When Congressional investigators seemed on the trail of damning evidence against his first Secretary of War, Simon Cameron, for instance, Lincoln cheerfully whisked him off to Russia as his Minister to the Czar. Actually, “it was lessons learned in country courtrooms and the grimy corridors of the Illinois Statehouse the finally made the difference: hard lessons about the value of keeping one’s own counsel, the pace at which public opinion could safely be shaped, and the uses of delay and flattery and the miraculous power of patronage to change men’s minds.” “This Lincoln is quite capable, when necessary, of acting with the kind of guile and sinuousness more often ascribed to, say, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Members of his own cabinet thought him a “countrified embarrassment,” which was OK with him. He engaged in “fierce and sometimes squalid,” political infighting for three decades before his presidency. But he was also “wily and elusive in his pursuit of them.” From age 23 he was “the little engine that knew no rest,” an ambitious man. He knew better than anybody–and better than he let anybody know–how to work the machinery. Lincoln was “a man of sorrows and a lifelong champion of what he called ‘cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason.’” Donald’s conviction: Lincoln was a master politician. The authors of most of them “began by assuming that he was a Great Man, then dutifully worked their way back through his life in search of clues as to how he got that way.” Lincoln’s real life was a sequence of twists and turns that could have landed him quite somewhere else. In the most troubled of times, here was a man who led the country out of slavery and preserved a shattered Union-in short, one of the greatest presidents this country has ever seen.October, 1995: there are 7,000 books about Lincoln. Donald goes beyond biography, illuminating the gradual development of Lincoln's character, chronicling his tremendous capacity for evolution and growth, thus illustrating what made it possible for a man so inexperienced and so unprepared for the presidency to become a great moral leader. Donald brilliantly depicts Lincoln's gradual ascent from humble beginnings in rural Kentucky to the ever-expanding political circles in Illinois, and finally to the presidency of a country divided by civil war. David Herbert Donald's Lincoln is a stunningly original portrait of Lincoln's life and presidency. Drawing on resources not available until recently, including Lincoln's personal papers, archives, and newspaper reports, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author David Herbert Donald presents a masterful account of Lincoln's rise to the presidency and the political and personal challenges he faced while in office. The phenomenal national bestseller that is "the Lincoln biography for this generation" (Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.)-now in paperback.
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