Review

Elizabeth Brown Pryor, Six Encounters with Lincoln: A President Confronts Democracy and Its Demons. New York: Viking, 2017. Pp. 480.

 
Today we celebrate Abraham Lincoln as one of the country’s three premier presidents. In so doing, however, we tend to lose sight of a more complex and intriguing reality. Elizabeth Brown Pryor pulls back the curtain to address Lincoln’s foibles and shortcomings.

Pryor is no mean-spirited iconoclast. She knows that “greatness does not mean perfection” and she admires Lincoln’s ability “to embrace the art of the possible.” She credits his tenacious defense of democratic governance and his insistence that “the disappointed and disgruntled should not simply take their ball and go home, but stay and tough it out, make their case, fight and persuade their way back to power” (9, 130).

But Lincoln hagiography strikes Pryor as saccharine and overblown—“pretending that he was something that he was not.” She notes “the inelegance of his everyday interactions” and she reminds us that during his four years in Washington “he was largely viewed as a well-meaning bumbler, a curious and earnest man, but not the leader needed in a national crisis.” He was “less a man of principle than of political expediency,” she harshly judges. Rather than providing a “moral compass,” he was “always playing catch-up” (4, 7, 8).

Those who want to place Lincoln on a pedestal will spurn this book. But those who want to know more about the sixteenth president will welcome Pryor’s contributions. A relentless researcher, she outclasses most Lincoln specialists. Her arguments may be questioned, but her critics must do their homework. On balance, she offers a bracing alternative to one-dimensional hero worship.

Pryor’s chapters each start with a specific “encounter” that opens a larger topic for scrutiny. Her earlier biography of Clara Barton demonstrated that Lincoln often failed to establish rapport with consequential women. Building on Barbara A. White’s essay in this journal (Winter 2009), Pryor strips away the mythology surrounding Harriet Beecher Stowe’s oft-cited encounter with Lincoln. She shows why we should retire the famed apocryphal quip: “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war!” (384n4). Lincoln shrank back when confronted by women who tried to play overt political roles—Jessie Benton Frémont, Jane Grey Swisshelm, and Anna E. Dickinson. Pryor bravely navigates the contested terrain regarding Mary Lincoln and the Lincoln marriage; she follows Douglas Wilson’s Honor’s Voice and steers clear of the acrimonious dispute between Michael Burlingame and Catherine Clinton. Pryor depicts “an uneasy marriage between two difficult partners, whose tastes and inclinations sometimes clashed.” Mary was no saint, but her husband was “moody and aloof, slovenly and coarse, careless and overindulgent with their four sons” (239).

Lincoln felt under siege from zealous egalitarians who viewed antislavery as a moral imperative. Pryor expands here on her striking essay in the JALA (Summer 2009) that brought Lincoln face-to-face with Sergeant Lucien P. Waters, a “self-appointed emancipator” who tried to free as many Maryland slaves as he could. The impetuous young soldier was a true believer. Waters tried to engage Lincoln on a hot day in August 1862 when the war was going badly and the beleaguered president was “nearly worked to death.” Lincoln abruptly ruled out discussing “the damned or Eternal niggar, niggar.” Distressed that the unbecoming slur was part of Lincoln’s vocabulary, Waters resisted the impulse to give him “a dressing down.” Instead he rationalized that Lincoln reflected “the influences by which he was constantly surrounded” (149–50). Pryor sympathizes with both. She lauds Waters’s “unwavering conviction” and sees it as a force that prodded “the more hesitant liberator” (146). Her findings implicitly counter historians such as Allen Guelzo and James Oakes who depict Lincoln as a closeted radical even before he became president.

Lincoln favored “promoting Indian welfare by pressing them to adopt white ways” (208). But he did little to implement that flawed policy. His tenure was marked by continued white looting of Native American property and violent clashes that made a bad situation worse. Although a modest number of Native Americans fought for the Union, at least four times that number sided with the Confederacy. No group had acclimated so impressively to white norms as the Cherokee. Cruelly removed from Georgia to so-called Indian Territory, in what is now Oklahoma, they persevered to become successful agriculturalists who built schools and churches and created democratic institutions. But war placed the Cherokee in peril. Cut off from federal forces, they agreed to ally with the South. Stand Watie, who became a Confederate general, led Cherokee forces in the Trans-Mississippi war against the Union. His veteran cavalrymen, according to historian Robert Kerby, were “lean, eager, professional, and experienced.”[1] Pryor regrets that Lincoln wouldn’t deal with John Ross, the exiled Cherokee chief, but the president was wary of a supposed leader who no longer led.

