In 2008, the Civil War Institute at Gettysburg College received 172 submissions for its $50,000 prize for the best book on Lincoln or the Civil War. Even without such a lucrative award, the perennial deluge of Lincoln books would show little sign of abating, as America’s 16th president and the war to preserve her union continue to intrigue admirers and critics alike. The novelty of Lincoln’s rise from frontier obscurity to world-historic figure, coupled with the challenge and significance of a fratricidal war amongst a self-governing people, presents a drama that continues to fascinate successive generations of Americans. If Thomas Paine was right when he wrote, “The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind,” Lincoln’s fitful ascent to power and deft exercise of presidential authority offer instruction about the possibilities and pitfalls of self-rule.
In this bicentennial year of Abraham Lincoln’s birth, it has been frequently noted that more has been written about his life than any other American and pretty much any mortal figure. Is there anything left to be known about the man Frederick Douglass once said “was a mystery to no man who saw him and heard him”? Michael C. Burlingame, the Chancellor Naomi B. Lynn Distinguished Chair in Lincoln Studies at the University of Illinois at Springfield, answers, “Plenty.” With notes and indexes, his Abraham Lincoln: A Life runs to 2,000 pages—and this, the author tells us, is the “pared down” version. After editing several volumes of the writings of Lincoln’s personal secretaries and associates (John G. Nicolay, John Hay, William O. Stoddard, and Noah Brooks), and connecting Lincoln’s personal travails with his later successes as a politician in The Inner World of Abraham Lincoln (1994), Burlingame took on the challenge of producing a scholarly, multi-volume biography. In his sights were Carl Sandburg’s best-selling Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years (2 vols., 1926) and Abraham Lincoln: The War Years (4 vols., 1939), the latter of which earned Sandburg his first Pulitzer Prize.
Lincoln and his world come to life in Burlingame’s biography with all the virtue and vice, reason and emotion, that wrestled for supremacy in the burgeoning American republic. What sets Burlingame’s magnum opus apart is its extensive reliance upon “reminiscence material”: namely, the recollections of contemporaries of Lincoln whose encounters and conversations with him were documented years after—in many cases, decades after—their interaction occurred. Burlingame acknowledges that “memories can dim with time,” but “the increasing respectability of oral history” among scholars and his unsurpassed familiarity with these materials has led him to conclude that but for these secondary sources of Lincoln’s utterances and actions, we would know little of his early life. Drawing upon more than twenty years of tilling in what had been long-neglected fields,[1] Burlingame offers for the reader’s consideration “many educated guesses” regarding the accuracy of these reminiscences. Here, the preponderance of evidence weighs in favor of accepting Burlingame’s use of what in isolation would stand merely as plausible, rather than likely, claims to veracity.
A signal feature of the first volume of the biography is the use of anonymous and pseudonymous newspaper editorials of the 1830s and ’40s that Burlingame believes were written by Lincoln. Unfortunately, the reader finds no direct explanation of how Burlingame distinguished the unsigned articles penned by Lincoln from those written by like-minded fellow Whigs. However, Burlingame does amass evidence from Lincoln’s contemporaries—friends as well as enemies—establishing him early in his political career as a master of “sarcasm and ridicule” and a “virtuoso belittler of Democrats.” This lends credibility to Burlingame’s subsequent attribution to Lincoln of unsigned articles and letters that surfaced in the local Whig newspaper, the Sangamo Journal. These writings attacked Democrats with a verve and bite that leaves only some doubt as to Lincoln’s authorship.
Some readers will be put off by Burlingame’s argument that Lincoln’s hard-earned “psychological maturity” enabled him to surpass his contemporaries in the political arena. A self-professed psychobiographer, Burlingame concedes that his dabbling in “Lincoln’s inner life” requires “speculation … that professional historians usually shy away from.” Nevertheless, amid all the direct quotations and recounted conversations of Lincoln and his contemporaries, Burlingame does surprisingly little play-by-play commentary and insinuates judgments only fleetingly by way of psychoanalysis. He establishes Lincoln’s personal and political motivations through accumulation of contemporary context and detail rather than direct assertion or extended argument.
