David Herbert Donald, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author of biographies of Thomas Wolfe and Charles Sumner, has crowned his distinguished career with this deeply learned and elegant biography of Abraham Lincoln. It will have considerable appeal for general readers and scholars alike. While doing justice to the complexity of Lincoln’s life and politics, Donald never allows his narrative to flag. He declares that Lincoln is America’s greatest president, but he allows that greatness to emerge not through extended analysis but through the narrative itself. Scholars will be gratified by the extensive notes at the back of the book, which not only detail Donald’s sources but also pay tribute to the wealth of Lincoln scholarship on which he has relied.
What makes Donald’s narrative gripping is his decision to remain within Lincoln’s point of view, so that events unfold, as nearly as possible, through Lincoln’s consciousness. Donald is fortunate to have a subject who wrote simply and beautifully and whose words were often recorded. The best passages of the biography are a skillful blending of judicious quotation and paraphrase of what Lincoln said and wrote.
In Donald’s view, Lincoln was a dogged and wily man, with a sense of humor and shrewdness not equaled by any of his contemporaries. Lincoln had less than a year of formal schooling, but he was blessed with a kind stepmother (his mother died when he was quite young) and a tolerant if not always sensitive father, who allowed him the time to read. Lincoln disliked physical labor. He did split rails, but he was hardly the heroic rail-splitter of his campaign propaganda. Indeed, he was a bit lazy when it came to physical work. Instead, he enjoyed the life of argument and was drawn to poetry, drama, and the law, carefully memorizing speeches and arguments until they became his own. The grace of his later writing grows out of a sensibility that saturated itself with William Shakespeare and the King James Bible. The cadences of Lincoln’s prose are compelling because they grew out of his absolute identification with words.
The word most often used by the young Lincoln was “humble.” He presented himself as an apprentice attorney and later as a budding politician who would do the people’s bidding. He was (he never tired of telling voters) their humble servant. He picked a political party, the Whigs, that believed in a passive president and a party led by the popular will. He opposed the Mexican War because President James Polk had used the executive branch of government to expand the country’s boundaries. Lincoln even campaigned for a slaveholding Whig president, Zachary Taylor, because Taylor said that he would abide by whatever the people told him to do.
Yet Donald rightly points out that Lincoln was not really a humble man. As president, he often acted unilaterally—perhaps even unconstitutionally—in time of war. On many occasions, he acted alone, not even consulting his cabinet. Although he would never admit it publicly, in private and among his closest supporters Lincoln behaved as though he believed himself inferior to no man. He had an ego as great as any of his rivals, but unlike them, he felt no call to reveal it.
On the face of it, Lincoln’s prospects for national office did not appear promising. He had served a few terms as a state legislator and congressman. He had failed twice to be elected an Illinois senator. He had a thriving law practice, but he was by no means wealthy and had to ride the rough roads of Illinois on the circuit arguing his law cases. He was consistently underestimated. He did not look the part of a great man. He apparently did not have a properly fitting suit until he was elected president. Many people thought him ugly and ungainly. He had a high-pitched speaking voice that settled into a comfortable lower register only after he had warmed up. He also tied his fate to the Whigs, a slowly declining political party.
How, then, did Lincoln triumph? He was indefatigable, always available to campaign for his party. Like any politician, he had enemies, but surely no American politician since Lincoln has been better at placating foes and making friends. Lincoln traveled so much of Illinois that he seemed to know almost every voter personally, and he spoke to people with an intimacy and lack of pretension that had enormous appeal. His timing was extraordinary. Even though he lost the 1858 election to Stephen Douglas, he demolished Douglas’ principle of popularity sovereignty, which held that states were entirely free to govern their own affairs—a doctrine that made a mockery of federal power and national authority.
Lincoln gradually became the second choice of the newly formed Republican Party. One of his rivals, William Seward, actually had more votes for the presidential nomination at the 1860 Republican convention, but Lincoln prevailed on the third ballot because he appealed to many delegates who could not put over their first choices. Lincoln’s positions placed him in the middle ground. He was against the spread of slavery, but he would not support the abolitionist cause. He supported the fugitive slave law (which forced northerners to return escaped slaves to the South), but he opposed the right of the Southern states to secede. He believed in an indivisible union.
