Lincoln revisionism is not new. In the nineteen-fifties, Edmund Wilson, in these pages, shook off the crooning hagiography of Carl Sandburg’s multivolume biography and replaced it with a vision of Lincoln as a calculating, aggressive nationalist—an American Bismarck, though one in possession of a sternly arresting prose style. The Civil War, in Wilson’s account, was fought for no higher cause than that which makes sea slugs attack other sea slugs: because it is in the nature of beasts to make war. In place of smiling Honest Abe we got lynx-eyed Killer Lincoln.
This view was taken up, with a few complimentary curlicues, in Gore Vidal’s best-selling 1984 novel, “Lincoln.” Wilson and Vidal, channelling the ghost of Henry Adams, and seeing themselves as the last redoubts of patrician hauteur, painted their Lincoln against the background of the Cold War. Lincoln’s militarization of the Republic, his invention of an armed national-security state, was taken to be a kind of original sin that would lead to the Pentagon and Vietnam. The lovable Lincoln persisted through this period, but Lincoln was interrogated as much as admired. (And this was merely the revisionism from the left; some Southern conservative intellectuals were still muttering “Sic semper tyrannis.”)
In the decades that followed, the tone of Lincoln biographies became remarkably more benign. There were hymnals in praise of Lincoln’s wisdom in assembling a Cabinet of political opponents (though all Presidents in the era assembled Cabinets of their rivals) and others on the beauty of his language (though Disraeli, in London, was as good a writer in his own way, and no one was deifying him). Spielberg’s Lincoln gave us the beatified, not the Bismarckian, President, even if Daniel Day-Lewis brilliantly caught the high-pitched, less than honeyed tones that Lincoln’s contemporaries heard. In more recent years, however, Lincoln has been under assault—not for being a militarist but for not being militant enough, for not being as thorough an egalitarian as some of the radical Republicans in Congress. Newer Lincoln biographies have been needed, and the need has been met.
David S. Reynolds’s Lincoln is very much an Honest Abe—the title of his book, in fact, is “Abe: Abraham Lincoln in His Times” (Penguin Press)—but he is an updated Abe, fully woke and finely radical. Indeed, Reynolds, the author of first-rate biographies of Walt Whitman and John Brown, makes much of Lincoln’s wonderfully named and often forgotten Wide Awakes—legions of young pro-Lincoln “b’hoys,” whose resolve and aggression far exceeded that of Bernie Sanders’s army. Though Reynolds rightly recycles the metaphor of the President as a tightrope walker, we’re assured that, even as the walker might list left and right, his rope stretched forth in a radically progressive direction, aligned with the hot temper of our moment.
Reynolds updates Lincoln by doing what scholars do now: he makes biography secondary to the cultural history of the country. Lincoln is seen as a man whose skin bears the tattoos of his time. Cultural patterns are explicated in “Abe,” and Lincoln is picked up and positioned against them, taking on the coloring of his surroundings, rather like a taxidermied animal being placed in a reconstructed habitat in a nineteenth-century diorama at a natural-history museum. Instead of rising from one episode of strenuous self-making to another, he passes from one frame to the next, a man subsumed.
So, where scholars have long known that Lincoln was plunged into a near-suicidal depression by the early death, in the eighteen-thirties, of his first love, Ann Rutledge, Reynolds connects Lincoln’s depression to a cult of “sensationalism” that swept the country, one that placed great prestige on acts of melodramatic emotion. In Reynolds’s account, Lincoln’s grief was, in part, a literary affect, or even an affectation, with Lincoln and Poe drinking from the same moody waters. This mapping of subject onto trope continues on through the last night of Lincoln’s life. John Wilkes Booth’s assassination of the President, Reynolds argues, was not only an act of terrorism on behalf of the defeated South but a kind of Method-acting exercise gone significantly wrong. Extreme self-identification of actor with role was highly valued then; Junius, the patriarch of the theatrical Booth family, was famed for the hyperintensity of his portrayals, and John, among the three Booth children who became prominent actors, most fully adopted his father’s stormy style. He was pleasing Junius’s ghost by enacting Brutus’s killing of Caesar, in real time with real weapons.
