Lincoln
By David Herbert Donald
Simon & Schuster, 714 pages, $35
`There is not much of it,” Abraham Lincoln admitted of his first, meager attempt at autobiography. The reason, he apologized, was that “there is not much of me.” Historians have long disagreed. Lincoln has inspired more books than any figure in American history.
One of the traditions of this vast literature is that each generation welcomes a new, one-volume Lincoln biography for the general reader. Most recently, Benjamin P. Thomas (1952) and Stephen B. Oates (1977) produced memorable examples. David Herbert Donald’s “Lincoln” immediately takes its place among the best of the genre, and it is unlikely that it will be surpassed in elegance, incisiveness and originality in this century.
Thomas and Oates wrote as relatively young men. Donald comes to his task following a long, distinguished career at Harvard and after producing a shelf of books that have already earned him two Pulitzer Prizes, for biographies of Charles Sumner and Thomas Wolfe. He brings to this effort a lifetime of familiarity with Lincoln and his era. If Donald has waited an unaccountably long time to produce this contribution, the result proves well worth the wait.
But this is no repackaging of classic David Donald (as enticing as such a prospect would be). He has undertaken a Herculean re-reading of original sources–Lincoln’s own writings, his vast incoming correspondence, period newspaper coverage and the newly gathered records of Lincoln’s law practice, together with obscure but revealing reminiscences by his contemporaries–to bring a bracing freshness to his subject. The result should engage the casual reader of American history while astonishing passionate Civil War aficionados and professional historians who seldom read a quotation they have not read before. They will surely read such quotations in David Donald’s “Lincoln.”
They will also encounter a Lincoln stripped of the patina of folklore . Donald’s Lincoln emerges as energetic, brilliant, ambitious, cunning, self-confident, impatient to succeed and, above all, determined to make a difference in the world. He can also be maddeningly passive, occasionally bad-tempered and sometimes quick to evade political responsibility (his wife gets the blame for his reluctance to accept a political appointment in the 1840s; the will of God, for the unprecedented sacrifices required to save the Union during the Civil War).
Of course, the outline of Lincoln’s American dream life story is so deeply etched onto the American consciousness that any biographer risks cliche by recounting it and public indignation by questioning it. Skillfully probing the lesser-known margins of Lincoln’s life, Donald limns a breathtakingly new Lincoln. But forewarned is forearmed: Donald has strong opinions and new ideas, and his Lincoln sacrifices some heroic stature even as he gains in determination, wisdom and humanity. For example, he punctures the romance of Lincoln’s exemplary rise from log cabin to White House by reminding us that Lincoln actually was mortified by his pioneer roots, hated physical labor (including railsplitting) and received rather a better education than previous biographies have conceded.
The book brims with startling interpretation. Lincoln earns at least half the blame for his stormy marriage to Mary Todd; if she was temperamental and needy, he was undemonstrative and emotionally unsupportive. Lincoln is also portrayed as a singularly unremarkable congressman, and not solely because he ensnared himself in a brave, but tardy and rather pointless, opposition to the Mexican War. As for the long-held belief that Lincoln was a dark horse at the convention that nominated him for president in 1860, Donald insists that the selection of a third-party candidate some weeks earlier made the Republicans’ choice of a westerner inevitable.
Nor does Donald’s Lincoln storm back into politics like some anti-slavery knight–as previous biographers have portrayed his re-emergence in 1854–“aroused” by passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Rather, Donald demonstrates that Lincoln was slow to react to that incendiary repeal of the Missouri Compromise and even slower to recognize the outrage perpetrated by the Supreme Court in its infamous Dred Scott decision three years later.
In fact, Donald’s Lincoln is almost always slow–slow to react, slow to move, slow to build consensus. He really does seem to believe, as he expressed it in words that previous biographers dismissed as so much posing, that events controlled him, instead of the other way around. And he seems more often converted to action by circumstance than illuminated by his own moral light. This combination of fatalism and adherence to the “doctrine of necessity,” Donald contends, hampers Lincoln’s early performance as president. Yet Donald’s Lincoln is never the weary, giant sufferer of legend: He is vigorous and durable and establishes the youngest First Family to reside in the White House up to that time.
