Our National Reckoning: A Historiographical Approach to Emancipation and Lincoln

This historiographical paper examines scholarship on Abraham Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation in our national reckoning with the legacies of slavery and race in American History since 1865. This leads scholars to inevitably confront the question of Lincoln’s true motivation for pursuing emancipation as a war goal: to save the Union or to provide a “new birth of freedom?” Following the tumultuous period of Reconstruction, which gave rise to segregation in the South, many white historians focused little attention on slavery and emancipation in studies of the Civil War. Attention returned in the twentieth century, especially with the centennial of both the war and the Emancipation Proclamation in the 1960s. Lincoln’s reputation as the “Great Emancipator” has undergone scrutiny very recently considering the growing trend since the Civil Rights era to highlight the agency of enslaved people during the Civil War and to rectify the complex white attitudes, like Lincoln’s, towards race and freedom that have existed throughout our national history. The paper concludes that scholars’ views on Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation have always evolved with the views on race and slavery in broader American society.