Reynolds’s cultural history illuminates Lincoln—and particularly his transformation from self-made lawyer into American Abe. Even readers long marinated in the Lincoln literature will find revelation in the way “Abe” re-situates familiar episodes. Reynolds places Lincoln’s early career in New Salem and Springfield, Illinois, in the eighteen-thirties, as a poor farm boy struggling to make himself into a middle-class lawyer, against the radical background of American sectarianism. We learn that “free thought” and “free love”—one favoring religious skepticism and the other sex outside marriage—flourished on the frontier, where folks had to make up their own institutions, including a debating club that forbade any appeal to God. Lincoln participated in both movements, declaring himself a freethinker (and apologizing for it in a fairly weaselly way later on, when he first ran for office) and acting as an early advocate for women’s right to vote, and to make their own sexual choices. The young Lincoln was an enthusiastic amateur poet, and his poems are a good guide to one side of his mind: the wild, passionate side, which, Reynolds says, was a counterpart to his youthful calls for “cold, calculating unimpassioned reason.” One poem defended women who’d become prostitutes: “No woman ever played the whore / Without a man to help her.”
Reynolds’s cultural frames become more arresting as Lincoln’s role grows more public; public people are always cultural objects. Lincoln spent February 27, 1860, the day he delivered his Cooper Union speech—the speech that made him President, as he later said—at a hotel across from P. T. Barnum’s museum. Reynolds reflects on Barnum and American life, and how the love of weird spectacle, what we now call the tabloidization of public people, was something Lincoln welcomed; he played up the comedy of his own appearance in a very Barnum-like way, his enormous body posed against his wife’s petite one. Barnum’s genius lay in taking circus grotesques and making them exemplary Americans: General Tom Thumb was a hero, not a freak. And so with Lincoln, as Reynolds writes: “His cragged face, with its cavernous eyes, large mouth and nose, and swarthy complexion; his wide ears and unruly black hair; his huge hands and feet and overly long arms and legs—these features, along with his ill-fitting clothes and awkward gait, made him seem almost as unusual as a Barnum exhibit.” When Lincoln was President, his Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton, compared him to a baboon, and Lincoln, asked how he could endure the insult, said, “That is no insult; it is an expression of opinion; and what troubles me most about it is that Stanton said it, and Stanton is usually right.” He saw that it cost him nothing to be an American spectacle in a climate of American sensation. (He even hosted a reception at the White House for Tom Thumb and his wife.)
Lincoln exploited photography to a similar end, beginning on that same February day, when his portrait was taken at Mathew Brady’s studio. Lincoln was usually pictured not as a polished neoclassical man, like his political rivals, but as rough and frontier-made. Americans like a craggy guy in times of crisis. (Humphrey Bogart offered a similar look in the Second World War.) Even his decision to grow a beard seemed meant to evoke a log-cabin hygiene that was then seen as a sign of sincerity. Lincoln knew how to use the expressive forms of his time as a frame for his mythology. Emerson and Whitman, Reynolds demonstrates, understood Lincoln better, as a national figure, than most journalists could. Emerson saw in him the model self-reliant man and Whitman the ideal democratic leader.
As the war begins, Reynolds’s lens widens in ways that are less appealingly whimsical than in the Barnum case but still more genuinely illuminating. He explains the old puzzle of Lincoln’s reluctance to fire the obstreperous and slow-moving General McClellan as a reflection of Lincoln’s enthusiasm for the new technology of war. Lincoln, a backwoods man forever forward-facing, loved state-of-the-art gizmos, even urging an early machine gun upon the Union Army that it wasn’t willing to use. McClellan shared Lincoln’s vision of an army modernized with telegraph communications, military balloons, and railroad transportation. The choice in 1862 was not yet between McClellan and Grant; it was between McClellan and chaos. The culture of war itself becomes a subject in Reynolds’s book: it explains the eventual turn from McClellan to Grant through a broader mid-nineteenth-century turn from elegant Napoleonic battle orchestrations to Clausewitzian frontal assaults.
