Table of Contents:
  • Introduction: what would Lincoln do?
  • The unlikely intellectual biography of Abraham Lincoln
  • Abraham Lincoln and the doctrine of necessity
  • Come-outers and community-men: Abraham Lincoln and the idea of community in nineteenth-century America
  • Lincoln and natural law
  • "Fiends ... facing Zionwards": Abraham Lincoln's reluctant embrace of the abolitionists
  • Apples of gold in a picture of silver: Lincoln, the constitution, and liberty
  • Understanding emancipation: Lincoln's proclamation and the end of slavery
  • Defending emancipation: Abraham Lincoln and the Conkling letter, August 1863
  • Prudence and the Proclamation
  • Lincoln and the "war powers" of the Presidency.