READING LINCOLN'S MIND

Extract

Allen C. Guelzo, Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1999)

William Lee Miller, Lincoln's Virtues: An Ethical Biography (New York: Knopf, 2002)

Stewart Winger, Lincoln, Religion, and Romantic Cultural Politics (Dekalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2003)

Since Good Friday 1865 most Americans have adored their sixteenth president. They venerate him because he so vividly embodies their two most cherished cultural stories—the poor farmer's boy risen to the top, the preacher of charity martyred for his people—while so strikingly surpassing even those mythic achievements. For the masses Lincoln lives on as the visionary emancipator, forgiving warrior, self-taught wordsmith, contemplative sage, and (most miraculous oxymoron of all) honest politician. For intellectuals Lincoln commands allegiance for his reasoned argument, his practical political judgment, his commitment to the principles underlying republican communities, and his tradition-rich eloquence (Shakespeare and the King James Version vying for prominence in his speech with authentic backwoods witticisms). How strange, then, that until Allen Guelzo's Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President appeared in 1999 no historian had written his intellectual biography. Many important studies of Lincoln's thought have been produced, going back to Harry V. Jaffa's 1959 classic Crisis of the House Divided: An Interpretation of the Issues of the Lincoln–Douglas Debates (Guelzo calls it (p. 469) “incontestably the greatest Lincoln book of the [twentieth] century”) and beyond that to William E. Barton's now forgotten The Soul of Abraham Lincoln (1920), a trenchant study of Lincoln's religious thinking. But Guelzo is the first to produce an intellectually disposed life of Lincoln, one that follows the lead of Daniel Walker Howe (most recently expounded in Making the American Self: Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln, 1997) by putting Lincoln's “Whig culture” and his distinctive theological musings at the heart of his personal and political story.