Lincoln A Life of Purpose And Power

Preface Abraham Lincoln understood the value of a well-judged disclaimer, so it may be as well to begin by stating what this book does not purport to be. It is not a personal biography of the sixteenth president of the United States. Rather, it is a study of Lincoln's political career, one which explores the sources and characteristics of his political authority, both before and after he won national recognition. To study Lincoln involves peering through a veil of myth and iconography. Any president who successfully steers a nation through a civil war can expect to be decked with the victor's laurels, but in Lincoln's case garlands for the Union's Savior and Great Emancipator have been interwoven with wreaths for its First Martyr. The nature and timing of Lincoln's death, personal and public tragedy though it was, proved perfect for his historical canonization. Legions of Lincoln scholars have recognized this, of course, and have tussled to reveal the enigmatic human being and unvarnished politician encased within the marble figure of national memory. After all, the Union's war president was scarcely a revered national hero at the time: even the loyal pressimpatient, anxious, and occasionally despairingoften questioned his wisdom and suitability for the job. Yet Lincoln still emerges, in so much that is written about him and the wartime Union, as a whollyeven unaccountablyexceptional figure. The remedy does not lie in gratuitous debunking: Lincoln was indeed a talented politician who rose beyond expectation to the supreme challenge of his office. But the key to understanding his rise to power and his achievement as president is to place him firmly into the setting in which he operated and to recognize the external sources of his authority, as much as his own endowments. In mid-nineteenth-century America, the world's first mass participatory democracy, political success derived from the effective interplay of three elements: personal drive, the force of public opinion, and the organizing machinery of the political party and other networks of communication. During Lincoln's career as a peacetime politician and then as the only United States president to face the challenge of a civil war, his great achievement was to set ambitious but realizable political goals; to fathom the thinking of ordinary citizens and to reach out to them with uncommon assurance; and to hone his impressive skills as a manager of the often unstable and fractious elements that made up the political parties to which he belonged. In what follows I have given particular emphasis to each of these elements, but within a largely narrative framework which recognizes that Lincoln's words and actions, and those for whom they were intended, need to be understood within specific and changing contexts. It seemed to many who watched Lincoln at first hand in Illinois and Washington that his special talent lay in his feel for opinion and in establishing rapport with the public at large. One young Springfield lawyer, convinced that Lincoln was privately "a radicalfanatically so," deemed that his strength lay in his never going "beyond the People." For George Baker, a clerk in the State Department, the president's success "consisted very much in the confidence and respect he won from the people. Other wiser, greater and as good men might not have won this and then all would have been lost in some of our great crises." But public opinion in Illinois and the wider Union comprised many ideological and cultural strands. Understanding "the people" meant comprehending pluralism. A common theme in what historians have written about Lincoln is the skill with which he made himself attractive, or at least indispensaCarwardine, Richard is the author of 'Lincoln A Life of Purpose And Power', published 2007 under ISBN 9781400096022 and ISBN 1400096022.