LINCOLN
A LIFE OF PURPOSE AND POWER
By
Richard Carwardine.
394 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $27.50.
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.
413 pp. St. Martin’s Press. $29.95.
By
Kevin Baker
Today
we look to television for our presidential ideals. Practically
the only part of network TV that is 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 quietly devout, family men and women,
with resumes that nonetheless push the far edges of credulity;
Davis’ president is a former college president, Sheen’s
a Nobel Prize-winning economist. They even have our ideal presidential
physiques; with the obvious exception of Sheen (good-looking enough
to play Bobby Kennedy in his youth!), 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 bedroom and the couch, we
want to know how Lincoln dealt with his depression or—the
most compelling question of all!—if he was really bisexual.
In
Lincoln, A Life of Purpose and Power, 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 previously escaped all notice. Most recently,
Doris Kearns Goodwin, in Team of Rivals, told the overdue
story of how Lincoln, the president, was able to mold the oversized,
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 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 state legislature or the U.S. Congress, he was
usually out making very good money, and his absences from office
were often strategic.
We
persist in wanting to see greatness thrust upon our hero—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 open-minded
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 in a free society.
Lincoln, he shows us, expertly utilized both the machinery of
his new party, and the power of his office. He preferred peaceful
and lawful means to his ends, but he did not hesitate to press
his Constitutional bounds to the breaking point, in the the desperate
struggle to keep the nation together.
He
was the original Great Communicator, unsurpassed as a debater,
and a “spellbinding” speaker of “unequaled eloquence,”
capable of giving a ninety-minute, extemporaneous address so riveting
that listening reporters forgot to keep taking notes. His audiences
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, masterful speeches,
and could quote readily from both Shakespeare and the Bible. He
rarely stooped to the politics of insult or abuse, but “appealed
chiefly to [people’s] sense of justice and loyalty to the
ideals of the Declaration of Independence,” and was “remarkably
free of hate.” Apart from his speeches, he wrote innumerable
public and private letters to influential newspaper editors, leading
churchmen; even the workingmen of Manchester and London, England,
when he thought it would further the Union cause.
Lincoln
endured an amazingly hands-on presidency, even for the time, 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 better gauge the
mood of the nation, and to build support for his policies in turn.
All his life, he impressed those he met close up with his humble
yet powerful demeanor; his extraordinary physical size and strength,
his plain speech, his love of a telling joke or anecdote; his
earnest desire to provide every individual, black as well as white,
with the opportunity to “better his condition”. The
troops he visited frequently in their hospitals and camps were
even more tenderly devoted to him, delighted by his unaffected
appearance, his sincerity and good humor, and his personal attention
to their needs. Carwardine estimates that “Lincoln held
perhaps two thousand or more private interviews with Union soldiers,”
and they in turn formed an invaluable bloc of voters and boosters.
Carwardine
lingers longest on the most intriguing appeal in Lincoln’s
considerable repertoire; his ability to rally evangelical, northern
Protestants to the flag, joined in 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, who sends a small chill up the spine. Considering
the repulsiveness of the cause he opposed (no, it wasn’t
“states’ rights”) and the unique hope offered
by American democracy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,
it is easy to understand such feelings. Given a cause less dire,
in hands less restrained than Lincoln’s, one feels a good
deal queasier contemplating a president obsessed with the millennium,
enjoying a special relationship with our armed forces, and willing
to sweep aside the Constitution and excuse his every action 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. It was edited
by two more, prize-winning, Lincoln scholars, David Herbert Donald
and Harold Holzer, but the collection could have used much more
of both men, beyond the short introductions and the limited commentary
they provide. Little writing of note is reproduced here; much
of it is not actually by Timesmen themselves, but verbatim communications
between generals and politicians. It is amusing, for instance,
to see the seventeen separate subheads under the headline proclaiming
“Victory!” for Lincoln’s Union-Republican coalition
in 1864, but they don’t tell us very much.
Worse
omissions, though, are the editors’ failures to include
much background on the turbulent 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 re-election campaign. Such a conflict of interest
would give the public editor apoplexy today, but Raymond was the
type to stick—literally—to his guns. During the terrible
New York City draft riots in 1863, he faced down hostile mobs
by mounting Gatling guns in the Times’ windows,
manned by Raymond himself and his co-owner, the stock plunger
and sportsman Leonard Jerome, better remembered as Winston Churchill’s
grandfather. That sounds to me like a story fit to print.
Kevin
Baker is the author of the historical novel, “Strivers Row,”
published this month by HarperCollins.
©
Copyright The
New York Times
