Lincoln (2 page)
Authors: David Herbert Donald
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COPYRIGHT © 1995 BY DAVID HERBERT DONALD ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THE RIGHT OF REPRODUCTION IN WHOLE OR IN PART IN ANY FORM.
SIMON & SCHUSTER PAPERBACKS AND COLOPHON ARE REGISTERED TRADEMARKS OF SIMON & SCHUSTER, INC.
DESIGNED BY LEVAVI AND LEVAVI
THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE HARDCOVER EDITION AS FOLLOWS:
DONALD, DAVID HERBERT, DATE.
LINCOLN / DAVID HERBERT DONALD.
P. CM.
INCLUDES BIBLIOGRAPHICAL REFERENCES (P. ) AND INDEX.
1. LINCOLN, ABRAHAM, 1809-1865.
2. PRESIDENTS——UNITED STATES——BIOGRAPHY. I. TITLE.
E457.D66 1995
973.7&092—DC20
[B] 95-4782 CIP
ISBN-13: 978-0-684-80846-8
ISBN-10: 0-684-80846-3
ISBN-13: 978-0-684-82535-9 (PBK)
ISBN-10: 0-684-82535-X (PBK)
ISBN-13: 978-1-43912-628-8 (ebook)
Frontispiece: Lincoln considered this photograph, made by Alexander Hesler of Chicago in February 1857, “a very true one,” but Mary Lincoln and others did not like it. “My impression,” Lincoln said, “is that their objection arises from the disordered condition of the hair.” (Lloyd Ostendorf Collection)
I CLAIM NOT TO HAVE CONTROLLED EVENTS,
BUT CONFESS PLAINLY THAT EVENTS
HAVE CONTROLLED ME.
Abraham Lincoln to Albert G. Hodges,
April
4,
1864
CHAPTER ONE • Annals of the Poor
CHAPTER TWO • A Piece of Floating Driftwood
CHAPTER THREE • Cold, Calculating, Unimpassioned Reason
CHAPTER FIVE • Lone Star of Illinois
CHAPTER SIX • At the Head of His Profession in This State
CHAPTER SEVEN • There Are No Whigs
CHAPTER EIGHT • A House Divided
CHAPTER NINE • The Taste
Is
in My Mouth
CHAPTER TEN • An Accidental Instrument
CHAPTER ELEVEN • A People’s Contest
CHAPTER TWELVE • The Bottom Is Out of the Tub
CHAPTER THIRTEEN • An Instrument in God’s Hands
CHAPTER FOURTEEN • A Pumpkin in Each End of My Bag
CHAPTER FIFTEEN • What Will the Country Say!
CHAPTER SIXTEEN • A New Birth of Freedom
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN • The Greatest Question Ever Presented to Practical Statesmanship
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN • It Was Not Best to Swap Horses
CHAPTER NINETEEN • I Am Pretty Sure-Footed
CHAPTER TWENTY • With Charity for All
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE • I Will Take Care of Myself
Maps
Lincoln’s Early Years in Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois
Territorial Expansion and Slavery, 1819–1854
between
Eastern Campaigns of the Civil War, 1861–1865
Major Engagements of the Civil War, 1861–1865
between
T
he only time I ever met President John F. Kennedy, in February 1962, he was unhappy with historians. A group of scholars had been in the Oval Office hoping to enlist him in a poll that ranked American presidents. I was not one of those visitors, but the next day when I gave a talk in the White House about Abraham Lincoln, the subject was much on his mind. He voiced his deep dissatisfaction with the glib way the historians had rated some of his predecessors as “Below Average” and marked a few as “Failures.” Thinking, no doubt, of how his own administration would look in the backward glance of history, he resented the whole process. With real feeling he said, “No one has a right to grade a President—not even poor James Buchanan—who has not sat in his chair, examined the mail and information that came across his desk, and learned why he made his decisions.”
This book was conceived in the spirit of President Kennedy’s observations. 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. It seeks to explain rather than to judge.
My biography is based largely on Lincoln’s own words, whether in his letters and messages or in conversations recorded by reliable witnesses. I have tried as far as possible to write from the original sources—that is, from firsthand contemporary accounts by people who saw and talked with the President. Of course, I have consulted the voluminous secondary literature, but I have used it chiefly for letters and documents that I could not find elsewhere. My approach was made possible by the availability of the Abraham
Lincoln Papers in the Library of Congress (now fortunately on microfilm). After use by Lincoln’s authorized biographers, John G. Nicolay and John Hay, in 1890, these papers were sealed until 1947 and therefore could not be consulted for the major biographies by Albert J. Beveridge, William E. Barton, Carl Sandburg, and J. G. Randall.
