Abe: Abraham Lincoln in His Times

I have just completed reading the superb book "Abe". Rarely have I felt as much regret upon reaching the end of a book as I did with this one. I simply did not want it to end. As a serious student of Lincoln , I knew it was impossible to reach the tragic conclusion and not accept the end was near, and, indeed, I wept again reading of the President's assassination. As Reynolds writew in his introduction and acknowledgements, there are many fine historians and biographers of Lincoln, many whom are cited in the body of the book or at the end. I have read many of them including the superb biography by David Donald and superb "narrow" works such as Gary Wills' "Lincoln at Gettysburg" and Harold Holzer's book on the Cooper Union Speech. I have also read many of the great histories by McPherson and Foner et al.This ranks as one of the finest books written on Lincoln. Reynolds sets himself the task of writing about the cultural milieu in which Lincoln grew up, grew to maturity and served as President and in doing so rounds out the picture of a man who was already fully realized and described in thousands of works. Perhaps an even greater accomplishment was to make palpable the atmosphere, at turns chaotic, crass, poisoned and yet hopeful, of much of 19th Century America.I cannot recommend ANY book more highly.

David Reynolds specializes in Antebellum cultural history and revivified that field with "Beneath the American Renaissance" and a biography of Walt Whitman. He is an authority on the usual suspects, e.g. the Transcendentalists, the great writers and, of course, politics, but he also has an exceptional nose for quotidian life in the decades prior to Fort Sumter. That was America's Elizabethan Era: crude, vulgar, violent, inventive and vigorous. We may like to think we live in such an era now but we do not. Political correctness and "good taste" has clipped our cultural wings. The fact that we are now forced to refer to a certain thing as "the N-word" is indicative.Culture is context. Lincoln fully understood this when he stated of southerners, "They are what we would be in their circumstances." Our sixteenth president was a somewhat dreamy and indolent youth whose physical strength protected him from the sometimes savage frontier America. He was a second-rate lawyer but a first-rate judge of human nature who used humor and sarcasm to sway juries in an intensely maudlin era. He understood that American humor was grotesque (his word) and was happy to be part of its milieu. He was respectful toward women but knew it is a man's world. He was well-educated but, likely virtually the entire population, innocent of much formal education. He could be learned, then, without being pedantic.Reynold's does an exceptional job of placing Lincoln in his own world in regard to race. He absorbed some of the biases of his time -- as how could he not? -- and rejected others. He grew to maturity two centuries ago and was "modern in his own time." He freed and then armed the slaves. What have you or I done?Reynolds reminds us just how anti-slavery the North and West was by the 1850s. Yes, Lincoln had to tread lightly because Illinois was, culturally, half-southern. That is the difference between a successful politician and an impotent "activist." Non-southern Americans of that era were quite willing to be gently chivvied toward ending the Peculiar Institution. In fact, they did just that. As for "Lincoln, the racist," etc., the emancipated millions of that era all but worshipped Abe. If he was the racist so many love to depict then the freed slaves were fools to have done so -- and I I don't think they were fools.Reynolds struggles now and then with PC. For instance, hs refers to "enslaved people" rather than writing "slaves," a condescending -- even insulting -- affectation that assumes his readership lacks the humanity he possesses in understanding the humanity of the enslaved and, so, have to be reminded. Sorry, David . . . we get it. With this sort of thing, and it happens often in his book, he represents today's historian in cultural context and not Lincoln in his own.Much of the book consists of padding. The author's assessment of Lincoln's generals is no better than whatBruce Catton and T. Harry Williams told us seventy years ago. His analysis of Lincoln's cabinet is no improvement on "Team of Rivals."But, this is a fine book and probably the best one-volume biography to date of Lincoln. I have always profited from reading Prof. Reynold's work and so I did with this one as well.

This is simply a magnificent biography of Lincoln. It is a majestic 900 pages of text and 100 pages of notes. But it is unique in other ways as well. If focuses upon how culture affected Lincoln throughout his life and how he in turn impacted on it. The book devotes surprisingly little attention to Civil War battles, so that it can concentrate on Lincoln riding circuit as a lawyer, an experience which helped shape him. We tend to think of Lincoln primarily in terms of the Civil War; the author expands our view by discussing Greenbacks; land grant colleges; the Homestead Act; the first national park; Lincoln's dead ear relative to Indians; and how he created the federal False Claims Act to prevent wartime procurement fraud (incidentally, my primary area of legal practice).The author has written extensively on Walt Whitman, John Brown, and the American Renaissance. So he knows this period deeply and intimately. How Lincoln emerged as the most skilled politician in the 1850's is a fascinating story. The author probes Abe's family life and his cabinet interactions. I was surprised to discover that Lincoln had been virtually a life long opponent of slavery. Like a pressure cooker, the force of this belief grew over time until it exploded with the Emancipation Declaration in 1863. Always keep to the center in politics--moderate and balanced--was a rule that yielded substantial benefits during the period leading up to the War.His transition to Commander-in-Chief is skillfully examined, as are his interactions with the Union Generals. Plain spoken Abe was confronted with the similar U.S. Grant--they complemented each other. When Grant was meeting secretly with Confederate negotiators, and the Southern continent said there was nothing they could do to end the War, Grant simply replied: "Well, you can surrender." This is a response Lincoln could have uttered. So there are many surprises in this long book, and anyone interested in the history of this country in the 19th century would be amiss if they did not take on this hefty tome. Abe emerges as a very complex individual hidden inside a seemingly simple exterior. A much more sophisticated individual than I had imagined before. One whom I would enjoy chatting with, such as the black soldiers in the first scene of "Lincoln" whom we learn are talking with Lincoln, because after reading this book I would know the very richness of this unusual man.

A hefty tome and no mistake but provides good value indeed.