In most writing about Lincoln, the resonance is piped in from outside: the milieu from which he sprang, the social and political context in which he acted, his changing image, his enduring influence. In Donald’s biography, the resonance emanates from Lincoln himself, who left a powerful impression on everyone who ever met him. Without novelizing, Donald re-creates what it must have been like to be in Lincoln’s presence – and even in his head. We see his awkward bows (“His chin rises – his body breaks in two at the hips”), hear his tenor voice with its residual Kentucky twang. We watch the new president, who had never run any enterprise bigger than a two-man law office, trying to figure out how to be a head of state and allowing smalltime petitioners to eat up most of his day. “How am I to know you lost it in battle,” he kids a one-legged veteran before giving him a card to present to a quartermaster, “or did not lose it by a trap after getting into somebody’s orchard?” Once, the lanky, 6-foot-4 former rail-splitter picks up an ax in one hand and holds it out horizontally “without even a quiver”; more than once, he reads aloud for hours to captive audiences from both his favorite homespun humorists and Shakespeare. He’s obsessed with these lines from “Macbeth”: “Better be with the dead/ . . . Than on the torture of the mind to lie / In restless ecstasy.”
Thanks partly to Lincoln’s achievements and partly to his assassination just days after the Civil War ended, he became a secular saint, and Donald feels obliged to warn us that his portrait of Lincoln is “perhaps a bit more grainy than most.” But we already knew Lincoln had bouts of depression and a sometimes difficult marriage, and that he was thwarted and vilified during much of his presidency. And we’d inferred that you don’t get to be president without immoderate ambition, unseemly expertise at political deal making and willingness to compromise principles. The only truly discomfiting aspect of “Lincoln” is that Donald remains unintrusive and non-judgmental through to the end, when Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton announces, “Now he belongs to the Ages.” (Period. Donald doesn’t even give us the funeral.) On the one hand, we come away feeling we’ve experienced Lincoln instead of being talked at about him; on the other, we’d like to hear Donald spell out why Lincoln (as he says in his preface) was “the greatest American President.” Not that we doubt it, but all we see is Father Abraham conducting himself like a mere mortal. Then again, maybe that’s achievement enough.
