12 SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 15, 2020OF THE 16,000 BOOKSproduced about Abra-
ham Lincoln since his death 155 years ago,
not one, in the view of the historian and bi-
ographer David S. Reynolds, fits the defini-
tion of a “full-scale cultural biography.”
Reynolds, the author or editor of 16 books
on 19th-century America, has set out to fill
that void with “Abe: Abraham Lincoln in
His Times,” a prodigious and lucidly ren-
dered exposition of the character and
thought of the 16th president as gleaned
through the prism of the cultural and social
forces swirling through America during
his lifetime.
More character study than narrative bi-
ography, this Lincoln portrait, fully 932
pages of text, goes further than most previ-
ous studies in probing the complexities
and nuances of the man: his tastes, likes,
dislikes, the quality of his thinking, the evo-
lution of his ideas — all shaped and molded
by the society around him. At the same
time, Reynolds succumbs to a pitfall in
drawing conclusions about how particular
Lincoln experiences influenced his later
thoughts and actions when no evidence for
such causal effects is discernible. The au-
thor employs speculative language abun-
dantly, as when he writes within one three-
page section: “must have been also sad-
dened by,” “could not but have been moved
by,” “could have exposed him to,” “must
have also been aware” and “appears to
have been influenced.”
It was a raucous and turbulent culture
that greeted Lincoln’s birth in 1809, with a
sentimental quality, certainly, but also
“ablaze with sensationalism, violence and
zany humor” as well as “popular exhibits
full of strange, freakish images.” In tracing
the multiple strains of American culture,
Reynolds explores Puritan and Southern
Cavalier sensibilities, frontier mores, alco-
hol consumption and the temperance
movement, the Baptist Church, Quaker-
ism, frontier humor, popular music, rural
carnivals and P. T. Barnum, among other
cultural phenomena.
Lincoln embraced nearly all of it, Reyn-
olds writes, “in an extraordinarily wide-
ranging manner.” Indeed, he adds, Lincoln
ultimately was able to redefine democracy
“precisely because he had experienced
culture in all its dimensions — from high to
low, sacred to profane, conservative to rad-
ical, sentimental to subversive.”
In portraying Lincoln, Reynolds exam-
ines an intellectual trait that guided this
frontier lawyer throughout most of his life
and became a hallmark of his presidency
(and probably his greatness) — his ability
to free himself from dogma and synthesize
seemingly divergent concepts into a coher-
ent whole. Take, for example, Lincoln’s
view of his own ancestry — New England
Puritan on his father’s side; Southern Cav-
alier on his mother’s. The two regional sen-
sibilities became so disparate that
The New York Herald once de-
clared, “There is nothing in com-
mon between them but hate.” And
yet Lincoln managed to mesh
those sensibilities through what
Reynolds calls “a unique fusion of
cultural traits,” which yielded a vi-
sion of national unity and generat-
ed a perception that he repre-
sented “a bridge across the Puri-
tan-Cavalier gulf.”
Lincoln also managed to recon-
cile his “rationalist impulse” with
more abstract thinking. He de-
voured and mastered all of Eu-
clid’s geometric propositions, for
example, during his days as an
itinerant lawyer on the Illinois
court circuit; Reynolds believes
Euclid’s propositions about equal
angles, equal sides and equal de-
grees actually combined with Lin-
coln’s rationalist outlook to help
shape his views on human equal-
ity.
But another of Lincoln’s literary
companions on the circuit was Ed-
gar Allan Poe, who stirred Lin-
coln’s rationalist side with his elab-
orate tales of ratiocination but also
saw limitations in the process of
reason, as explained with particu-
lar acuity by Poe’s fictional detec-
tive, C. Auguste Dupin, in the tale
“The Purloined Letter.” As Reyn-
olds points out, in the story Dupin
dismisses mathematics as a
means of adducing abstract truths
about morals or human motiva-
tion. “Mathematical axioms are
not axioms of general truth,”
Dupin says, to which Reynolds
adds: “On this point Poe trumped
Euclid.”
Lincoln’s aim, Reynolds says, was to find
a “balance between reason and passion.”
He consequently positioned himself al-
most always upon a solid middle ground.
