There is properly no history, only biography.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON, Essays: First Series (1841)
Biographers see themselves as a special breed of historians, concerned with how one person “lived, moved, spoke, and enjoyed a certain set of human attributes.” Thus, of all the genres of history, biography is the closest to literature. This does not always bring the biographer a place in the front ranks of historians. “Consider how uneasily biography lies between historical writing and belles lettres.” If, like the novelist, the biographer probes the hearts and minds of people in search of character and motive; if biography “humanizes the past,” it also narrows that past to a single path. Biographers may explore the “inner life” of their subjects or emphasize the “public and social” world in which their subject traveled, but the subject remains a historical one. The synergy of biography and history is obvious.1
Everyone who ever lived has a biography. History is what happened to everyone, and everyone is part of history. The shop girl and the laundress, the dirt farmer and the truck driver are as much a part of history as the presidential candidate and the commanding general. Historians have developed social history, cultural history, the history of women, immigration history, urban history, labor history, historical demography, the history of the family, the history of childhood, and microhistory among other subjects of study to recover the lives of ordinary people. “We love to read the lives of the great, but what a broken history of mankind they give, unless supplemented by the lives of the humble. But while the great can speak for themselves, or by the tongues of their admirers, the humble are apt to live inarticular and die unheard.”2
The “microhistory” is a popular modern form of biography that gives voice to the ordinary people. While the origin of these studies lies in Europe, European historians writing about European people and events on the margins of society (for example, Menocchio), the term has gained a somewhat different connotation among American historians. It has become synonymous with the biography of ordinary men and women. The best known of these, and the model for the genre, is Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s The Midwife’s Tale, a brilliant and moving depiction of the life of a rural Maine midwife. Ulrich’s literary skill transformed a slender and terse diary of midwife, mother, and businesswoman Martha Ballard of Hallowell, Maine, into a source that enables us to imagine the entire range of women’s activities in early modern New England. We feel the cold of the winters’ nights and the rough textures of homespun. What had been overlooked by historians for its terseness, Ulrich turned into a marvelous source, though, “One might wish for more detail, for more open expressions of opinion, fuller accounts of medical remedies or obstetrical complications, more candor in describing physicians or judges, and less circumspection in recording scandal, yet for all its reticence, Martha’s diary is an unparalleled document in early American history. It is powerful in part because it is so difficult to use, so unyielding in its dailiness.”3
Ballard was a remarkable women in her time and Ulrich’s account is a remarkable achievement, but what attracts most readers to biography (unlike what attracts many modern historians to microhistories of ordinary people) is what elevates human action above the ordinary. Greatness is not quite the same as common fame (and infamy). Greatness inspires us. Infamy disgusts us. But such distinctions are not as important to the connection between history and biography as those between the great and the common. For even before historians commenced their democratic voyage of discovery into the lives of the not-so-rich and not-so-famous, chroniclers’ stock and trade was retelling the deeds of the great and the would-be great: stories of saints, kings, battles, and empires. In the nineteenth century, this notion was encapsulated in the “great man theory of history.” Great men made history, and their example was the proper object of historical study. As Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in “The Uses of Great Men,” “Nature seems to exist for the excellent. The world is upheld by the veracity of good men: they make the earth wholesome. … We call our children and our lands by their names.” The most popular biographer of that period, Thomas Carlyle, argued in his Heroes and Hero Worship (1869) that heroic deeds would live on in history forever. At the core of these narratives was the notion that there was a certain ineffable quality in people that historians and their readers could judge, a quality of greatness.4
The great man or representative man theory of history was the original foundation for biography and remains so. As the biographer John Morton Cooper Jr. explained his own choice of subjects, Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, “there is always the requirement that our subjects have historical significance and that they illuminate important things about the times in which they lived and the events in which they participated.” In other words, the proper subjects of biography for most readers are those individuals in whom there is the quality of greatness.5
Biographers have sought this elusive quarry from the beginning of the genre. The first and foremost biographer of the ancient world, the Greek Plutarch was consumed with curiosity about greatness. Plutarch lived most of his life in Greece, though he traveled as an ambassador throughout the Mediterranean and attained Roman citizenship during one of his two stays in the imperial capital. In his native land, he held priestly and civil offices and had access to archives there and in Rome. As well, he was welcomed into leading families’ homes. One might say that he was as much a historian for his age as Arthur Schlesinger Jr. was for ours, a celebrity author, raconteur, and pundit. “The charm of his style and the breadth of his vision of a past which had already become classical in his own day … won him admiring readers from his contemporaries to the present.”6
Plutarch’s judgments were often severe. As he wrote of Julius Caesar, the greatest figure in the Roman Republic after he had driven his rivals from Rome and amassed almost all power in his own hands:
Caesar was born to do great things, and had a passion after honor, and the many noble exploits he had done did not now serve as an inducement to him to sit still and reap the fruit of his past labours, but were incentives and encouragements to go on, and raised in him ideas of still greater actions, and a desire of new glory, as if the present were all spent. It was in fact a sort of emulous struggle with himself, as it had been with another, how he might outdo his past actions by his future.
