LINCOLN
A Life of Purpose and Power
By Richard Carwardine.
Illustrated
Alfred A. Knopf
394 pages
LINCOLN IN THE TIMES
The Life of Abraham Lincoln as
Originally Reported in The New York Times
Edited by David Herbert Donald and Harold Holzer
Illustrated
St. Martin’s Press
413 pages
TODAY we look to television for our presidential ideals. Practically the only programs on network TV that are not yet “reality based” are those weighty dramas set in the White House. The presidents and would-be presidents, portrayed by the likes of Martin Sheen, Geena Davis, Jimmy Smits and Alan Alda, are fantastically wise, eloquent, decisive, patient, capable, hard-working, sympathetic and open-minded. They are also quietly devout family men and women, with résumés that sound unlikely for candidates built to survive the modern primary system; Davis’s president is a former college president, Sheen’s a Nobel Prize-winning economist. They even have perfect physiques; with the obvious exception of Sheen (good-looking enough in his youth to play Bobby Kennedy), they are tall, wiry and hard-bodied.
Most Americans would probably not be surprised to learn that once upon a time such a model president actually walked the hustings—or that his name was Abraham Lincoln. Our fascination with Lincoln, the man, has rarely waned since his death, and he long ago became the tabula rasa upon which we inscribe our obsessions of the moment. In our current preoccupation with the couch and the bedroom, we want to know how Lincoln dealt with his depression or—the most compelling question of all—if he might have been bisexual.
In Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power, the British historian Richard Carwardine makes it refreshingly clear from his title on that he is more interested in Lincoln the politician. It’s not that Lincoln’s political abilities have escaped notice. Most recently, Doris Kearns Goodwin, in Team of Rivals, told the overdue story of how Lincoln, as president, was able to mold the oversize, contentious personalities in his cabinet into a remarkably effective unit. But Carwardine provides a more comprehensive study of how an essentially good man could gain and wield power, even in scoundrel time.
Lincoln came of age in a period of almost continuous, rough-and-tumble electioneering, an era when “men turned out to vote in proportions rarely matched by Americans before or since.” He proved himself early on to be a political master of this roiling frontier world. Perhaps our oddest contemporary misconception of Lincoln is that he should serve as a model of persistence through failure. Carwardine points out that “only once in his political career did he lose an election when his name was on the ballot” and even then he carried his own town—the friends and neighbors who knew him best—by a vote of 227-3. When he was not serving in the Illinois Legislature or the United States Congress, he was usually out making very good money as a lawyer, and his absences from office were often strategic.
We persist in wanting to see greatness thrust upon our heroes—some vestigial, republican idea of virtue. In fact, as Carwardine makes clear, Lincoln was an agent of his own destiny. Like most of our greatest politicians—Washington, Jefferson, both Roosevelts—he both consciously sought after power and possessed a rare sense of timing. In an era of extremes, he was able to position himself as an unyielding moderate, outmaneuvering many men who thought themselves more clever simply by standing on principle. His goal was always the preservation of the Union—yet he was pragmatic enough to understand, as the war went on, how this end had become inextricably interwoven with the end of slavery.
In dissecting Lincoln’s triumph, Carwardine has provided us with a democratic version of Machiavelli’s “Prince,” a primer on how power can and should be won and used in a free society. Lincoln, he shows us, expertly employed both the machinery of his new party and the authority of his office. He preferred peaceful and lawful means to his ends, but he did not hesitate to press constitutional bounds to the breaking point—or instance, suspending habeas corpus, shutting down the occasional newspaper and detaining thousands of Southern sympathizers—in the desperate struggle to keep the nation together.
He was the original Great Communicator, unsurpassed then, and certainly today, as a debater and a “spellbinding” speaker of “unequaled eloquence.” He was capable of giving a 90-minute, extemporaneous address so riveting that listening reporters forgot to keep taking notes. His audiences, Carwardine says, felt an “electric thrill” and were transported by his “tone of earnest truthfulness, of elevated, noble sentiment and of kindly sympathy.” He wrote his own masterly speeches, and could quote readily from both Shakespeare and the Bible. He rarely stooped to the politics of insult or abuse, but appealed primarily to his audience’s “sense of justice and loyalty to the ideals of the Declaration of Independence”; he was “remarkably free from hate.” Apart from his speeches, he wrote innumerable public and private letters to influential newspaper editors and leading churchmen, and even to the workingmen of Manchester and London, England, when he thought it would further the Union cause.
Lincoln ran an amazingly open presidency, even for the time. He was inundated with endless streams of well-wishers, advice givers, office seekers. He met as many as he could, claiming to enjoy these “public opinion baths.” They enabled him both to gauge the mood of the nation and to build support for his policies. They also gave him the chance to do something he loved to do, tell a joke or an anecdote. The troops he visited frequently in their hospitals and camps were devoted to him, delighted by his unaffected appearance and his personal attention to their needs. Carwardine estimates that “Lincoln held perhaps 2,000 or more private interviews with Union soldiers,” and they in turn formed an invaluable bloc of voters and boosters.
Carwardine, whose previous books include Evangelicals and Politics in Antebellum America, lingers longest on Lincoln’s considerable ability to rally evangelical Northern Protestants to the flag by nourishing the millennial belief that they were God’s chosen people, defending what was truly “the last, best hope on earth” against “all the powers of hell.” This was no mean feat, coming from a man who had been suspected of agnosticism or atheism for most of his life. Yet by the end, while still a religious skeptic, Lincoln, too, seemed to equate the preservation of the Union and the freeing of the slaves with some higher, mystical purpose.
This is the spooky Lincoln, the politician who can send a small chill up the spine. Considering the repulsiveness of the cause he opposed (no, it wasn’t “states’ rights”) and the universal hope offered by American democracy in the 19th and 20th centuries, it is easy to understand such feelings. But one feels a good deal queasier contemplating a president less thoughtful and tempered than Lincoln, who enjoys a special relationship with our armed forces, is willing to play fast and loose with the Constitution and justifies his policies as part of God’s great plan.
If Carwardine has written an illuminating and thoroughly intelligent assessment of Lincoln the politician, it is difficult to understand any need at all for Lincoln in The Times: The Life of Abraham Lincoln as Originally Reported in The New York Times. It was edited by the prize-winning Lincoln scholars David Herbert Donald, the author of the biography Lincoln, and Harold Holzer, the author of Lincoln at Cooper Union. But the collection could have used a larger contribution from both men, beyond the short introductions and limited commentary they provide. Little writing of note is reproduced here, and much of what is included is not actually reports by Timesmen, but rather verbatim communications and proclamations by Lincoln and others. Though it’s amusing, for instance, to see the 17 separate subheads under the headline proclaiming “Victory!” for Lincoln’s Union-Republican coalition in 1864, they don’t tell us very much.
Worse, however, are the editors’ failures to include much on the terrible draft riots of 1863, in the very city in which The Times was being published, or more than a few passing references to the paper’s founder, Henry J. Raymond, one of the most intrepid journalists of his day. Deeply skeptical of Lincoln at first, Raymond became his most steadfast supporter in the city, and national chairman of his 1864 re-election campaign. Such a conflict of interest would give The Times‘s public editor apoplexy today, but Raymond was the type to stick — literally — to his guns. During the riots, he faced down hostile mobs by mounting Gatling guns in The Times’s windows, manned by Raymond himself and his co-owner, the stock speculator and sportsman Leonard Jerome, better remembered as Winston Churchill’s grandfather. Now that sounds to me like a story fit to print.