And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle by
Jon Meacham
My rating:
5 of 5 stars
This is one of the best biographies I've ever read. Meacham captures the life, spirit, and times of Lincoln in a near perfect balance. It is not so detailed that one is overwhelmed, nor lacking in appropriate levels of depth. One aspect I really liked was how he weaves together so much of the story through newspaper accounts, speeches, letters, and other comments from contemporaneous stories. This gave the account a greater authenticity, as well as better capturing the changes in perspective of Lincoln himself and of Lincoln by others. Meacham presents an objective, clear-eyed view of Lincoln: a great and good man with many flaws. (Maybe much like the country he led and continues to inspire?)
The slow, prodding movement of Lincoln towards emancipation and equality is one of the main themes. Lincoln was always anti-slavery. But over time, his views about how to bring about its end and what to do after the ending of slavery evolved more and more. At first, he thought limiting slavery to the South, preventing its expansion would slowly kill it. But by the civil war and its end, it became clear to him that slavery had to be killed directly and immediately. At first, he was a proponent of colonialism: the emigration and resettlement of the freed black population somewhere outside the border of the US, Lincoln came to see that this wouldn't work and there was a need to come to grips with a multi-racial society--one where blacks would be equal participants in the political process. Lincoln seem to hold many of the conventional and common racist views of his day, but again over time, he sheds those views. Lincoln, in his own person, shows the way to moral growth.
Lincoln was a politician but also a statesman: a man with political ambitions, but always guided by a strong moral compass and clear set of principles. He had a grand vision for liberty and equality but knew that he couldn't merely impose it; that it had to be more gradual and incremental; that he needed to bring the country along as he had been brought along to the view of equality. This was frustrating to some of his contemporaries, like Fredrick Douglass, Charles Sumner, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton who wanted to move faster and more immediately. In retrospective, Lincoln's incremental, slow movement looks more effective. But one never knows.
The counterfactual of the direction of America, in reconstruction and beyond, had Lincoln lived is one of the most intriguing. Meacham doesn't delve into this too much -- though the discussion of Johnson and his reversals after Lincoln's murder strongly suggests that had Lincoln lived, reconstruction would have proceeded with the moral vision of equality and liberty for all. We might have avoided the Black Codes and Jim Crow. What untold greatness of America did we miss out on because Lincoln did not live to guide that vision?
I cannot recommend this book highly enough; it should be required reading in every US high school.
View all my reviews
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