Abstract
Timed to coincide with the sesquicentennial of the final decree are a number of important new books on the origins, character, and effects of the Proclamation. Some of them focus entirely on the two Proclamations, while others contextualize those turbulent few months between Lincoln’s issuance of his preliminary Proclamation in September 1862 and his signing of the official Emancipation Proclamation January 1, 1863, within larger studies of emancipation or the war’s impact on slavery. In the process, a consensus of sorts has emerged, at least regarding most of the central questions that previously divided historians. Yet, if very few recent authors find it particularly constructive to battle over simplistic views of Lincoln as the Great Emancipator, the question of whether the president “was an enthusiastic or reluctant” liberator, as Harold Holzer remarks, “continues to test our will to understand the complex past as its participants lived it.”