Abraham and Mary Lincoln by Kenneth J. Winkle, and: Abraham Lincoln and Horace Greeley by Gregory A. Borchard, and: Lincoln and the Civil War by Michael Burlingame, and: Lincoln and the Constitution by Brian R. Dirck, and: Lincoln and the Election of 1860 by Michael S. Green (review)

The Concise Lincoln Library from Southern Illinois University Press is a shrewd idea, well executed and full of surprises even for the serious Lincoln student. The growing collection of short monographs on Abraham Lincoln’s life and times edited by Richard W. Etulain, Sara Vaughn Gabbard, and Sylvia Frank Rodrigue aspires to reach a broad audience but refuses to do so by catering to the lowest common denominator. The editors have instead recruited some of the finest Lincoln scholars to help launch the series and have given them wide berth to craft their narratives with large interpretive questions at stake.

This is no easy task, and anybody familiar with Lincoln scholarship will instantly recognize the risk-taking nature of the endeavor when contemplating the editors’ decision to call upon Michael Burlingame to produce a 130-page volume on Lincoln and the Civil War. Burlingame might well be the most significant Lincoln scholar working in the field today, but nobody would ever associate his immense talent with the term “concise.” During his long career, Burlingame has dazzled readers with the depth and breadth of his archival research. He also became something of a legend among fellow scholars when he reportedly returned a large book advance from a commercial publisher in order to transform a planned one-volume biography of Lincoln into the multivolume Abraham Lincoln: A Life, published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 2008. Yet even that exhaustive 2,000-page-plus study, for which Burlingame won the coveted Lincoln Prize in 2010, left him unfulfilled. He has since turned to the Lincoln Studies Center at Knox College to post online his entire unedited manuscript from that project (see http://www.knox.edu/academics/ distinctive-programs/lincoln-studies-center/burlingame-abraham-lincoln-a-life.html). Now here is the tireless scholar attempting to summarize Lincoln’s wartime presidency with fewer words than he once devoted to endnotes in a single volume of his great work.

The result is a far more readable and effective summary of Lincoln as wartime president than the scholar’s prizewinning but dense study. Those who bought Burlingame’s two-volume biography but haven’t quite been able to find a summer vacation (or two) long enough to read it should consult this volume. More important, those who teach the Civil War but struggle to find short monographs that convey the complexity of the challenges that President Lincoln faced should assign it. Burlingame is especially adept at explaining the partisan politics of the second half of the war. His chapter on the reelection campaign of 1864 is about as good as any short reading on the topic currently in print.

So far, politics appears to be one of the strengths of the Concise Lincoln Library. Michael S. Green has produced a highly readable study of the 1860 election, which even more self-consciously than Burlingame’s volume appears designed for undergraduate classroom adoption. Green is meticulous about providing context essential for guiding student understanding of a complicated four-way campaign. He also provides sharp portraits of the contest’s memorable cast of characters. But most significantly, Green offers a nuanced depiction of candidate Lincoln, one that manages to emphasize both his “shrewdness and, when necessary, his selfishness” (37). Gregory A. Borchard’s Abraham...