Lincoln's Virtues

The biographer does a good job on trying to sort out the legendary Lincoln from the mythical Lincoln, mostly. There are times within this book that one begins to feel that the author is projecting his understanding of Lincoln onto the events that happened--such as suggesting that some of his retorts were quips when in fact they probably were not. Everyone, it seems, misunderstands Lincoln at some point or another which was true of his life.

When I began reading this book, I was familiar with the perspective of slavery being a state's rights issue. What this book does uniquely well is that it outlines that this is not so. Since Lincoln was not an outright abolitionist, the position was often confusing in history. What he was, was perhaps, a pragmatist in the sense that he did not politically think slavery could be outright abolished but rather that it could be contained and not spread like a virus. The fact that it was permitted and was within the law of the country at least in some places I think, to him, meant that the institutions of the country had decided it would be so. What the national conscience had not decided, however, was whether or not as a nation it SHOULD be so. Lincoln clearly and categorically personally hated slavery. It was a moral question to him that was easily answerable.

In reading this book, I found several quotes attributed to Lincoln I had not discovered before. His desire to take an oath in 1860 somewhat of his own making was most enlightening. The fact he suggested that war was now in the hands of the people as opposed to his own self was also interesting since after he had sworn to protect the constitution he knew that his job was to defend the institutions it represented. Since the people had no such oath, they were free to come and go as they pleased, as he pointed out. War would be up to them.

The other interesting thing this book does not do is focus much on his assassination. Indeed, as a character study, it has little need to explore that topic. Rather, the book ends just as the civil war starts. The author wisely has allowed the reader to fill in all the blanks that happen in the next five years from that marker in time by understanding the character of the person under study previous to that point. Since the research that was done was thorough, you know what is going to happen next even if you had never read any civil war history prior.

Another interesting item the author elucidates are grammatical changes Lincoln made. Since Lincoln asked for the advice of people around him, he often listened to their suggestions so that the wording he presented was partly his own and partly modified by others who were sensitive to the climate in ways that he might not have been. Many of these original works do not suggest a personality of compromise in the sense that we are often led to believe Lincoln held amongst opposite personalities and contrary positions. Rather, many of his positions are very pointed and not at all compromising when it comes to the consequences of certain behavior and how the law would understand that behavior at a constitutional level. One wonders whether he would have been better served with his original verbiage in some areas we understand with historical hindsight.

All in all, a very thorough character study of Lincoln, and an enjoyable read that any Lincoln scholar should have familiarity with--notwithstanding the occasional authorly attribution of something as a joke or jab that was probably neither. The period of politics leading up to the civil war was, I suspect, sometimes just that loony.