New book explores how Lincoln's nationalism helped to save the Union

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. How Abraham Lincoln viewed the U.S. Constitution played a more important role in preserving the Union during the Civil War than previous scholarship has indicated, according to a new book by Mark E. Neely Jr. McCabe Greer Professor of History at Penn State. In "Lincoln and the Triumph of the Nation: Constitutional Conflict in the American Civil War," published this month by the University of North Carolina Press, Neely goes beyond the previous focus of historians on Lincoln and First Amendment freedoms and sees the iconic president in the broader context of nationalism. "Lincoln's 19th-century nationalism was not necessarily dangerous to the Constitution and the liberties it protects," said Neely, who has already authored a Pulitzer Prize-winning study of Lincoln and civil liberties. It was more positive, akin to the nationalism Benedict Anderson described in his bestselling "Imagined Communities" (1983), a book that Neely credits with inspiring his own effort to explore Lincoln as a nationalist. "Lincoln's nationalism was not the 'near-pathological' variety characterized by Anderson as driven by fear and hatred - there was no cult of personality, no attempt to vastly increase the power of the presidency, none of the usual evidence of dictatorships." Lincoln derived his opinions about the Constitution from his desire for national economic growth and federally supported internal improvements, his anti-slavery sentiments and a general adherence to the political philosophy of the Whig party, a predecessor of the Republican Party.