The Place of Abraham Lincoln in History (From The Atlantic Archives) [Kindle-editie] beoordelingen het boek quotes

George Bancroft was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1800, and lived until 1891—almost a full century, during which he became the country’s preeminent historian, completing and revising his 10-volume History of the United States by 1885. He also held several government posts; as Secretary of the Navy, he established the Naval Academy at Annapolis. In February of 1866, Bancroft was Congress’s choice to deliver a special eulogy for Lincoln. In the closing days of April 1865, even as Lincoln’s funeral train was moving slowly from Washington to his home in Springfield, Illinois, George Bancroft was on a hard deadline to deliver “The Place of Abraham Lincoln in History” in time for the June issue of The Atlantic Monthly. Bancroft chose to write not so much a tribute to Lincoln (“It is too soon after death to write about the man …”) as a history of slavery in the United States, from when the first slaves had landed in Virginia 246 years earlier. In the kind of tour de force that readers have learned to expect from The Atlantic, Bancroft lays out the progress of what he calls the “slow poison” of slavery in the body politic, the remedies tested and rejected, until the patient was at death’s door when Lincoln appeared on the scene. Bancroft details how unlikely a candidate for greatness Lincoln appeared to be, then goes on to describe the immensity of his success in the United States and the world. The essay ends with these prophetic words about the democracy Lincoln saved: “With one wing touching the waters of the Atlantic and the other on the Pacific, it will grow into a greatness of which the past has no parallel; and there can be no spot in Europe or in Asia so remote or so secluded as to shut out its influence.”