With Malice Toward None

Ever since I went to the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library Museum, I've wanted to read a biography of Abraham Lincoln. Considering he is one of the most written-about figures in history ever, it was hard to pick just one biography to read. I decided to read With Malice Toward None, by Stephen B. Oates.

I think the thing about Abraham Lincoln that stood out the most to me, as he was portrayed in this biography, is how Lincoln didn't pop out of the womb as the great president and leader that we think of him as. According to this biography, it seems as if he was actually a rather poor leader at first, who was thrust into the presidency right as the country was going to war and had to learn how to take on the reigns of strong leadership while he was in office.

It turns out that, although we think with nostalgia on the log cabin that Lincoln was born in, because it symbolizes just how far an American can come, Lincoln himself seemed to be ashamed of that part of his past, and wasn't as thrilled about it when folks talked about it. It's probably similar to how someone who has grown up in the projects and on welfare doesn't want to think about or return to that kind of past. He was embarrassed that he had no formal education, but he was smart enough and driven enough that he taught himself the law on his own, by reading voraciously. He opened up his own law practice in Springfield, Illinois, the capitol of the state. Back then, a judge would ride around the state on a circuit, hearing cases. Lincoln would follow the judge around and defend folks when the judge came through. Those seemed to be happy days for him as he and the judge and other travelling lawyers would sit by the fire and tell stories each night at the various inns they stopped at.

Lincoln wanted to be in office... badly. It didn't help that his wife, Mary, was rather insecure and wanted her husband to climb the social ladder. He initially hoped to win a senate seat but lost. He really only won the presidency because one of the other candidates imploded and folks chose to go with the unknown candidate with a lot of promise (Obama style).

He was one of the biggest advocates of a new party, the Republican Party, which was built on a platform of containing slavery to the south. It's interesting to note that Lincoln wasn't opposed to slavery so much on moral grounds, but on the grounds that he believed that the founding fathers intended for it to die out one day. He felt an incredibly strong conviction that the country should abide as much as possible to the Constitution and felt expanding slavery was unconstitutional. He disliked slavery on a personal level, but campaigned on a platform of permitting slavery in the states where it was already legal, but not allowing new states in the union to be slave-holding. During the war, after he emancipated the slaves in the south, he depended on their numbers to help fight the war, and then felt like it would be unfair to not grant them things like equal wages and freedom for fighting for the Union. My feeling is that he would be considered racist today, but that his acceptance of blacks advanced throughout his life and that he was rather liberal in comparison to others of his day.

Because he sort of slid into the office of president, many folks out east, in the more "sophisticated" towns of New York, Philladelphia, and Washington, D.C. thought he was just a country bumpkin from the Midwest. In some sense, he was. Here he had never held any office beyond being in the Illinois legislature and he travelled around in the sticks defending cases, and now all of a sudden he was president. A lot of these folks, including a number of men in his cabinet, tried to hijack the presidency and carry out policies on their own without consulting him, thinking he wouldn't know the difference. Over the course of time he had to increasingly put his foot down to stop this type of behavior.

When in came to the Civil War, he actually believed that the southern states, who had started seceeding as he came into office, would come back to the Union peacefully if they could just have a rational conversation. He seemed to think this was like a family spat where one person angrily leaves the house. He didn't seem to notice that the South had packed its bags and wasn't coming back. He believed so much in the Constitution that he believed that southerners would return to the Union if they just believed in the Constituion like he did.

Once it became apparent that he needed to do something, he drew up a large army in D.C., called the Army of the Potomic. The various generals he had apparently refused to fight. They constantly whined about not having enough men, enough preparations, etc. Lincoln got so exasperated that he started going to the library and reading up on the strategy and tactics of war so he could tell his generals where to go and how to fight. Although he had very little military experience, he had to become a bold leader in his effort to compel his generals to fight.

I think that's what stood out to me... that at first his cabinet members tried to hijack his office, and he had to learn to tell them who was boss; and then the army wouldn't fight so he had to eventually learn to take bold leadership to lead the country through war. At first, neither of these leadership traits came natural to him; they had to be developed. I think we often want our presidents to be perfect right out of the gates, and it's a good reminder that one of our greatest presidents was often depressed and melancholy and stressed out as he had to learn to make difficult decision after difficult decision.

I did not know that he was assissinated just 3 days after the signing of the treaty at the Appomatax court house. It's ironic that he made it through the whole war alive and was killed after it was all over.