The New Criterion

There's a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we will.
— Shakespeare, Hamlet

David Herbert Donald has called his new biography, Lincoln, a book for the Nineties.[1] If it is a work for this time, Donald seems to mean that nowadays we no longer need any great mythic figures in the national pantheon. Donald's Lincoln is anything but the larger-than-life conquering hero whose sublime historical achievement was to have saved the Union and to have freed the slaves and whose apotheosis is monumentally evinced in that awesome, brooding memorial in Washington. Is it risky to think of Lincoln as a mythic hero. Idols, of course, invariably have clay feet; and it is probably wise not to stand too near them, as they have a way of burying their devotees as they come crashing down. Lincoln has always had a stature wall in excess of his six feet four inches; and there have always been Lincoln critics ready to take him down a peg or two. This president is, in my view, a troubled and troubling figure. But to do justice to Lincoln one need not mythicize him. Does Donald do him justice?

 It should be said at the outset that Donald's education and training have fully prepared him to do justice to the life of Lincoln. In fact, as the Charles Warren Professor Emeritus of American History at Harvard, Donald spent a long career in mastering the intricacies of nineteenth-century American history and politics and has produced, among other works, Lincoln's Herndon (1948), Lincoln Reconsidered: Essays on the Civil War Era (1959), Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War (1960), The Politics of Reconstruction, 1863-1867 (1965), The Nation in Crisis, 1861-1877 (1969), and Charles Sumner and the Rights of Man (1970). Donald's first work on Sumner won for him the Pulitzer Prize, as did his Look Homeward: A Life of Thomas Wolfe (1988). He is thus fully familiar with his material and is a prize-winning writer. In anticipation of a great popular success, Lincoln has already been selected by the Book-of-the-Month Club, the History Book Club, and Reader's Digest Condensed Books. It is manifestly intended as a work for specialists and generalists alike.

Yet I must confess at the outset that l found the book quite deflating. My reaction has nothing to do with the fullness of the book. It is comprehensive, accurate, and detailed, so far as I can judge. And Donald's Lincoln offers all the relevant biographical facts: Lincoln's birth in 1809 in rural Kentucky, his impoverished childhood in a makeshift log cabin in Indiana, his family's hand-to-mouth existence in Illinois, and his meager schooling but great avidity for learning. Donald takes us knowledgeably through Lincoln's early youth when he supported himself by farming, clerking, running a local mill, and doing various odd jobs to make a living. We learn of Lincoln's youthful service as a postmaster, a surveyor, an aspiring politician, and a sometime soldier (in the Illinois militia during the Black Hawk Indian War in 1832).

In the course of telling Lincoln's story, Donald also provides us with a great deal of incidental information about Lincoln's early relationships: his cultivation of the "Clary's Grove Boys," the local rowdies who assured his first election in Illinois; his friendship with Joshua Speed, the storekeeper with whom he boarded for a time; his romantic involvements with Ann Rutledge (who died at twenty-two), with Mary Owens (to whom he was briefly engaged), and with Mary Todd (whom he married in 1842). His election to the presidency in 1860 and the Civil War isolated Lincoln from family and friends, and Donald's Lincoln seems a remote, impassive figure whose only concern came to be winning the war and saving the Union. His executive actions in respect to his generals—McClellan, Halleck, Grant, Sherman, and others—are narrated with shrewd understanding. His dithering over the slave question and emancipation is sensitively handled. And Donald's account of the shooting of Lincoln by John Wilkes Booth, on April 14, 1865, is affectingly told.

Still, I find this portrait of Lincoln is rather lacking in sharp resolution. And the reason may lie in Donald's decision to narrate his story wholly within the framework of information that Lincoln had available to him at any one time in his life:

In tracing the life of Abraham Lincoln, 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. It is, then, a biography written from Lincoln's point of view, using the information and ideas that were available to him.

Presidents should not of course be judged on the basis of knowledge that has only later come to light. But the effect of Donald's self-limitation is evident in the great "gaps" in Lincoln's "life" that other biographers have already filled for us. For instance, Robert E. Lee hardly figures in this biography because Lincoln knew little about him. Yet the elusive Confederate leader who kept Lincoln and his generals guessing for four years should inexorably be one of the major players in the landscape of any Lincoln biography. But the reader of Donald's Lincoln is allowed to know only what Lincoln gleaned from military dispatches and the like. As he readily concedes, almost nothing is provided "about the internal affairs of the Confederacy, because these were matters that Lincoln could not know about." Likewise, Lincoln's marriage to Mary Todd produces here a shadowy and perplexing woman because, presumably, Lincoln did not know what she was up to much of the time, and he could not understand her outbursts of weird spiritualism, her paranoia and manifest irrationalism. It could be argued, I suppose, that presidents have many unofficial sources of information. But whether Lincoln knew more than Donald gives us or not, it seems unnecessarily limiting to restrict the reader to "What did Lincoln know and when did he know it?" Most readers of history or historical biography want, I suspect, the big picture.

So far as the president's personality is concerned, much might be said about Donald's biography. But in the space available here, let me touch upon what I find most interesting in Donald's portrait: Lincoln's essential "passivity." Attorney General Bates recorded the following in his diary at the end of 1861: "he lacks will and purpose, and, I greatly fear, he has not the power to command." This was a common response to Lincoln. He drove to distraction both his friends and his enemies with the oft-repeated assertion that "my policy is to have no policy: To his enemies this meant that he had no principles and so was a dangerous opportunist.