Not content with conquest of Gaul and Egypt, he eyed Germany and Thrace, and beyond. There was no limit to his desire for conquest and fame.7
Plutarch’s Parallel Lives of famous ancient Greeks and Romans was an exploration of the quality of greatness. By comparing lives, he sought to isolate the trait. Caesar was great, but corrupt and venal. Merely possessing power did not ensure true greatness, a quality that eluded Caesar in Plutarch’s judgment. Instead, true greatness was elevation of spirit, as Plutarch implied when he compared the modest but intensely serious Athenian orator Demosthenes with the boastful and jokingly eloquent Cicero of Rome. Both men opposed tyrants, Demosthenes denouncing Philip of Macedon and Cicero attacking Mark Anthony. Both men were banished and ultimately paid for their courage with their lives. For Plutarch, Demosthenes was the greater man because of his “gravity and magnificence of mind,” compared with Cicero’s tendency to “admire and relish” his own abilities. To Plutarch, true greatness required nobility of spirit.8
Like Plutarch, scholars and readers both want to know how to judge greatness, to know, in effect, who should be adjudged great. Nobility of the sort that Plutarch described is not the same as fame. One can be famous, for example Elvis Presley, without being great in spirit or grace. The ill fame of tyrants, for example Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin, would surely elevate them as major figures in history, but to call them great men would be to stretch the definition of nobility past all imagination. We admire the great because we see something in them that we would like to see in ourselves. Today only the homicidal or the insane would see in monsters like Hitler and Stalin something of themselves.
The question then is not the definition of greatness but whether the definition is objective or subjective. For a great many Germans in Nazi Germany and others who watched the rise of Hitler with admiration, the man was the very epitome of greatness. He often spoke and wrote of it, and saw himself as the very personification of the greatness of the German-speaking peoples. With this in mind, one can ask if the definition of greatness is so elastic, so dependent on time, place, and the situation of the speaker, that one observer’s great person can be another avatar of evil. In other words, is greatness subjective?9
A series of case histories will help to answer the question of how to determine greatness. Take the membership application of one Christopher Columbus. Does he belong among the greats? Samuel Eliot Morison certainly thought so, and Morison was a giant among historians in the first half of the twentieth century. Boston and Harvard prepared him for the life of a scholar, and a stint as the historian of the U.S. Navy in World War II turned his attention to Columbus. Morison’s Admiral of the Ocean Sea: A Life of Christopher Columbus won the Pulitzer Prize in biography for 1943. His Columbus, fittingly, “would be the humble yet proud instrument of Europe’s regeneration … [W]ith a maximum of faith and a minimum of technique, a bare sufficiency of equipment and a superabundance of stout-heartedness, [he] gave Europe new confidence in herself, more than doubled the area of Christianity, enlarged indefinitely the scope for human thought and speculation, and led the way to those fields of freedom which, planted with great seed, have now sprung up to the fructification of the world.” Case closed?10
When I was a pupil at P.S. 188 in Queens, many years ago, we celebrated Columbus Day, October 12, the day he and his crew arrived in the Bahamas. The celebration closed the schools, and there was a parade down Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. No one doubted for a second the greatness of Columbus. No one thought that his greatness was a subjective judgment. As the five-hundred-year anniversary of Columbus’s first voyage approached, President George H.W. Bush prepared the way for a national festival commemorating Columbus’s arrival in New World waters. “On Columbus Day, we pause as a nation to honor the skilled and courageous navigator who discovered the Americas and in so doing, brought to our ancestors the promise of the New World.”11
Little did the president anticipate that the quincentenary celebration in 1992 would cast Columbus and his fellow European explorers in a wholly new and not very flattering light. For every parade that year, there was a protest. Native American groups called the coming of Columbus the beginning of centuries of genocide. The American Library Association resolved: “[W]hereas Columbus’s voyage to America began a legacy of European piracy, brutality, slave trading, murder, disease, conquest, and genocide”—a very different tack from the president’s proclamation. The U.S. Congress’s Columbus Quincentenary Jubilee Commission tried to quiet the dispute by changing the “celebration” to a “commemoration,” but the shift in language mollified few of Columbus’s critics or defenders.12
