His new work, “ And There Was Light,” will fit comfortably onto the Lincoln bookshelf, joining these other luminous volumes, complementing them and in some ways displacing them, perhaps nudging them an inch-and-a-quarter to the right to make room for it at the forefront of the Lincoln canon.Īnd what coursed through his mind when - perhaps feeling mystic chords of memory himself - he wrote of Lincoln, “Yet he defended the possibilities of democracy and the pursuit of justice at an hour in which the means of amendment, adjustment, and reform were under assault”? Now comes Jon Meacham, himself a Pulitzer winner (for his biography of Andrew Jackson). All of them changed the way we look at the 16th president. There was the estimable “ Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer” from Fred Kaplan in 2008 and the groundbreaking “ The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery” by Eric Foner in 2011. You might have thought that was enough - until Garry Wills published “ Lincoln at Gettysburg” in 1992, or until David Herbert Donald came out with “ Lincoln” in 1995, or until Doris Kearns Goodwin produced “ Team of Rivals” in 2005. That’s how many books have been written about Abraham Lincoln. Richly detailed and gracefully written, this is an essential reminder that “progress can be made by fallible and fallen presidents and peoples.” Illus.
Light is shed on Lincoln’s failures, including his 1849 effort to abolish slavery in Washington, D.C., which would have required municipal officers to arrest and return to their owners any enslaved people who escaped into the district, as well as his “theological quest” to understand the “concepts of God and Providence” as he grappled with the issue of slavery and the tragic death of his son, Willie, in the White House. Pulitzer winner Meacham ( His Truth Is Marching On) more than justifies yet another Lincoln biography in this nuanced and captivating look at the president’s “struggle to do right as he defined it within the political universe he and his country inhabited.” Drawing sharp parallels to Lincoln’s battles against “an implacable minority gave no quarter in a clash over power, race, identity, money, and faith” and today’s “moment of polarization, passionate disagreement, and differing understandings of reality,” Meacham highlights Lincoln’s struggles to live up to a “transcendental moral order” that called on humans “to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with their God.” For Meacham, Lincoln is above all “an example of how even the most imperfect of people, leading the most imperfect of peoples,” can bend the arc of the universe toward justice.
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