With it being estimated that there's more than 16,000 Lincoln bios in print, it's definitely hard to find new angles or new interpretations for new authors.
Two new books within the last six months or so have done just that, though. Unfortunately, in both cases, what has been good, even occasionally splendid new work, has been offset by whoppers in historical errors I know the authors could have avoided, and in both cases directly related to the header.
Here you are, first with:
The Crooked Path to Abolition: Abraham Lincoln and the Antislavery Constitution by James OakesMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
This is good overall, but it loses a star on Lincoln and colonization. With Oakes, it's more a throwaway than a full-throttled claim like that of David S. Reynolds in "Abe-Abraham Lincoln and His Times," (see below) but Oakes claims Lincoln stopped discussing abolition after 1862.
Update: Book lost a star due to email exchange with Oakes:
You have to be obsessed with colonization to give a shit about this. I’m not and I don’t.
Here’s why:
Q. Of the four million slaves emancipated by the Civil War, how many did the federal government colonize outside the United States?
A. Zero
I’m interested in explaining what happened, not what didn’t happen.
My response:
I'm "obsessed" with historical accuracy. I guess you're admitting you're not.PLUS, you knows it "goes to motive" on explaining persona of Lincoln.
Oakes' main claim is half-true by the letter, at best, and totally untrue in spirit, as he allowed the Emigration Bureau to discuss Belize colonization in 1863, asked AG Bates in 1864 if colonization was legally still on the table, and reportedly discussed the issue with Spoons Butler just before his assassination. (See extended note at bottom.)
Given this, and that Oakes like Reynolds tries to "soften" old Lincoln statements from charges of racism, it's no wonder Reynolds blurbed it. Add to that the fact that they're peers at CUNY and even both went to Berkeley and there probably was some cross-pollinization.
As with Reynolds' book, were the five-star elements in it not fully five-star, the book would have gotten three stars because of this willful and egregious failure. (As with Reynolds, it is both; I know he knows the history I just cited.)
View all my reviews
And followed by:
Abe: Abraham Lincoln in His Times by David S. ReynoldsMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
I would have loved to five star this book. And, even with some of the early problems on one issue, I was still leaning that way. But, more problems on that issue meant I couldn’t do it. And, if it weren’t so good otherwise, it risked falling to three stars.
(Update: In hindsight, and seeing James Oakes is peddling some of the same untrue claims about Lincoln abandoning colonization after 1862, and with these claims getting bigger play in Reynolds, I have decided that for this and other reasons noted by myself and mentioned by other reviewers in various places, the rating must be reduced to three stars after all.)
First, the good of what’s billed as the first ever “cultural biography” of Lincoln? Reynolds delivers in spades in many ways.
One area where he really impressed me was on Lincoln’s religiosity. He notes that his parents attended an anti-slavery Baptist church in Kentucky, and were steadfast in their own stance. Beyond that, Reynolds talks about Lincoln’s younger adult deism, and how he soft-peddled that as part of his political rise. At the same time, along with other biographers, especially after the death of son Willie, he shows Lincoln, though still not a churchgoer, moving toward a more fatalistic version of conventional Calvinism.
Reynolds is also good on Lincoln’s legal practice. Many biographers focus on his 1850s railroad cases. Reynolds looks at how many divorce cases the younger Lincoln handled, for women as plaintiffs suing on grounds of desertion. He adds that Illinois was one of the few states that allowed women to file for divorce on desertion as well as abuse, and that it was fairly generous, for that day, on what counted as abuse.
Fast forward to the 1850s. Reynolds talks about Lincoln avoiding ‘isms,” a charge Democrats hurled repeatedly at Republicans. He notes that Lincoln was like French tightrope walker Blondin, who had crossed Niagara Falls at this time. He adds how Lincoln sometimes made this modeling conscious, and how many newspaper columns and cartoons in the 1860 election explicitly drew this out.
He also talks about how Abe, not just Mary, was interested in spiritualism, especially after Willie’s death. Again, he puts this in the context of a rising national interest in spiritualism, fueled largely but by no means entirely by the Fox sisters. Among his contemporaries, Ben Wade, Josh Giddings and Garrison all had at least some degree of interest. Lincoln conversed with both Robert Edmonds and Robert Dale Owen, the son of utopian Robert Owen, and listened seriously to Owen on matters both within and outside of spiritualism.
(Sidebar: This puts paid to the lie by folks like the Freedom from Religion Foundation that Lincoln was an atheist.)
That’s just a sample.
On the non-cultural side, Reynolds does a good job of recognizing Anna Carroll’s contributions to the war effort. I had read basically nothing about her before.
