April 20, 2020
Washington College historian Striner (Woodrow Wilson and World War I) venerates Abraham Lincoln’s “capacity for manipulation, his power to command while projecting sweet innocence” in this run-of-the-mill biography. Setting out to challenge the “wrong-headed” stereotype of Lincoln as a “slow-moving moderate who somehow achieved true greatness,” Striner highlights his antislavery stances as a one-term congressman in the late 1840s, including his support for the Wilmot Proviso, which would have prohibited slavery in territories acquired in the Mexican-American War, and his failed attempt to introduce a bill abolishing slavery in Washington, D.C. Striner also credits Lincoln with launching a “direct attack upon the racism of Douglas” in his famous 1854 “Peoria Speech” criticizing the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Though Striner succeeds in casting Lincoln as a leader who combined lofty moral values with superb political cunning, his take will be familiar even to general readers, and his awkward blend of long, undigested excerpts from Lincoln’s speeches and letters with staccato one-line paragraphs grates, as does his disparagement of the women in Lincoln’s life, including wife Mary Todd Lincoln, who “fancied herself a kind of power behind the throne,” according to Striner, and “used emotional blackmail to get her way.” This adulatory portrait contributes little to the understanding of Lincoln.