The chief advantage of this approach is that the reader experiences Lincoln’s world through the words that both reflected and shaped mid-19th-century America. This proves especially useful when Burlingame traces the development of Lincoln’s approach to race in his pursuit of public office. He cites numerous contemporary newspapers to demonstrate the obstacle that northern racial bigotry posed to Lincoln’s quest in 1854 and thereafter to stop the spread of black slavery into federal territories. Burlingame is not the first to emphasize that frontier Illinois was “a sea of Negrophobia,” but reading the anti-black sentiments expressed even by many abolitionists provides the necessary context for Lincoln’s nuanced confrontation with the blatant white supremacy of U.S. Senator Stephen A. Douglas. For those who argue that Lincoln played the race card during his debates with Douglas in 1858, Burlingame shows that Douglas played the whole deck.
To his credit, Burlingame scrupulously recounts Lincoln’s criticism in 1840 (and possibly 1836) of Martin Van Buren for favoring limited black suffrage in New York. That said, given the clear contrast between Lincoln and Douglas on the race question in 1858, the lack of any explanation for Lincoln’s race-baiting early in his political career leaves too much for the reader to infer from a string of quotations. An educated guess from Burlingame, likely to mention reckless partisanship as well as immature wit on the part of Lincoln the aspiring state legislator, would have gone far to prepare the reader for the next pivotal phase of Lincoln’s rise to national prominence.
More generally, though the amassing of quotations provides a textured account of Lincoln’s life and times, it also operates as a drag on the narrative pull of the Lincoln story. This is an elephant of a biography that perforce is best consumed at a leisurely pace, wearing steel-toed shoes.[2] But for those interested in the most thorough account of the development of Lincoln as a man and politician against the backdrop of America’s struggle to mature as an idea and a nation, Burlingame’s Abraham Lincoln stands without peer. Not a Lincoln for our times, but the Lincoln of his times, and future biographers would do well to take note(s).
In A. Lincoln: A Biography, by contrast, Ronald C. White, Jr., gives us a Lincoln for the 21st century, presuming our times demand a leader with Progressive bona fides. While White’s previous books on Lincoln focused on the power of his prose,[3] his biography emphasizes Lincoln’s capacity for growth as the salient quality of his leadership. Both the clever title and soft-focus cover image present an approachable Lincoln, accessible to a new generation of readers because White gives them a man “comfortable with ambiguity” and one who “came to believe that each generation must redefine America in relation to the problems of its time.”
White introduces his biography with a chapter entitled “A. Lincoln and the Promise of America.” Capitalizing on that lone capital A, White stresses that just as Lincoln rarely signed his full first name, “people sought to complete the A—to define Lincoln, to label or libel him.” This open-ended “A. Lincoln,” cast as an evolving thinker, suits White’s narrative strategy: “the promise of America” remains undefined here, and the reader gets to fill in the blanks. For White, what draws us to Lincoln is not what can be known about him, but the fact that “he eludes simple definitions and final judgments.”
White rescues Lincoln from his early, unprogressive attitudes toward blacks, slavery, and the meaning of America by arguing two things: first, Lincoln evolved as a politician—meaning, he got better as the nation got worse—and, second, his evolution points the way for subsequent generations of Americans to follow his example. Lincoln’s Whig devotion to law, order, and tradition did not prevent him from “coming to believe that every generation needed to redefine America for its own time.”
Thus, Lincoln remains relevant not so much because he understood some basic truths about the American founding and thought them worthy of preserving, even to the point of war, but because “the dynamism of the developing Lincoln could not be confined.” Yes, he affirmed “the old Declaration of Independence,” but his genius lay in forging “a new vision for America,” one where “he was not to be bound even to the American Revolution and the founding generation” (emphasis added). Marked by pursuit of both “conservative and liberal goals,” his presidency was one of creative tensions, and when “people came to him with their certainties, he responded with his ambiguities.” The “A” in “A. Lincoln” begins to look like it stands for “amorphous.”
White is correct to focus on Lincoln’s latching onto the Declaration during a pivotal time in his political life and that of the nation. However, White finds more to admire in Lincoln’s “intellectual imagination” than in the Declaration itself as containing what Frederick Douglass called “saving principles” for the increasingly divided country. As White understands statesmanship, “Presidential leadership comes from the ability to articulate a compelling vision for the nation.” And so the man, not the ideas, are what matter most in prodding this nation forward. Add Lincoln’s ability to “move beyond partisanship and bring people of differing viewpoints together,” and what White has confected looks surprisingly like our current president.
