The best and most comprehensive treatment of Abraham Lincoln and his presidency must be Michael Burlingame’s two-volume biography, “
There could never be too much that is good to read about Lincoln. It is not just that he is nearly universally counted as one of the greatest American presidents but also that in his short and tumultuous time at the top, while he prosecuted the Civil War, he grew so much as a statesman.
Nearing the end of his first term, with the outcome of the war still somewhat in doubt, he had reason to wonder what the appalling carnage was for. He was not particularly religious (or well read) but, as Achorn shows, that, too, was changing as he approached his second inauguration, in 1865.
Achorn captures a Lincoln who, though re-elected, was still despised on every side, as much in the North, for usurping civil liberties to prosecute the war, as in the South for being the dictator at the head of a pack of “Negro-stealing” cowards, as a Confederate captain writes. We think of Lincoln today as a solemn and profound figure, but that was not the way he often was known to contemporaries. “Many found it especially troubling,” Achorn writes, “that, as young Americans fell by the thousands, this backwoods politician incessantly told funny and often earthy stories to political cronies and White House visitors. ... Some critics considered Lincoln worse than a vulgar despot; he was a decidedly second-rate leader, his incompetence responsible for the war’s insane butchery.”
The abolitionist and women’s rights activist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, writing to her friend Susan B. Anthony, said that if “Dishonest Abe” was re-elected, “I shall immediately leave the country for the Fijee Islands.”
None of this escaped Lincoln. His soul-searching took the form of wondering whether his critics could be as right as they were numerous and disparate. Why, after all, had the war gone on so long and why had so many died? Was it all because of his faults alone, or was something greater making it so – as repentance for slavery?
This was the question at the heart of his brief second inaugural address. No one had wanted this. “And the war came.”
Lincoln, the “rationalist and freethinker who never joined a church,” was groping toward a light. “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will,” says Hamlet – a line the 16th president likely knew, for, while he was not well read by quantity, he adored Shakespeare.
“Both sides in this war (Lincoln argued in the inaugural) shared responsibility for the grievous offense of slavery,” Achorn writes.
“Both sides had brought it to these shores, nurtured it, endured it and sustained it. ... Lincoln was suggesting that Americans had earned their terrible suffering.”
It is tantalizing to think what this could have meant for a Lincoln who survived to preside over Reconstruction, rather than the cynical botch that became. He was the leader almost no one wanted and – we can say now – everyone needed.
