Abraham Lincoln

Description

Manuel Corchado y Juarbe was twenty-eight, Puerto Rican, and studying in Spain when he published this. Slavery would not be abolished in Puerto Rico until 1873, and in Cuba until 1886; writing about Lincoln in Spanish in 1868 was therefore not an exercise in foreign history but an argument about home, made in the only form the censors would allow. Corchado went on to sit in the Spanish Cortes and to plead abolition there. The book is short, ardent, and worth reading for what a Caribbean liberal saw in the American president that Americans did not.