The Irrepressible Conflict 1850-1865, First Edition 1934

Description

The Irrepressible Conflict 1850-1865, First Edition
by Charles Cook
Like new copy. 1934. Stunning dust jacket with protective cover originally issued. first edition 468 pages. MacMillan Co.
Doubt if you can find a book in this condition 86 years old. One corner slightly bent.
The first of the nine articles, Arthur C. Cole’s “President Lincoln and the Illinois Radical Republicans,” was published in March 1918. Cole, who chided Randall for using the “first personal pronoun,” taught at Case Western Reserve University and Brooklyn College, succeeded Milo Quaife as editor of the
Review
in 1930, and rounded out his service to the
oah
as its president in 1941–1942. Cole had already established himself by 1918 with a history of the Whig party in the South and a flurry of articles on a broad array of Civil War subjects. He wrote
The Era of the Civil War, 1848–1870
for the Illinois state centennial history series in 1919 and a widely used and much-reprinted survey of the Civil War era,
The Irrepressible Conflict, 1850–1865,
in 1934. From the research Cole was conducting for his Illinois centennial history volume, he spun off “President Lincoln and the Illinois Radical Republicans.” In it Cole argued, to his evident satisfaction, that Lincoln had been “inclining more and more to the position recommended by the radicals” all through the Civil War. It was not a perfect harmony, however, and the Radicals’ plans for Reconstruction “required of Lincoln serious changes in his own views, changes he was not as yet ready to make.” His assassination, “which placed a martyr’s crown upon his troubled brow,” relieved him of “possible estrangement” from the Radicals, but the “estrangement” was only “possible,” and it would be hard to deduce from Cole’s tone that he thought Lincoln had been weighed in the balance and found wanting.
Cole’s essay was not followed by any article-length Lincoln work in the
Review
until 1935, when Winfred A. Harbison edited and published a series of letters from the Zachariah Chandler Papers in the Library of Congress, detailing the backstage political activity Michigan’s Radical Republican senator undertook in the fall of 1864 to persuade other Radicals to rally around Lincoln as the least of political evils in the presidential election of 1864. It was succeeded the next year by a briefer editorial submission by Paul I. Miller from the Thomas Ewing Papers (also in the Library of Congress) on Lincoln’s telegram, and then letter, declining appointment as governor of the Oregon territory in 1849. (The last example of that genre of Lincoln—an edited collection of correspondence between J. Franklin Jameson and Albert Beveridge concerning the composition of Beveridge’s
Abraham Lincoln
—appeared in 1949.)
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