Book Review - Lincoln

My latest finished book is Lincoln, by David Herbert Donald. This is a LONG book. It's supposed to be the authoritative biography on Abraham Lincoln, and I don't think this book could have been much more thorough, hence its length.

For the most part I enjoyed this book. I read through his childhood, but found myself skipping a lot of the pages dealing with his adult law practice and all the cases he argued. I was most interested in his presidency. Once I got there I also skipped a lot of the pages about the politics of the mid-19th century. His relationship with his cabinet, what the other parties were saying about him, how he dealt with Congress.....all things I found myself just thumbing through. You'd think I'd be more interested in those things, being a political science major and all, but I found them dry. What I gravitated towards and was most interested in was the war, and how he dealt with it. I'm an unabashed war history buff, but history in general interests me. I was also very interested in his personal relationships with his wife and children.

Here are the most interesting things I learned:

- He was a very "hands off" kind of leader, almost to the point of letting people walk over him. He would give very earnest suggestions to his generals, but go to great pains to let them know he wasn't telling them how to do their jobs. He picked a very politically diverse cabinet, a few members of which were anything but loyal to his policies. He didn't press his generals when they refused to divulge their military plans, even when things were going badly for the Union. He set aside 2-4 hours of his day, everyday, to entertaining visitors who wanted anything from the honor of shaking his hand to an appointment to some office or position. Much of this was a complete waste of his time but he did it anyway.

- He was a very involved father, but only later in life after he stopped traveling the court circuit. He would often babysit for his wife, a very unusual practice for his day, and one which led him to be labled "hen pecked" by many.

- He had surprisingly little security to protect him. This was common for presidents back then. He would sometimes have nothing more than one bodyguard, and sometimes not even that, accompanying him as he walked through Washington, traveled, or took carriage rides. It would have been extremely easy to assassinate him, as John Wilkes Booth discovered.

- He initially favored deporting black slaves to some country in the Carribean due to a widely held view that blacks and whites could never live peacefully in the same country if they were freed. He dropped this idea later after it became clear that the black community was not going to buy it.

- While a Christian, he did not associate himself with any particular church, and disliked organized religion. At the beginning of his life he was more of a deist, but came to have more faith in the God of the Bible after his son Willie died.

More than anything, this book helped to make Abraham more human to me. I always held him on such a pedestal, and in essence saw him as infallible. While I still admire the man greatly, this book helped demonstrate his weaknesses, fears, and shortcomings (i.e. - his human qualities) of which I knew little.

My next book is The First American, which is a biography on Benjamin Franklin my mother gave me. I'm only 20 pages into it, but it promises to be a good one.