Sometimes Reynolds’s kind of cultural history demands more suppleness of mind than he displays. When, for instance, he proposes a parallel between Mary Lincoln locked up in the White House and Emily Dickinson isolated in her home, in Amherst, we feel that we are in the presence of a similitude without a real shape: Emily was a Yankee poet of matchless genius, Mary a bewildered Southern woman in an unmanageable role. All they shared was being alone in a big house. Elsewhere, Reynolds expresses perplexity that the pro-Lincoln satirist David Locke persisted in writing sketches in the voice of Petroleum V. Nasby, his impersonation of a Copperhead—an anti-Lincoln, pro-slavery Northerner. “Given Locke’s actual affection and respect for Lincoln, it must have been very hard for him to maintain the outrageous Copperhead pose,” Reynolds writes. But that’s like wondering why a pro-Biden comedian would keep on impersonating a MAGA-hat-wearing Trump supporter. Sticking to the joke is what comedians do.
Even with Reynolds’s more compelling examples of anthropological patterns, small whitecaps of uncertainty may stir in the reader’s mind: a man who loses the love of his life does not need cultural license to mourn, and, though Booth undoubtedly choreographed his assassination with an eye to the crowd and to his father, his brothers Junius and Edwin were committed to the manner but appalled by his deed. Actors know overacting when they see it.
Throughout “Abe,” the terms “culture” and “cultural” recur with such hammering relentlessness (four times on a single page, and in that chapter title as well) that one wishes Reynolds’s editor had given him a thesaurus. Not having enough words means not seeing enough types. Culture is a diffuse thing. Reading a book, choosing a costume, adapting a rhetorical style, transferring a code of conduct from one forum to another, just laughing at a joke—each of these forms of cultural transmission has its own vibration, its own dynamic, and its own web of associations.
What counts is a sense of what counts. It’s true that, as Reynolds shows in his account of sensationalism, Lincoln loved sad parlor songs, but pretty much everyone in the period loved sad songs; to make much of this is like making the possession of an e-mail address a significant cultural token today. On the other hand, although the Shakespeare whom Lincoln loved was very much the Shakespeare beloved by nineteenth-century America—a strenuous moralist, devoted to the explication of characters in extreme emotional states—Lincoln was distinctive in turning this shared Shakespeare into a template for a new kind of oratory. The passionate phrasing and sharp summations of Lincoln’s speeches—“the better angels of our nature”; “of the people, by the people, for the people”—are shaped by the passionate soliloquies and monosyllabic end stops of Shakespeare’s most agonized characters. (Among Lincoln’s favorite passages was Claudius’s guilt-ridden “Oh, my offense is rank” speech.) The interpenetration of Abe and Will is real. It is important to recognize cultural set pieces, but it’s also important to see that they are malleable and self-created. Lincoln made his time as much as he lived in it. That, after all, is why we’re reading this book.
Macro-history gives us a big picture, but politics, as “Hamilton” reminds us, happens in hidden rooms. Readers who seek the political micro-history can turn to Sidney Blumenthal’s multivolume Lincoln biography, now in its third installment—“All the Powers of the Earth” (Simon & Schuster)—with two more promised. Written by someone who bears the battle scars of modern democratic politics, the volumes are all about Lincoln as a battle-scarred democratic politician. (Blumenthal, who was once a staff writer for this magazine, worked as an adviser to President Clinton and distinguished himself in the Ken Starr wars.) Where Reynolds’s account of the most significant act in American political history—Lincoln’s insurgent victory over William Seward, a senator from New York, in the Republican-nomination battle of 1860—is necessarily summary, Blumenthal offers a vividly realized, slow crawl across the Convention floor by someone who has been there.
