The Great Emancipator

Abraham Lincoln
by David Herbert Donald
Simon & Schuster. 714 pp. $35.00

David Herbert Donald, a distinguished historian of the South and a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for biography, is the Charles Warren Professor Emeritus of American History and American Civilization at Harvard. In recognition of his eminence, he was invited by President George Bush in December 1989 to deliver the first of what was to be a series of White House lectures on American Presidents; quite properly, he lectured on Lincoln, “the greatest of our Presidents.” He has now published what is being hailed as the definitive Lincoln biography.

In some respects, the book deserves the praise. Drawing on Lincoln’s personal papers and on legal documents long sealed to the public, Donald is able to present the most detailed account ever written of Lincoln’s career, from impoverished boy to small-time lawyer and local politician and, finally, to President and commander-in-chief in the most deadly of our wars. Yet something is lacking in this account. Donald announces that his purpose is “to explain rather than to judge.” But it is impossible fully to explain Lincoln without judging him. He was a man of extraordinary ambition, passions, capacities—including an extraordinary intellect—and a man fully aware of his superiority, however much he tried to hide it. In brief, Lincoln cannot be explained without assessing what he did and, equally important, what he said.

Donald begins by telling the story of Lincoln the sometime schoolboy, bargeman, storekeeper, surveyor, state legislator, smalltown lawyer, and autodidact. But he says nothing of a quality that goes far toward “explaining” Lincoln as a young man and that distinguishes him from nearly all our other Presidents: namely, his disinterested passion for learning, or, to employ a phrase from Tocqueville, his “taste for the pleasures of the mind.”

In those days in Illinois, judges would go on circuit, and with them would go the lawyers, moving from town to town, trying cases by day and staving in the same hotel and frequently in the same room by night. In his own biography of Lincoln, his law partner “Billy” Herndon tells how, while the others were sleeping, sometimes all together in a single bed, Lincoln would lie on the floor with a lamp studying Euclid’s geometry. There is an intellectual beauty, an elegance, in Euclid’s Elements—it is one of the truly Great Books—but only an unusual intellectual curiosity could have led a backwoods lawyer to pick it up and set out to master it, starting with the definition that “a point is that which has no part,” proceeding through the demonstration that all the angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles, and on to the end. Why did he do it? Donald is content merely to say that Lincoln read Euclid, and leave it at that.

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More is missing in Donald’s account of Lincoln the budding statesman. “In tracing the life of Abraham Lincoln,” he writes in the preface, “I have asked at every stage of his career what he knew when he had to take critical actions, how he evaluated the evidence before him, and why he reached his decisions.” Fair enough, up to a point. But Lincoln’s deeds, his evaluations of reality, the decisions he reached, and, above all, his words—words that moved the nation and resound among us to this day—were influenced by his political thought, and this biography has almost nothing to tell us about that. To Donald, Lincoln, who asserted he never had a political thought that did not derive from the Declaration of Independence, was nothing but a pragmatist.

This will not do. Lincoln reentered politics in 1854 with the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which permitted slavery to be extended to those territories on the basis of “popular sovereignty,” and ran for the Senate in 1858 against Stephen Douglas. As Lincoln saw it, the Act represented an abandonment of the principles embodied in the Declaration of Independence. Did it? And if so, did that matter? In their historic debates, Lincoln answered yes, Douglas answered no. To Donald, however, there is no way of knowing who was right: “[W]hether the Declaration of Independence intended to include blacks in announcing that all men are created equal [is] an interesting, if ultimately unresolvable, historiographical problem.” Besides, Donald goes on, “it was not easy to see just what [this] had to do with the choice of a Senator for Illinois in 1858.”

Lincoln and Douglas understood that it had everything to do with that choice, and so did the many thousands of Illinois voters who stood for hours—as Donald points out, there were no seats—listening to them debate the slavery question. According to Donald, Lincoln and Douglas “exaggerated their differences” on the issue. But did they? If, as Lincoln insisted and Douglas denied, blacks were among the men who were endowed by their Creator with the unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, then slavery was wrong, and its extension into the territories ought to be prohibited, as it had been prohibited prior to the adoption of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. If slavery was not wrong, what was to prevent its spread, not only into the territories but into Illinois and the other Northern states? Having been assured by the Supreme Court (in the Dred Scott case of 1857) that “the right of property in a slave is distinctly and expressly affirmed in the Constitution,” why should not Northerners also see the advantage of “wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces”?

