The Civil War Round Table
Of Chicago

Vernon Burton
on
"The Age of Lincoln"

May Meeting At A Glance:

• 671st Regular Meeting
• May 9, 2008
• "The Age of Lincoln"
• by Vernon Burton
• Holiday Inn Mart Plaza
• Cocktails (Cash Bar) 5:30pm Dinner 6:30pm
• Dinner for Members/Non-members with reservations $35
  Sliced Strip Loin, Catch of the Day
  Fruit Plate, Hot Vegetable Plate

For dinner reservations call 630 460-1865 or email chicagocwrtdinner@earthlink.net with your name(s) and choice of entree.

Non-members are welcome to attend.

Freedom. In Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, he noted that while Americans differed on the cause of the Civil War, all acknowledged that slavery was a part of that causation. To Lincoln, man was born to be free, not slave, and he promised that a “new birth of freedom” would come out of that war.

On May 9th, Professor Vernon Burton will present his views on Lincoln and his times, and how Lincoln both redefined and expanded human freedom. The talk will be based on professor Burton’s acclaimed book, The Age of Lincoln. In the words of the publisher:

“Stunning in its breadth and conclusions, The Age of Lincoln is a fiercely original history of the five decades that pivoted around the presidency of Abraham Lincoln. Abolishing slavery was the age’s most extraordinary accomplishment, but not its most profound. The enduring legacy of the age was inscribing personal liberty into the nation’s millennial aspirations.

America has always perceived providence in its progress, but in the 1840s and 1850s a pessimism accompanied a marked extremism. With all sides claiming God’s blessing, irreconcilable freedoms collided; despite historic political compromises the middle ground collapsed. In a remarkable reappraisal of Lincoln, the distinguished historian Orville Vernon Burton shows how the president’s Southernness empowered him to conduct a civil war that redefined freedom as a personal right protected by the rule of law. In the violent decades that followed, the extent of that freedom would be contested by racism and unregulated capitalism, but not its central place in what defined the country.”

Vernon Burton was born in Royston, Georgia, reared in Ninety Six, S.C., graduated from Furman University, and received his Ph.D. in American History from Princeton University in 1976. He is Director of the Institute for Computing in Humanities, Arts, and Social Science (I-CHASS) at the University of Illinois, where he is Professor of History, African American Studies, and Sociology. Professor Burton is the author of more than a hundred articles and the author or editor of fourteen books, including In My Father's House re Many Mansions: Family and Community in Edgefield, South Carolina. The Age of Lincoln was published in July 2007 and is the recipient of the Chicago Tribune Heartland Literary Award for Nonfiction.