Better than a saint

Furthermore, Miller insists, Lincoln balanced his bedrock opposition to slavery against his fundamental commitment to America and its form of government. Because we still live with the painful racial legacy of slavery, we subject Lincoln's feelings on that issue to particular scrutiny; we now take for granted the Union he preserved at such a terrible cost to so many Americans, including himself.

Miller's defense of the morality of Lincoln's political choices is thorough, but his portrait of Lincoln's moral formation is pretty sketchy. There's something bracingly old-fashioned, as Miller readily acknowledges, about his "picture of a human being as a rational moral agent," his emphasis on "human reason" as the basis for Lincoln's deeply felt beliefs. And this doesn't seem inappropriate in describing the life of a man who mostly lacked the weaknesses and atavistic passions that make a person a "fascinating character" to the contemporary biography reader. Unlike Coleridge, Lincoln, a lifelong teetotaling nonsmoker, never succumbed to "substances"; unlike Kennedy, he remained faithful to his (unloved) wife. Of the flaws that at times drag even the great down to the level of the rest of us, Lincoln had precious few, perhaps none at all.

Yet Lincoln was never boring or priggish, as Miller demonstrates in some of the book's most valuable passages. It was his very lack of self-righteousness, Miller argues, that made him so good at advancing his political and moral agenda. He was "moral but not moralistic," and unlike the sanctimonious (and far less effective) abolitionists of his time -- men like Charles Sumner, who remarked that you'd no sooner find a joke in one of his speeches than in the book of Revelation -- he could "condemn slavery itself ... without giving off that odor of haughty superiority and preemptory oversimplication."

Instead of resorting to blame and thunderous denunciation of slaveholders and Southerners, Lincoln treated slavery as an evil that was "the responsibility of the entire nation." He observed that "they [the Southern people] are just what we would be in their situation," and when he addressed Southerners he asked them to consider the ways they had already shown their true repugnance for the institution by stigmatizing and eventually outlawing slave trading. He learned to present his reasons for holding his beliefs clearly and earnestly, without personal attacks. Righteous indignation could be called the American national vice (certainly Miller sees it in Lincoln's contemporary critics), and Lincoln set a remarkable and challenging example by eschewing it.

Perhaps there is a touch of the cold, clear light of human reason to this approach -- it is far more persuasive to invite people to change their minds than to berate them into defensiveness, after all. But this key aspect of Lincoln's genius doesn't really seem to be the result of the wide reading and deep thought to which Miller attributes Lincoln's moral development. No doubt there were men of his time, perhaps even of his class, who read much the same books and spent as much time pondering them.

Instead, Lincoln's generosity and humility, like his wonderfully fastidious ambition and his winning sense of humor, are a matter of personality, of temperament. While Miller does an excellent job of showing us how these qualities enabled Lincoln to be "moral but not moralistic" -- a rare, almost miraculous thing that is close to the heart of his greatness -- he can't tell us where they came from.

Partly that's the result of the inherent fustiness of Miller's approach, and partly it's a consequence of the lack of information about Lincoln's early life. Drawing together a collection of scraplike anecdotes and memories, Miller tells us that the young Lincoln, when he could, refused to hunt, fish, gamble, farm, fight, swear, smoke, and that he always vigorously protested cruelty toward animals. The author notes that all of these were commonplace activities for the men around him. And yet while rummaging around for early mentors, and finding "fewer face-to-face original powerful moral influences" than one might expect, Miller never quite makes the leap to fully crediting the women in Lincoln's early life: his mother (who died when he was 9), and his beloved stepmother.

Surely this is at least partly where the young Abe acquired the gentleness, humility and inclusive spirit that played as much a role in his destiny as his ideas? Miller credits the stepmother, Sarah, with a contribution that consisted of merely "recognition that he was unusual" and "emotional sustenance," "support" rather than "guidance," as if emotions were somehow peripheral niceties to the task of forming a moral character. But isn't morality as much a matter of feeling as of thought -- can the two even be separated? Can the idea that slavery is a "monstrous injustice" be the result of dispassionate reason alone, or doesn't it also indicate an imaginative act of sympathy or empathy? Didn't emotion guide Lincoln as well as thought?

These are questions that, perhaps, given the limits of the record, Miller can't answer. (Richard Slotkin's "Abe: A Novel of the Young Lincoln" is a splendid fictional treatment of the question of how Lincoln became Lincoln that satisfies in a different, complementary way.) But his book does teach us to ask them; it clarifies what made Lincoln such a remarkable leader. Miller is right that to regard Lincoln as if he were a saint is to obscure the humanity that is the fabric of his greatness. To paraphrase Hamlet, he was a man, take him for all in all -- and we shall not look upon his like again.

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