September 1, 2023
Lincoln Prize winner Holzer's Brought Forth on This Continent considers how immigration shaped U.S. society in the three decades before the Civil War (when 10 million foreign-born people settled in the United States) and Lincoln's attitudes toward this new wave. Prepub Alert.
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Copyright 2023 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
January 1, 2024
Holzer (director, Hunter Coll. Roosevelt House Public Policy Inst.; The Presidents vs. the Press) explains how nearly 10 million immigrants moved to the United States during the 30 years before the Civil War and influenced the political landscape and outcomes. They not only changed the country's demographics but demanded reforms to voter registration, to give them the right to vote. The majority, 90 percent, settled in the north and voted strongly against the Civil War and destroyed Lincoln's Whig party. Nonetheless, on July 4, l864, Lincoln signed an act into law to establish the office of the U.S. Immigration Commissioner to encourage further immigration and ban indentured servitude for periods longer than one year. During the Civil War, immigrants had become a significant portion of the Union army, with more than 200,000 German and l50,000 Irish serving. But Lincoln also ruled that immigrants could not be immediately drafted at the time they migrated. Instead, they had to first declare that they renounced allegiances to any other country before being enlisted. VERDICT An outstanding and important book on Lincoln and immigration. A must for readers of American history and immigration studies.--Claude Ury
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February 12, 2024
Historian Holzer (A Just and Generous Nation) offers an elegant examination of Abraham Lincoln’s political evolution on the contentious issue of immigration. Chronicling the “seismic political realignment, cultural upheaval, and personal growth” that led to Lincoln openly encouraging immigration and making it a “policy priority” in an historic November 1863 address to Congress, Holzer explains how Lincoln’s proposal resulted in the “first piece of proactive federal legislation” supporting immigration, which would also be the last of its kind until 1965. Holzer is balanced in his estimation of Lincoln’s statements and actions during the years preceding the Civil War, when “poisonous” ethnic tensions flared: he faults Lincoln for “dallying with deplorable nativists” to gain a political edge, but acknowledges a “signal moral achievement” in Lincoln’s “consistent revulsion for the hatred of Catholics and foreigners.” Adding texture to Holzer’s political analysis are profiles of the president’s foreign-born close associates, mainly Germans, like Carl Schurz (the first German-born American elected senator) and Lincoln’s private secretary John Nicolay. (Lincoln’s relationship to the primarily Democratic-voting Irish community was thornier, particularly given his persistent use of ethnic humor—Holzer provides some off-color examples from Lincoln’s “trove of Irish stories.”) This robust and lively account makes cogent connections between history and today’s immigration policy that will resonate with a wide readership.
Starred review from January 15, 2024
The noted Civil War historian looks at a sidelight of the conflict: its role in encouraging foreign immigration to the U.S. "The immigration debate had been raging since the beginning of the republic," writes Holzer. As with so much else connected to abolition and civil rights, Lincoln's thinking on it evolved even before he entered the White House. Though Lincoln did not harbor xenophobic views, as the author points out in this readable history, his growing support for immigration did not extend to newcomers from Asia or Latin America. Rather, he hoped for a steady flow of newcomers from northern Europe. There were reasons for Lincoln's strategic recrafting of immigration policy: Most newcomers came to northern ports and provided fresh soldiers for the Union Army. One example was the vaunted "Fighting Irish," as Robert E. Lee dubbed them, led at first by an immigrant named Michael Corcoran who, in a Confederate prison, declared, "God bless America, and ever preserve her as the asylum of all the oppressed of the earth." Lincoln also reckoned that once the war ended and slavery was abolished, agriculture in North and South alike would benefit from a replenished foreign labor force. He had to balance carefully the competing demands of the newcomers. Many Germans, for example, were not always keen to follow orders by non-German superiors, even as Lincoln saw the wisdom of ethnically distinct units in the interest of unit coherence. The country's open-door policy continued after Lincoln's death. As Holzer reminds readers in closing, it was a Swiss-born immigrant, commandant of the notorious Andersonville prison camp, who was the last casualty of the Civil War, executed on November 25, 1865, his last words uttered "to remind his captors that he had merely followed orders." Of considerable interest to students of 19th-century American history as well as of the Civil War.
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Starred review from February 1, 2024
Lincoln scholar Holzer's latest book again demonstrates his deftness in blending a detailed focus on part of Lincoln's career, an explanation of how it fits into Lincoln's life, and a political and historical backdrop. This highly readable narrative chronicles Lincoln's journey from ignorance regarding immigrants to a frustratingly long dalliance with nativists to finally using presidential powers to welcome immigrants and help them achieve success. Lincoln appealed to idealism and pragmatism, mixing calls to extend the promise of the Declaration of Independence to new arrivals with reminders of how essential immigrants were to sustain the Union Army and wartime industry. Holzer emphasizes that Lincoln's welcome extended solely to European immigrants, relates experiences of German and Irish Civil War soldiers and generals, and reveals that anti-immigrant sentiment was so prejudiced and violent against Irish and Germans at the time that many people called it the First Civil War. Holzer's atmospheric writing enables him to quickly conjure a scene's details and mood, placing the reader in the middle of the action, while photographs and artwork provide even more perspectives. Holzer brings part of America's past alive and shows that while modern immigrants come from different places, controversies about them are the same as generations ago.
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