Though he loathed slavery, he never joined
such abolitionists as the radical William
Lloyd Garrison or even New York’s more
moderate William Seward in criticizing the
Constitution as a flawed document be-
cause it sanctioned slavery in the original
states.
Instead, Lincoln hewed to an “antislav-
ery constitutionalism” that anticipated the
eventual end of bondage by prohibiting itsspread into new American territories.
Thus did he anchor his outlook firmly
“within the boundaries of the American
system.” As Congressman Lincoln said in
1848, “In the West, we consider the Union
our ALL.”
One could argue, based on Reynolds’s
study, that this balance broke down as Lin-
coln and the country entered the vortex of
war after the 1860 election. The crux of the
matter was the concept of the “higher law,”
described by Reynolds as “the law of mo-rality and justice that transcends human
law, including what some regarded as pro-
slavery passages in the Constitution.” The
higher law was embraced by Northern
radicals who argued that man’s law lacked
the force to address the moral blot of slav-
ery. Garrison publicly burned the Constitu-
tion to make that point, and it guided John
Brown in his murderous attack on a pro-
slavery family at Pottawatomie Creek dur-
ing the 1856 “Bleeding Kansas” days and in
his raid on Harpers Ferry three years later
to initiate a Southern slave revolt.
Lincoln rejected the higher law, declar-ing at one point that “insofar as it may at-
tempt to foment a disobedience to the Con-
stitution, or to the constitutional laws of
the country, it has my unqualified con-
demnation.” Reynolds writes that Lincoln
saw the higher law as a potentially de-
stabilizing concept because it could be “ap-
propriated by anyone to defend any posi-
tion.”
As for Brown, even as prominent liter-
ary figures like Ralph Waldo Emerson and
Henry David Thoreau hailed him as “that
new saint” and “the clearest light
that shines on this land,” Lincoln
kept his distance and sought to
balance a few words about
Brown’s “great courage” and “rare
unselfishness” with a stern admo-
nition that those traits “cannot ex-
cuse violence, bloodshed and trea-
son.”
And yet Reynolds identifies Lin-
coln ultimately with the higher
law, notwithstanding his early
“condemnation.” He bases this
particularly on Lincoln’s embrace
of the equality language of the
Declaration of Independence,
which he viewed as “the most
powerful moral law America had
produced,” as Reynolds puts it,
and whose spirit, in Lincoln’s view,
was “inherent in the Constitution.”
Certainly this was a profound ele-
ment of Lincoln’s thinking. The
historian Garry Wills has called
Lincoln’s elevation of the Declara-
tion at Gettysburg “one of the
most daring acts of open-air
sleight of hand ever witnessed by
the unsuspecting.” But Lincoln
never suggested the principles of
that hallowed language should be
promulgated through any extra-
constitutional means or, later, any
actions that went beyond the rec-
ognized laws of war.
Reynolds may be on less solid
ground when he seeks to portray
Lincoln as an ultimate admirer of
John Brown — not of his lawless-
ness, of course, but of his “meth-
ods,” which by 1864 seemed to Lin-
coln “desirable and defensible.”
Reynolds adds that by combining
his Emancipation policies with his
doctrine of “hard war” to break
the South, “Lincoln had already estab-
lished a cultural atmosphere friendly to the
memory of John Brown.”
The author of a hagiographic Brown bi-
ography, Reynolds marshals his evidence
for Lincoln’s affinity for Brown with his
characteristic thoroughness. But in the
end he doesn’t make a definitive case that
Lincoln adopted a view of Brown that fit
those of Emerson and Thoreau (or Reyn-
olds). Ultimately he can’t get around the
fact that Lincoln was a saintly genius while
Brown was a murderer, a traitor and a
madman. 0More Than Just Honest
Examining the 16th president through his period’s cultural and social forces.
By ROBERT W. MERRY
ABE
Abraham Lincoln in His Times
By David S. Reynolds
Illustrated. 1,088 pp. Penguin Press. $45.
The melancholy Abraham Lincoln.IMAGE FROM THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESSROBERT W. MERRY,a former Washington corre-
spondent for The Wall Street Journal and the
chief executive of Congressional Quarterly, is
the author of biographies of James K. Polk
and William McKinley.