Did not Columbus deserve a better fate? Did he not prove the world was a sphere, and that sailing to the west would bring him to the Western Hemisphere? Had he not discovered America and brought with him civilization and prosperity to benighted and primitive native peoples? Actually, nothing in these statements is quite true. He was not the first to see the earth as a sphere. Ptolemy, the Greek geographer, did that during the early Roman Empire. Renaissance scholars had rediscovered his work, kept alive in Arab libraries, and republished his maps in 1477. Columbus, trained as a ship’s navigator in Portugal, knew all about these maps, though he (like Ptolemy) misjudged the size of the earth by a third.13
The name America came from one of Columbus’s rivals, Amerigo Vespucci, something of a scalawag. Vespucci, an Italian map maker and explorer, visited the coast of South America in 1502 and 1504, but his original accounts are lost, and what was published under his name is probably fabulous. He scooped Columbus by accident, only because a German map maker and printer named Martin Waldseemueller needed a name for the places that Vespucci said he visited. The Americas became continents on the map of the globe Waldseemueller was preparing.14
Nor did Columbus think he had discovered the Americas. He believed to his dying day that he had come to the edge of Asia, where the East Indies and their wonderful spices were to be had, and for this reason he called the natives he encountered Indios. In fact, he was not the first person to arrive in America. Archeological evidence puts the first Americans on the continent more than 15,000 years ago. In fact, in the Indies Columbus met relative newcomers to the Bahamas. The Taíno peoples had arrived only a few hundred years previously. As Samuel Eliot Morison’s Pulitzer Prize–winning biography concluded, “except for a few prophetic moments, it was Columbus’s misfortune to ignore the significance of his discoveries that have given him immortal fame, and to advance geographical hypotheses that made him a laughingstock for fools.”15
As for civilized gifts from Europe, when Columbus came to the Americas he brought with him cockroaches, rats, smallpox, chickenpox, measles, and weed pollen. His livestock, notably the pigs, destroyed Indian crops. In their search for gold, his men despoiled Indian villages and took Indian lives. Islands in the West Indies whose populations before Columbus approached one million were reduced to the thousands by 1520. Columbus was no godsend to the Indians.16
But perhaps Columbus is still rightly judged a great man by Plutarch’s old standard. Though not an aristocrat, he had a certain nobility of spirit, the gumption and the ability to convince a foreign potentate (the queen of Spain) to finance a three-ship voyage. He kept a near-mutinous crew in check during that voyage. He was a fine blue water sailor and an even better navigator of treacherous coastal shoals. Dubbed by Queen Isabel the “Admiral of the Ocean Sea” after he returned from his first voyage, Columbus led three more fleets on voyages to the Bahamas, the Caribbean, and the coasts of South America and the Gulf of Mexico. To the court of Spain, and from thence all over educated Europe, Columbus brought evidence of strange and wonderful people, plants, and animals never seen in the Old World. With these came the promise of great riches. Spain, and later its European rivals France, England, Portugal, and the Netherlands, would exploit those riches, leading Europe on the path to imperial power and wealth. For Europe in the Americas, it all started with Columbus. “The true importance of his discovery became clearer with every passing decade as the New World yielded up its considerable treasure to the Old, and as the historical significance became appreciated in scholarly, and then popular, opinion.”17
If greatness in history is a matter of influence, then the elusive quality of nobility need not be sought. One could propose an objective definition. At its most basic, the formula for greatness would be: Whoever changes the course of history the most is the greatest figure in history. Indeed, under this definition more often than not it is the bad man who is great, for ambition, greed, and hunger for power sometimes prove far more potent motivations than loving kindness and serenity. Thus would a paradox lie at the center of biography—history may attach objectively greatness to those we most abhor.
