Lincoln Reconsidered: Essays on the Civil War Era

by David Herbert Donald

Overview

A “brilliant” look at America’s sixteenth president by the New York Times–bestselling, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Lincoln (American Historical Review).

First published in 1956 and revised and updated for the twenty-first century, Lincoln Reconsidered is a masterpiece of Civil War scholarship. In a dozen eloquent, witty, and incisive essays, the author of the definitive biography of Abraham Lincoln offers a fresh perspective on topics previously shrouded in myth and hagiography and brings the president’s tough-mindedness, strategic acumen, and political flexibility into sharp focus.

From Lincoln’s patchwork education to his contradictory interpretations of the Constitution and the legacy of the Founding Fathers, David Herbert Donald reveals the legal mind behind the legend of the Great Emancipator. “Toward a Reconsideration of the Abolitionists” sheds new light on the radicalism of the antislavery movement, while “Herndon and Mary Lincoln” brilliantly characterizes the complicated relationship between two of the president’s closest companions. “Getting Right with Lincoln” and “The Folklore Lincoln” draw on the methods of cultural anthropology to produce a provocative analysis of Lincoln as symbol.

No historian has done more to enhance our understanding of Lincoln’s presidency and the causes and effects of the Civil War than Donald. Lincoln Reconsidered is an entertaining and accessible introduction to his work and a must-read for every student of American history.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781504034029
Publisher:	Open Road Media
Publication date:	03/22/2016
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	210
Sales rank:	304,260
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

David Herbert Donald (1920–2009) was an American historian and the author of many books on the Civil War era, including Lincoln (1995), a New York Times bestseller widely regarded as the definitive biography of the US president. Donald twice won the Pulitzer Prize, for Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War (1960) and Look Homeward: A Life of Thomas Wolfe (1987), and served as the Charles Warren Professor of American History at Harvard University. His other notable works include the influential essay collection Lincoln Reconsidered (1956); Charles Sumner and the Rights of Man (1970), the second volume in his acclaimed biography of the antislavery statesman; and Liberty and Union (1978), a comprehensive analysis of the American scene from 1845 to 1890.

Hometown:

Lincoln, Massachusetts

Date of Birth:

October 1, 1920

Place of Birth:

Goodman, Mississippi

Education:

Holmes Junior College, Millsaps College, 1941; M.A., Ph.D., University of Illinois, 1942, 1946

Read an Excerpt

Lincoln Reconsidered

Essays on the Civil War Era

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By David Herbert Donald

OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA

Copyright © 2001 David Donald
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5040-3402-9

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CHAPTER 1

Getting Right with Lincoln

I

About no other American have so many words been written as about Abraham Lincoln. Jay Monaghan's Lincoln Bibliography requires 1,079 pages merely to list the books and pamphlets published before 1939, when even the experts lost count. On library shelves the multivolumed biographies by Nicolay and Hay, Sandburg, and Randall and Current stand cover to cover with Lincoln Never Smoked a Cigarette and Abraham Lincoln on the Coming of the Caterpillar Tractor. Every February sees a fresh flood of Lincoln Day oratory and verse.

This extraordinary interest in the details of Lincoln's life seems the more astonishing in light of his low contemporary standing. His associates were sure there were greater figures in their era; usually they had at least one such person in mind — and close at home at that. Lincoln they thought a simple Susan, a baboon, an aimless punster, a smutty joker. He left the highway of principle to pursue the devious paths of expediency. A "huckster in politics," sneered Wendell Phillips, "a first-rate second-rate man." A Springfield neighbor called him "The craftiest and most dishonest politician that ever disgraced an office in America." "If I wanted to paint a despot, a man perfectly regardless of every constitutional right of the people," cried Saulsbury of Delaware in the Senate, "I would paint the hideous form of Abraham Lincoln...."

Not even assassination at once translated Lincoln into sainthood. "The decease of Mr. Lincoln is a great national bereavement," conceded Representative J. M. Ashley of Ohio, "but I am not so sure it is so much of a national loss." Within eight hours of his murder Republican Congressmen in secret caucus agreed that "his death is a godsend to our cause." Andrew Johnson, they believed, would carry through the proposed social revolution in the South that the conciliatory Lincoln had blocked. Now, crowed Ben Wade, "there will be no trouble running the government."

