And There Was Light, Jon Meacham. Random House (ISBN: 9780553393965), 2022.
Summary: The convictions shaping Lincoln’s public life including his opposition to slavery, the importance of the union, and his belief in providence.
One of the things I’ve appreciated about the writing of Jon Meacham is that he focuses on the formative influences, qualities of character, and deeply held convictions of his subjects. And this what sets his biography of Lincoln apart from the many other fine biographies of the sixteenth president.
Of course he traces the life of Lincoln from his humble upbringings, his law career, early political life, his rise in Republican circles, and his war-marred presidency and its tragic end. Two formative influences stand out. One is his step-mother Sarah, who encouraged his hunger for books and brought order to a struggling household. The other was Mary Todd Lincoln, his wife, who wanted to marry the man “who had the best prospects of being president.” She was at his side in all his political endeavors, the archetypal political spouse.
What she recognized was an ambitious man with a greatness of vision. The Declaration of Independence, even more than the Constitution, shaped him. It’s ringing words, “all men are created equal” form a bedrock conviction in Lincoln. Consequently, he could not envision a good society as one where one man enslaved and lived off the work of another.
Yet he was a also a savvy politician with an acute sense of the possible. This explained his pragmatic approach of only trying to stop the spread of slavery. Preserving the Union, as far as possible, was uppermost in his priorities as President. This frustrated extreme abolitionists, including Frederick Douglass, who eventually reached a very different appraisal. An example of that sense of timing was the Emancipation Proclamation, planned for some time, but only proclaimed after victory at Antietam.
Closely tied to his intuitive sense of was his deep sense of feeling and empathy. Thus, he would struggle with the black bear of depression and would deeply grieve his lost son. Also, he was patient and gentle with a shrewish and increasingly unstable Mary. These same qualities were in evidence when he visited wounded soldiers in field hospitals.
Finally, though not a conventional Christian, Lincoln had a deep conviction of the providence of God in human affairs. He understood he could not bend or appropriate God’s will to his ends. The war would last as long as God willed, though this didn’t prevent him from looking for generals who would fight. He understood grace and forgiveness and had no intent to punish the South at war’s end. One wonders how different Reconstruction might have been were it not for Wilkes’ bullet.
One cannot, in an election year, help but think about presidential character. In the case of Lincoln, Meacham portrays a Lincoln with not only the requisite political skills, savvy, and ambition. He also had depths of character, breadth of vision and spiritual underpinnings to meet the challenges of the moment. Do we want that in those we entrust to our highest office? And if we do not, what does this say of us as a people?