One cannot accept the simple idea of greatness equaling influence, however, because no one can change history unless the times are ripe for change and that person’s abilities fit the time and place—a sort of Darwinian definition of greatness. But as in Darwinian evolution, fitness is a matter of fit. The times must be right for the individual’s own gifts and vision to make an impression on those times.
Consider then the American schoolmaster James Johonnot’s The Ten Great Events in History (1887). Chapter 5 introduced Columbus.
Columbus lived in a stirring age. Everywhere light was breaking in after centuries of darkness, and all Europe was restless with suggestions and beginnings of new life. Great men were plenty; rulers, like the Medici of Florence … reformers, chief among them Luther, just beginning to think the thoughts that later set the world agog. Great inventions were spreading … suddenly opening knowledge to every class; the little compass, with which mariners were just beginning to trust themselves boldly on the seas, in spite of the popular impression that it was a sort of infernal machine presided over by the devil himself.
A rising tide of greatness lifted all boats, Columbus’s boats, and America’s, for it was to America that Columbus carried the genius of his age, the Age of Discovery. Columbus brought the energy, intelligence, and will of Europe to America. In the heady days after the celebration of all things American after the triumph of the Centennial International Exposition of 1876 in Philadelphia, it was comforting for Americans to know that the origins of their nation went as far back as Columbus’s heroic deed.18
Columbus was great not only because he was a heroic figure. He was also a representative figure to turn-of-the-twentieth-century biographers. He joined a list of eminent men in Rossiter Johnson’s twenty-volume set of Great Events by Eminent Historians because what he appeared to represent was important to biographers then. It was an age in the West that celebrated invention, exploration, and Western ideas. Some of these may seem above reproach today—material improvement, progress, and science. Other notions the biographers lauded may seem repellent—racism and imperialism, for example. Johnson linked the two sets of concepts. “As the surveyors of a great country take their observations from hilltop to hilltop, and thence make the triangulations that reveal the extent and character of the lower ground, so may one read history to the best advantage—first from the altitude of great and significant events, such as turn the course of empire or hasten the march of civilization.” For only through the celebration of true greatness would Americans see that they were the true inheritors of the ruling races. From the work of “a carefully elaborated list of authorities throughout America and Europe” Johnson derived “the following practical, and it would seem incontrovertible, series of plain facts,” the triumph of the Western European man over lesser peoples and more primitive cultures.19
Biography would prove what history surmised: “When our humankind first become clearly visible they are already divided into races, which for convenience we speak of as white, yellow, and black. Of these the whites had apparently advanced farthest on the road to civilization.” Each race had its place, its characteristics, and its contributions, and according to the contributors to Johnson’s anthonlogy these contributions were not equal. “Let us look at the other, darker races, seen vaguely as they come in contact with the whites. The negroes, set sharply by themselves in Africa, never seem to have created any progressive civilization of their own, never seem to have advanced further than we find the wild tribes in the interior of the country to-day.” The prosopography of Great Events was rooted in racism. It was to the Aryan race that Europe owed its eventual world dominion. Great events, it would seem, were the doing of great men, and greatness in men was determined by bloodlines, at the top of which was “our own progressive Aryan race.”20
Johnson was an amateur biographer, but graduate school training and academic stature did not make a difference in the subjectivity of Victorian biographers’ view of greatness. In 1890, John Jay, president of the American Historical Association, told its members that the nation owed its greatness to “the stronger races.” After all, “the army of Washington were representatives of races which had been the most distinguished in the battle-fields of Europe … of the Englishmen who had battled at Naseby and brought the king to the block at Whitehall; of those who stood with William of Orange or with the partisans of James at the battle of the Boyne.” It could not have escaped his audience that all of these heroes were Protestant, white, and from northern Europe—the same heroes who fought alongside George Washington during the war for independence (ignoring the French Catholics, the free African Americans, and the Indians).21
