Given the everlasting cascade of books about Abraham Lincoln, is anything at all left to be said? Perhaps. We sometimes overlook Lincoln’s pivotal role as a cause—or at least a provocation—of the war. Without his election, would hostilities have broken out? A hypothetical question, of course, but it is imaginable, if unlikely, that with a different election outcome in 1860 the secessionist fever might have abated—if (a big if) the abolitionists had quieted down. It might even have dawned on the South Carolina fireeaters that paid labor is more efficient than slave labor, as was congruent with the spirit of the age. But historical might-have-beens are sterile, and Michael Burlingame wastes little time on them.

Jefferson Davis

Newscom

No one, to turn to historical reality, has ever fully explained Lincoln’s evangelical resolve to save the Union at any cost, unless it was his old congressional colleague Alexander Stephens, who observed that Lincoln’s dedication to the Union approached “religious mysticism.” Lincoln himself obviously meant it when he spoke of the American democratic union as “the last, best hope of earth.” If it perished, the cynics who saw democracy as mob rule would be vindicated. Burlingame adds substantially to this mystery.

One persistent and fascinating question is how a rough-hewn plainsman, sprung as he himself said (in quoting Thomas Gray) from “the short and simple annals of the poor,” attained surpassing strength, wit, and eloquence. Lincoln’s biographers, including many of the best, have viewed his political and spiritual maturation as a seamless process in which hidden strengths were intimated early, had there been wit to detect them.