As part of my US Presidents course of reading, and in combination with my obsessive 1840s – 1860s dive, I’ve read two biographies of Abraham Lincoln this year – one hailing him a saint, the other a brute. Both of these books were written with an Intention in mind, and I decided to try a third volume – one written more as a straightforward biography. With Malice Toward None came highly recommended to me as an enduring one-volume biography of one of the United States’ most pivotal presidents – a man who either ‘saved the Union’, or forged a new one. I can certainly understand why it carries its reputation, as it’s quite readable and offers a good ‘mix’ of Lincoln’s life, with neither politics nor war overwhelming treatment of the man underneath the stove-pipe hat. We find that man complex and largely sympathetic – driven and easy to be around, even when we find the decisions he makes or permits unfortunate.
With Malice Towards None immediately stands out as the most comprehensive Lincoln biography I’ve read to date, since Meacham and DiLorenzo were largely focused on Lincoln’s civil war work. One of the more surprising things I’ve found while studying his life is how politically unsuccessful Lincoln was in public: he only served a single turn in Congress, then returned to private practice. It was in the background, though, that he made his bones and grew as a political actor – working tirelessly to build the Republican party and support its candidates. Even in his failures, like the senate race with Douglas, he eloquently expressed and promoted the Republican principles, and Oates gives the debates and Lincoln’s philosophy there expressed their due.
Stephen Oates accomplishes something which I would think difficult – making Lincoln admirable in his stances even when the modern mind would find them abhorrent, salvageable only because the alternatives were worse. Contra the fears of the South, Lincoln and the Republicans had no intention of attacking slavery where it existed – but they were adamant it not expand. Lincoln was not the racial egalitarian his contemporary opponents made him out to be: he viewed blacks and whites as too different to live together, and continued championing ‘colonization’ – the deportation of blacks to Africa or some other colony – as a means of settling the race question after slavery well into the war. He took the view, though, that even if blacks were inferior to whites that it was unjust and un-Christian for whites to take from blacks what little they had, like the fruits of their own labor.
The narrative gets more potentially complex, but Oates’ execution more admirable, once the war begins. We see Lincoln as a politician, commander in chief, and man – all at once. The narrative gives an interesting take on the war, in that we see Lincoln working in despair for over two years, thinking that defeat will meet them in the field. The Union army cannot seem to win any great strategic victories, and the view from his desk is that this owes to a lack of real talent in the field. While his generals might be excellent field commanders, they quarrelled with one another, and according to Oates’ Lincoln, none of them had a grand strategic vision. Oates has Lincoln grumbling that the proper focus of fire should be Lee’s army, not Richmond – something Grant knew. I’m hesitant to fully subscribe to Oates’ depiction of Lincoln as a war-time commander, in part because I do not see why a country lawyer from Illinois would possess some grand vision that his West Point officers lacked, and because Lincoln in military histories comes off as a meddler, camping in the War department offices and constantly trying to run the war himself. The humanness of Lincoln keeps making itself known, though; when he’s laid low by an illness, he jokes and asks after the office-seekers who hounded him early on; at last he has something to give everybody. Even as the election approaches and Lincoln views his prospects dim – with draft riots and the peace movement rising in the north – he reads something so funny he has to trot through the house in his bedclothes to share it with people still working.
Although Oates always gussies up Lincoln – treating him with kid gloves where civil liberties are concerned, describing his antagonists through their negative physical appearances, and so on – he does at least mention the excesses instead of ignoring them altogether. Even Clement Vallandigham gets a brief mention, even if it’s just Lincoln saying “How can I authorize shooting a soldier for deserting and ignore the man who advised him to do it?” Whether Vallandigham’s rhetoric rose to the level Lincoln implied is debatable: I haven’t gotten that sense from prior books where he made an appearance. Oates drops the ball where war on civilians is concerned, referring to the Union army’s treatment of South Carolina towns, farms, and homes as their “sweeping in like avenging angels”: that is an interesting way to describe Sherman’s deliberately malicious campaign to reduce women and children into starving refugees, and Lincoln not only did not condemn this but made jokes about another general’s similar policy.
Taken all together, this was an impressive biography, addressing the many issues that Lincoln’s life encompassed rather adroitly. While Oates is plainly enamored of his subject – most people are, Lincoln frequently being raised to the level of Washington – he paints him as a man who was nearly as good as his time and his responsibilities allowed him to me, and often more courageous on matters of import than was prudent. Oates has quite the bibliography and I can see myself returning to him, especially his Voices series that draws in first-hand accounts before and during the war to understand what people at the time thought about it.
Reading Freely 