When time and place allowed, biographers could and did judge the connection between greatness and race differently. By the second decade of the twentieth century, the Indian wars were over. Sitting Bull, once a feared adversary, toured with Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West show. Geronimo had spent his last days in exile in Florida, more than 2,000 miles away from his native Arizona. No longer a threat to the westward movement of the ruling races, Indians’ nobility could be attributed to racial characteristics in the same way that Indians’ ferocity was once attributed to immutable racial character. For example, Ely S. Parker, a Seneca Indian leader, after training as an engineer was taken on to U. S. Grant’s staff (despite the general ban on Indians in the Union Army). Parker went on to distinguish himself during the Civil War (he was the draftsman of Lee’s surrender terms at Appomattox) and as Superintendent of Indian Affairs during Grant’s first administration as president. In 1919, the Buffalo, New York, historical society devoted an entire issue of its collections to a biography of Parker by his great-grandnephew, Arthur C. Parker. The preface to the volume, by Frank H. Severance, a trustee of the historical society, reminded readers “but the notability of Ely S. Parker, was and is unique, for he embodied in his life and his career the best traits of a race, always imperfectly understood and usually unfairly judged by their white neighbors. He was a high type of the Iroquois.” Severance’s was a kinder, gentler racism than Jay’s.22
Such judgments are more than suspect. Because they are self-serving—Jay was a member of the stronger race, the master race, the ruling race—his views cannot be accepted without question. Severance could celebrate the nobility of the Seneca hero, for Parker was part white, from “clean honest stock,” and that, added to the natural nobility of the warrior race (now safely confined on a reservation), made Parker a tribute to his people. Of course, in 1890 or 1905 or 1919 the science of genetics was in its infancy. Scientists recognized evolution but did not know how traits were passed. Thus skin color and hair type looked much more important then. Now science knows that the human genome is complex and that skin and hair types are not what make us human, much less what determine the course of history.
One lesson of the posthumously discovered greatness of an Ely S. Parker is that biographers’ weighing of greatness is bound up in their judgment of everything else. In other words, they see the past through the eyes of their present. How could they pronounce so confidently about a ruling race in 1900, and then just as confidently pronounce today about the irrelevance of race? After all, Parker was forgotten when he died, in 1893.
What if one were to begin the inquiry into the nature of greatness by selecting a consensus figure, someone whose nobility of spirit and whose influence on the course of history were not in question, and then asked how that reputation rose above the whim of biographers or the time and place of the biography? First, one would have to look for such a person outside the realm of biography. Otherwise the inquiry would be circular. The most obvious and the most simplistic of biographical judgments of greatness is public opinion. For little more than ease of presentation, we may consider polls ranking American presidents as an example of public opinion that can be tracked over time. By looking at the rankings at different points in time, one might discover an individual who different generations of American historians agree is great. That is just what happens. The first of these polls was organized by the Harvard historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr. in 1948. He asked historians whom they ranked at the top, and Abraham Lincoln was the consensus. In 1962, Schlesinger’s son conducted another poll of historians. Again, they selected Lincoln. More recent polls of a broader spectrum of respondents (after all, how representative are academic historians?) show Lincoln’s remarkable persistence at the top of the lists. His staying power through more than sixty years of polls suggests that there may be a consensus (if not an objective) measure of greatness after all.23
A closer look at biographies of Lincoln will show how an objective measure of greatness can shine through the haze of subjective viewpoints. When the nation was celebrating the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln’s birth, the hoopla was accompanied by several new books on the character, the politics, and the wisdom of Lincoln. Some commentators compared newly elected President Barack Obama to Lincoln, a connection made possible by Lincoln’s wartime emancipation of slaves in rebel territory. How different this was from 1860, when Lincoln won the highest office in the land. Then, Americans had no difficulty deciding who belonged in the temple of greatness, and Lincoln appeared to have no chance to enter. Reviled by Democrats, sneered at by southerners, and dismissed by editors, politicians, and lay people in his own Republican Party, Lincoln seemed the wrong man for the momentous job ahead. To his great rival, Democratic presidential hopeful Stephen A. Douglas, Lincoln was small-minded, happy to incite “a war of sections,” and a Negro-lover. To Mississippi’s Jefferson Davis, Lincoln was a man who could not be trusted to obey the Constitution. He had no honor and was ruled by expediency. Davis’s animadversions were mild by contrast with other southern fire-eaters. Yet all of the bicentennial celebrants, scholars included, had no doubt that Lincoln was great, a man whose resolve and genius led a nation in its darkest time. “Lincoln is revered as our greatest president, but he is certainly more than that. He is an unparalleled national treasure, a legend that best represents the democratic ideal. Every generation looks to Lincoln for strength, inspiration and wisdom.” One of America’s most beloved poets, Carl Sandburg, wrote a six-volume elegy on Lincoln. It ended with his death, as “To the four corners of the earth began the spread of Lincoln story and legend … mystic shadows and a bright aura gathered around Lincoln.” The present count of Lincoln books is 775 titles, a surfeit added by the end of Lincoln’s bicentennial.24
