Lincoln Prize Winner Announced

James Oakes’s “Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861-1865,” has been awarded the 2013 Lincoln Prize, bestowed annually by Gettysburg College and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History for work about the Civil War.

Mr. Oakes, a professor of history at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, will receive $50,000 and a bronze replica of Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s bust “Lincoln the Man” at a ceremony in New York on April 10. It is the second Lincoln Prize for Mr. Oakes, who also won in 2008 for “The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of Antislavery Politics.”

Previous winners of the prize, which was established in 1991, have included Eric Foner, James M. McPherson, Doris Kearns Goodwin and Ken Burns. The runners-up for this year’s award were Stephen Kantrowitz’s “More Than Freedom: Fighting for Black Citizenship in a Whie Republic, 1829-1889” and Yael A. Sternhell, “Routes of War: The World of Movement in the Confederate South.”

“Freedom National,” published by W.W. Norton â€" and excerpted here â€" appears at a moment when Steven Spielberg’s film “Lincoln” has prompted intense public debate among historians about whether Lincoln can really be said to have “freed” slaves who were already taking action to liberate themselves. Mr. Oakes steers a middle course, detailing the on-the-ground activities of slaves and Union soldiers while arguing that historians have neglected the role of Republican legislators, whom he sees as determined from the beginning that the Civil War would not only restore the Union but abolish slavery.

“There’s too m! uch hyperbole in the way we talk about Lincoln,” Mr. Oakes writes. “He was neither the Great Emancipator who bestrode his times and brought his people out of the darkness, nor was he in any way a reluctant emancipator held back by some visceral commitment to white supremacy. In the evolution of wartime antislavery policy, Lincoln was neither quicker nor slower than Republican legislators. Instead they seemed to move in tandem.”

In an e-mail interview with Salon, Mr. Oakes praised aspects of the Spielberg movie but questioned the scene where Lincoln had to bring conservative and radical Republicans into line to pass the Thirteenth Amendment in January 1865. In fact, he argued, the Republicans were united all along, as evidenced by the vote on the amendment the previous July, which failed despite drawing only one Republican “no” vote (in what Mr. Oakes characterized as a procedural maneuver).

Full emancipation, M.. Oakes argues in “Freedom National,” was part of Republican policy from the beginning of the war, rather than one arrived at as a “military necessity,” as Lincoln later said of the Emancipation Proclamation. The party, he writes, “never had to move from union to emancipation because the two issues â€" liberty and union â€" were never separate for them.”