The Enigma Behind the Icon
By Jonathan Yardley
Oct. 1, 1995
It goes without saying that the publication of David Herbert Donald's life of Abraham Lincoln is a cultural event of note. One reason is that it has been more than four decades since the appearance of the last important one-volume Lincoln biography, by Benjamin F. Thomas, four decades during which Lincoln scholarship has uncovered much of interest, albeit largely peripheral, about our greatest president. A second is that Donald has spent his entire long career in the Lincolnian vineyards and nearby territory; thus this book is the culmination of the life's work of a scholar and writer who enjoys universal affection and admiration.
Writing the life of Lincoln in a single volume is a daunting challenge, for that life encompasses not merely the four most crowded and dramatic years in American history, those in which the Civil War was fought, but also a long preliminary period during which Lincoln prepared, all unwittingly, for his own life's culminating task. It is a story that begins in the frontier of Kentucky and Illinois, moves through the manifold controversies that arose as the youthful states sought to shape themselves, then races to the nation's capital and the momentous issues of Union and slavery with which it struggled in the early 1860s-a struggle quite literally for the nation's soul, one in which the central role was played by Lincoln himself.
For the biographer seeking to compress this immensely complex story into less than 600 pages of text, a sea of difficulties emerges. Lincoln's early life is as much the stuff of legend and romance as of hard documentation; sifting through all the truths, half-truths and suppositions has preoccupied many a scholar for decades, yet the biographer must distill it into a handful of pages. Lincoln's sturdy character must be firmly delineated, all the while making clear how inherently unknowable he was. The tangled politics of Illinois, Springfield and Sangamon County must be untangled, and the participants therein must be sorted out, assigned partisan affiliation, and clearly identified as to their influence on Lincoln, and his on them. There are the Lincoln-Douglas debates to be described and interpreted, the decline of the Whigs and the rise of the Republicans to be charted, the messy election of 1860 to be straightened out-and then, if one has not already reached 600 pages, the entire Civil War to be fought, a matter to which the likes of Allan Nevins and Shelby Foote have devoted multivolume histories yet not come close to exhausting the subject.
So to write a single-volume life of Lincoln requires the exercise of a quality not often found in the profession of history these days: discrimination. The writer must decide what is of sufficient importance to be included, and what can safely be left out. Is the biography to be impressionistic-such as Mark Neely's remarkably brief The Last Best Hope of Earth: Abraham Lincoln and the Promise of America-or is it to contain as much hard factual material as its limited space permits?
David Herbert Donald, though he scarcely hesitates to analyze and interpret, has chosen a fundamentally documentary approach. No doubt this is in large measure because he feels an obligation to his fellow Lincoln scholars to take into account all the work that has been done since Thomas's biography was published, and to get into print for a lay readership material from the Lincoln Papers in the Library of Congress that until now has gone unpublished. He has chosen to center the biography "largely on Lincoln's own words," and to focus "closely on Lincoln himself," rather than to write "a general history of the United States during the middle of the 19th century."
Donald has also chosen, as indeed we would expect him to, to take his own slant on Lincoln, this being "the essential passivity of his nature," as evidence for which he quotes Lincoln himself as saying, "I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me." Lincoln "did not come to conclusions quickly, and he was temperamentally averse to making bold moves." And: "Whenever Lincoln's plans were frustrated, he reverted to the fatalism that had characterized his outlook as a youth." And: "Always reluctant to be out in front of public opinion, always hesitant to assume positions from which there could be no retreat, Lincoln deliberated long before making a hard choice." And: "Reading the Bible reinforced Lincoln's long-held belief in the doctrine of necessity, a belief that admirably fitted the needs of his essentially passive personality."
Fatalistic Lincoln most certainly was, deliberate and cautious as well, but "passive"? Perhaps we have here merely a question of definition, but the synonyms commonly listed for "passive" include "submissive," "inactive," "unassertive," "apathetic," "inert," "pliable" and "listless." There is absolutely nothing in the historical record-or, for that matter, in Donald's book-to suggest that Abraham Lincoln was ever any of these. There were periods when he hesitated to act, periods when he sunk into despair, periods when he was torn between political expediency and moral necessity, periods when "he brooded over the war and his role in it"-but in none of these was he "passive" as the term is commonly understood.
If anything, Lincoln's story as Donald has chosen to tell it gives the lie to that interpretation of his character. Over and over again, Donald shows Lincoln moving reluctantly to decision but, once having reached it, proceeding with determination and vigor. "His ambition was no secret," Donald writes, and quotes William H. Herndon, Lincoln's law partner and early biographer, as calling Lincoln's ambition "a little engine that knew no rest." Donald repeatedly describes Lincoln's powerful self-confidence and its steady growth over the years as Lincoln came to see others as less able and determined than himself. If these are characteristics of a "passive" man, then the lexicon is in need of major revision.
This isn't a quibble. Passivity is central to Donald's view of Lincoln, and his failure to sustain it leaves an immense hole at the center of his book. It is hardly fair to say that this undermines the credibility of the entire enterprise, as Donald is far too scrupulous, conscientious and knowledgeable for that to be the case, but it leaves the reader constantly wondering why the book's central thesis bears so little connection to the story its author tells and the portrait he paints thereby.
There are three other problems, closer to quibbles but problems all the same. One is occasional repetitiveness, as for example in Donald's repeated recapitulation of Lincoln's fuzzy ideas about resettling the slaves in Africa. A second is that he tells far more about Lincoln's early law career and the internecine details of Illinois politics than a one-volume biography requires; this is in large measure why the book is not far short of half over before Donald reaches his principal subject, Lincoln and the war. Finally, Donald quotes too frequently from newspaper editorials; these carried greater weight in Lincoln's day than they do in ours, but (a) they are a poor substitute for vox populi in any circumstances and (b) inasmuch as Donald tells us that Lincoln paid little attention to newspapers, what's the point?
For the generally negative tenor of these comments, I am tempted to apologize. David Herbert Donald is a scholar of the first rank, and over many years his contributions to our understanding of Lincoln and his era have been invaluable. For that matter a reader coming for the first time to Lincoln's life will find his biography largely satisfactory, despite my reservations. But in no significant way does Donald's Lincoln supplant Benjamin Thomas's, which is still in print and still, for the reader looking for Lincoln at once in full and in brief, the definitive work.
© 1996 The Washington Post Co.
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