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 White
Republic, 1829-1889” and Yael A. Sternhell, “Routes of War: The
World of Movement in the