Perhaps our quest for objective judgment is too quixotic. We can, however, move past the differences of opinion listed above by recalling that any measure of greatness must involve both the individual and the times. Revisit those times. Lincoln served as president during the most horrific and perilous of all American wars. His life, until the Civil War erupted, did not seem to prepare him for greatness. But it did prepare him for suffering. Often lonely, beset by images of his dying mother, melancholy and depressed, he identified with others’ suffering. Suffering taught Lincoln to hide a portion of his thoughts and feelings, and the empathetic suffering he exhibited during the war. The poet W. H. Auden wrote, “Let us honour if we can; The vertical man; Though we value none; But the horizontal one.” Is Lincoln great because he is gone? Did martyrdom bring him glory? Is his mystical legend, as Sandburg termed it, more important than his actual life? Did death turn a skilled politician into a statesman? Elevate a meddling commander-in-chief into a master strategist? Transform a racist into an avatar of racial justice?
More questions, no answers. In order to understand the puzzle that Lincoln’s greatness presupposes, one must once again ask how history determines greatness. One finds that in life Lincoln’s reputation was not what it became after his death. True, a half-century after Lincoln went to his grave, he had become “the icon of American democracy.” When going to the movies became the country’s most popular pastime, Lincoln appeared on the silver screen as a young hero (Young Mr. Lincoln) and as an avatar of freedom (Abe Lincoln in Illinois) and the moving force behind the Thirteenth Amendment (Lincoln). But Lincoln’s reputation in the scholarly world had as many ups and downs as Lincoln’s own life. Reviled by some historians as the most egregious example of a “blundering generation” of self-interested and short-sighted politicians by some, defended as wise and practical by others, Lincoln remains something of an enigma.25
A final effort to judge greatness will rest on our own measure of the man. Who was Lincoln that we should be mindful of him? Born into a farming family, losing loved siblings and mother early, working his way up from farm hand to store owner to lawyer (and a very successful one at that); moving from place to place (the great passion of many in his day) to better himself; grasping at book learning with a kind of avidity that only his love of politics rivaled; settling into a tumultuous marriage that nevertheless worked for both him and Mary Todd; finding that politicking came easy but staking out an anti-slavery position early that barred his way to the leadership of his first party affiliation; stricken with bouts of depression and self-doubt but facing the world with geniality, modesty, and self-deprecating humor, Lincoln represented the antebellum white male. In him resonated all of the dreams, dashed and realized, of his generation. Though he decided to take a leading role in the quarrel that divided that generation, his role was scripted by the values of his fellow Americans. Their expansive ambition was his own. Their ambiguous moralism was his own. His part in the new Republican Party, his election to the highest office, his choice of cabinet, and his management of the war made him the most important man in America because he was everyman, and yet he controlled the lives of millions of men in uniform, a budget of billions (in today’s dollars in the trillions), and a burgeoning federal bureaucracy. Like that of his fellow northerners, his anti-slavery stance grew into abolitionism, his realistic view that the war was fought against secession morphed gradually into a far more idealistic view of a new kind of nation, and then, like so many of them in blue, he was struck down. The nation mourned, and still mourned, as Lincoln became a symbol of the sacrifices to the war he tried to avert. “Scorned and ridiculed by many critics during his presidency, Lincoln became a martyr and almost a saint after his death.” He had saved the Union, not singlehandedly, but with single-minded determination.26
But did his very representativeness make him great? What great deeds, what shining heroism, did he exhibit? Called the Great Emancipator, he was neither. He genuinely hated slavery. It violated his ideal that a man should benefit from his own labor and that a man should be free to move about seeking work, starting a family, and guiding his children’s upbringing. But Lincoln was not in favor of social mixing, and he was a white supremacist. He ended slavery with the Emancipation Proclamation in portions of states still in rebellion, a war powers step that helped recruit blacks into the Union Army and denied their labor to their former owners. He acceded to the Thirteenth Amendment, ending slavery, though it was the work and the idea of others in his party.
