Is there room for yet another biography of Abraham Lincoln? Of course there is, especially if the biographer in question is as deft and insightful as Jon Meacham.
And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle by Jon Meacham (676 pages, Random House, 2022)
Is there room for yet another biography of Abraham Lincoln? Of course there is. There always is. Jon Meacham surely thought so, and he was surely right to think so. No matter the era or the moment, there will always be a place for a new Lincoln biography—especially if the biographer in question is as deft and insightful as Mr. Meacham.
Put simply, this is a great read about a great man. It is also a heavily political book about a highly political figure. And yet there are more than a few glimpses of Lincoln, the son and husband, Lincoln the father and friend, as well as Lincoln the searcher (for ultimate truths) and Lincoln the struggler (whether with his own demons or against his political opponents or for the greater causes of somehow ending slavery and preserving the Union).
The title is a curious one, perhaps even a mysterious one. What was the “light,” and just when—and about what—was Lincoln finally enLIGHTened? That leaves the “struggle.” Was it the country’s struggle or Lincoln’s—or some combination of the two?
To be sure, there were deep religious rumblings within Lincoln. And there are more than occasional religious ruminations in these pages. But at base Lincoln was a political animal, who never forgot and never denied that he was a politician. It’s also the case that he never regretted having chosen to enter the world of politics as a candidate for office.
What’s also undeniable is that Lincoln was a politician of towering, and at times even consuming, ambition. He understood this; his law partner William Herndon realized this; and this biographer, Jon Meacham, emphasizes this.
At the same time, the political Lincoln never placed the pursuit of his ambitions above his pursuit of principle and of the common good as he understood both. At the heart of that understanding were two additional pursuits which came into direct conflict in 1861. One was his commitment to bringing about the end of chattel slavery in the United States. The other was preserving a united United States as a “more perfect union.”
A man of principle as well as a politician, Lincoln was anti-slavery to his core. A man of ambition as well as an opponent of slavery, he envisioned playing a crucial role in putting what many called the “peculiar institution” on the road to what he hoped would be “ultimate extinction.”
A Whig for better than two decades, Lincoln became a Republican almost immediately after the party’s creation in 1854. An opponent of slave expansion following the Mexican War, Lincoln was an advocate of “free soil” well before that became the official position of his new party. Confining slavery to the existing slave states rather than abolishing slavery was the immediate goal of Lincoln and the Republican party. Letting it live for the time being, while awaiting its “ultimate extinction,” was the most prudent—and principled—political course.
When might that be, he would sometimes be asked. Perhaps 1900, was his general answer.
At the time Lincoln, the anti-slavery politician, was generally criticized by hardcore abolitionists. Jon Meacham has no quarrel with the abolitionists no matter the hardness or softness of their core. But he is not about to call Lincoln on the carpet for not numbering himself as one of them. Each had a role to play. Therefore, Mr. Meacham is content to defend both, while at the same time defending Lincoln, the politician, who was also Lincoln, the non-abolitionist anti-slaveryite.
Then there was also Lincoln, the colonizer. Mr. Meacham does not so much defend this Lincoln as explain him. Lincoln, the politician, thought that his anti-slaveryism would sell better among skeptical white northerners, if they believed that their president seemed to prefer—or at least anticipate—that freed former slaves would be colonized in Africa.
Lincoln actually borrowed the colonization idea from his political hero, Henry Clay. A colonizer for conservative reasons, Clay believed that liberated slave would have a better chance to flourish in Africa where they would be “evangels of the west.” Lincoln seems to have essentially agreed.
Mr. Meacham, in turn, is essentially silent about that agreement. He neither criticizes it nor endorses it, content as he is to portray his subject as a cautiously wise, and yet highly principled, political leader. What seems safe to conclude is that Lincoln was much more committed to putting slavery on the road to “ultimate extinction” than he was to putting former slaves on ships to send them to Africa.
In general, the author is reluctant to tackle Lincoln from the left or the right. He refuses to label Lincoln a racist for publicly endorsing colonization. At the same time he refuses to take Lincoln to task for any of his pre-progressive era, big government wartime presidential actions. Mr. Meacham’s Lincoln always appears to be intent on looking backward to the Declaration of Independence rather than forward to any future day of an all-powerful federal government accompanied by an all-powerful presidency.
To be sure, such acts as President Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus violated the Constitution. And the Constitution, to Lincoln was the “frame of silver” around the “apple of gold” that was the Declaration of Independence. Still, Lincoln did not hesitate to “deploy executive power” against those who would “undermine it.”
Mr. Meacham, in turn, is hesitant to criticize Lincoln for his lack of hesitation in this arena. So was poet James Russell Lowell at the time: “Mr. Lincoln probably thought it more convenient… to have a country left without a constitution, than a constitution without a country.” The fair conclusion seems to be that Lincoln, Lowell, and Meacham all believed that once victory had been secured, once slavery had ended, and once the Union had been preserved, the president would see to it that full constitutional government would be restored.