 But Lincoln meant that he would take matters one step at a time, make each decision as it came up, and base the new decision on the effect of the last one. He remarked that "the pilots on our Western rivers steer from point to point as they call it —setting the course of the boat no farther than they can see; and that is all I propose to myself." This reluctance to define aggressively a policy in advance and then to execute it is not explained by Donald as a form of native American pragmatism. Don-aid sees Lincoln's passivity as grounded on his adherence to the "Doctrine of Necessity"—a belief that "the human mind is impelled to action, or held in rest by some power, over which the mind itself has no control: This doctrine was not identical with the belief in a Higher Law espoused by Christians or even claimed by the abolitionists and transcendentalists in New England who rhapsodized over the Over-soul or the Universal Current of Being.

Lincoln was in fact a youthful prairie skeptic whose immersion in Voltaire, Volney, and Tom Paine had turned him away from his parents' Baptist fundamentalism. Condemned as "an open scoffer at Christianity" in the 1846 campaign for Congress and periodically denounced as a "Deist," Lincoln always insisted "I have never denied the truth of the Scriptures; and I have never spoken with intentional disrespect of religion in general, or of any denomination of Christians in particular." This reassurance to the faithful may indicate merely that Lincoln was a good politician. But I mention the matter because as the Civil War carnage continued, Lincoln began to carry the Bible with him. He memorized many of its consoling passages, and he began to speak (often quite movingly) in the terms of nineteenth-century religious discourse. Although Mary Lincoln was right to say that her husband was never a "technical Christian," one affiliated with any particular church, Lincoln recognized during the Civil War that his religious ideas were undergoing a "process of crystallization."

As this crystallization occurred and as the war dragged on, Lincoln came increasingly to feel that it was not he and Jefferson Davis and their governments and generals who were killing these boys but God himself. God evidently did not want the end of the Civil War. God did not want it ended until some obscure purpose had been worked out. He told Mrs. Eliza P. Gurney that

the purposes of the Almighty are perfect, and must prevail, though we erring mortals may fail to accurately perceive them in advance. We hoped for a happy termination of this terrible war long before this; but God knows best, and has ruled otherwise. . . . We must work earnestly in the best light He gives us, trusting that so working still conduces to the great ends He ordains. Surely He intends some great good to follow this mighty convulsion, which no mortal could make, and no mortal could stay.

And to the editor of The Frankfort Commonwealth in Kentucky he said that "I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me. Now, at the end of three years' struggle the nation's condition is not what either party, or any man devised, or expected. God alone can claim it."

David Herbert Donald is of the opinion that such fatalism as is here expressed was Lincoln's mode of escape from the moral burden it was his to bear, a projection onto "God" of a responsibility for unbearable slaughter that was actually a human responsibility—that of Lincoln, his cabinet, and his generals, that of Jefferson Davis and the flesh-and-blood powers of the Confederacy. Something of the same viewpoint was expressed a few years ago by Shelby Foote, who remarked, in The Civil War: An Illustrated History (1990), that

Civil War Americans killed each other in such great numbers because of a failure on our part to find a way not to fight that war. It was because we failed to do the thing we really have a genius for, which is compromise. Americans like to think of themselves as uncompromising. But our true genius is for compromise. Our whole government's founded on it. And it failed.

These conclusions seem implicitly utopian to me. While ostensibly rationalistic, they are in fact visionary. Both historians assume that history can be controlled by rational thought and by deliberated action issuing therefrom. To the rational mind, political, social, racial, and religious differences can always be defused through negotiated compromise. Conflict resolution, they think, is always possible. Sometimes it is. But sometimes it is not. And neither historian can countenance the idea that historical developments may be beyond the capacity of man to control. But since men can barely control themselves, it seems unlikely that they could "dominate" history. Beyond this, it is evident that neither historian can countenance the idea that the unfolding of history may have a purpose that is non-human, providential, or divine.

Perhaps only a railsplitter like Lincoln, a man familiar with both Shakespeare and the blunt edge of the axe, could have fully appreciated Hamlet's figure of one's "rough-hewn" destiny ultimately and more finely shaped by a Divinity beyond human comprehension. He had been elected to preserve the Union, not to free the slaves. And he told Horace Greeley, editor of The New York Tribune:

My paramount object in this straggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union.

But the irresistible feeling that a higher power was moving him from point to point in the twisting river of time evidently persuaded Lincoln that the freeing of the slaves must be the key to the salvation of the Union and to the hidden purposes of history. And so he issued the Emancipation Proclamation, on January 1, 1863. (Should we forget the fact of political maneuvering, that he was up for re-election the next year?)

Donald's Lincoln, though "one of the least experienced and most poorly prepared men ever elected to high office," is given high marks. But I come away from the biography troubled by many aspects of the man and his administration. Basically a case lawyer of routine litigation, Lincoln had no theoretical understanding of the law. Inexperienced, ill-organized, lacking in forcefulness, he was full of contradictions that confused and disabled his administrations. Moreover, while it is true that a Civil War erupted during his administration, requiring extraordinary measures for the safety of the Union, we have the duty to question whether some of his decisions were warranted by the actual peril: Lincoln's harsh invocation of martial law, his suspension of the writ of habeas corpus, his ignoring the decisions and orders of the Supreme Court, his arbitrary arrest of dissenters, and his closing down of antiwar newspapers. We think of these matters as involving the sacred constitutional rights of our citizens. Indeed, the Ohio congressman Clement L. Vallandigham charged that Lincoln's "repeated and persistent arbitrary arrests, the suspension of habeas corpus, the violation of freedom of the mails, of the private house, of the press and of speech, and all the other multiplied wrongs and outrages upon public liberty and private right" had turned the United States into "one of the worst despotisms on earth." Lincoln thought that the judgment of thoughtful men would be forgiving. It certainly is in the case of David Herbert Donald. Although this biography undertakes to demythicize and demystify Lincoln, he is still, for Donald, "the greatest American President."

1 Lincoln, by David Herbert Donald; Simon & Schuster, 714 pages, $35.