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What Lincoln Believed: The Values and Convictions of America's Greatest President

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"What Lincoln Believed" is part of a line of recent presidential biographies (Jefferson, Jackson) taking what some readers think is a hypercritical look at some of this country's leading political personalities. It's no exaggeration to say that "What Lincoln Believed" will, for many, be an eye-opener, especially those who haven't focused on our greatest president since high school.

While I had been familiar with some of Lincoln's motivations for the Emancipation Proclamation as well as his Free-Soil views, this remarkable work brought to light numerous other facets of Abe's views on slavery including the relative rights of "free" slaves (his support of the Black Laws) and various details of his support for black colonization in both Africa and the Caribbean.

While some reviewers believe author Lind went out of his way to excoriate Lincoln based on 20th Century views of race, my own belief is that he has very honestly widened the historical record on this shrewd, passionate and courageous man, ultimately paying him the highest tribute by comparing him to the leading figures of his day and explaining how Lincoln was the right man at the right time to preserve the Union and perpetuate the philosophical seeds of democratic republicanism - seeds that could easily have been cast aside as our nation continued to enter the world stage.

"What Lincoln Believed" will make you rethink some of your assumptions about a legendary figure, but you will close the book still knowing that our sixteenth president was the person America needed at its darkest hour.

Lincoln is an icon from our political past, but it seems that many groups want to claim him as exemplifying their beliefs: Democrats and Repubs, proponents of economic opportunity, civil rights advocates, etc. The author, by analyzing Lincoln's utterances and actions, demonstrates that none of them are entirely correct or wrong in their claims.

It cannot be forgotten when examining his life, that Lincoln, as any, was a man of his times. He did originate from very humble beginnings, as did many of his era, but he seemed to have an inordinate desire to make something of himself. Lincoln occasionally represented railroad interests in court, but it is quite a stretch to suggest, as the author does, that Lincoln was essentially a well-to-do lawyer for the fat-cats. If anyone can lay claim to advancing beyond log-cabin origins, it would be Lincoln.

Lincoln was first and foremost a Henry Clay Whig and adhered to his program of internal improvements, national banking, and the protection of industry by tariffs. He was not a free-trader as are the current Repubs. Furthermore, he constantly held that labor was more important than capital, hardly an idea held by modern Repubs or the slave-holding Southern oligarchs.

Lincoln had a lifelong reverence for the Declaration of Independence, especially in its advocacy of universal rights of liberty. And that fundamentally impacted his view on slavery, the burning issue of the times, yet Lincoln was essentially a racial segregationist. He was a "Free-Soiler," who advocated for the exclusion of slavery in new territories and states, as well as already freed blacks. Lincoln mostly hoped that freed blacks could form free societies outside of the US. It is only by stages, including attempts to get Southerners to end the insurrection with slavery intact, that Lincoln arrived at the final draft of the 13th Amendment, eliminating slavery in the US. For his times, Lincoln was a liberal voice on the issue of slavery, but he was a practical politician - not an abolitionist.

Lincoln was a staunch Unionist, seeing the gradual solidification of the US state culminate with the ratification of the US Constitution. Any right to leave the Union could only be achieved via constitutional amendment. He regarded the Southern secession as a criminal insurrection. One of the most controversial aspects of Lincoln's presidency was his suspension of writs of habeas corpus in cases where he or his field commanders felt the union's war efforts were being impeded - even via speech. There is no doubt that there was an excess of heavy-handedness in this policy - mindful of many other less than exemplary curtailments of freedom in this country during supposedly times of crisis.

For anyone believing in the purity or idealism of Lincoln's beliefs, this book will let the air out of that notion. On the other hand, the ante-bellum period had become increasingly polarized. For convincing, one need only examine the bloodshed that went on for years in Kansas primarily over the issue of slavery. Lincoln was the moderate compromise candidate among abolitionist Republicans and more conservative ex-Whigs and Democrats. What emerges is that Lincoln was a keen student of the American past. He instinctively knew what was needed and what was possible for his country relative to the times. Perhaps other paths could have been chosen, and the author does speculate on the possibility of other outcomes over the slavery and North/South divide. But finally, the author does hold Lincoln to be deserving as one of the foremost figures from our past in the rise of American democracy, bumpy though it has been.

I enjoyed this book. The attempt to describe the character of Lincln in the context of his era was excellent, though I thought Lind at times got on his own soap box about race and how we as a country have been dealing with it. He does take Abe apart and bashs "historians" on their descriptions of him - who ever these "historians" are, but he also describes Abe in the global context on government theory - at the end Lind admits we were better off with Abe and with the diffcult situations he faced, the world and democracy couldn't have been in better hands.

This should be a must read for anyone who is studing Abe or political science. It provides an overview of Abe, his era, and the impact his decisions had on the world.

An excellent book - if the writer was able to avoid his soap book - I would have given it 5 stars.

Lind, it should be noted, is a journalist and public policy writer, not a professional historian. Nevertheless, this is an interesting and well-researched look at Abraham Lincoln -- perhaps our most appreciated, and misunderstood, president.

The focus of the book is on aspects of Lincoln's career and personality that you probably never learned about in school. His understanding of economics and capitalism, for instance, was surprisingly sophisticated for his age, but does not fit well into our modern pro- or anti-government framework. And Lincoln's attitude towards religion was ambiguous, to say the least -- he actually wrote a book attacking Christianity as a young man, and may have remained agnostic the rest of his life, but he sprinkled Biblical allusions into nearly all of his political speeches, and came to appreciate the power and influence of religious belief in Americans' everyday lives.

