln, from Albert Beveridge to Eric Foner, who have expressed varying degrees of skepticism about the worth of his ideas. Still, Freehling has to be considered seriously, if only because of his marvelous record as a historian of the antebellum South. His two volumes on the coming of secession, The Road to Disunion: Secessionists at Bay, 1776–1854 (1997) and The Road to Disunion: Secessionists Triumphant, 1854–1861 (2007), forced us to understand the fatal dissensions that existed within the South's geography — the Border South (Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky, Missouri), the Upper South (Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Arkansas), and the Lower South (South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, and Texas) — and how those dissensions fed the Lower South's fearful frenzy for secession, lest the Border and the Upper drift (as they were indeed drifting) away from slavery.
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