Lincoln probably would not have been elected in 1860 if the Democratic Party had not split into sections. Of the four presidential candidates, Lincoln received a plurality of 39 percent. As Donald convincingly shows, Lincoln was unprepared for secession and did not believe that it would occur. He made disastrous mistakes during the first two years of the war, allowing his cabinet so much latitude that he seemed a weak leader, alternately indulging and then trying to rein in his vain military commander, George McClellan. He bore the trials of losing a beloved son (Willie) and of the increasing instability of his wife.
Yet Lincoln grew in office, cultivating Radical Republicans such as Charles Sumner and winning over competitors such as William Seward, his secretary of state. A tougher case was Salmon P. Chase, whose brilliant work at the Treasury ensured that Lincoln had enough money to fight the war. Chase thought Lincoln ineffectual and a far poorer choice for president than himself. Lincoln realized that Chase was disloyal and contemptuous, but he needed Chase and his Republican followers as much as he needed Seward and his coterie, for Seward and Chase (bitter rivals themselves) represented the two wings of the Republican Party that Lincoln had to keep intact.
Donald demonstrates that Lincoln, without doubt, was the greatest politician the United States has ever seen. The turning point in the Lincoln Administration came when a delegation of Republican senators came to him with concerns about reports that his cabinet was in disarray. Shrewdly, Lincoln assembled his cabinet officers and the senators in one room and had the cabinet, especially Chase, reply to the concerns. It was one thing for Chase to work behind the scenes to undermine Lincoln’s authority. It was quite another for him to say in the hearing of everyone that the cabinet and Lincoln’s leadership were failing. Having no other option, Chase had to support his president, and the Senate delegation departed, having lost what seemed like a sure opportunity to dominate a weak president.
Lincoln never lost control—although his courage and patience were tried again and again by vicious attacks in the press and in Congress and by Union losses that shook the public’s confidence in his leadership. To recoup, Lincoln began what has become a familiar course for modern presidents: In a series of public letters, he began speaking directly to the American people. Gradually they saw that their president had a distinctive voice and point of view, speaking for the Union itself, not for the collection of interests assembled in Congress or in the press.
Two of Lincoln’s speeches fixed the public perception of his presidency. Both were extraordinarily brief, but they captured the public imagination and have become not merely classics of American history but also contributions to world literature. The first, the Gettysburg Address (272 words), could not have taken more than five minutes to deliver, no matter how slowly Lincoln spoke. As Donald points out, Lincoln’s first words revolutionized thinking about American history. By beginning with “four score and seven years ago,” Lincoln dated the inception of the Union not from the Constitution but from the Declaration of Independence, which emphasized that all men were created equal. The sacrifice at Gettysburg, in other words, fused the idea of an indivisible Union with the idea of equality—a position that Lincoln had not taken at the beginning of the war, when he said that he would preserve the Union even if it meant preserving slavery. Just as Gettysburg was a turning point in the war—the Confederates would never again mount a full-scale invasion of the North—so it became for Lincoln a turning point in the purpose of the war.
Similarly, Lincoln’s second inaugural address (703 words) eschewed any justification of his role in the war and concentrated on its greater meaning. He admitted that slavery was “somehow” the cause of the war, leaving open the question of exactly why slavery became the deciding factor. He cast remarkably little blame on the South and stressed that a Civil War was the Almighty’s judgment on both sides. His parting words exemplify how he dared to evoke history while maintaining that humility that nearly always marked his public utterances: “With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in.” The work, Lincoln concluded, was not merely an end to the war but the beginning of a lasting peace among Americans and all nations.
Lincoln knew that he had made the speech of his life; he observed to one intimate, “Lots of wisdom in that document, I suspect.” It is a curiously impersonal remark to make about a speech that Lincoln wrote himself, as if it were not his own. As Donald observes, however, the speech itself is impersonal, and Lincoln saw himself more as an instrument of fate than as an actor. He was responding to history as much as he was making it, and he could only hope that he was seeing clearly. How tragic and ironic, then, that he should be murdered by an actor, a man suffused with the belief that the Shakespearean roles he played had made him into a hero for his section, the South. Donald brilliantly renders the assassination scene, which closes his biography, with a spare sketch of the life of John Wilkes Booth, a self-regarding hero who in every sense of the word became Lincoln’s nemesis.