Venerating Lincoln: a history of Abraham Lincoln's critics would be improved if the author weren't so smitten with Lincoln himself.

• Author: Hummel, Jeffrey Rogers
• Position: Loathing Lincoln: An American Tradition from the Civil War to the Present - Book review

Loathing Lincoln: An American Tradition from the Civil War to the Present, by John McKee Barr, Louisiana State University Press, 471 pages, $34.94

ABRAHAM LINCOLN is widely considered the greatest president in American history, yet there have always been dissenters from this prevailing veneration. In Loathing Lincoln, the Lone Star College historian John McKee Barr offers a comprehensive survey of those who have condemned or simply criticized the 16th president.

These detractors, emerging even before Lincoln's election to the presidency and continuing right to the present, have included southern slaveholders, radical abolitionists, Lincoln's Democratic opponents, anti-imperialists, white supremacists, a small number of prominent African Americans, agrarian romantics, neo-Confederates, conservatives, and libertarians. With impressive and wide-ranging research into books, pamphlets, journals, newspapers, speeches, manuscript collections, and even letters to the editor, Barr's book is an exhaustive and scholarly compendium of those who have found fault with Lincoln. You will encounter in this tome's nearly 500 pages such diverse figures as Lysander Spooner, Lord Acton, H.L. Mencken, Gore Vidal, William Appleman Williams, and Ron Paul.

Given the major role that admiration for Lincoln still plays today in popular perceptions about American history and, as a result, in political discourse, any study that looks at Lincoln's critics is a valuable exercise. reason readers will probably find Barr's final two chapters most interesting. One covers the debate over Lincoln among conservatives from 1949 to 1989--a debate that played out most prominently in the pages of National Review, with Willmoore Kendall and Frank Meyer disapproving of Lincoln while Harry Jaffa served as the Rail Splitter's champion. The other chapter looks at Lincoln's libertarian critics and defenders, including Murray Rothbard and Thomas DiLorenzo on the anti side and Timothy Sandefur on the pro. My own book on the Civil War, Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men, figures in the chapter as well.

Barr's summaries of what Lincoln's critics specifically wrote and said are largely accurate. I could quibble about some of his phrasing. For instance, Barr states: "Lincoln was therefore the cause, as Hummel (and Rothbard before him) put it, of 'the welfare-warfare State of today'" (emphasis mine).That is not precisely what I have asserted with regard to either timing or responsibility. What I claimed is that the Civil War represents the great watershed in American history. Prior to the war, successive ideological surges had brought about...