Volume 53, Number 16 · October 19, 2006
How Lincoln Won
By David Bromwich
Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power
by Richard Carwardine
Knopf, 394 pp., $27.50
Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln
by Doris Kearns Goodwin
Simon and Schuster, 916 pp., $35.00
Abraham Lincoln knew himself well—something we seldom allow for and perhaps do not want in a great man. It is harder to feel a legitimate pride in our own understanding when the hero has been there first. 'My mind,' Lincoln wrote to a friend, 'is like a piece of steel, very hard to scratch any thing on it and almost impossible after you get it there to rub it out.' But his self-knowledge was not confined to smaller traits. At a low moment in the mid-1850s, he made an entry in a notebook comparing his apparent fate of obscurity to the fortunes of his rival Stephen Douglas. The two, Lincoln recalled, had started out in politics at the same time:
Review, 5802 words
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