Abraham Lincoln: The Enigmatic President

Lincoln by David Herbert Donald Lincoln by David Herbert Donald is worthy of all the praise and awards it has received. As the cover exclaims, Lincoln was a New York Times Bestseller, the book won the Lincoln Prize, and Donald had previously won the Pulitzer Prize twice. Published in 1995, it was called the best single-volume biography of Lincoln to date and can arguably still claim that distinction. Donald’s book title indicates that he had nothing less in mind. Merely, Lincoln , with no subtitle. All of this acclaim does not mean the book is flawless. I read a trade paperback edition that was 600 pages long, with another 114 pages of back matter. I hadn’t seen paper so thin since the Bible. I constantly checked page numbers to ensure I hadn’t flipped two pages by mistake. Yes, the book is comprehensive, thorough, and encyclopedic. Yet never boring. Donald’s writing is clean and unadorned. He does not intrude on Lincoln’s story, and it is such a good story that the reader is pulled t...

  The Radical and the Republican, Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of Antislavery  Several books study the relationship between Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. I have not read Brian Kilmeade’s The President and the Freedom Fighter , so I cannot compare them. The Radical and the Republican is a balanced view of a pair of critically important men in American history. Since Lincoln and Douglass did not meet until nearly two and a half years into Lincoln’s first administration, the book mostly reports their personal histories and views separately, as if they were on parallel tracks toward the same goals. Except that the tracks were not parallel. The strategy and tactics were so wide apart that Douglass doubted that Lincoln was an ally in his cause. Although you could not prove it by Lincoln’s utterances, their slavery goals were the same. The following two quotes from the book succinctly summarize how Lincoln crafted his strategy. The first is from Lin...