Several problems with the book, though, and they all center around slavery. Reynolds isn’t quite doing the Spielberg movie version, but ….
First and foremost, no, Lincoln did not stop talking about colonization in 1862. His administration continued discussions with Central American countries well into 1864, and in 1865, Lincoln purportedly said he had only abandoned it at the time for political reasons. Spoons Butler said that Lincoln, the day before his assassination, asked him to continue to look into it. It’s dishonest of Reynolds to not even mention Bernard Kock and the Ile-de-Vache (Vache Island) scheme.
It's true that Vache Island wasn't actively promoted after 1862. But, colonizing Belize? That was an activity the Emigration Bureau did promote, under Lincoln's auspices, into 1863. And, per Wiki, Lincoln continued to have at least a background attachment to colonization into 1864, even if he and Butler didn't discuss it in 1865.
The question is, ultimately, after the war itself started swinging to the US more instead of the Confederacy and 1863 elections went pro-Republican, how much was Lincoln’s diminished public push for colonization his own change of mind and how much was change of politics? This site from the Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association, by Michael Vorenberg pushes for Lincoln's abandoning colonization after 1863 elections, but not convincingly to me. Basically, I find Reynolds, given the amount of knowledge he has otherwise, to be intellectually dishonest.
Back to The Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association, but a much different take. More here, about the likely reality of Lincoln holding on to colonization ideas until the end of his life. MUCH more, about that April 1865 meeting between Lincoln and Butler, which did in fact happen. Phillip Magness writes 15 years later than Vorenberg, and rejects the idea that he disproved the existence of such a meeting. He also notes, contra Oakes and Reynolds, that Carl Schurz and George W. Julian both say that Lincoln continued to push colonization after issuing the Emancipation Proclamation.
Magness expands on some of these thoughts in an edited and condensed version of his Lincoln journal thoughts, at his own website, in 2015, seven years later. Per that, Magness notes that even Thad Stevens supported re-funding James Mitchell, Lincoln's colonization commissioner, and that there was some indication that a Freedman's Bureau under Lincoln's development would have had colonization attached to it.
==
UPDATE, Feb. 12, 2026 (Lincoln's Birthday!). Magness has another piece with the Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Society talking about some lost papers that colonization commissioner (specific title: Administrator of the Emigration Office) took with him after leaving office. Secondary link here. It further puts the lie to Oakes and Reynolds. It includes that, in 1871, in the middle of his wrangling with President Grant over Santo Domingo, in part because he feared Grant wanted it as a colonization outlet, Charles Sumner asking Mitchell what Lincoln might have said on the subject. Mitchell had an 11-page response, which has since been lost, but he ran a summary in the Atlanta Constitution. Magness has that as well.
Just as we don't have these lost papers of Mitchell, for whatever reasons, Magness suggests the reason we don't have more on paper from Lincoln's own hand on colonization after Jan. 1, 1863, is that these papers were removed. By whom, he doesn't say. Mary Lincoln is quite unlikely. Robert Lincoln is a possibility in my eyes, as is Seward, of course.
Magness restrains speculations:
It would be unduly speculative and even irresponsible to suggest that the lost Mitchell papers contain evidence that would otherwise establish a detailed record of Lincoln’s colonization interests into the final days of his life. The small glimpse of their contents that Mitchell and others left behind suggests no such smoking gun but rather a diverse volume of letters, notes, and memoranda that may help to close the gaps in Lincoln’s sporadically documented—though indisputably existent—colonization work after the Emancipation Proclamation, particularly that which occurred in 1863 and early 1864.
Well put.
That said, we do have Abe's signature on an 1863 order related to colonization in British Honduras, today's Belize. Related to that, at footnote 12 in the main piece, three weeks AFTER the Emancipation Proclamation, Magness notes that Lincoln talked up the issue with British ambassador Lord Lyons.
The "smoking gun" vis-a-vis Oakes and Reynolds is that, in 1871, Sumner did not have information to clearly confirm for him that Lincoln had abandoned colonization after Jan. 1, 1863 and wrote Mitchell in part to that end. (Former Interior Secretary John Usher was still alive at the time; there's no information on why Sumner didn't ask him; maybe he knew enough to go straight to Mitchell.)
==
Back to Reynolds.
Second, he “sanitizes” some of Lincoln’s somewhat racist comments in the 1840s and 50s. No, they were racist, if not the worst racist for his age, and they weren’t all told in the service of politics.
