In a time of great contest and confusion over the future of democracy as a governing principle, the example of Abraham Lincoln continues to provide encouragement and direction about democracy’s viability in the face of immense challenges. In The Political Writings of Abraham Lincoln, Allen Guelzo brings into one volume Lincoln’s most famous political documents and speeches from his earliest days as a political candidate under the banner of the Whig Party, to his election and service as the first anti-slavery Republican president, from 1861 to 1865, and the nation’s leader in the fiery trial of civil war. While many anthologies of Lincoln’s political documents routinely concentrate on his presidential years or only on his anti-slavery writings, Guelzo concentrates on documents from Lincoln’s earliest political activity as an Illinois state legislator in the 1830s up through his presidency. The result is an accessible resource for students, researchers, and general readers.

In a time of great contest and confusion over the future of democracy as a governing principle, the example of Abraham Lincoln continues to provide encouragement and direction about democracy’s viability in the face of immense challenges. In The Political Writings of Abraham Lincoln, Allen Guelzo brings into one volume Lincoln’s most famous political documents and speeches from his earliest days as a political candidate under the banner of the Whig Party, to his election and service as the first anti-slavery Republican president, from 1861 to 1865, and the nation’s leader in the fiery trial of civil war. While many anthologies of Lincoln’s political documents routinely concentrate on his presidential years or only on his anti-slavery writings, Guelzo concentrates on documents from Lincoln’s earliest political activity as an Illinois state legislator in the 1830s up through his presidency. The result is an accessible resource for students, researchers, and general readers.

In a time of great contest and confusion over the future of democracy as a governing principle, the example of Abraham Lincoln continues to provide encouragement and direction about democracy’s viability in the face of immense challenges. In The Political Writings of Abraham Lincoln, Allen Guelzo brings into one volume Lincoln’s most famous political documents and speeches from his earliest days as a political candidate under the banner of the Whig Party, to his election and service as the first anti-slavery Republican president, from 1861 to 1865, and the nation’s leader in the fiery trial of civil war. While many anthologies of Lincoln’s political documents routinely concentrate on his presidential years or only on his anti-slavery writings, Guelzo concentrates on documents from Lincoln’s earliest political activity as an Illinois state legislator in the 1830s up through his presidency. The result is an accessible resource for students, researchers, and general readers.

In a time of great contest and confusion over the future of democracy as a governing principle, the example of Abraham Lincoln continues to provide encouragement and direction about democracy’s viability in the face of immense challenges. In The Political Writings of Abraham Lincoln, Allen Guelzo brings into one volume Lincoln’s most famous political documents and speeches from his earliest days as a political candidate under the banner of the Whig Party, to his election and service as the first anti-slavery Republican president, from 1861 to 1865, and the nation’s leader in the fiery trial of civil war. While many anthologies of Lincoln’s political documents routinely concentrate on his presidential years or only on his anti-slavery writings, Guelzo concentrates on documents from Lincoln’s earliest political activity as an Illinois state legislator in the 1830s up through his presidency. The result is an accessible resource for students, researchers, and general readers.

In Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) and other antislavery writings, Harriet Beecher Stowe widened the concept of moral complicity to include “tolerance complicity,” the failure to obey the natural promptings of one’s conscience in the face of slavery’s harms. Delineating this moral malfunction, Stowe sought to awaken in system bystanders and participants the capacity to feel the system’s implications – its complicities and consequences – and respond conscientiously to that feeling. Crucial to this awakening is individuals’ openness to moral shame. For Stowe, moral shame was more than an inward-looking, self-convicting emotion. It was also a crucial affective resource that illuminated the nature and reach of the implicating slave system. Stowe demanded that white northerners and southerners, women as well as men, remain vigilantly alert to moral shame. Out of such an alertness, more direct and public efforts to move the community and uproot the system would follow.

The introduction sets out the main objectives of the book and its central themes and arguments. It introduces the source material and the methodological approaches employed. It delineates the new approaches taken to the topic and how they fit with current scholarship, including the internationalisation of early English colonialism, the societal and cultural influences that impacted English projects in the New World, and the embodied nature of early English explorative projects. The introduction finishes by giving a brief outline of the book’s structure and a summary of why the arguments presented are critical for reshaping our understanding of English colonialism in the New World.

This chapter traces changing English approaches towards exploration, settlement, and colonisation across the sixteenth century. It explores the tension in English travel and colonial literature between the desire to seek wealth and riches in the New World and the need to advance the glory of God, identifying the roots of this tension in the 1550s, its abandonment in the 1570s, and its re-emergence in the 1580s. By analysing this process and identifying what precipitated it, this chapter argues that by the end of the sixteenth century a unique brand of English colonialism had emerged that placed both religious evangelisation and commercialisation at its centre. This mixed approach to colonisation projects would continue to be a hallmark of English activity in the New World well into the seventeenth century.

This chapter challenges the pervasive notion in the current historiography that the European inability to recognise the uniqueness and difference of the Americas in the sixteenth century was the product of an inflexible and monolithic early modern mind. In contrast, this chapter contends that Old World frameworks of knowledge were concsiously employed by English writers to justify their explorative and colonial approaches to the New World, rather than an unconcious reflection of their own incapability to recognise American difference. In doing so, this chapter argues that English explorers and writers viewed the new American lands selectively, seeing not what was really there, but what was most advantageous to the political, economic, cultural, and colonial aims of the viewer. This type of ‘selective appopriation’ shaped early English understandings of the New World and helped to define and validate sixteenth-century English colonial decisions.

The conclusion synthesises the main arguments of the book and what this means for the historiography of early America. It concludes by suggesting that the English approach to settlement and colonialism in the New World at the turn of the seventeenth century was the result of decades of translating and transforming images of America that first came from continental Europe, of utilising and adapting intellectual and cultural frameworks of understanding to explain the existence of this new and shockingly different world, of experiencing and responding to both English colonial failure and success, and of incorporating the peoples and environments of America into the mental world of early modern England in an attempt to persuade English men and women to make the difficult decision to cross the Atlantic in search of a new life. It was in the sixteenth century that the English first grappled with what the discovery of 1492 meant for them, both in terms of how they came to understand and define the new lands across the Atlantic and how they came to craft their own colonial approach that would challenge their rivals and restore the English realm to economic and political health. The sixteenth-century English involvement with America, although at times sporadic and limited to a small group of interested parties, was foundational, establishing and defining the ways in which English colonialism would proceed in the New World.

Through an investigation into the role played by diet in English overseas projects, chapter four argues that corporeality was vital to the formation and dissemination of English representations of America. Eating and the effect of food on the body became, when placed in an American context, indicative of successful and profitable ventures or unsuccessful and troublesome ones. English ideas about the human body and how it functioned in different environments were integral to the encounter between England and America. This bodily discourse allowed for the defence of failed attempts at settlement, the celebration of English explorative and colonial projects as providential, and for the establishment of a set of beliefs about the American environment that had ideas about food and the body at its centre.

This chapter examines the multi-faceted English understandings of both Indigenous clothing and nakedness, analysing the various ways that English explorers, writers, and translators described the appearances of the diverse groups of Indigenous people that they encountered. In doing so this chapter argues that descriptions of Indigenous clothing and nakedness in English print varied throughout the sixteenth century and performed a variety of functions, from shaping English approaches to trade and colonisation in the New World, to informing and framing moral and religious debates taking place back home, through reflecting shared European cultural values. Everyday practices of dressing, and English perceptions of Indigenous bodies, were thus central to the articulation of English colonialism in the sixteenth century.