Lincoln and Douglas were contesting more than a Senate seat; they were engaged in a contest for public opinion, or, in Lincoln’s words, for the public mind on slavery. Although Douglas won the Senate seat in 1858, Lincoln was destined to win that wider contest. Told by friends that if he posed a certain question in the debate, he would lose the Senate race, Lincoln replied, “Gentlemen, I am killing larger game; if Douglas answers, he can never be President, and the battle of 1860 is worth a hundred of this.” He was right, and the rest is history.

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Donald’s Account of the Lincoln presidency—the problems he faced, the fools he tolerated, the generals he endured, the defeats he suffered, and, despite it all, the objectives he successfully pursued—is, so far as it goes, the best ever written. But, however rich in details, once again it fails to explain Lincoln’s greatness, or the reverence in which he is held by his countrymen.

One element of that greatness was a wise and humane prudence. Instead of immediate and wholesale emancipation, for example, Lincoln at one point during the war proposed that the Southern states be compensated by the national government in return for a willingness, over a period of years, to abolish slavery within their boundaries. Although Congress rejected the plan, there was much to be said in its favor. As Lincoln averred correctly, it would bring the war to an end, and while its costs would be great, the cost of the war was much greater. Best of all, the plan would rescue the then-living slaves from “the vagrant destitution which must largely attend immediate emancipation.” Yet about Lincoln’s reasons for advancing this plan, Donald says nothing.

Donald is similarly weak on another, contrasting element of Lincoln’s greatness—namely, his decisiveness, which was often combined with the most powerful and painful introspection. We find here only the briefest reference, for example, to what Lincoln called his “leg cases,” involving soldiers who deserted because God had given them a “cowardly pair of legs.” Probably no duty Lincoln had to perform as commander-inchief caused him greater anguish—“You don’t know how hard it is to let a human being die, when you feel that a stroke of your pen will save him”—but he nevertheless authorized the execution of 267 such men during his four years in office. These, surely, are deeds and thoughts worthy of mention in a definitive biography. Here they are ignored.

Most significantly, Donald seems to be oblivious to the power of Lincoln’s words and the role they played, and that Lincoln intended them to play, in his policy. Thus, he is content merely to remark the responses in the country, pro and con, to the Gettysburg Address, saying nothing of its beauty, its purpose, or its continuing effect on generations of Americans.¹

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In short, for a fuller appreciation of Lincoln’s greatness, we have to turn elsewhere than to this new biography. My own strong recommendation for a good place to start would be the “memoir” of Lincoln first published in 1916 by an Englishman, Lord Charnwood:

Many great deeds had been done in the war. The greatest was the keeping of the North together in an enterprise so arduous, and an enterprise for objects so confusedly related as the Union and freedom. Abraham Lincoln did this; nobody else could have done it; to do it he bore on his shoulders such a weight of care and pain as few other men have borne. When it was over it seemed to the people that he had all along been thinking their real thoughts for them; but they knew that this was because he had fearlessly thought for himself. He had been able to save the nation, partly because he saw that unity was not to be sought by the way of base concession. He had been able to free the slaves, partly because he would not hasten to this object at the sacrifice of what he thought a larger purpose.

This most unrelenting enemy to the project of the Confederacy was the one man who had quite purged his heart and mind from hatred or even anger toward his fellow-countrymen of the South. That fact came to be seen in the South too, and generations in America are likely to remember it when all other features of his statecraft have grown indistinct.

Unlike Charnwood’s memoir, Donald’s biography is a masterful assemblage of the facts of Lincoln’s life; but we would look in vain in it for what “generations in America” remember of his example.

¹ I have dwelled on these qualities in my review of Garry Wills's Lincoln at Gettysburg in the November 1992 COMMENTARY.