Just this evening I’ve finished reading William Lee Miller’s President Lincoln: The Duty of a Statesman, mentioned here last week. I have read any number of Lincoln books over the years, notably and most recently, Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals and David Herbert Donald’s biography Lincoln. Miller’s book deserves mention along with these.
The book is more an analytical than a narrative history. It takes a number of events and topics and explains in detail how Lincoln approached them. In so doing, Miller makes a persuasive case for Lincoln’s remarkable, yet almost disqualifying personal characteristics for a political leader, and Lincoln’s indispensable, perhaps single, ability to preserve the Union and end slavery. Anyone with an interest in the era or Lincoln will appreciate this book. It is instructive, provocative, occasionally amusing, and at times moving.
(I would only add that it might, in places, have been improved with tighter editing.)
I haven’t read Miller’s Lincoln’s Virtues: An Ethical Biography, despite owning a copy. It will be on the agenda soon.