Thesis (Ph. D.)--Duke University, 1931. / Without thesis note. "A classified bibliography of poetry, fiction, and drama dealing with Lincoln": p. 309-[327].

Words matter. America was founded with a five-word mission statement: "All men are created equal." The nation's most successful politicians have understood the power of words. Theodore Roosevelt claimed the nation's chief executive could lay out his agenda from the "bully pulpit," while Franklin Delano Roosevelt calmed the public's fears throughout his term in office during regular fireside chats. Similarly, John F. Kennedy challenged the nation with his rhetoric to look beyond "what your country can do for you" and ask instead "what you can do for your country," while Barack Obama's speech at the Democratic National Convention in 2004 propelled him onto the national stage. Abraham Lincoln not only understood the power of words, but he knew how to use them to his advantage. Words were the secret to his success; indeed, they continue to serve his legacy well. While scholarly studies of Lincoln's rhetoric have steadily increased over the last fifteen years, the historiography remains consumed with his presidency. However, by beginning the story of Lincoln's eloquence in the White House, scholars have neglected his painfully revealing personal and literary evolution. Despite the thousands of books written about the sixteenth president, there has never been a full-length study devoted to his poetry. His intensely autobiographical poetry remains one of the last great untapped reservoirs for scholars. Not only does Lincoln's poetry reveal that he was engaged in a lifelong struggle to come to terms with loss, but his private poetry also found its way into his public speeches. In the process, he helped a nation find meaning in the confusion and tragedy of civil war.

This thesis describes the circumstances surrounding the presidential election of 1864, including the Civil war and the divided Republican party.

While the migration of Abraham Lincoln’s family to the Northwest has often been documented as a significant event of his youth, historians have neglected the powerful repercussions this family decision had on Lincoln’s assessment of the South and the secession crisis in 1860 and 1861. Lincoln’s years living and working in the Northwest from 1831 to 1861 exposed him to the anti–slave system ethos of that region’s southern-born migrants. Sensitive to the restraints they believed the social system of slavery placed upon their own liberties, these former southerners simultaneously despised the slave system, hated African Americans, and sympathized with white slaveholders and nonslaveholders who remained in the South. After building his initial sense of southern society from these migrants, Lincoln spent his years as a U.S. congressman learning the significance of the Northwest Ordinance in creating the free society in which they had thrived. Emphasizing Thomas Jefferson’s role in conceiving the Northwest Ordinance and utilizing statistical evidence to prove the superiority of free soil over slave, Lincoln’s colleagues further expanded Lincoln’s conception of the South. All these influences combined to produce Lincoln’s uniquely northwestern approach to slavery, the South, and the secession crisis. Believing that the self-interest of white nonslaveholding southerners naturally propelled them away from the South and toward free society, Lincoln perceived the slave South as a vastly unequal society controlled by a minority of aristocratic slaveholders who cajoled or chided their nonslaveholding neighbors into accepting a vision of the South’s proslavery, expansionist future. As president-elect, Lincoln therefore overestimated the Unionist sentiment of southerners before and during the secession crisis. He remained convinced that the majority of white nonslaveholders would not support a secessionist movement that he believed countered their own self-interest. With time, and through careful communications with the South, he remained convinced that he could settle secessionist passions and bring southerners to trust him and the Republican Party. This northwestern perception of the South therefore explains, in part, Lincoln’s silence and his refusal to compromise during the secession crisis.

My project examines the legacy of the Gettysburg Address from 1863 to 1965. After an introduction and a chapter setting the stage, each succeeding chapter surveys the meaning of the Gettysburg Address at key moments: the initial reception of the speech in 1863; its status during the semi-centennial in 1913 and during the construction of the Lincoln Memorial; the place it held during the world wars; and the transformation of the Address in the late 1950s and early 1960s marked by the confluence of the Cold War, Civil Rights Movement, Lincoln Birth Sesquicentennial, and Civil War Centennial. My final chapter considers how interpretations of the Address changed in textbooks from 1900 to 1965, and provides the entire trajectory of the evolving meanings of the speech in one medium and in one chapter. For each time period I have analyzed what the Address meant to people living in four cities: Gettysburg, Richmond, New York, and London. My argument is twofold. First, rather than operating as a national document the Gettysburg Address has always held different meanings in the North and South. Given that the speech addressed questions central to the United States (equality and democracy), this lack of a common interpretation illustrates that there was no singular collective memory or national identity regarding core values. Second, as the nation and world shifted, so did the meaning of the Gettysburg Address. Well into the twentieth-century the essence of the speech was proclaimed to be its support of the democratic form of government as opposed to monarchies or other institutions. But in the middle twentieth-century that interpretation began to shift, with many both abroad and at home beginning to see the speech’s assertion of human equality as its focal point and most important contribution.

