It probably came with a recognition that Lincoln as the president of a democracy engaged in a civil war managed to both prosecute a war and preside over a bitterly factionalized country with astounding success.
It’s really only been in the relatively recent past-maybe 20 years, maybe less-that there has been a coalescing of opinion around Abraham Lincoln as the greatest President the United States has ever had. Much more than a political biography, Lincoln seats us behind the desk of a President who was both a master of ambiguity and expediency and a great moral leader, as he makes the decisions that preserved the Union and shaped modern America. And he depicts a man who was basically passive by nature, yet ambitious enough to take enormous risks and overcome repeated defeats.
He reveals the development of the future President's character and shows how Lincoln's enormous capacity for growth enabled one of the least experienced men ever elected to high office to become a giant in the annals of American politics. In the bestselling tradition of Truman, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer David Herbert Donald offers a new classic in American history and biography - a masterly account of how one man's extraordinary political acumen steered the Union to victory in the Civil War, and of how his soaring rhetoric gave meaning to that agonizing struggle for nationhood and equality.ĭonald spent 50 years studying Lincoln tracing his rise from humble origins to the pinnacle of the presidency.
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