Perspective

According to the back cover, Mark E. Neely, Jr., is one of America's outstanding authorities on Abraham Lincoln, Director of the Lincoln Museum, author of The Abraham Encyclopedia, co-author of The Lincoln Image, and other studies on the Civil War era. In both the introduction and epilogue, Neely observes professional historians have been either blinded by the Lincoln myth or embarrassed by his so-called dictatorial treatment of constitutional issues. They have overlooked abundant source materials on what was said and done, and Neely sets out to examine matters from the bottom up. Determined not to take Republican claims that only traitors are arrested and Democratic cries of partisan excesses, Neely spends fourteen months working in the National Archives to compile The Fate of Liberty, working with records badly mangled and intermingled during transfers between earlier repositories.

Neely tries but is unable to reproduce the quantitative figures given in...