Harold Holzer has been recognized as one of the outstanding Lincoln scholars for the past few decades, so it comes as no surprise that his new book, Brought Forth on This Continent, is chock full of detail - a good deal of which will be new to even the more than casual student of Lincoln's history. And his focus on the issues surrounding immigration in this era is a somewhat different take than most of the scholarship out there. One should note, too, the relevance to today, where immigration issues and the sometimes toxic discussion around them is so prominent.

And yet, I was a bit disappointed in Holzer's book. It was well written as expected and I learned new things - but I did not find its core message particularly enlightening. Yes, Lincoln fell prey to some of the stereotypes of his time and used language that may be offensive, particularly by today's standards. And yes, he was a masterful politician, for all the compromises that requires - one of the best practitioners of his time and probably in all of American history - one of the reasons I admire him. But ultimately Holzer still seems to conclude that Lincoln was a moral, well-intentioned man who did what he could given the circumstances (and one must recognize that immigration, even if important, was not the most critical issue he dealt with). It does not take a great scholar or even a student with more than passing knowledge to recognize Lincoln as "a man of profound feeling, correct and firm principles and incorruptible honesty..." as Carl Schurz is quoted in chapter 10 of the book.

I am glad to have read the book and might recommend it to some people depending on their background and goal. I just wish I had felt it did not ultimately take me to a place I already knew.

The author has added improved works on Lincoln by adding this timely tome to his amazing previous volumes. Just when you think all aspects of Lincoln have been given due attention, leave it to Harold Holzer to explore an area that need attention. A work of this type greatly assists in understanding the goings on in today's climate. This is a valuable read for anyone interested in Lincoln and how gaining a better understanding of our past can assist us in comprehending our current attitudes.

If you’re an author who specializes in Abraham Lincoln, what are you going to do, write a couple of books and rest on your laurels? Hardly. More likely, you’re going to look for new angles on which to base new Lincoln books.

So I can’t fault Harold Holzer for doing what Lincoln authors do, in thinking up a new angle, by capitalizing on a current hot-button issue for a new Lincoln book. But while it’s well-written and engaging, as all the Holzer books I’ve read have been, Lincoln’s views on immigration policy prove to be too thin a thread on which to hang an entire book.

The narrative here is bookended by Lincoln's 1863 annual message to Congress, in which he devoted a few sentences to encouraging immigration and ensuring that existing immigrants seeking citizenship accepted the associated responsibilities along with the privileges. This was notable, Holzer points out, because it marked "the first federal effort to stimulate foreign settlement in America since the repeal of the Sedition Act at the dawn of the century," and came more than a century before the next major legislative immigration overhaul.

But aside from a line in a pre-inaugural speech, in which Lincoln said of immigrants that he did not desire "to prevent them from coming to the United States," this appears to be about all that he had to say about the issue. So between the bookends that introduce and more fully explore the message to Congress, the rest of the book is more about Lincoln and immigrants than it is about Lincoln and immigration, which are really two different things.

Four broad themes make up this middle portion of the book - Lincoln’s opposition to nativism and Know-Nothingism; his courting of political support from immigrant groups, particularly German-Americans; German and Irish immigrants’ role in fighting for the Union in the Civil War; and finally, random, coincidental or inconsequential encounters Lincoln happened to have with various immigrants in his daily life.

More on that last theme in a bit. But the first theme, of Lincoln’s opposition to nativism, is told somewhat in the context of his opposition to slavery. "How can any one who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor of degrading classes of white people?" he once wrote to his friend Joshua Speed. That said, he seemed to limit his concern to white immigrants, while also telling ethnic jokes with as much enthusiasm as he told racist jokes, so his devotion to tolerance only went so far.

This transitions into the second theme, as Lincoln and his Whig party wavered between repudiating and welcoming support from anti-immigrant nativists. After the Kansas-Nebraska Act destroyed the Whig party and gave rise to the Republican party, Lincoln and other Republicans had to build a new coalition among nativist Know-Nothings and the very immigrants they opposed, if those immigrants and anti-immigrants happened to also be opposed to slavery.