All in all, while there's not much here for high-level history students, Lind's book is a great choice for general readers, especially anyone who doubts they really learned much about the Civil War back in high school.

As I read this I found myself thinking of the old saying that you know when a politician is lying because his mouth makes noise. We like to think of Lincoln as the Great Emancipator. Mr. Lind is careful to point out that he was no slouch as a politician. You don't get elected to that office without being an accomplished professional politician. Perhaps the Great Emancipator is a title, a view that we hold of him several generations later.

Mr. Lind spends a good bit of time on the definition of the United States as a nation vs. an alliance of sovereign states. Mr. Lind shows Lincoln's vision of the United States as a model of liberty and democracy for the world. Mr. Lincoln's model seemed to be that a state had the liberty to join the Union, but did not have the liberty to leave.

I greatly enjoyed reading Mr. Lind's book. I do question some of his conclusions. They are based on the thinking of a man raised in a culture offset from Lincoln's by a hundred and fifty years.

Michael Lind's masterful political biography gives us the real Lincoln. No saint, he was a man whose views on race mirrored the Social Darwinism of his times. But Lincoln also believed deeply in American democracy. As Lind notes, without Lincoln the world would be a far different, and probably far worse, place than it is today. Lind's book is a great work of historical interpretation.

This book is provocative only in the sense that Lincoln's politics if transferred to our current day system have continually been a subject of debate among the American people. People from all over the political spectrum are eager to claim the 16th president as one of them, and the Illinois politician has since assumed a larger-than-life persona.

Although Lincoln is the nation's first official Republican president, he earned reverence among generations of African Americans (who would vote Republican until the 1960's) for emancipation. Musician Dion even enshrined him (along with Dr. King and the Kennedy's) into a somber Parthenon of 'great Americans who fought on behalf of civil rights' for a still-catchy song.

Lind produced a general book about Lincoln, but this book contains large sections on Lincoln's views on race and ethnicity. As progressive as he was on some issues, Lincoln was still a product of his own time. Lind even goes as far to suggest that Lincoln was personally sympathetic to white supremacists. Because such an image would be at considerable odds with how the American public would like to remember him, this book raises some troubling questions about "American heroes". Can we really continue identifying with Lincoln if we do not actually know about his political ideology and issue positions?

While this book was an interesting read, Lind's research leaves something to be desired. His miscalculation of the senators and representatives during Lincoln's presidency is appalling. Lind is not aware that the figure he had given in this book was too large for the time. Finally, he appears to have his own made up version of who Lincoln really was. Lind has a demagogue's penchant for simply ignoring prior substantiated historical evidence which discredits his thesis.

An excellent read. An unbiased exposition of a pragmatic politician. Portrayed as he was, not a rewrite of history to meet a political agenda.

This book hardly qualifies as a history, only doing so by the nature of the categorization process in which any book which deals with the past is labeled "history". This book is far more political than historical. The author not only makes patently false statements that could (and should) be easily checked in any decent history textbook, let alone a monograph, but devolves into counterfactual territory when attempting to argue what would have happened if what happened didn't happen (ie if Lincoln wasn't assassinated, among other such instances in this work). Just one example of bad facts is the author's statement that "The Civil War formally ended on April 9, 1865, when Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox". This is untrue. For one thing, Lee surrendered at Appomattox Courthouse, an entirely different community (though adjacent) from Appomattox. Secondly, and more importantly, there were still Confederate forces in the field under other generals, and there was still seated a formal elected government of the Confederate States of America. Any decent history text acknowledges this but it hardly fits Mr. Lind's rhetoric to acknowledge the complexities of history.

Perhaps more troubling than his poor factual research is Mr. Lind's degeneration into anachronistic analysis of the morality of Lincoln's views. Judging a person of the 19th century by 21st century standards of morality is a "schoolboy" error which no one properly educated in the field of history and historical analysis would make, thus betraying Lind's status as a non-historian writing a book about the past, rather than a historian writing an actual academic monograph. If Lind's portrayal of Lincoln's racism is accurate, Lind's denunciation of it rather than unbiased reporting of the fact is a major fault within a work purporting to be history.

On other issues, Lind is similarly sanctimonious and inaccurate. For one, he accuses historians of being kinder to Republicans than to Know-Nothings/American Party members because historians are white and of non-English descent and thus descendants of those whom the Know-Nothings discriminated against. This ignores the inherent racism of all parties of the 19th century, which makes any division along lines of racist thought difficult if not impossible without devolving into anachronism. For another, in the same section, Lind uses anti-Catholic and anti-Irish as interchangeable terms. They are not. While the vast majority of the Irish were Catholic, quite a good proportion of the Catholics in the United States were not Irish -- a fact Lind chooses to apparently ignore.

Sadly, this is still not a complete review of the faults of this work, but it is, hopefully, enough to give a sampling of why this book has perhaps some merits for political science, but very very few within the academic field of history. I urge all readers to be wary of reading history written by a political journalist -- the agendas are rarely about history or the persons portrayed in the work, and are therefore inherently problematic in an accurate study of history.

The drawing of a baleful Abraham Lincoln on the jacket of this book is a tip-off. The author emphasizes the negative about the sixteenth president at about every turn, especially as related to race. Michael Lind seems more interested in giving his theories on the post Civil War development of the modern Republican party--viewed by Mr. Lind as now the party of Jefferson Davis--than writing about President Lincoln as a human being making hard choices within the context of trying times. While there is much of interest in this book, I suggest any first time reader on Lincoln explore other, more balanced presentations such as those by David Herbert Donald.