Donald David Herbert - Lincoln reconsidered: Essays on the Civil War era

Lincoln Reconsidered

Essays on the Civil War Era

David Herbert Donald

About the Author

David Herbert Donald (19202009) was an American historian and the author of many books on the Civil War era, including Lincoln (1995), a New York Times bestseller widely regarded as the definitive biography of the US president. Donald twice won the Pulitzer Prize, for Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War (1960) and Look Homeward: A Life of Thomas Wolfe (1987), and served as the Charles Warren Professor of American History at Harvard University. His other notable works include the influential essay collection Lincoln Reconsidered (1956); Charles Sumner and the Rights of Man (1970), the second volume in his acclaimed biography of the antislavery statesman; and Liberty and Union (1978), a comprehensive analysis of the American scene from 1845 to 1890.

PREFACE

Alfred A. Knopf, surely the greatest American publisher, had a pawky sense of humor. He had published my first book, Lincolns Herndon, in 1948, and in 1955 I presented for his consideration a collection of my essays on Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War. He liked the essays but was troubled that I didnt have a title for the book. After ruminating for several minutes, he announced, in all apparent seriousness, that he would call it Chips from a Historians Workbench.

Fortunately his marketing department shot down that idea, and when the essays were published the next year they bore the title Lincoln Reconsidered. The book was so successful that in 1961 a second edition was called for, in which I included two additional essays. And now here is a third edition, which includes two hitherto unpublished essays: Education Defective: Lincolns Preparation for Greatness, and Reverence for the Laws: Abraham Lincoln and the Founding Fathers.

Glad as I am that the book was not sunk by Alfred Knopfs suggested title, I can seein retrospect, at leastthat it had considerable merit. If not exactly chips from my workbench, the essays in Lincoln Reconsidered represent investigations that had to be made, problems that had to be solved, before I could proceed with the large biographies of Charles Sumner and Abraham Lincoln, on which I was engaged. For instance, Toward a Reconsideration of Abolitionists emerged from my attempt to understand why Charles Sumner, like so many other New Englanders of his generation, became such a passionate advocate of the abolition of slavery. Similarly, Refighting the Civil War resulted from my effort to understand the strategy and tactics of Union generals so that I could better appraise Lincolns role in directing the war. Several of the other essaysespecially The Radicals and Lincolnwere intended to clear the ground for my Lincoln biography by analyzing Civil War political leadership.

Originating in my own need for self-education, these essays had an added objective: I wanted to share my excitement over applying methods derived from the other social sciences to knotty, much controverted historical problems. Thus, in Getting Right with Lincoln and The Folklore Lincoln I tried to show how the methods of cultural anthropologists and folklorists can reveal new ways of thinking about the Lincoln symbol. I applied the techniques of psychology and sociology to explore the origins of the abolitionist movement and borrowed from political science the technique of career-line analysis to identify the Radical Republicans. In Refighting the Civil War I wanted to show that military history, so often treated as a narrow, isolated specialty, has significant connections with intellectual history and the history of technology. My several studies of Lincoln as wartime political leader suggest how political theory can help recast our assumptions about the nature of nineteenth-century American political parties.

Though a slim book, Lincoln Reconsidered has had considerable impact on the study of the Civil War era. Widely used in colleges, and even in high schools, it has stimulated other historians to think afresh about the period. For instance, my stress on the importance of the Lincoln legendon what people believe Lincoln said and did, whether accurate or nothelped call attention to the importance of studying the Lincoln myth. Merrill D. Petersons richly rewarding Lincoln in American Memory (1994) has carried this exploration much further, and David W. Blights Race and Reunion: the Civil War in American Memory offers a searching analysis. My essay on abolitionists evoked a good deal of criticism, but it also led other historians to treat the antislavery crusade as social movement, rather than as a morality play. Similarly, even when scholars disagreed with the conclusions in Refighting the Civil War, they went on to investigate the intellectual background of Civil War military leaders and to discuss their theories of warfare. A Whig in the White House may not have originated the recent re-evaluation of the Whig party, but it has certainly had its influence on such important studies as Gabor S. Boritts Lincoln and the Economics of the American Dream (1978). And The Radicals and Lincoln has stimulated supporters and critics to produce a veritable library of books and articles.

In this new edition I have rearranged the essays, so that they appear in a more logical order, with the new essays interspersed at the appropriate points. I was tempted to make extensive revisions in the older essays, so as to bring them up to date. For instance, just a few paragraphs added to Getting Right with Lincoln would tell how all the presidential candidates in the 2000 election invoked Lincolns blessing, and I longed to include Governor Jesse Venturas announcement that he had much in common with Abraham Lincoln since they were both wrestlers. But such rewriting would double the size of this little book. On the whole it has seemed best to let the essays stand as originally written (with minor corrections of facts and typographical errors), but I have updated the bibliographical essays.

I hope that this new edition will continue to provide interest and controversy. My objective, as always, has been to keep Civil War studies, and especially accounts of Abraham Lincoln, from degenerating into antiquarianism by asking fresh questions and by suggesting fresh answers to old questions. Because these essays represent an effort to think about Lincoln and the Civil War in a different way, they are, to some extent, experimental efforts. I have no doubt at times fallen into errors of fact or interpretation, and, like most innovators, I may have stated ideas too baldly. I regret these weaknesses, but I do not apologize for my belief that the Civil War era is the most fascinating period in American history. It ought to attract our best minds and our most imaginative writers.

David Herbert Donald

I have omitted from this edition Toward a Western Literature (written in collaboration with Frederick A. Palmer).

FOR ADA

CONTENTS

ONE

Getting Right with Lincoln

I

About no other American have so many words been written as about Abraham Lincoln. Jay Monaghans Lincoln Bibliography requires 1,079 pages merely to list the books and pamphlets published before 1939, when even the experts lost count. On library shelves the multivolumed biographies by Nicolay and Hay, Sandburg, and Randall and Current stand cover to cover with