The heroes of Blumenthal’s most recent volume are the so-called Lincoln Men, a group of boosters and advisers led by David Davis and Leonard Swett, who, with a comic brio right out of Mark Twain, employed every hardball trick in the book to win Lincoln the nomination. At the Wigwam, in Chicago—an immense wooden convention hall, capable of holding more than ten thousand people, and thrown together, American style, in a month—they boxed out the Seward forces, making it physically difficult for his delegates to mingle and make deals.
The Lincolnians also courted a now often overlooked interest group, the émigré Germans, including many exiled by the failed liberal revolutions of 1848. As Blumenthal notes, Lincoln had bought a German-language newspaper, in order to appeal to those key players of the “identity politics” of the time. (It was the equivalent of surreptitiously funding Facebook pages in 2020.) The Germans refused to support anyone who was known to have a pro-nativist taint, which ruled out a lot of dog-eared veteran politicians. At the same time, the nativists spurned Seward, who, as governor of New York, had backed state subsidies for Catholic education. In the end, it all came down to a single eve-of-battle meeting in Chicago between the Lincoln Men and a group of delegates from Pennsylvania, who proposed a flat-out political swap: they’d support Lincoln in exchange for a Cabinet post going to Simon Cameron, a corrupt Pennsylvania senator. David Davis agreed. Lincoln had officially warned him off such dealmaking, but, as he memorably said, “Lincoln ain’t here.” (Lincoln gave Cameron the War Office, not the Department of Treasury he wanted; Davis, for his efforts, got a seat on the Supreme Court.)
As with Kennedy in 1960 and the Obama campaign in 2008, a macro-moment met micromanagement. The background in each case was the elevation of a novice with a gift for speaking, an extraordinary personal story, and a political record too short to have incurred too many grudges. The foreground was sharp dealing. Blumenthal’s kind of intricate political history—providing all the details of how the sprockets and gears engage—feeds, in turn, the larger cultural perspective. It’s hard to grasp, today, the extent to which those émigré Germans were perceived as the soul of the educated élite. (In Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Women” series, it is the idealized German—and perhaps Jewish—Professor Bhaer, with his heavy accent and love of Goethe, who rescues Jo from conventionality and joins her in building a progressive school.) It may be an obvious truth, but it is still a truth worth telling: history needs both micro-political and macro-cultural perspectives. The room where it happened is part of a world where it could.
Reynolds’s macro-history and Blumenthal’s micro-history coincide in their vindication of Lincoln as a profound radical. Lincoln was a single-issue candidate and a single-cause politician; that issue was slavery and the cause was its abolition. But he was a politician, not a polemicist: he created a broad coalition and placated its parts. He was a pluralist rather than a purist.
His central understanding, registered in his home base of Springfield—where, Reynolds shows, there was a lot more African-American political activism than has often been imagined—was that racist Northerners who could not be driven to equality could still be coaxed toward humanity. Abolition annealed to a broader “Americanism”—an understanding of equality as rooted in the sacred documents of the country—might produce emancipation. This was an insight that Lincoln, with Machiavellian shrewdness, drove to an armed point. Lincoln was not a centrist politician who happened to find himself on top of an erupting volcano in 1861; his election caused the eruption. As Blumenthal shows, Lincoln, in his 1858 debates with the racist senator Stephen Douglas, tactically conceded points about segregation: “I do not understand that because I do not want a negro woman for a slave I must necessarily want her for a wife.” But he was emphatic on the central point, that “there is no reason in the world why the negro is not entitled to all the natural rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence—the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I hold that he is as much entitled to these as the white man.”