Pryor demonstrates that Lincoln’s problems with his generals had deeper roots than the personality clash that poisoned his relationship with George B. McClellan. Professional army officers, she notes, “were better educated than he was, and more poised and polished to boot” (25). Dignified presentation “was important for these warriors,” she observes. They lived in a world of order and “firm discipline.” But he came from a world of political maneuver and negotiation and did not “project authority” (51, 55). Pryor deplores his promotion of political figures to field command (of course, many professionals likewise faltered). In sum, historian T. Harry Williams still stands tall. His classic study of the subject contended that Lincoln grew on the job and became more adept over time in exercising his military responsibilities.[2]

Pryor examines Lincoln’s penchant for storytelling. It gave him a “powerful social tool” and an “ability to control a situation.” A clever story could “clinch an argument” (79). Humor also shielded “an intensely self-absorbed person” who was “not good at small talk and had trouble forming deep bonds” (80). Pryor rejects “the popular impression today that Lincoln was a master of both beautiful prose and inspired conversation.” She considers him “an awkward conversationalist” who had “a poor grasp of grammar and elegant expression” (81). Impromptu speeches befuddled him, and most of his writing was “banal or workmanlike,” often “so clumsily phrased as to be obtuse” (331). She recognizes, as she must, several unforgettable instances of the wartime president’s superb wordsmithing. But she hardly does justice to historian Douglas Wilson’s close-grained study of Lincoln’s “remarkable abilities as a writer.”[3]

Most audaciously, Pryor faults Lincoln for having failed to see what he was up against: he and other Republicans were “blind to Southern resolve” (300). They found themselves fighting a war they had not expected against a determined foe that enjoyed ardent popular support. She connects Lincoln’s inability to understand the South with his affinity for Shakespeare’s tragedies. He was frustrated at wearing a “hollow crown” (in other words, the white South fought him rather than acknowledge his legitimacy). His “ascent to power” had brought “terrible consequences,” and he bore the guilt (335). She is not the first historian who has tried to delve into Lincoln’s mind, a quest that inevitably threatens to substitute speculation for evidence. The Southerners Lincoln knew best were fellow Whigs who admired Henry Clay and were devoted to the Union. Like them, Lincoln regarded Southern Rights ideologues as annoying malcontents. Sensible Southerners, he believed, understood that disunion made no sense. He was predisposed, before the election, to see secession threats as empty. He and the Republican Party thereby sleepwalked into the gravest crisis of all.

When Deep South extremists seized control in November and December 1860, Lincoln could not comprehend that the tail somehow had contrived to wag the dog. He hoped the troubles in the South were a temporary spasm, not a permanent alienation. He trusted that reasonable Southerners might regain the upper hand. He was oblivious to the dreadful truth that hundreds of thousands in the Upper South who thought secession a terrible idea nevertheless bolted from the Union when told they must choose sides. Months after the fighting began, he was convinced that the pro-Union majority in Virginia had been “repressed, and silenced.”[4] Pryor laments Lincoln’s “chronic misunderstanding of the South—a perpetual tone deafness that had been present since before the inauguration” (272).

Lincoln became painfully aware of his own limitations, Pryor insists. He regretted his absence of “executive or military experience.” He could not reconcile his vaulting ambition and “colossal ego” with nagging doubts that his stubbornness had brought the crisis to a head in the first place. “By his own admission, he lurched and stumbled,” unable to stop the torrent of bloodshed (8, 335). Shakespeare’s tragedies spoke to his condition, Pryor concludes—the “self-induced hell of rulers” who “find themselves impotent and unfulfilled” by “the isolation of power” and tormented by their mistakes. However hard he tried, he could not be president of “the entire United States” (332, 334, 336).

Here Pryor may overreach. Lincoln’s high estimate of his own capabilities is apparent; her view regarding his insecurity is asserted rather than proven. Notwithstanding his scant education and limited political experience, an inner gyroscope served him well. Other presidents who rose from obscurity retained self-destructive chips on their shoulders (the two Johnsons come to mind). Lincoln wasn’t that way at all. Yes, he loved Shakespeare. But on that fatal evening in April 1865, he went see a farce, Our American Cousin.

Shakespeare’s kings and princes performed on a political stage quite distinct from Lincoln’s sprawling democratic polity. His arena was electoral politics. Six Encounters doesn’t touch the pre-presidential era when he deftly outmatched an array of talented rivals and vaulted to power. It shortchanges his wartime skill at conflating the Union cause with the Republican Party, thereby marginalizing his intra-party opponents.[5] Do Lear’s or Hamlet’s snarled family relations shed light on the challenges Lincoln faced? Do Macbeth’s or Richard III’s crimes? What might Shakespeare have taught Lincoln about the Confederacy?

Elizabeth Brown Pryor did not live to see this volume in print. Soon after completing the manuscript on which she had long labored, her life was snuffed out in a senseless automobile accident. Her sister, Beverly Louise Brown, brought the book to publication and supplied its many illustrations.

Pryor was sui generis. Her Reading the Man: A Portrait of Robert E. Lee Through His Private Letters (2007) set her apart. It revealed an extraordinary talent. Her Lee is in perfect focus, making it unlikely that anyone else ever will publish so discerning a study of the Confederate commander. Her Lincoln, by contrast, is both a virtuoso triumph and a bit blurred. But nobody who writes about Lincoln in the future can be taken seriously unless they heed Pryor’s stern research regimen and take full account of her achievement here.

1. Robert L. Kerby, Kirby Smith’s Confederacy: The Trans-Mississippi South, 1863–1865 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972), 354.

2. T. Harry Williams, Lincoln and His Generals (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1952).

3. Douglas L. Wilson, Lincoln’s Sword: The Presidency and the Power of Words (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), 3. See also Michael P. Johnson, ed., “Abraham Lincoln, Wordsmith,” in Abraham Lincoln, Slavery, and the Civil War: Selected Writings and Speeches (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2001), 1–10.

4. Message to Congress in Special Session, July 4, 1861, in Basler, ed., Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, IV:427.

5. Adam I. P. Smith, No Party Now: Politics in the Civil War North (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).