1 of 4

The bicentenary of Abraham Lincoln's birth approaches at a time of a remarkable renaissance in Lincoln scholarship. Biographies, specialist monographs, reprinted memoirs, and scholarly editions of the reminiscences of Lincoln's family, friends, and acquaintances have streamed from the press over the last few years. Efforts to reconstruct Lincoln's legal career are reaching their climax. Electronic versions of his collected works and private papers are well under way. What explains this hum of activity?

Interest in the Civil War goes in cycles, of course. A decade ago Ken Burns's television series helped reawaken public fascination in a subject neglected since the 1960s. Lincoln now commands attention as a model of political seriousness, in shining contrast to the sound-bite vacuity of contemporary public life. But disillusionment with political leadership can cut both ways. In the 1970s, when Watergate poisoned the appetite for political history and tainted the notion of political heroism, volumes of Lincolniana cluttered second-hand bookstores.

The rediscovery of Lincoln probably has less to do with current political attitudes than with deeper intellectual currents in the academy, not least a sense that the dominant social history of the last three decades has its limits as well as its rewards. Important as they may be, structures, cultures, non-contingent forces, and the disempowered are not the whole story. Some see in the study of political leadership an antidote to the centrifugal fashions of recent American historical writing. The return to Lincoln becomes all the more rewarding thanks to our deeper understanding of the world in which he moved. Ironically, this has been the achievement of social and cultural historians disenchanted by the narrowness of political history, traditionally understood.

What guarantees the enduring attraction of Lincoln studies is, naturally enough, the magnitude of the issues with which he grappled: the meaning of equality in a racially hierarchical and economically expanding society; the defense of freedom in a slave-based republic; and the moral justification for a war of internecine savagery. But, teasingly, there is also the near impossibility of pinning down the "real" or inner man. As with Shakespeare, whose undying fascination relates not just to the glory of his writings but also to his personal obscurity, so Lincoln's magnetism has something to do with the enigma of the private man. In the words of his law partner and biographer, William Henry Herndon, Lincoln "only revealed his soul to but few beings—if any, and then he kept a corner of that soul from his bosom friends." Lincoln's fellow itinerant on the Eighth Judicial Circuit, David Davis, considered him "the most reticent, secretive man I ever saw or expect to see." After his death the world was not short of people—former friends, colleagues and acquaintances—who professed to have discerned the true Lincoln behind his mask of discretion. But their confused and contradictory voices leave us wrestling with a clutch of questions that are unlikely ever to be definitively answered (not least, because Lincoln kept no private journal or diary).

Of these questions, it is Lincoln's faith that has done most to baffle. When his first biographer, Josiah Holland, poured him into the mould of a Christian president, a disbelieving William Herndon found the outcome unrecognizable. He set about interviewing those who might be in a position to know, and in a series of lectures denied there were any Christological elements in Lincoln's spiritual thought. Thus began the battle for Lincoln's soul. Few religious traditions have subsequently failed to embrace him. Friends have pointed to his Virginia Quaker forebears, Baptists to his parents' faith, Methodists to a supposed conversion at a camp-meeting, Catholics to a surreptitious joining of their Church, and Presbyterians to a public attendance at theirs. Masons, Unitarians, and Universalists have each clasped him to their bosoms. Following the visits of two or three mediums to the wartime White House, the Spiritualists claimed him as one of theirs, though Lincoln himself was facetiously dismissive, remarking that the contradictory voices of the spirits at these seances reminded him of his Cabinet meetings.

next page... |  1 of 4