Up to this point, this is all interesting enough, though it speaks more to Lincoln’s support for existing immigrants than it does to his support for immigration itself.

By the time we get to the third theme, it starts to feel like it belongs in a different book about immigrants and the Civil War, since this has more to do with them than with Lincoln. Yes, it is interesting that ¼ of all Union soldiers were immigrants, and ⅓ of those were native Germans. But the chapters on this theme often read like a simple roster of foreign-born soldiers - there was this one, and also this one, and here’s another one - without fitting into the stated theme of Lincoln and immigration.

The fourth “theme,” if you can call it that, is where the book feels padded and stretched. In essentially telling Lincoln’s life story through the lens of immigrants and immigration, Holzer sometimes strains to keep the immigration motif going - at one point, he describes how Lincoln himself "emigrated from his father's log cabin" to New Salem, and later "made plans of his own to emigrate… from Springfield to Washington."

Also, did you know that Lincoln employed Irish servants in his Springfield home, was aided by the German-born John Nicolay, and was later served by Irish White House staff in Washington? He was also warned of the Baltimore assassination plot, instigated in part by a Corsican immigrant, by the Scottish-born detective Allan Pinkerton, while he was in Philadelphia, the site of anti-Irish riots in 1844. So Lincoln reportedly disguised himself by wearing a "Scotch cap", guarded by a Pinkerton detective from Erin, New York, a town founded by Irish immigrants.

Oh, but there’s more. The Lincoln assassination is told by noting that one of the Booth conspirators was "Prussian-born," the Petersen House where Lincoln was taken after the shooting was "owned by a German-born immigrant tailor," and among the doctors who tended to him was "a Jewish ophthalmologist born in Russia."

It becomes unclear in these stories what, if anything, Holzer is trying to say exactly, other than just pointing out coincidences that happen to involve immigrants, but have nothing to do with Lincoln’s feelings about immigrants or positions on immigration. It just reads like a litany of trivia, of all the instances where Lincoln happened to cross paths with people who were natives of other countries. It becomes kind of silly and distracts from the story, but also exposes the fact that there just might not be enough story to tell without them.

The first portion of the last chapter finally digs into the details surrounding Lincoln’s call for encouraging immigration in his 1863 message, and the ensuing debates about whether government financing of immigrants' journeys would attract “undesirables,” the suspicions overseas that it was all part of a plot to lure immigrants to America only to enlist them into the armed forces, and the cynicism that immigrants were being brought in as "replacements" for laborers who were killed in the war. This is the basis for the whole book, but there’s not much there that couldn’t have been thoroughly covered in an article without most of what preceded it.

Holzer ends with the soaring conclusion that Lincoln’s rejection of nativism and destruction of slavery "had helped preserve the Union and set the country on a path to an expanded citizenry with expanded rights." This is followed by a weak attempt to connect progress on race with progress on immigration from then to now, by linking Lincoln and Obama (I won’t spoil the ending by quoting the clumsy concluding sentence), which is then followed by a tacked-on epilogue on “whatever happened to” everyone else mentioned in the book.

So aside from the silly coincidental stories, the various immigrant-related themes explored in the book are fine on their own, but they don’t fully come together. The importance of Lincoln supporting increased immigration seems a good starting point, but the facts that Lincoln happened to know a lot of immigrants, courted their support politically, and benefited from their service in the Civil War, don’t support the main thesis so much as they are merely adjacent to it. There’s no evidence cited that any of these adjacent facts informed his decision to call for increased immigration, or that his call for increased immigration helped him politically in any way. Nor is there an attempt made to do what would seem obvious in a book about an issue that’s as relevant now as then, by examining “what we can learn from Lincoln’s immigration policy as we grapple with that very issue today.”

While some often ask “do we really need another book about Lincoln?” I tend to be on the side of “there can never be too many books about Lincoln.” But this may simply have been too narrow a topic to warrant one more.