Lincoln’s vigor notwithstanding, Donald contends that the inexperienced administrator fundamentally misunderstood the depth of the secession crisis in 1861. Yet in the next breath he compellingly suggests that Lincoln’s pre-inauguration speeches– dismissed then and since as wasted opportunities at Union-saving rhetoric–were in fact masterpieces of firmness, sound policy and the clever use of humor to make the very notion of secession sound absurd. This is provocative, defining historical writing.
The author goes on to skewer the long-held assumption that as commander-in-chief Lincoln quickly mastered military strategy. This Lincoln has some good strategic ideas but seldom communicates them well and, even when he does, is bedeviled by subordinates unable or unwilling to follow orders.
Above all, Donald’s Lincoln exudes “native caution.” He is a consummate politician struggling to hold together a fractured and fractious North by placating abolitionists, reassuring border-state slaveowners, enticing War Democrats, cajoling newspaper editors, dispensing and withholding patronage and nurturing creative tension within his cabinet and his military family–almost all of whom stubbornly undervalue the chief executive. As the author explains, critics of Lincoln’s day were simply “unable to see that behind his adaptability as to means lay a firm commitment to ends, such as the preservation of the Union and the spread of liberty.”
On the other hand, Donald firmly rejects the temptation to “palliate” Lincoln’s views on race, pointing out that while some politicians of his day were far more retrograde on this issue, others were far more liberal.
Lincoln ultimately expands his horizons on race. But in no other biography has he appeared less worthy of “Great Emancipator” status. Donald paints a portrait of a very reluctant liberator indeed, fearful that he is moving too far, too fast, and shockingly willing, as late as 1865, to consider reneging on his own Emancipation Proclamation by urging delay and compensation to the Confederate states in exchange for peace and reunion.
Historians have long recounted Lincoln’s achievements in almost linear fashion, as if he was able, even during the most complex periods of his presidency, to handle issues one by one, each unrelated to the other. Such could never have been the case, of course, but no previous biographer has advanced so many hitherto unimagined personal and professional conjunctions. Their discovery represents the particular genius of this biography.
Donald’s Lincoln, in one such revelatory example, first recognizes slavery as the great storm clouding America’s future only after the death of his hero, Henry Clay, in 1850. Earlier, the event that truly inspires his overinterpreted Lyceum Speech of 1836, in which he calls for cold, calculating reason to overrule hot passion, is Lincoln’s own hyperemotional, potentially career-ending near-duel with a rival named James Shields.
The list goes on. Lincoln’s first annual message to Congress, Donald posits, proved banal because the president was at the time of its writing distracted by a diplomatic crisis with Great Britain over seizure of Confederate emissaries from the high seas. The Emancipation Proclamation might have engendered far more opposition from Northerners had not his simultaneously issued suspension of the writ of habeas corpus effectively inhibited dissent. And the resumption of the White House social schedule in early 1864 did not signal the end of the Lincolns’ long mourning period for their son as much as their determination to use White House invitations to build enthusiasm for the upcoming re-election campaign.
Donald supports these and other provocative theories with nearly 90 pages of sources and notes, each chapter’s worth introduced by an expert historiographical essay that brilliantly (and bluntly) assesses the scholarly literature of the past 125 years. The result constitutes an “underbook” worthy of careful review by every student of the Civil War era.
Of course, no reader of history can absorb a book of such ambition and originality without questions and quibbles. For example, Lincoln was not accused of “singing ribald songs over the graves of the Union dead” at Antietam, as Donald recalls, but rather of requesting that a “jolly” song be sung there to him. And one can appreciate Donald’s refusal to enter the debate over where Lincoln wrote his Gettysburg Address but not his failure to give readers the full text of those unmatched 272 words.
But these constitute minor complaints about a book of investigative tenacity, interpretive boldness and almost acrobatic balance. And if Lincoln fails to emerge into the full flower of greatness until the book is nearly done–only after his triumph in the re-election campaign of 1864–Donald has done no less than accurately reflect popular sentiment in Lincoln’s own time, which remained unrelentingly negative about the president until the war was nearly over.
Rather than reconstruct Lincoln in the warm, retrospective afterglow of historical canonization, Donald has painstakingly built his unsentimental but, in the end, admiring portrait from the ground up. The result will surprise all, elate some, perhaps disturb others and, in all likelihood, “long endure.”
