President Lincoln
by , with Preface and Conclusion by William H.
Townsend
[Bobbs-Merrill, 2 vols., $7.50]
DR. BARTON’S subject, Lincoln as President of the United States during the Civil War, was one of the few remaining great opportunities for the American historian. Dr. Barton unfortunately was not the best man for the enterprise. He devoted his life to the study of Lincoln, but he was primarily interested in personality — in the human figure, the development of Lincoln’s mind, the quality of his thoughts, the mysterious deepening of his nature. His laborious researches have been invaluable to biography, both in the establishment of fact and in the destruction of legend. But tlie present work, perhaps because it was unfinished before Dr. Barton’s death, does not do justice to the most critical Presidency in our history.
The book, in fact, hardly justifies its title. It is a military history of the Civil War interspersed with anecdotes of personality and occasional brief summaries of the social scene in Washington and Richmond. It is an acceptable outline for superficial readers, but little more. The military history is conventional, a running narrative which fails to take into account most modern research and which fails to consider the economics and the grand strategy of the war. The anecdotes are familiar to nearly everyone, and the social background is derived chiefly from Gideon Welles and J. B. Jones.
Most of the important problems that a discussion of Lincoln as President should face are ignored. We are not given an adequate statement, even, of the enormously complex question of foreign relations. The narrative of the Trent affair omits everything but the dramatic aspects. The customary accounts of the British ironclads and the French proposal for arbitration appear, but no statement, of the problems involved, no analysis of the solutions, and, more surprisingly, no estimate of Lincoln’s relationship to them are made. Chase is commended for his financial policy and we are told that Lincoln discussed finance with him, but no critical analysis of that policy is made and one who wonders what Lincoln had to do with it is left as ignorant as before. Again, Dr. Barton does not even mention the Homestead Act or the two acts relating to the Union Pacific Railroad — and one who asserted that these were, finally, more important than Emancipation could not easily he controverted. The most catastrophic omission is the much-needed study of Lincoln as a politician — it will he the central occupation in the eventual settlement of Dr. Barton’s theme. Of what did Lincoln’s genius for the management of men consist, and by what use of it was he able to hold together a disintegrating nation and make it fight a victorious war? That, in one question, is what the historian, the philosopher, and the general reader want to know, and Dr. Barton does not even phrase it.
BERNARD DEVOTO