*
The results of my inquiries can most readily be defined in negative terms. This book is not a general history of the United States during the middle of the nineteenth century. I have stuck close to Lincoln, who was only indirectly connected with the economic and social transformations of the period. It is not even a history of the Civil War. There is, for example, almost nothing in the following pages about the internal affairs of the Confederacy, because these were matters that Lincoln could not know about. It is not a military history; I have not described campaigns and battles that Lincoln did not witness. I have not offered a broad philosophical discussion of the origins of the Civil War and I have not addressed the question of whether it was the first modern war. These are important subjects, but they did not present themselves to Abraham Lincoln in any practical way. I have not asked whether Lincoln freed the slaves or the slaves freed themselves, because Lincoln never considered these roads to emancipation as mutually exclusive. Certainly he knew that thousands of slaves, in individual heroic acts of rebellion, were leaving their masters to seek freedom behind the Union lines, but he also knew that ending the institution of slavery required official action on the part of the United States government.
In focusing closely on Lincoln himself—on what he knew, when he knew it, and why he made his decisions—I have, I think, produced a portrait rather different from that in other biographies. It is perhaps a bit more grainy than most, with more attention to his unquenchable ambition, to his brain-numbing labor in his law practice, to his tempestuous married life, and to his repeated defeats. It suggests how often chance, or accident, played a determining role in shaping his life. And it emphasizes his enormous capacity for growth, which enabled one of the least experienced and most poorly prepared men ever elected to high office to become the greatest American President.
More important, this biography highlights a basic trait of character evident throughout Lincoln’s life: the essential passivity of his nature. Lincoln himself recognized it in a letter he wrote on April 4, 1864, to Albert G. Hodges, a fellow Kentuckian, who asked him to explain why he had shifted from his inaugural pledge not to interfere with slavery to a policy of emancipation. After relating how circumstances had obliged him to change his mind—how
emancipation and the use of African-American soldiers had become military necessities—the President concluded: “In telling this tale I attempt no compliment to my own sagacity. I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me.”
From his earliest days Lincoln had a sense that his destiny was controlled by some larger force, some Higher Power. Turning away from orthodox Christianity because of the emotional excesses of frontier evangelicalism, he found it easier as a young man to accept what was called the Doctrine of Necessity, which he defined as the belief “that the human mind is impelled to action, or held in rest by some power, over which the mind itself has no control.” Later he frequently quoted to his partner, William H. Herndon, the lines from
Hamlet:
There’s a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we will.
From Lincoln’s fatalism derived some of his most lovable traits: his compassion, his tolerance, his willingness to overlook mistakes. That belief did not, of course, lead him to lethargy or dissipation. Like thousands of Calvinists who believed in predestination, he worked indefatigably for a better world—for himself, for his family, and for his nation. But it helped to buffer the many reverses that he experienced and enabled him to continue a strenuous life of aspiration.
It also made for a pragmatic approach to problems, a recognition that if one solution was fated not to work another could be tried. “My policy is to have no policy” became a kind of motto for Lincoln—a motto that infuriated the sober, doctrinaire people around him who were inclined to think that the President had no principles either. He might have offended his critics less if he had more often used the analogy he gave James G. Blaine when explaining his course on Reconstruction: “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 in this great problem.”
Both statements suggest Lincoln’s reluctance to take the initiative and make bold plans; he preferred to respond to the actions of others. They also show why Lincoln in his own distinctively American way had the quality John Keats defined as forming “a Man of Achievement,” that quality “which Shakespeare possessed so enormously...
Negative Capability,
that is when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”
Much of the research for this biography was made possible through a generous grant from the Division of Research Programs of the National Endowment for the Humanities (Grant No. RO-2128–89). I am particularly indebted to Charles Ambler and George R. Lucas, Jr., in that division for their assistance.
I am also grateful to Dean Henry Rosovsky, Dean Michael Spence, and Dean Phyllis Keller, who were instrumental in arranging leaves of absence from my teaching duties at Harvard University.
Throughout the project I was fortunate to have the assistance of Laura Nakatsuka, who not merely performed expert secretarial services but proved a highly efficient research sleuth, uncovering Lincoln items in a dozen or more manuscript collections.
Several gifted Harvard undergraduate and graduate students have performed invaluable work as research assistants who scoured the newspapers and periodicals for material on Lincoln, and I am indebted to them all: Richard Bennett, Steven Chen, Martin Fitzpatrick, Elaine Goldenberg, Sally Hadden, Zachary Karabell, Timothy McCarthy, Matthew Pinsker, Gerald Prokopowicz, and Ronald Ryan.