No description available.

This research looks at the narrative of Abraham Lincoln as the Great Emancipator versus the Evolving Emancipator. The goal of this thesis is to contribute to the narrative of the Evolving Emancipator and show an imperfect man who achieved this action after trials and tribulations.This has been achieved by examining letters and other primary sources to fully understand the scope of Lincoln’s sentiments regarding slavery. My research shows a man who acknowledged slavery because it was sanctioned by the law. He recognized the rights of slave owners, both to retain their slaves and to have fugitive slaves returned, as they were clearly guaranteed in the Constitution. My thesis aims to accurately represent a man with conflicting thoughts who at the end of the day was sensible about his time, but through extensive pressure finally found his conviction with his prime goal being to unite his nation once more. By providing analyses of primary sources, like his letters to Horace Greeley and his draft of the Emancipation Proclamation, I was able to garner an account of Abraham Lincoln’s adaptability to the social, political and economic changes during his presidency and decision to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. There is no shortage of data on the subject at hand and through primary and secondary sources I was able to collect a copious amount of details for my thesis. The sources used for this study effectively give a well-rounded idea of the era’s current events that helped formulate and add to my research.

Master of Arts / Department of History / Charles W. Sanders, Jr. / This thesis examines the reasons Union soldiers voted overwhelmingly for Abraham Lincoln in the presidential election of 1864. This thesis bridges the gap between the emerging disagreements within the historiography of the soldier vote in 1864. The disagreements thus far deal with the role of emancipation in the Union soldier’s decision-making process versus the role of other issues, particularly whether or not the war effort should have been continued on to ultimate victory. By extension, the argument also deals with whether or not Union soldiers adhered to the Republican Party’s ideology in making their decision. Through analysis of primary sources including Union soldiers’ letters and diaries, the answer that emerges is that Union soldiers adhered to Republican ideology as outlined by Republican campaign materials as well as their party platform in making their decision for president. This thesis ultimately concludes that a focus on any one reason or another that soldiers chose Lincoln misses the larger picture.

This is a study of the pursuit of African American colonization as a state and latterly a federal policy during the period c. 1850-65. Historians generally come to the topic via an interest in the Civil War and especially in Lincoln, but in so doing, they saddle it with moral judgment and the burden of rather self-referential debates. The thesis argues that, whilst the era’s most noteworthy ventures into African American colonization did indeed emerge from the circumstances of the Civil War, and from the personal efforts of the president, one can actually offer the freshest insights on Lincoln by bearing in mind that colonization was, above all, a real policy. It enjoyed the support of other adherents too, and could be pursued by various means, which themselves might have undergone adjustment over time and by trial and error. Using an array of unpublished primary sources, the study finds that Lincoln and his allies actively pursued colonization for a longer time, and with more persistence in the face of setbacks, than scholars normally assume. The policy became entangled in considerations of whether it was primarily a domestic or an international matter, whilst other overlapping briefs also sabotaged its execution, even as the administration slowly learned various lessons about how not to go about its implementation.By early 1864, the resulting confusion, as well as the political fallout from the fiasco of the one expedition to go ahead, curtailed the president’s ability to continue with the policy. There are strong suggestions, however, that he had not repudiated colonization, and possibly looked to revive it, even as he showed a tentative interest in alternative futures for African Americans. This thesis makes a case against unrealistically binary thinking, anachronistic assumptions, abused hindsight, sweeping interpretive frameworks, and double standards of evidentiary assessment respecting a technically imperfect and ethically awkward policy.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of West Florida, 2009. / Title from title page of source document. Document formatted into pages; contains 304 pages. Includes bibliographical references.