But politicians of all parties were apparently startled by the extent of the national grief over Lincoln, and, politicanlike, they decided to capitalize upon it. Democrats were, of course, under a handicap, but a surprising number of them now discovered that they had really heartily endorsed the Lincoln program. That vicious Copperhead sheet the Chicago Times discerned "indications of the last few days of [Lincoln's] life that he might command [Democratic] support on the close of the war," and Clement L. Vallandigham reported that even the peace men had begun "to turn toward Lincoln for deliverance."

The Republicans' claim to Lincoln was surely somewhat more plausible, and, being in a majority in Congress, they were able to make it good by staging a three-week funeral procession, witnessed by millions of persons, in which Lincoln's body was dragged by special train, to the accompaniment of mourning bells and wailing choirs, through the principal cities of the North. Democrat Charles Mason of Iowa though the whole affair a political trick, like the "crafty skill of Mark Anthony [sic] in displaying to the Roman people the bloody mantle of Caesar." Republican Radicals, he felt, in seeking a vindictive peace and a new social order for the South, wanted "to make ... political capital out of the murder. They wish to strengthen their hands and brutalize the hearts of the Northern people till there shall be general concurrence in all measures of confiscation and extermination...."

That was precisely what the Radicals intended and did. Their Lincoln eulogies were carefully directed toward proving that Democrats had been in part responsible for Lincoln's death and toward demonstrating that Negro suffrage was necessary in order to prevent the traitors from returning to power. In his Lincoln oration in Boston, Charles Sumner, theorist for the Radical faction, carefully interjected a strong plea for Negro enfranchisement, which his party friends found "very cunning."

Meanwhile, a third contender for the Lincolnian mantle appeared in the person of Andrew Johnson, the new President. After a momentary aberration in which he seemed more radical than the Radicals, Johnson adopted a conciliatory policy toward the South, granting general amnesty and exacting neither confiscation of property nor Negro suffrage. All this in the eyes of the Radicals was bad enough, but he did it all in the name of Lincoln. William H. Seward, who continued as Secretary of State, assured all comers that the Johnson reconstruction plans "grew during the administration of Mr. Lincoln," and in his proclamations setting up provisional governments in the South, the President specifically referred to Lincoln's earlier actions as his precedents.

Republican Radicals were furious. Johnson they considered a traitor, all the more dangerous because he threatened to divert the idolization of Lincoln, so carefully fostered by the Radicals, into support of an antiradical program. "Is there no way to arrest the insane course of the President ...?" groaned Thaddeus Stevens.

There was a way, and it is not too much of an oversimplification to regard the ensuing struggle between President and Congress as a ghoulish tugging at Lincoln's shroud; both parties needed to identify Lincoln with their respective reconstruction programs. It was a vindictive quarrel, and shrill denunciation by the one faction provoked harsher abuse from the other. Johnson, publicly branding Sumner, Stevens, and Wendell Phillips as "opposed to the fundamental principles of this government," asked petulantly: "Are [they] ... not satisfied ... with one martyr? Does not the blood of Lincoln appease [their] ... vengeance and wrath ...?" And Ben Butler, speaking for the Radicals thus accused, replied by impeaching the President before the Senate: "By murder most foul ... [Johnson] succeeded to the Presidency, and is the elect of an assassin to that high office...." In the Republican national convention of 1868 it was openly charged that "the treachery of Andrew Johnson ... cost us the life of Abraham Lincoln."

The rival parties of the Reconstruction era were not, of course, historians quibbling over a footnote. They were politicians seeking power, and they invoked Lincoln's name to win votes. Among the Negroes of the South they knew that identification with Lincoln might assure a candidate of victory. In Lexington, South Carolina, for instance, the fall elections of 1867 were expected to be close, and Radicals felt that they must carry the entire Negro vote. Proudly the ward heeler wrote Charles Sumner of their methods. The Republicans secretly printed their own ballots, to be distributed on the day of the election, which "were to contain a sign ... and by it, we hoped to conquer." "I inclose a ticket," he continued, "and you will see the sign — no less than Abraham Lincoln, the martyr to Liberty — and no colored man dared refuse it — nor did one single one fail to vote it. ... When our ticket distributers ... showed their tickets with the face of Lincoln, their eyes beamed with gratitude, and one old worn out freedman exclaimed 'Tank God, I tought he would send you to us!'"

