Jaffa has again delivered a powerful contribution to Lincoln scholarship. Historians will find many riches in Jaffa's latest learned volume.

Michael Vorenberg, American Historical Review

Harry V. Jaffa takes his time. The wait is well worth it. In unpacking Lincoln's great speeches and debate orations, Jaffa shows what an astute, formidable, and brilliant interlocutor Lincoln was.

Jean Bethke Elshtain, The Laura Spelman Rockeller Professor of Social and Political Ethics, University of Chicago; author of Just War Against Terror, Civil War Book Review

On exhibit in this book is a powerful intellect. . . . Among the prominent Americans who are brilliantly illuminated here as they have rarely been are Thomas Jefferson, John C. Calhoun, Jefferson Davis, and, of course, Abraham Lincoln.

George Anastaplo, author of Abraham Lincoln: A Constitutional Biography

A New Birth of Freedom more than meets the critical expectations that Professor Jaffa has invited in the years since his acclaimed study, Crisis of the House Divided: An Interpretation of the Lincoln-Douglas Debates, reoriented scholarly investigation of Abraham Lincoln and the coming the Civil War. A work of profound historical erudition and disciplined philosophical criticism, Jaffa's new work offers an original analysis of the crisis of the Union in the perspective of the western political tradition and in the context of the constitutional principles of the American Revolution. More judiciously than any other twentieth-century scholar writing in the nationalist tradition, Jaffa meets the challenge posed by the political philosophy and constitutional constructions of John C. Calhoun and the southern secessionists. Recognizing the openness of the historical situation that existed in 1861, Jaffa provides the most searching and fair-minded analysis of Lincoln's reasons for resisting secession that I have ever read.

Herman Belz, University of Maryland, College Park

Four decades ago, Harry Jaffa offered powerful insights on the Lincoln-Douglas debates in his Crisis of the House Divided. In this long-awaited sequel, he picks up the threads of that earlier study in this stimulating new interpretation of the showdown conflict between slavery and freedom in the election of 1860 and the secession crisis that followed. Every student of Lincoln needs to read and ponder this book.

James M. McPherson, Princeton University

With A New Birth of Freedom Harry V. Jaffa reestablishes himself as the greatest living scholar of Lincoln's political thought and Lincoln's greatest defender, period. Jaffa's analysis of the First Inaugural is without parallel as he demonstrates once and for all the incoherence of Calhoun's arguments for the southern secession. For every citizen interested in the preservation of the American union and the principles on which it rests, Jaffa's book is a must-read.

Steven B. Smith, Yale University