Third, he claims the republic was strong against the slave trade, citing that the death penality was made a possible punishment in 1820. Reality? The Lincoln Administration’s imposition of it, once, was the ONLY time in the 42 years. More reality? The US refusing to cooperate with Britain in African shore naval policing. MORE reality? Very few cases brought in the US. W.E.B. DuBois may be too high, but, as of the start of the Civil War, I’d estimate 100,000 blacks had either been post-1807 illegally imported (whether from Africa or the post-1832 British Caribbean) or descendants of such people.
In addition, I found a phrase here and there jarring, such as calling Elizabeth Keckley’s son “light complexioned.” Of what relevance is that? None, obviously.
On the 13th Amendment? Lincoln may not have personally handed out favors. (I can’t remember what Speilberg claimed.) But, did he know that Ashley and others WERE? Yes. And, some of the favors being peddled? Federal jobs are executive branch appointments. For instance, only Abe (or Andy Johnson, later) could have named George Yeaman ambassador to Denmark. The movie part about Lincoln personally lobbying Yeaman at the White House is true.
And, again, I know Reynolds knows this. If not, he should
It’s anachronistic to call a Lollard like John Oldcastle a Puritan.
Per reviewers elsewhere, applying labels like "conservative" and "progressive" to the battle over slavery is also anachronistic and serves no purpose.
==
As with Spielberg's movie, promoting untrue claims about Lincoln does nobody any good today. All it does is give openings and fuel to libertarian pseudo-historians attacking Lincoln for violating civil liberties and stuff like that. (For the wondering, I'm referencing Thomas DiLorenzo. Yeah, Oakes, I know academics reject him, and largely rightly so, but a chunk of the general public eats him up. And, I haven't even mentioned Lerone Bennett, who would kick your ass if still alive.)
And, yes, that note applies to you, Prof. Oakes. And, assuming this is part of why Reynolds never responded to my email, it applies to you as well. And, I'm not going to add further email exchanges to the book review, or the full amount of them here.
Suffice it to say that I never claimed Lincoln uttered public calls for colonization after 1862, so I'm not even further answering that. The fact is that, officially, even without public pronouncement, Lincoln kept colonization on the official governmental plate through the first two-thirds of 1864. And, as is documented, he talked to Bates about it as late as late 1864. And, as great a historian as Foner is, if he uses the lack of PUBLIC discussion post-1862 to also pretend that colonization wasn't on Lincoln's plate after that? Well, Mr. Oakes, then Eric Foner, as great as he is? Is wrong.
And, all the links on the Reynolds review apply to Oakes as well. Hell, they apply to Foner if he really claims that Lincoln making no more public calls for colonization after 1862 means that he abandoned the idea of colonization general. The first of the three links in the one Reynolds review paragraph has Seward claiming in 1877 that Lincoln never abandoned the idea. Gideon Welles is quoted as saying the same, also in 1877. While Bates, Seward and Welles were on the conservative side of Lincoln's Cabinet, outside the Cabinet, Butler was an eventual Radical. George Julian, who also said after Lincoln's death that he supported colonization to the end of his life, was a Radical in the 1860s, though later a Liberal Republican then a Democrat. Samuel Pomeroy, also a Radical, recounts this as well.
Let's also add that both books are biographies of Lincoln, or biographies of select slices of him, NOT histories of the end of slavery in the US. That's another reason Oakes and Reynolds are guilty of intellectual dishonesty. And again, applies to Foner, too, if he really holds this.
And, contra Oakes' vituperative response to my "goes to motive" comment? It DOES go to motive. You come off as promoting a St. Abraham legend on the subject of colonization, per my header.
For the reader? Lincoln's colonization schemes were always voluntary. To riff on his famous 1862 letter to Horace Greeley? If he could have Black freedom and basic civil liberties while keeping all African-Americans in the U.S., that was his preference. But if not, he stood ready to continue to keep colonization on the back burner.
As for taking two stars away? With Reynolds, even more than Oakes, it wasn't just for this, it was for several other reasons, all obvious in the review. Both authors sanitize Lincoln's comments. Plus, I note Reynolds' wrongness on the slave trade and other things, including his "jarring" comments.
Oakes lost the second start for being contentious.
As for "goes to motive"? Much historical speculation ink has been spilled on how Reconstruction would have played out differently had Lincoln lived. Surely, he would have cracked down on the Klan, Knights of the Camellia, etc., quicker than Johnson did. He would have done other things more firmly. But, if Butler, Wells, Seward, Schurtz, the Blairs, etc., are all right, would he have started peddling colonization again, even with a Lincolnesque version of "see, I told you we can't live together"?