In the Northern states Republican use of the Lincoln symbol was somewhat more literate but scarcely less emotional. During the campaign of 1868, Edwin M. Stanton, whose conversion to Lincolnian views might be termed posthumous, swept his Pennsylvania audiences for Grant by reading the Gettysburg address. Then he said, tearfully: "That is the voice of God speaking through the lips of Abraham Lincoln! ... You hear the voice of Father Abraham here tonight. Did he die in vain? ... Let us here, every one, with uplifted hand, declare before Almighty God that the precious gift of this great heritage, consecrated in the blood of our soldiers, shall never perish from the earth. Now —" and he uplifted his hands — "all hands to God. I SWEAR IT!" After which his auditors all presumably went out and voted Republican.

II

After Johnson was defeated, it seemed to be Lincoln and the Republican party, one and inseparable. Other parties, of course, could revere and admire Lincoln as a great American, but it was clear to the right-thinking that the Great Martyr was Republican property. In periodic campaign addresses Republicans invoked the Great Emancipator to bless the good cause and to smite the unrighteous. To some these terms might need definition, but not to Republicans. Lincoln, they were sure, would favor the high tariff; urge the annexation of the Philippines; oppose greenbackism, socialism, populism, and labor unions; fight the income tax; and assail the League of Nations and the World Court.

Every four years Republican hopefuls sought — and presumably secured — Lincoln's endorsement. According to the campaign literature, Lincoln invariably bore marked physical or moral resemblance to the party's candidates, including such unlikely persons as William McKinley, William Howard Taft, and Calvin Coolidge. Year after year Republican politicos reviewed their party's lineage in Lincoln Day addresses that the world has little noted nor long remembered. One oration, however, deserves to be treasured — that of Warren G. Harding, commencing: "Destiny made Lincoln the agency of fulfillment, held the inherited covenant inviolate and gave him to the ages. No words can magnify or worship glorify." As W. S. Gilbert observes, "The meaning doesn't matter if it's only idle chatter of a transcendental kind."

The Lincoln cult in literature was closely connected with this party tradition. The laudatory Lincoln biographies — those of Holland, Nicolay and Hay, and the like — were written by men who firmly believed that, next to the dog, the Republican party was man's best friend. Orated George S. Boutwell, somewhat inaccurately: "The Republican Party gave to Mr. Lincoln the opportunity on which his fame rests, and his fame is the inheritance of the Republican party. ... When we set forth the character and services of Mr. Lincoln we set forth as well the claims of the Republican party to the gratitude and confidence of the country...."

Not until 1887 did the party formally begin holding annual rallies on February 12. By that time the outlines of the Lincoln portrait were fading in even the most tenacious Republican memory and a yearly banquet offered the dual opportunity to retouch the portrait and to refill the party treasury. This useful custom rapidly spread, and today most major Republican congregations hold dinners on Lincoln's birthday. Every year these somewhat grim rites of early spring are reported in the newspapers, and drearier reading would be hard to find. Take, for instance, the seventeenth annual Lincoln Day dinner of the New York Republican Club, held at the Waldorf-Astoria in 1903. Some five hundred men attended — their wives were segregated in those happy, bygone days — and ate the seven-course dinner. As the menu was in French, Lincoln probably could not have known what was served; and as the food, as is usual at banquets, was reported atrocious, he perhaps would not have wished to. Later the "handsomely gowned" women were permitted to join their spouses, electricity illuminated the figure of an elephant behind the speakers' table, and Lincoln's spirit was invoked to be present. The presiding officer read regrets from dignitaries unable to attend — Senators, Supreme Court Justices, party bigwigs. President Theodore Roosevelt wrote: "I feel that not merely the Republican Party, but all believers in the country, should do everything in their power to keep alive the memory of Abraham Lincoln." That was about the only nonpartisan note of the evening.

There followed — as always — addresses. The chief speaker was former Governor Frank S. Black of New York, chosen for his alleged resemblance to Lincoln. "There are subjects," he began, "upon which nothing new can be said" — but this did not deter him from continuing. His theme was the advantage of Lincoln's poverty. "The child may shiver in the fury of the blast which no maternal tenderness can shield him from, but he may feel a helpless tear drop upon his cheek which will keep him warm till the snows of time have covered his hair." His well-clad auditors, safe from the wintry blast, applauded. "It is not wealth that counts in the making of the world, but character. ... Give me the hut that is small enough, the poverty that is deep enough, the love that is great enough, and I will raise from them the best there is in human character." Again his hearers, who, after all, were considerably poorer for their attendance at this gathering, applauded the virtues of poverty.

