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Lincoln's Ambition Shines Through

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By ROGER K. MILLER

The Tampa Tribune

Published: December 21, 2008

"The Lincoln Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Legacy From 1860 to Now," edited by Harold Holzer (Library of America, $40)

What "If the South Had Won the Civil War" as MacKinlay Kantor speculated in his short 1961 novel of that title, an excerpt from which appears in "The Lincoln Anthology." The questions Kantor raised and the alternative viewpoint he brought to that fiction are the sort of things that make the anthology valuable to the general reader.

To many if not most Americans, Abraham Lincoln and his achievements are bathed in a golden mist of myth and sentiment. Several of the writers in "The Lincoln Anthology," edited by Lincoln expert Harold Holzer and timed for the 200th anniversary of the 16th president's birth, send a brisk wind clearing away the mist, giving us a better look at the realities.

Kantor, for instance, imagines Lincoln not in the conventional view as a noble leader of the righteous, but as a humbled "prisoner of State" of the Confederacy, an emasculation, Holzer says, "designed to evoke horror in readers accustomed" to seeing him "endowed with reassuring powers of tenacity and resistance."

Holzer calls this anthology a conversation held - borrowing Lincoln's own words - across "all distances of time and of space," with the dozens of journalists, biographers, satirists, essayists, novelists, clergymen, poets, playwrights, historians, memoirists and statesmen collected herein; their varying ideas provide useful adjustments to our understanding of what is probably our most beloved president.

He supplies helpful introductions both to the entire volume and to each individual entry. In the general introduction he sums up the shifting general perceptions of Lincoln across time.

Of course, there always were dissenters to the conventional view of any particular era. The vision advanced by Walt Whitman (liberally quoted here) of "Lincoln the sublime" was fiercely opposed by Lincoln's onetime law partner and dedicated biographer William Herndon. He emphasized not piety and sentimentality, but Lincoln's ambition, lack of orthodox religious belief and love of Ann Rutledge.

Likewise, as early as 1876, the former slave and black abolitionist, Frederick Douglass, boldly stated that Lincoln "was preeminently the white man's President, entirely devoted to the welfare of white men"; he had not been opposed to slavery, but to the extension of slavery. Holzer maintains that no speech on Lincoln and race, before or since, has been as provocative, influential or insightful as this one.

The most searing iconoclasm came in the second half of the 20th century with critic Edmund Wilson's "Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War" (1962). Extremely influential yet hotly disputed, this nevertheless well-documented and well-argued analysis saw Lincoln as more tyrant than saint. Wilson rejects Carl Sandburg's "romantic and sentimental rubbish," emphasizing instead Lincoln's ambition, sense of destiny and personal superiority, white-supremacist outlook and waffling (or worse) on abolition.

Roger K. Miller, a novelist and freelance writer and editor, writes the blog graustark.blogspot.com.

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