Author of His Country.(Review)

The Life and Writings of Abraham Lincoln, edited, with a biographical essay, by Philip Van Doren Stern (Modern Library, 876 pp., $14.95)

As I write, there is a struggle brewing over Confederate imagery in the Georgia state flag, and President Bush's nominee for attorney general has been criticized for saying admiring things about Southern Partisan, a pro-Confederate magazine. Since the Civil War manages to stay in the news, what could be more timely than The Life and Writings of Abraham Lincoln?

This Modern Library edition is a new paperback version of a collection first assembled in 1940. The 190-page biographical essay by Philip Van Doren Stern, a high priest of prewar middlebrow, avoids many of the errors and obsessions of modern scholarship. The bulk of the volume gives a generous selection of Lincoln's most important speeches and letters. We have the major addresses, all but the earliest ones complete, and generous selections from the Lincoln-Douglas debates. The famous letter of condolence to Mrs. Lydia Bixby, who, Lincoln believed, lost five sons in the Civil War, is retrieved from the clammy hands of Steven Spielberg (who quoted it in full in Saving Private Ryan). "I feel how weak and fruitless must be any words of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming." In fact, two of Mrs. Bixby's sons died in battle, two were taken prisoner, and one deserted-but the letter is still poignant in its frank helplessness.

There are also a few oddities, including three verses: A wild bear chase, didst never see? / Then thou hast lived in vain. Lincoln did well to concentrate on prose.

Stern's essay reminds us forcibly that the Civil War was won by failures. In the decade before the guns went off, Ulysses Grant was a drunken, unsuccessful tradesman. Abraham Lincoln was better off, but only to the extent of being a statehouse lawyer and hack politician, rather like a Republican lobbyist in Albany today. When he first emerged as a national figure, he seemed scarcely more impressive. Charles Francis Adams II, grandson and great-grandson of presidents, noted that at Lincoln's inauguration in 1861 the outgoing president, James Buchanan, with his "tall, large figure, and white head, looked well beside Mr. Lincoln's lank, angular form and hirsute face; and the dress of the President-elect did not indicate that knowledge of the proprieties of the place which was desirable." How was this bright, ambitious rube propelled to greatness?

The Lincoln myth, which has dried into the crust of commonplace, is that he rose from poverty. Stern breaks through the cliche by making the frontier squalor vivid. The Lincolns were hillbillies, more or less, who moved into the old Northwest just steps behind the defeated Indians. In 1816, when Abraham was seven, the family homesteaded a farm in Indiana, huddling in a lean-to their first winter. When Abraham was in his early twenties, he lived in an Illinois town so new, small, and unpromising that it was always on the verge of going bust. Many of his later eloquent statements on the value of free labor grew out of his having done so much of it as a youth, and knowing firsthand how punishing it was.

He emerged from these bleak circumstances spiritually and emotionally pinched. He had no more religion than a cat; at age 32 he acknowledged the gift of a Bible thus: "I doubt not that it is really . . . the best cure for the blues, could one but take it according to the truth." Lincoln's romantic history, as told in his own and Stern's words, explains recent attempts to recruit him for gay pride. I do not believe that he was homosexual; indeed, the likeliest candidate for queerness among the presidents is Buchanan (if he were your trophy, wouldn't you want another?). But Lincoln's relations with women were hopeless. His account of his abortive courtship of Mary Owens in his late twenties is bitchy and detached; womankind paid him back in the form of his eventual wife, Mary Todd, a tempestuous spendthrift. To do Mrs. Lincoln justice, living with her passive, impenetrable husband must have been almost as difficult as living with her.