Books to read,films to watch: Abe as He Really Was

New angles, fresh insights and perennial truths

By JOHN A. BARNES

Feel that you've heard a bit too much about Lincoln in the past few weeks? Barack Obama's remarkable political journey from Illinois to Washington has certainly inspired a lot of Lincoln comparisons. Journalists and Obama supporters alike -- if one may be forgiven the redundancy -- see Mr. Obama as "the next Lincoln" or, more grandly, as the man who will complete Lincoln's quest to redeem America's race-torn soul.

As it happens, Abraham Lincoln is worthy of our interest quite apart from dramatic parallels, real or imagined, with our current political moment. And with the bicentennial of Lincoln's birth (Feb. 12) now upon us, it is a good time to dip into the latest writings about him for fresh facts, surprising angles and familiar truths.

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Mathew Brady's photograph of Lincoln in February 1860.

"A. Lincoln" (Random House, 796 pages, $35), by Ronald C. White Jr., is the first comprehensive, single-volume biography of Lincoln since David Herbert Donald's in 1996. Taking advantage of newly available resources, such as the recent publication of the voluminous Lincoln Legal Papers, Mr. White delivers a strong narrative that moves neatly from Lincoln's boyhood in Kentucky and legal career in Illinois to his rise within the Whig Party, his defeat in the 1858 Senate race to Stephen A. Douglas and his election, in 1860, as the first presidential standard-bearer for the new Republican Party and, as it turned out, the country's leader in a time of war.

Mr. White aims at the general reader, not the specialist, and pauses helpfully to define terms ("doughfaces," for instance, are Northerners with Southern sympathies). As Mr. White notes, Lincoln could not have been more unlike most of today's lawyer-politicians, few of whom have spent much time trying cases. He was a grizzled trial veteran who handled contested wills, railroad tax tangles and even murder cases. The experience taught him, Mr. White argues, an appreciation for the other fellow's point of view. Until the Civil War, Lincoln subscribed to Southern newspapers, and he kept reading them in the White House whenever they became available. He refused to lay the blame for slavery exclusively at the feet of Southerners, saying that Northerners would feel the same about the practice if the two populations changed places.

For Lincoln, facts and argument were the keys to winning people over to his point of view. Wary of extemporaneous speaking, he "mastered his brief" instead, assembling his speeches ahead of time and taking care with his choice of words. His first great speech was his address at Peoria, Ill., in 1854 attacking Stephen A. Douglas and the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which allowed slavery to take hold again in the territories. He wrote the speech himself after doing the considerable investigation into the provisions the act. Unlike most public men today, he had no "researchers" to do his work form him.

Facts might win men's minds; their hearts were another matter. Here Mr. White argues against the common policy of pigeonholing Lincoln as merely an Enlightenment deist. Lincoln's "Meditation on the Divine Will," a memorandum written after the carnage of the summer of 1862 and discovered only after Lincoln's death, shows a man grappling to find divine purpose in the war's violence. Somewhere between the lawyer's brief of the First Inaugural Address and the soaring biblical cadences of the Second, Lincoln discovered that a blend of reason and faith was more likely to persuade his listeners than reason alone.

Lincoln's relation to the written word is the subject of Fred Kaplan's "Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer" (Harper, 406 pages, $27.95). Not unlike Allen C. Guelzo, who argued in "Redeemer President" (1999) that Lincoln deserves to be considered a first-rate political thinker, Mr. Kaplan argues that Lincoln deserves to be considered a first-rate American writer. "The novelist William Dean Howells's claim about his friend Mark Twain, that he was the 'Lincoln of our literature,' can effectively be rephrased," Mr. Kaplan writes. "Lincoln was the Twain of our politics."

The statement sounds over-generous at first, but Mr. Kaplan makes a good case. How many American writers, after all, have had their words chiseled in marble and, so to speak, graven in the hearts of their countrymen? Memorizing the Gettysburg Address was once as much a rite of passage in American childhood as memorizing "Old Ironsides" and "Hiawatha."

Any great writer starts as a great reader, and it is here that the young Lincoln began to stand out. The son of an illiterate father and a semi-literate mother, Abraham had little formal education. Reading and writing were simply not seen as important to life in the agricultural world of the early 19th century. Thus began Lincoln's heroic act of self-education. "Abe was not Energetic Except in one thing," his half-sister later wrote; "he was active & persistent in learning -- read Everything he Could."

Which, at the beginning, wasn't much. The King James Bible was his starting point, since it was one of the few books on the Kentucky-Indiana frontier. Its parables and prophecies had little effect on Lincoln theologically, but its rhythms and meter would show themselves later in the "House Divided" speech (delivered on June 16, 1858, in Springfield, Ill.) and in the Second Inaugural. Shakespeare would become a lifelong favorite, with quotations from the plays coming, Mr. Kaplan says, as "naturally to him as breathing."

While Lincoln never lost his love of great literature, the press of the war forced him to widen the scope of his learning to include practical matters. In May 1861, he confessed to Navy Secretary Gideon Welles that he "knew little about ships." Necessity compelled him to learn quickly.

Lincoln actually knew more than he let on, as Craig L. Symonds, a retired Annapolis professor, notes in his splendid "Lincoln and His Admirals" (Oxford, 430 pages, $27.95). The only president to hold a patent (on a device designed to lift riverboats over shoals), Lincoln was fascinated by maritime technology and frequently visited the Washington Navy Yard to see the latest weapons and engines.

His problems with the naval high command often mirrored those he faced on land: officers raised in another age and unable to come to grips with the new -- in this case, with steam, ironclads and combined operations with the army. Lincoln often had to step in and force action, such as the time he personally organized the taking of Norfolk, Va., in 1862, having taken a tug out of Washington to the battle site. By the end of the Civil War, Mr. Symonds shows us, the Navy, both on the oceans and on the Western rivers, had played a major role in bringing about Union victory, thanks in no small part to Lincoln's persistent naval leadership.

Working at close quarters with Lincoln in the White House was an education in itself, as Daniel Mark Epstein observes in "Lincoln's Men" (Collins, 262 pages, $26.99), his study of Lincoln's secretaries: John Hay, John Nicolay and William Stoddard. The first two actually lived in the White House, probably spending more time with Lincoln than anyone outside his immediate family. All three were Illinoisans. Nicolay early put his finger on one of his boss's great strengths: his ability to size people up upon first meeting them. "He knew men on the instant," Nicolay recalled.

The White House budget allowed Lincoln to employ exactly one secretary (Nicolay). To handle the work, Hay and Stoddard were added, though they were officially paid by the Interior Department. In addition to answering correspondence from senators, congressmen and governors, they responded to begging letters from office seekers and the mothers of soldiers. They also read through a huge amount of hate mail. Nicolay became an overnight expert on protocol to supervise White House functions. The task of "handling" the prickly Mrs. Lincoln went to Stoddard, who, alone among the three, calmed her tantrums.

But it wasn't all work and no play. Hay, the poet and artiste of the three, carried on an affair with a married actress. Nicolay often danced the night away while his fiancée waited patiently back in Illinois. Stoddard speculated on the stock and gold markets, with mixed success.

For Lincoln, of course, life in Washington during war was almost all work and no play. To read more about him is to realize how few of our current political leaders even begin to approach his level of intelligence, rhetorical skill, natural wit and capacity for empathy. It also reminds us how ridiculous it is make comparisons between Lincoln and anyone today.

Mr. Barnes is the author of "Ulysses S. Grant on Leadership" and "John F. Kennedy on Leadership."