The Presidency of Abraham Lincoln

Book Review

by 'tamerlane'


The Presidency of Abraham Lincoln
by Phillip Shaw Paludan
University of Kansas Press, 1994


A scholarly and insightful overview of Lincoln's administration and leadership style, Phillip Shaw Paludan's The Presidency of Abraham Lincoln offers an enlightening analysis of the workings of Lincoln's mind while bringing to life the events and personalities that surrounded the president. Paludan's prose is lucid, at times dense with detail but never flounders in minutia.

Paludan tackles the material chronologically, but takes a refreshing thematic approach to each of the 16 chapters, for example: "Forging the Resources of War: January to February 1862"; "Cabinet Crisis: December 1862" ; "Emancipation and the Limits of Dissent: January to June 1863."

We see Lincoln balancing conflicting ideals, juggling crises, and managing personnel for maximum effect. Military events are covered in a broad but accurate brush, and Paludan places them in the context of the myriad other concerns facing Lincoln: midterm elections, intra-party rivalries, the threat of foreign intervention, fostering economic growth and expansion. Among a cacophony of competing voices, and with the war both as a backdrop and the catalyst, Lincoln turned his party's vision of a new America into a new version of America:

"The elections of 1863 asked voters how they felt about entering their future so quickly.... When Democrats offered the old world in 1863, the large majority responded that they were ready to accept a new day."

Paludan's analysis of the evolution and impact of the Emancipation Proclamation is the clearest and most profound ever encountered. We are given both the broad political, cultural, military, and constitutional milieu, and a probing analysis of the president's thought process:

"Lincoln did not, as some charged, free the slaves only in places where he could not reach them; he freed the slaves in the only place he could legally reach them - in places that he ruled under presidential war powers. The language of the great deed had to be a lawyer's language because Lincoln was taking legal action. He was placing the great ideal of freedom within the constitutional fabric - the only place that it could have life in a constitutional republic."

Paludan presents us with a visionary president who successfully melded the competing desires of radical abolition and conservative preservation of the Constitution, by defining it as a document of Liberty. "An older idea of liberty from government was being transformed into a vision of liberty because of government." We also see how Lincoln quickly and deftly learned from his mistakes: to thwart discord among his cabinet; or, after indulging the inert McClellan with excessive patience, he wasted little time on Burnside and Hooker.

Delegating without ever relinquishing ultimate authority, letting actors and events play out until his intervention was required, Lincoln steered the nation through its greatest peril, while never once losing sight of its founding principles.

(c) 2009 by 'tamerlane.' All rights reserved.