In a speech in Peoria, Lincoln declared, about the indifference toward slavery he saw in Congress, “I hate it because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself. I hate it because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world . . . and especially because it forces so many really good men amongst ourselves into an open war with the very fundamental principles of civil liberty.” Reynolds, quoting this passage, remarks that “Lincoln’s loathing of slavery comes through as strongly here as it does in any work by the most radical abolitionist.” What separated Lincoln from most other abolitionists was the absence of rhetoric that was intended to frighten as much as teach—what Reynolds calls “dark reform” rhetoric—or that catalogued, graphically but accurately, the physical horrors inflicted by slave masters.
This wasn’t because Lincoln did not know of these horrors. It was because he understood that moving the masses of the North to abolition could be done only by appealing to fundamental principles—reminding them that their own values were being violated, not merely another group’s interests. Reynolds writes that Lincoln, aware of the risks of the kind of nihilistic bloodletting that John Brown would produce, directed “this potentially anarchistic cultural current into two documents treasured by most Americans: the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.” By linking the fight against slavery to the extension of these documents, rather than to their repudiation, he could build a truly broad antislavery coalition—and an army brutal enough to enforce its mission. Every act of his Presidency, from the gathering of the militias to the speech at Gettysburg, moved toward this end.
It worked, at a price. For Lincoln, the critical issue was the abolition of slavery; racism and its constraints were, for the moment, secondary. Reynolds addresses Lincoln’s supposed racism in considering colonization programs for freed slaves, noting that Martin Delany, the most radical Black activist of the time, had also championed relocating Black people away from the degradations they faced here. It was a back-to-Africa sentiment, a kind of Black Zionism, that both Lincoln and Delany contemplated. Similarly, Lincoln’s notorious letter to the New York newspaper editor Horace Greeley, saying that if he could save the Union without freeing any slaves he would do so, is situated as part of an ongoing joust between Lincoln and Greeley—and, Reynolds says, as a way for Lincoln to garb “his radical antislavery position in the dress of military necessity.”
An unexampled source on the subject of Lincoln at war—what it cost him and what he really believed—remains John Stauffer’s “Giants,” a 2008 study of Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. And the best summation of Lincoln is still the oration delivered by Douglass in 1876 on the unveiling of a monument to the freed slaves:
Sometimes cultural works, novels and plays, can tell you more about the history of culture than cultural history can. George Saunders’s universally praised novel “Lincoln in the Bardo” (2017) creates an imagined Lincoln for our era that more literal accounts can only reinforce and echo. Saunders’s novel, an oratorio of fragments sung by American ghosts huddled in a graveyard, crowding around (and, creepily, inside) Lincoln himself as he mourns his son Willie, who died in 1862, makes that death the center point of Lincoln’s journey.
Reynolds, in turn, reveals that Spiritualism—hard-core, table-rapping Spiritualism—really was a presence in the Lincoln White House. The movement, as American as Mormonism, had begun in the eighteen-forties with the Fox sisters and their pet ghost, Mr. Splitfoot, and by the eighteen-seventies had millions of adherents. Poor Mary Lincoln, after losing Willie, consulted Spiritualists who claimed to commune with the dead, and held séances in the White House, which her husband seems to have attended. Abe himself took seriously the political counsel he got from two leading spirit-mongers, though not from their spirits.
However clearly stage-managed, this cult of an accessible afterlife gave to the tragedies of the war a set of redemptive possibilities that normal religiosity couldn’t quite contain, and adds to our understanding of Civil War mourning. Reynolds even includes a hair-raising, and heartbreaking, “spirit” photograph of Mary Lincoln with Abe’s ghost, contrived for her years after his death. The obviousness of the fraud does not alter the pathos of the embrace, the tall man’s hands placed on the small woman’s shoulders. The phony and freakish treated as heroic and elegiac—these elements, the materials of Melville’s “The Confidence-Man,” are the materials of mid-nineteenth-century American culture. Lincoln’s legend sits right there among them.
