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ABRAHAM LINCOLN, December 1, 1862

Preface

EVER SINCE his death a century and a half ago, Abraham Lincoln has provided a lens through which we Americans examine ourselves. As an icon embodying the society’s core values and myths—self-made man, frontier hero, liberator of the slaves—he exerts a unique hold on our historical imagination. Lincoln has been described as a consummate moralist and a shrewd political operator, a lifelong foe of slavery and an inveterate racist. Politicians from conservatives to communists, civil rights activists to segregationists, and members of almost every Protestant denomination as well as nonbelievers, have claimed him as their own. As early as 1870, the Memorial Lincoln Bibliography listing books, eulogies, sermons, and ephemera ran to 175 pages.1 Today the Lincoln literature comprises many thousands of works. In the last decade, his psychology, marriage, law career, political practices, literary style, racial attitudes, and every one of his major speeches have been subjected to minute examination. There are even books about the myths and hoaxes surrounding Lincoln.

In a way we have found it too easy to understand Lincoln. We think we know him, because in looking at Lincoln we are really discovering ourselves. Hence, he seems perennially relevant; he is always our contemporary. And, of course, issues of Lincoln’s era such as the enduring legacy of slavery, the nature of presidential leadership, the relationship between morality and politics, and the definition of American nationality and citizenship remain as urgent today as when he lived. In his own time, however, people found Lincoln in many ways enigmatic. A self-controlled, intensely private man, he seldom disclosed his innermost thoughts, even to close friends. David Davis, who knew Lincoln well, described him as “the most reticent, secretive man I ever saw or expect to see.” Lincoln could be gregarious and outgoing, but he did not reveal himself to others. “No man can tell by any conversation with the president (and he is very free in talk) whether he means what he says, or designs only to extract ideas,” wrote one government employee who spoke with Lincoln frequently during the Civil War.2

Lincoln jotted down notes and private musings on public issues, but he kept no diary and wrote few personal letters. Records of the law cases in which Lincoln participated have recently become available in digital form, but The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln runs to a mere eight volumes plus two thin supplements and consists mostly of speeches and wartime directives. By contrast, the Papers of Thomas Jefferson consists of forty volumes to date and has only reached the first year of Jefferson’s presidency. To fill in the gaps in the historical record, many writers rely on recollections of Lincoln’s words related long after they were spoken and often of dubious reliability. Once Lincoln died, of course, such memories were filtered through his apotheosis as the Great Emancipator. For this reason, I have preferred in the chapters that follow to cite Lincoln’s words as recalled by others only if they were recorded at the time they were spoken. Later recollections are clearly identified as such.3

In some ways, the private Lincoln will forever remain elusive; to plumb his thoughts we must rely on his actions and his public letters and addresses. Fortunately, Lincoln not only had a command of the English language matched, among presidents, only by Jefferson but also was a deliberate and meticulous writer who chose his words with extreme care.4 Like any politician, he said things for strategic reasons. Moreover, his views changed over time. Yet at each point in his career his public statements revealed a consistency that allows us to take him at his word.

This book traces the evolution of Lincoln’s ideas and policies about slavery from his early life through his career in the Illinois legislature in the 1830s, his term in Congress in the 1840s, his emergence as a