After some minutes — a good many minutes — more of this, a Vermont judge spoke on Lincoln and Wendell Phillips. Then Congressman Cushman of Washington followed on "Abraham Lincoln and the Northwest," concluding: "And with no sordid thought of gain for myself or for my party, I say that it beats in every throb of my heart tonight that the greatest good, the grandest future, and the most immortal destiny of our nation lies [sic] with the Republican Party." Another Congressman then talked about "Lincoln's War Secretary," but his remarks have fortunately not been preserved. Late at night, in various stages of numbness the guests escaped, clutching their sacred relics of the reincarnation they had just witnessed — watch fobs showing Lincoln swinging a woodman's mallet.

III

For decades the Republican claim to Lincoln so repeatedly asserted went virtually unquestioned. Although minor parties from time to time jeered that a McKinley or a Coolidge had hardly the physique for a rail-splitter, Democrats for the most part respected the Republican title. Grover Cleveland, for instance, making a tour of the Middle West in 1887, carefully avoided a stop at Springfield, Illinois, not because he lacked admiration for Lincoln but because he felt that the Lincoln shrines were Republican preserves. Woodrow Wilson did make Lincoln Day speeches — and to Democrats, at that — but he admitted the prior Republican claim by beginning: "I sometimes think it a singular circumstance that the present Republican party should have sprung from Lincoln, but that is one of the mysteries of Providence...."

In 1912, however, Lincoln became a partisan issue. Denying any wish to "treat [Lincoln's] name as a mere party symbol," President Taft claimed Lincoln as a regular who would never ally himself with Theodore Roosevelt's Progressives. "Lincoln knew no such word as insurgent," former Congressman Charles F. Scott echoed his chief, "for it never entered his mind to consider himself more important than his principles." But Theodore Roosevelt insisted that Lincoln was on his side: "The official leaders of the Republican party today are the spiritual heirs of the men who warred against Lincoln, who railed at him as a revolutionist, ... who accused him of being a radical, an innovator, an opponent of the Constitution and an enemy of property." By 1916, however, in Lincoln's name, Roosevelt urged his Progressive following to return to the regular party ranks; Lincoln had come home.

It was not until 1932 that another serious effort was made to raid the Republican closet and steal the stovepipe hat. Harassed Herbert Hoover, making the traditional pilgrimage to Springfield, likened himself to Lincoln in the dark days of 1864, and found victory over the Depression just a matter of fighting it out on this line if it took all summer. Traditionally, Democrats had regarded such oratory as an exclusively Republican prerogative, but now a new spirit had entered that party. James A. Farley piously announced himself "shocked" at Hoover's partisan use of the Lincoln symbol, and Gifford Pinchot declared that Lincoln in these sad days "would not get to first base" with the Republican party on "his platform of human rights." It was even suggested that campaigning Governor Franklin Roosevelt might make an address at Lincoln's tomb, a report that caused cries of "sacrilege" among Springfield Republicans, one of whom threatened an injunction to stop this Democratic outrage.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Lincoln Reconsidered by David Herbert Donald. Copyright © 2001 David Donald. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• One: Getting Right with Lincoln
  • I
  • II
  • III
  • IV
• Two: The Folklore Lincoln
  • I
  • II
  • III
  • IV
  • V
  • VI
• Three: Toward a Reconsideration of Abolitionists
  • I
  • II
  • III
• Four: An Excess of Democracy: The American Civil War and the Social Process
  • I
  • II
  • III
• Five: Education Defective: Lincoln’s Preparation for Greatness
  • I
  • II
  • III
  • IV
  • V
  • VI
• Six: Herndon and Mary Lincoln
  • I
  • II
  • III
  • IV
• Seven: Refighting the Civil War
  • I
  • II
  • III
  • IV
  • V
• Eight: The Radicals and Lincoln
  • I
  • II
  • III
  • IV
  • V
• Nine: Abraham Lincoln and the American Pragmatic Tradition
  • I
  • II
  • III
• Ten: A Whig in the White House
  • I
  • II
  • III
  • IV
  • V
• Eleven: Reverence for the Laws: Abraham Lincoln and the Founding Fathers
  • I
  • II
  • III
  • IV
  • V
  • VI
• Twelve: A. Lincoln, Politician
  • I
  • II
  • III
• Bibliographical Essay
• Index
• About the Author

Editorial Reviews

A common sense, witty, and erudite analysis.”–The Atlantic

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