Elegantly and engagingly written, chock-full of splendid illustrations, and informed by much of the latest scholarship, A. Lincoln is sure to adorn many a coffee table this bicentennial year. Nevertheless, White has produced a biography that has less to do with how Lincoln understood himself and more with how White understands the necessities of our age.
James McPherson has been reading, writing, and teaching about the Civil War longer than this reviewer has been alive. His books have ranged from specific topics—the abolitionists (the product of his PhD dissertation), the motivations of Civil War soldiers, individual battles—to the comprehensive sweep of the truly magisterial Battle Cry of Freedom, the best-selling, Pulitzer Prize-winning account of the Civil War that established him as one of the premier historians of his generation. The George Henry Davis ’86 Professor Emeritus of History at Princeton University puts the lie to the “emeritus” in his honorific, as his books and honors continue apace. Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief (2008) earned him his second Lincoln Prize (justly shared with Craig Symonds for Lincoln and His Admirals).
McPherson’s latest offering, simply titled Abraham Lincoln, surely is the shortest biography from a major publisher on the bicentennial shelf, totaling only 65 pages of narrative text. Yes, its publication is meant to capitalize on the increased interest in the ever-popular Lincoln franchise, to say nothing of the sales guaranteed by the McPherson brand. But his sketch of the most iconic figure in American politics highlights Lincoln’s achievements (and setbacks) as an orator, politician, and war leader without ignoring key enigmas and controversies—for example, Lincoln’s lack of church membership and his refusal to endorse civil and political equality for blacks in his 1858 campaign for Senate—that contribute to America’s abiding fascination with Lincoln as a statesman nonpareil.
The masterful economy of McPherson’s chronicle allows for little exploration of key episodes in Lincoln’s personal life or public career. Nevertheless, on topics like the Lincoln marriage, his devotion to the ideals of the American founding, his strategy against Stephen Douglas, and his turning to emancipation as a war measure (just to name a few), McPherson’s observations are clear, judicious, and sensible. This micro-biography of Lincoln will serve equally well as a refresher course on the Lincoln chronology or as an introduction to whet the appetite of those who want an overview before digging deeper in other sources. For a more substantive introduction, readers should turn to longer “short” works like Allen C. Guelzo’s intellectual synopsis Lincoln: A Very Short Introduction (125 pages) and William E. Gienapp’s war-heavy chronicle Abraham Lincoln and Civil War America: A Biography” (203 pages).
Frederick Douglass said of Lincoln that “those who only knew him through his public utterance obtained a tolerably clear idea of his character and personality. The image of the man went out with his words, and those who read them knew him.” This remains the most fitting reply to those who ask where they should begin to learn about Lincoln. A Martian with a decent command of the English language would learn important things about Lincoln from any of the books reviewed herein. But to get to the soul of the man, one must meditate upon his own words, for in them one finds all that Lincoln believed important about the political issues and public controversies that pressed upon him and his fellow Americans at their most trying hour. Like great works of literature, Lincoln’s speeches and writings bear re-reading and reflection to appreciate the depth of political perception of the nation’s most famous autodidact.
1. Douglas L. Wilson and Rodney O. Davis, co-directors of the Lincoln Studies Center at Knox College, have also ably mined reminiscence material to critical acclaim. See Wilson and Davis, Herndon’s Informants: Letters, Interviews, and Statements about Abraham Lincoln (Univ. of Illinois Press, 1997); and Douglas Wilson’s Lincoln Before Washington: New Perspectives on the Illinois Years (Univ. of Illinois Press, 1997) and the Lincoln Prize-winning Honor’s Voice: The Transformation of Abraham Lincoln (Random House, 1998).
2. Alas, the publisher has yet to release a version for the Kindle.
3. See The Eloquent President: A Portrait of Lincoln Through His Words (Random House, 2005) and Lincoln’s Greatest Speech: The Second Inaugural (Simon & Schuster, 2002).
Lucas E. Morel is professor of politics at Washington and Lee University, author of Lincoln’s Sacred Effort: Defining Religion’s Role in American Self-Government, and currently at work on a book entitled “Lincoln, Race, and the Fragile American Republic.”
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