Exploring Lincoln: Great Historians Reappraise Our Greatest President ed. by Harold Holzer, Craig L. Symonds, and Frank J. Williams (review)

Advising readers to focus on the core of wisdom, the teacher in Ecclesiastes suggests that too much scholarship—the “making of many books”—is a distraction to genuine understanding. Following this line of reasoning, continued scholarly work about Lincoln and the Civil War obfuscates well-established interpretations that new investigations are not likely to challenge. Now well past the bicentennial of Lincoln’s birth and the sesquicentennial of his presidency, surely scholars must have exhausted the rich vein of Lincoln ore. A testament to Lincoln’s bigness, to borrow from Frederick Douglass, and to the powerful scholarly minds drawn like moths to Lincoln’s flame, these two volumes suggest that prospecting Lincoln continues to yield new precious flecks of understanding of Lincoln’s presidency and the Civil War.

The sixteen essays comprising Exploring Lincoln, papers presented since 2012 at the Lincoln Forum at Gettysburg, demonstrate that fresh inquiry and even new discoveries of material continue to sharpen the historians’ understanding of Lincoln and the Civil War Era. Personality and politics provide shape to many of these topical essays. William C. Harris reploughs Lincoln’s role in shaping a Republican victory in the 1860 election, elucidating Lincoln’s efforts in molding his message and in helping party operatives persuade voters and encourage a large turnout, which proved decisive especially in states like Illinois and Indiana. Michael Kline employs his legal skills to make a convincing circumstantial case that a real plot existed in Baltimore to assassinate president-elect Lincoln in 1861 and, had counter-measures not been taken, the plot may well have succeeded. John Marszalek demonstrates how changes in the United States Army in the 1850s permitted Grant and Sherman largely to remake its military culture, although conservative forces undid much of the transformation after Appomattox. Seward’s biographer Walter Starh offers a summation of the Lincoln-Seward partnership, in which Seward was really Lincoln’s right-hand man. In her examinations of funerals and funerary in the Lincoln and Davis white houses, Catherine Clinton provides a protean look at death, dying, and gender. Frank Williams poses a counterfactual analysis—asking how good a judge would lawyer-President Lincoln have been—to reveal both the probing intellect and deep empathy in Lincoln’s character. Finally, based on hitherto unknown letters between Mary Todd Lincoln and her lawyer-friend Myra Bradwell, Jason Emerson establishes that the tragic Mrs. Lincoln was quite insane by the end of her life.

Lincoln as commander-in-chief, whose expansion of war powers permitted emancipation with all of its manifold implications, acts as an organizing principal for the remainder of this collection. Craig Symonds examines the critical early months of 1862, in which Lincoln was most directly involved in military matters, to demonstrate that Lincoln was as much involved in running the navy as he was in prodding McClellan to move the army. William C. Davis explores the paths by which the reluctant secessionist Jefferson Davis and the career U.S. soldier Robert E. Lee chose the Confederacy in 1861. John Stauffer contextualizes the composition of the Battle Hymn of the Republic and its evolution into a truly national song, from its initially unsuccessful competition against John Brown’s Body, into a twentieth-century anthem that transcends region. Eric Foner revisits Lincoln and emancipation, focusing on the president’s reading of events in 1862 during which Lincoln evolved into the Great Emancipator. Richard Striner’s Lincoln is a more strident radical, whose feigned moderation brought him to the presidency and whose policies led not only to emancipation but also presaged political rights for formers slaves. Historians have long noted that the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation made British recognition of the Confederacy unlikely. Amanda Foreman shows...