Saunders’s ghosts include those of soldiers killed in the war, reproaching the President as he mourns his own child. There is a terrible Providence in the Lincolns’ undergoing the same kind of loss that so many less celebrated Americans had to endure. The ghosts did indeed live alongside the living. Surely the belief in ghosts was, in part, a way of registering the mass killing of ordinary boys—and their persistence as a constant harrowing of the soul. All wars leave a hideous deficit, but the Civil War somehow left one uniquely deep. To grasp why the comedy of séance-table Spiritualism was not comedy at all, one must reckon with the scale of the killing—proportionally, it is as if eight million Americans were killed in a war now. And, perhaps, above all, one must reckon with the adjacency, the nearness of the places where these farm boys and working men with wives and babies were slaughtered to the places where they had lived: they died not in a foreign glade or on a distant shore but in a hayfield across the state border.
Lincoln was a pluralist politician negotiating a world resistant to pluralism of any kind. He achieved great things through compromise and cunning and occasional cruelty. The choice between pluralism and purism remains the defining choice between liberalism and its enemies. It is why, astoundingly, John Wilkes Booth adored John Brown. They spoke the same language of absolutism.
With the recent degradation of the American Presidency—our four-year nightmare has provided no spectacle more nightmarish than that of Trump sitting at Lincoln’s feet, in his memorial, for a self-pity session—it is a truism to say that we need Lincoln again. But which one? Three possible Lincolns come to mind. Call them a Barnum Lincoln, a Bardo Lincoln, and a Wigwam Lincoln.
The Barnum Lincoln shows us that a vigorous thread of vulgarity ran right through Lincoln’s life and public persona, and appropriately so for a democratic leader. Though not a vulgarian himself, Lincoln saw the value of vulgarity. The sepulchral Lincoln of Daniel French’s statue was not the Lincoln his contemporaries knew and loved. One of the actors in “Our American Cousin,” seeing the First Couple arrive in their box not long before the President was killed, ad-libbed the line “This reminds me of a story, as Mr. Lincoln says . . . ,” to great and appreciative laughter. This was the Lincoln his time knew: ribald storyteller, fabulist, beloved Barnum-style freak. It is a Lincoln worth keeping in mind for those of us inclined to bemoan the “debasement” of our political culture. (The trouble with Trump is not that he’s a short-fingered vulgarian showman; the trouble is that he is only a short-fingered vulgarian showman.)
It is the Bardo Lincoln who radiates moral authority from his time into our own, exactly because he was one of those rare leaders who could stare directly into their complicity in death and suffering without attempting to weaken or lessen its horror. Lincoln was in intimate touch with the suffering he made happen, and he sought every day to justify it, to himself and to the country. He sensed from very early on that he would never go home to Illinois; the spectre of assassination was constant throughout his Presidency, and his legendary dream of death in the White House is a sign that he accepted this. The British philosopher and Lincoln lover John Stuart Mill wrote soon after the President’s death that there was something almost salubrious in his dying just as the war was won. Shocking as it sounds, Mill meant that, in some almost providential way, the arc of Lincoln’s life demanded his martyrdom to complete it. This Lincoln, the man of sorrows acquainted with grief, is central to understanding the spell he continues to cast on us.
If there’s a Lincoln we need now, though, it must be the Wigwam Lincoln, the pol who pretended to oppose dealmaking in the boozy Chicago night, even as his ambition demanded it. That’s the ghost to haunt us—master politician, always placating one side in order to broaden a path to another, misdirecting and redirecting, building and rebuilding coalitions, all of it guided by shrewd insight into other people’s foibles and needs. What really distinguished Lincoln from the other Presidents who built Cabinets of rivals was that, instead of struggling against them politely, he played them like a piano. He expected to lose the election of 1864, and hatched an apparent plot—involving a secret letter that he demanded his Cabinet sign, unseen—to get as many slaves freed as possible if he did. (And then the election of 1864 was duly held, in the middle of a war, with millions of voters, and no one has ever had cause to question its legitimacy.) Lincoln will not return from the dead, even as a ghost, but his broadly balanced, extravagantly compromised democratic pluralism may be all there is to rescue us yet again. Something has to, soon. ♦
