Review Essay: Lincoln and His Commas

Boritt, Gabor. The Gettysburg Gospel: The Lincoln Speech That Nobody Knows. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006.

Dirck, Brian. Lincoln the Lawyer. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007.

———, ed. Lincoln Emancipated: The President and the Politics of Race. Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2007.

Goodwin, Doris Kearns. Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2005.

Steiner, Mark E. An Honest Calling: The Law Practice of Abraham Lincoln. Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2006.

White, Ronald C. Jr. The Eloquent President: A Portrait of Lincoln through His Words. New York: Random House, 2005.

Williams, Frank J. Judging Lincoln. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2002.

Wilson, Douglas L. Lincoln’s Sword: The Presidency and the Power of Words. New York: Knopf, 2006.

These days almost all historians like Lincoln. Not everybody loves him, but the few writers who still send hate mail to the sixteenth president tend to operate on the margins of scholarly respectability. Social historians sometimes snipe at Lincoln from the sidelines, but among those who have taken the time to go through the Lincoln papers there’s not much root-and-branch criticism. If there are complaints, they have more to do with the weaknesses of Lincoln scholarship than with Lincoln himself. The bill of particulars runs something like this: The Lincoln literature is too narrow, focused too much on Lincoln’s life and too little on his times; it’s too apologetic, it’s redundant, and it tends toward scholasticism.

This was not always the case. In the ten or twenty years after World War II, a wave of distinguished Lincoln scholarship appeared, much of it precipitated by the opening of the Lincoln papers at the Library of Congress and by the publication of Roy P. Basler’s edition of Lincoln’s writings.¹ Major essays by David Donald, Don Fehrenbacher, and Harry Jaffa placed Lincoln in a broad political universe.² For Donald, Lincoln’s background as a Whig politician was crucial; Fehrenbacher clarified, in his inimitably meticulous way, Lincoln’s place in the origins of the Republican Party; for Jaffa, the crucial context was Lincoln’s titanic struggle with the North’s most powerful Democrat, Stephen A. Douglas. Historians published books like Lincoln and the Radicals, Lincoln and the Negro, Lincoln and His Generals—books whose very titles placed Lincoln in a wider world where black reformers, military officials, and politicians, shared center stage with the president.³

Since then, critics complain, Lincoln scholarship has become solipsistic. The melancholy Lincoln explains the compassionate Lincoln. The racist Lincoln explains Lincoln the colonizationist. Lincoln the lawyer explains Lincoln the commander in chief. Lincoln the brilliant wordsmith explains Lincoln the brilliant politician. Is it possible to bore down so deeply into Lincoln that everything around him is blacked out? Has Lincoln scholarship become provincial, self-referential? A survey of the most recent pile of Lincoln books offers some opportunity to find out.

At first glance, Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, seems to promise a wider perspective by encompassing within the Lincoln biography the stories of the influential men who were his leading rivals for the 1860 Republican presidential nomination. Goodwin’s title is an apt expression of her theme: It was an act of political genius for Lincoln to invite into his cabinet the very men he had defeated for the nomination. Moreover, the shrewdness of his initial victory over his rivals foreshadowed the brilliance with which he managed them through the war years.

If only Team of Rivals was as coherent as that. It is, in fact, three different books held together by an engaging chronological narrative. The first book, encompassing the opening 250 pages, traces the careers of four rivals—Lincoln, William Seward, Salmon P. Chase, and Edward Bates—up to the tumultuous Republican nominating convention in Chicago. (For some reason Simon Cameron, who was also a rival and was also installed in the cabinet, is not part of Goodwin’s “team.”) The second book is a history of Lincoln’s cabinet, which involved a somewhat different...