Memorializing Lincoln
New explorations of a president who still fascinates us.

By Justin Ewers
Sunday, January 14, 2007

What makes a president great? Stephen Colbert, in his fake-news show, "The Colbert Report," enjoys poking fun at the question, teasing members of Congress who come on the program about how history will view the current chief executive. "George W. Bush," Colbert asks with a grin. "Great president? Or the greatest president?"

Politicians may have their own motives for keeping Bush out of the top spot, of course, but for historians, the reason is simple. In scholarly rankings of presidents going back 50 years, one man, more than any other, has been rated first again and again: Abraham Lincoln, the Great Emancipator, savior of the Union, winner of the Civil War. More than 140 years after his death, the most celebrated man ever to occupy the White House certainly doesn't want for adulatory biographies -- dozens have been published in the last five years alone -- but scholars still can't resist reexamining his legacy. Several books try to put Lincoln's leadership under new light, offering a variety of interpretations of what made Honest Abe so, well, great.

LINCOLN'S SWORD The Presidency and the Power of Words

By Douglas L. Wilson

Knopf, $26.95

The Lincoln of legend is usually depicted as the ultimate stump speaker, a mesmerizing teller of yarns. But in Lincoln's Sword, Douglas L. Wilson, co-director of the Lincoln Studies Center at Knox College, argues that he was something else as well: one of the great presidential writers in history, rivaled only by Jefferson.

When Lincoln first took office, few would have agreed. Intellectuals smirked at the dirty-joke-telling frontiersman who had moved into the White House. "Who will write this ignorant man's state papers?" one newspaper editor mused. But that sentiment began to fade after Lincoln's first inaugural, when he offered a delicately worded olive branch to the seven Southern states that had seceded from the Union: "We are not enemies, but friends," he said. "We must not be enemies."

The offer was turned down, and war consumed the rest of Lincoln's presidency. Wilson expertly demonstrates just how much Lincoln used his flair for language to influence public opinion. Lincoln refused to give unscripted speeches, painstakingly drafting and redrafting his words before presenting them to an audience. By the time he was assassinated, it was clear that his pen had become as mighty as any sword: The Emancipation Proclamation, the Gettysburg Address and his Second Inaugural (in which, only a month before he died, Lincoln asked Americans to pursue peace "with malice toward none") continue to define the way the Civil War is remembered.

THE GETTYSBURG GOSPEL The Lincoln Speech That Nobody Knows

By Gabor Boritt

Simon & Schuster, $28

The Gettysburg Address, more than any other piece of his writing, dominates the popular memory of Lincoln. Given at the dedication of the new national cemetery in Gettysburg, Pa., in November 1863, just four months after the battle there that turned the tide of the war, Lincoln's speech was nine sentences long; it took only two minutes to read. And its simple elegance -- "The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here" -- has gained iconic status. Garry Wills, in his seminal Lincoln at Gettysburg, went so far as to say that Lincoln's speech "remade America."

That's not what people thought at the time, insists Gabor Boritt, the director of the Civil War Institute at Gettysburg College. In fact, he writes in the enjoyable, closely argued The Gettysburg Gospel, Lincoln's remarks were barely heard by many listeners, who were surprised when he sat down so quickly. His words were widely misreported. ("Four score and seven years ago," was shortened to "Ninety years ago" in some newspapers.) And they were generally misunderstood: Edward Everett, the former senator who spoke before Lincoln, got most of the press afterward, which noted only that the president had given a few "dedicatory remarks."

Once the speech was published in full, of course, it had its desired effect: steeling the resolve of a nation confronted with so much death. But adulation on a grand scale would have to wait. Only with Lincoln's assassination -- and, Boritt insists, when failed postwar attempts at reconstruction revealed the hollowness of emancipation -- did his simple words take on deeper meaning. "A generation had to pass," Boritt writes, "before his 'few appropriate remarks' grew into the Gettysburg Address."

MR. LINCOLN'S T-MAILS The Untold Story of How Abraham Lincoln Used the Telegraph to Win the Civil War

By Tom Wheeler

Collins, $24.95

With his knack for squeezing so much meaning into so little space, it's only fitting that Lincoln became a master of the telegram. In Mr. Lincoln's T-Mails, Tom Wheeler, a former telecommunications executive, argues that it was not his writing or his speaking but Lincoln's adroit use of new technology that allowed him to triumph over the less tech-savvy Southerners.

Wheeler is no great wordsmith himself, but he does offer an original take on Lincoln's presidency. Lincoln saw a telegraph for the first time only three years before he took office, and he hardly touched the device during the first year of the war, Wheeler finds. But in 1862, frustrated with his commanders' tentativeness on the battlefield, the president seems to have grasped the power of instant communication. During one particularly disastrous battle that spring, he took matters into his own hands, firing off telegrams from Washington ordering the movement of troops. His actions raised eyebrows. "Some well-meaning newspapers advise the President to keep his fingers out of the military pie," one of his secretaries wrote later. "The truth is that if he did, the pie would be a sorry mess." By the time he died, Lincoln had sent nearly a thousand missives by telegraph, becoming the first president to exert his will so directly on the battlefield -- and hurrying, Wheeler persuasively argues, the end of the war.

LINCOLN UNMASKED What You're Not Supposed to Know About Dishonest Abe

By Thomas J. DiLorenzo

Crown Forum, $22.95

In a world of Lincoln admirers, there are bound to be some naysayers -- and none is more pointedly revisionist than Thomas J. DiLorenzo, an economist at Loyola College in Maryland. In Lincoln Unmasked, DiLorenzo takes aim at the entirety of Lincoln's sprawling legacy. By fighting to preserve the Union, DiLorenzo insists, Lincoln destroyed it; by failing to join the early abolitionists, he revealed his true feelings on slavery; by stretching the Constitution in wartime, he proved himself a tyrant.

Of course, Lincoln's presidency had its dark side. Most infamously, the Great Emancipator suspended habeas corpus in 1861-62, allowing the indefinite detention of citizens without trial. Still, DiLorenzo's work is more of a diatribe against a mostly unnamed group of Lincoln scholars than a real historical analysis. His wild assertions -- for example, that Lincoln held "lifelong white supremacist views" -- don't help his argument.

Even Lincoln's admirers have sometimes been uncomfortable with the saintly aura that surrounded him after his death. Ward Hill Lamon, his former law partner and biographer, worried that history had begun to view his friend "not as a human being endowed with a mighty intellect and extraordinary virtues, but as a god." Most modern-day historians are wary of falling into this trap, concluding that Lincoln was a more complicated figure than legend would have it -- a man who lived in troubled times and may have made as many controversial decisions as brilliant speeches. On balance, he is remembered today as a conflicted but still great man. DiLorenzo's rabid, warts-and-all approach to his life errs too much on the side of the warts.

Justin Ewers is a senior editor at U.S. News & World Report.