When it comes to unconditional, open praise for Lincoln, the author trains his historian’s eye on three things: Lincoln’s skillfulness as a political leader, his laser-like, yet cautiously and carefully articulated commitment to ridding the country of slavery, and his growth before and especially during his presidency.
“If slavery is not wrong, then nothing is wrong,” was always at the front of Lincoln’s mind. Not far behind was his desire to acquire and exercise political power in order to begin to do what he could to rid his country of this wrong. If Lincoln was not an abolitionist, it’s also true that he was not a johnny-come-lately to the general issue of slavery and to the specific issue of slave expansion.
That leaves this matter of Lincoln’s growth. Today a politician’s growth usually refers to a political journey from right to left. That’s not what Jon Meacham has in mind. Lincoln’s growth was in a spiritual, rather than political direction. A man of Christian belief himself, the author repeatedly brings the reader back to Lincoln’s religious journey. In doing so, he occasionally employs that very word “growth” to capture what he thinks must have been going on in Lincoln’s mind.
And yet Mr. Meacham makes no claim to having somehow divined exactly what it was that was going on in that mind. For that matter, he concedes that we will never really know whether Lincoln ever knew what he truly believed.
What is clear to Mr. Meacham is that Lincoln had come to believe that the world was not random and that morality could not be divorced from politics. The latter conviction only intensified his commitment to end slavery.
In any case, in the author’s mind, Lincoln’s “theological quest” was a terribly important one during the final decade of his life and especially during his presidency. That quest unquestionably helped Lincoln “steel” himself and his party during the secessionist winter of 1860-1861, when pressure was building on the president-elect to compromise on free soil by restoring some version of the Missouri Compromise. Lincoln refused, knowing that such a compromise would have made a mockery of his campaign pledge to contain slavery within the existing slave states rather than let it spread anywhere else. But he also held that line because, as Mr. Meacham tells us, the first Republican president thought it was the “right, just and morally sound thing to do.”
It was also true that Lincoln had not taken secessionist sentiment very seriously. Here he made one of his few political misjudgments. Still, it’s not at all likely that he would have altered his no-compromise commitment had be believed that secession was imminent or at all inevitable.
Such political misjudgments were rare. But the fact that they occurred at all helped keep Lincoln grounded. “I may not be a great man,” he once remarked to someone Mr. Meacham neither names nor cites, “and perhaps it is better that this is so—for it makes me rely upon One who is great and who has the wisdom and the power to lead us safely through this great trial.”
His awareness of the “One,” or of what he occasionally called “Providence,” only grew during his country’s great trial. That growth could never have been more apparent than in the words of the political sermon that was Lincoln’s second inaugural address.
As Mr. Meacham puts it, “Lincoln had come to believe that the Civil War might well be a divine punishment… for a national sin.” Not yet finished, he adds that Lincoln’s contention was a “startling one from an American president. God was exacting blood vengeance for the sin of human enslavement in a specific place and a specific time.”
Clearly, Lincoln had grown. The great black abolitionist, Frederick Douglass very much agreed. The two men met briefly later that same early March day. Lincoln asked Douglass what he thought of the speech. Douglass replied, “Mr. Lincoln, that was a sacred effort.” Jon Meacham very much agrees.
Here we are in 2023. The country in many ways is more divided that we were in 1860. Are we headed toward some sort of a break up, whether peaceful or otherwise? And if so, where might we be on that uncharted road? Are we closer to, say, the early 1830s when a young Abraham Lincoln was just beginning to find his place in the world. Or are we on the verge of 1860 when Lincoln was on the verge of winning the presidency? Or are we either somewhere in between or nowhere close to either one? No one know, and no one can know.
Jon Meacham tries to stand above the current fray as he seeks to become our next David McCullough. Having authored a number of popular histories, he claims to be neither a Republican nor a Democrat. Instead, as he informed a recent PBS audience, he simply favors those political leaders who favor the “common good,” whatever that is, and opposes political extremism, whatever that is.
There were moments when he did get more specific. At one point he praised the “courage” of Liz Cheney, and at another point he labeled “Christian nationalists” as “dangerous.” In other words, he got specific enough to let his listeners know that he did not regard the current Republican party as the party of Abraham Lincoln. One wonders, however, if an extremist on the order of one Abraham Lincoln would agree.
While the title and subtitle of this very good book are themselves quite vague, one also wonders just where the search for light would take an ambitious politician today. And just what is the nature of the current struggle? Would a budding Lincoln be saying to himself, “if abortion isn’t wrong, then nothing is wrong?” Would that same Lincoln attack the race-based policies of his Democratic opponent? Would he harken back to the sense of equality as expressed in the Declaration of Independence rather than endorse the new goal of equity as applied to matters economic and racial? And would he have grown along the way in the manner and way that Lincoln himself did?
If so, a Jon Meacham might be inclined to think that such a candidate would be worth supporting and might one day be worthy of chronicling. But for the time being he is apparently content to look elsewhere for potential leaders to champion and for possible subjects to explore.
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The featured image is a photograph of Abraham Lincoln taken by Alexander Gardner on November 8, 1863, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.