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