Would perhaps a major part of Lincoln’s greatness have come to any other man elected to the highest office in these times? Had Lincoln not won the Republican Party nomination in 1860, would we have seen the man as great? Had not the nation been plunged into a Civil War, would his virtues have seemed so evident or his character so luminous? A mental experiment will help us weigh the relative impact of times and the man. The outgoing president, James Buchanan, is reckoned in all the polls one of the worst or the worst of U.S. chief executives. Yet he presided over the same crisis as Lincoln. The times had not changed.
Consider, however, Buchanan’s inaugural address, delivered on March 4, 1857:
In entering upon this great office I must humbly invoke the God of our fathers for wisdom and firmness to execute its high and responsible duties in such a manner as to restore harmony and ancient friendship among the people of the several States and to preserve our free institutions throughout many generations. Convinced that I owe my election to the inherent love for the Constitution and the Union which still animates the hearts of the American people, let me earnestly ask their powerful support in sustaining all just measures calculated to perpetuate these, the richest political blessings which Heaven has ever bestowed upon any nation.
Could these words lift the spirits of a nation? Capture its deepest emotions? Live through the ages?27
If Lincoln is great, it is because he is perceived as great, and he is perceived as great because of the enduring power of his words. Historians and lay readers agree on this. An indifferent public speaker with a high-pitched voice, unable to match the dramatic onstage performances of some of his political rivals, Lincoln could out-write them all. As he told the first audience he faced after he announced his candidacy for the U.S. Senate seat held by his great rival Stephen A. Douglas:
If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could then better judge what to do, and how to do it. … A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved—I do not expect the house to fall—but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new—North as well as South.
The answer was the victory of the free soil Republican Party, a victory that Lincoln foresaw:
Our cause, then, must be intrusted to, and conducted by, its own undoubted friends—those whose hands are free, whose hearts are in the work—who do care for the result. Two years ago [in 1856, the first time the party ran a candidate for the presidency] the Republicans of the nation mustered over thirteen hundred thousand strong. We did this under the single impulse of resistance to a common danger, with every external circumstance against us. Of strange, discordant, and even hostile elements, we gathered from the four winds, and formed and fought the battle through, under the constant hot fire of a disciplined, proud, and pampered enemy. Did we brave all them to falter now?—now, when that same enemy is wavering, dissevered, and belligerent? The result is not doubtful. We shall not fail—if we stand firm, we shall not fail. Wise counsels may accelerate, or mistakes delay it, but, sooner or later, the victory is sure to come.
When the house had divided, President Lincoln told the crowds at his first inaugural, in words that are as moving today as they must have been when so much depended upon them:
My countrymen, one and all, think calmly and well, upon this whole subject. Nothing valuable can be lost by taking time. If there be an object to hurry any of you, in hot haste, to a step which you would never take deliberately, that object will be frustrated by taking time; but no good object can be frustrated by it. Such of you as are now dissatisfied still have the old Constitution unimpaired, and, on the sensitive point, the laws of your own framing under it; while the new administration will have no immediate power, if it would, to change either. If it were admitted that you who are dissatisfied hold the right side in the dispute, there still is no single good reason for precipitate action. Intelligence, patriotism, Christianity, and a firm reliance on Him, who has never yet forsaken this favored land, are still competent to adjust, in the best way, all our present difficulty. In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The government will not assail you. You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors. You have no oath registered in Heaven to destroy the government, while I shall have the most solemn one to “preserve, protect, and defend” it. I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearth-stone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.
In the midst of a terrible war, surrounded by the graves of so many young Americans, Lincoln dedicated the Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, cemetery.
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. … But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
In a few words, Lincoln encapsulated the republican dream of five generations, and the hope of many more generations to come. As Garry Wills explains, “By giving this language a place in our sacred documents, Lincoln changed the way people thought about the Constitution.” The old states’ rights idea of a constitution that was a compact among separate entities faded. The Lincoln Constitution was an indissoluble union, a great nation. Equally important, Lincoln taught us how to read the Declaration of Independence. “A single people, dedicated to a proposition” of government for, by, and of all the people, was an “intellectual revolution.”28
When that war had almost come to a close, Lincoln once again gave an inaugural address, and its serene confidence and magnanimity recapture the dream of a single nation, living in harmony, looking to a better future.
Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether.” With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan—to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.
His audience listened with intent silence, a profound appreciation for his services, and, most of all, the hope that the peace would bind up the nation. A month and ten days later he lay dying from an assassin’s bullet. In 1840, after love seemed to have eluded him once again, he told a friend: “he would have been more than willing to die save that ‘he had done nothing to make any human being remember that he had lived.’” Now everyone remembered what he had done, because no one would forget what he had said.29
War brings out the hatred in men. Civil war is the worst of wars in this fashion, for both sides feel betrayed by the other. As Wills demonstrates, Lincoln’s wartime telegrams to his commanders have an almost brutal sternness and determination. The war must be won at all costs. But Lincoln himself did not hate. Perhaps this was because Mary Todd’s brothers—his brothers-in-law—fought for the Confederacy. Perhaps it was because he empathized so easily with the human cost on both sides. Perhaps it was because he hated war itself more than he hated those who would dismember the Union. And perhaps it was because he was always looking beyond the war, confident in victory, to the reknitting of the torn threads of nationhood. His words carried all of these emotions, but not hate.30
When C-SPAN issued its early 2009 ranking of the presidents, one of the moderators of the survey said that Lincoln topped the list “because he is perceived to embody the nation’s avowed core values: integrity, moderation, persistence in the pursuit of honorable goals, respect for human rights, compassion.” Nothing in his life so captured these values as his words. So if greatness is in words—for how else, in the end, would history know who was great—what is the measure, the judgment of greatness of words? Lincoln’s words were great because they were enduring, and enduring because they were great—a perfect circle, but one in which all of us live and judge. We know because we know greatness in words like Lincoln’s, it strikes us immediately, like poetry we cannot forget or a movie sequence that repeats itself in our heads after we have left the movie house. Greatness cannot be modest. Lincoln was modest in almost all ways, save his gift for language at just the right public moment. He rose to those occasions, as he did not to so many others. It was his vaulting ambition to move hearts and minds with words that so became him, and his time, and ours. It is majestic, sweeping, grand—but not through heavy-handed allusions or flights of fancy. Like Shakespeare’s prose, Lincoln’s used the commonplaces of language in his time. To be sure, he was part of a tradition of political oratory that included his political forebears like Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, and John C. Calhoun. But who can remember any of their speeches? For they swayed by the tone and drama of their performance, while he swayed not by manner or voice but by words themselves. And because those words were so American—so rooted in deeply held and hotly contested values of freedom and equality—they remain the best markers of Lincoln’s continued greatness.31
Because the biographer’s judgment of greatness in the last resort depends upon words—stored words, remembered words, words on paper or, now, pixels in the electronic ether—the words of those who have gone before us matter as much as their deeds. For by their words we know them. What would Caesar have been to us without his Conquest of Gaul? Or Lincoln if he had been known as “Silent Abe”? Greatness in history is a quality conferred not by life itself but by the pale remnant of life in the historical record. This may been both a facile and cynically logical conclusion. But what biography reminds history is that without sources, there is no history, and without the words of our subjects, we have no history.32
It is this dependence on the survival of words that brings history and biography together. How the historians and the biographer read character and motive behind the words may vary, but both students of the past cannot do their work without the words. If the popularity and prize-winning ways of biographies of Lincoln, and his fellows in the pantheon, the founding fathers, are any indication, the “golden age” of biography is not past. It is still with us. If the biographer regards the subject as a hero or a villain, if the biographer over-identifies with the subject, then the biographer forfeits the right to our belief. But by assimilating the methods of the historian proper, by finding objective means to weigh the significance of a life in its times, the biographer’s judgment becomes trustworthy.33
It is just as important to conclude that the value of the biographer’s judgment of greatness does not derive from its finality but from its lack of finality. Just as the historical judgment of one scholar or generation of scholars does not bind the scholar or generation looking at the same documentary evidence, so biographers are free to reassess older judgments of greatness. If one could reply to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s epigraph at the start of this chapter, it would be that there is properly no biography; there is only history.