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Title: Lincoln's Virtues: An Ethical Biography by William Lee Miller ISBN: 0-375-40158-X Publisher: Knopf Pub. Date: 15 January, 2002 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $32.50 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.71 (24 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Another Excellent Miller Book
Comment: This is another excellent book by William Lee Miller, the author of The First Liberty (about church/state separation), The Business of May Next (about Madison and the Constitution), and Arguing About Slavery (about John Quincy Adams and the controversy about slavery). In all these books, Miller has explored what he refers to as the moral basis of America, an effort to uncover the basic motivations leading to the establishment of basic American institutions. His strategy has usually been to select some major personality and episode and systematically use that episode to get to the heart of the basic impulse underlying the result.
This book is a little different. Lincoln's Virtues concentrates more closely on the person, in this case Lincoln, than prior books and provides less background history. In this book, Miller uses a roughly chronological/biographical structure to examine the development of Lincoln's ideas and motivations in the years leading up to the Presidency. The result is fascinating reading. Miller has developed style combining very well written narrative, careful use of quotations from primary sources, and scrupulous exegesis of the primary literature. Miller is simply an excellent writer with an engaging, almost conversational style. He presents Lincoln as a man who developed a series of strong moral convictions but also a personally ambitious individual who dedicated himself to professional politics. Through his personal traits, such as his magnaminity and self-discipline, Miller shows Lincoln harnessing his ambition in the service of achieving substantial moral ends. Miller's Lincoln is an extremely admirable person. To Miller, Lincoln is a powerful and largely self-educated intellect, a skilled professional politician with high moral stature, a very ambitious man who consistently put moral considerations ahead of personal achievement, and an excellent speaker who relied on reasoned appeals for justice rather than emotional demagoguery. Miller shows well how this unlikely paragon, and that is not too strong a word, emerged from the unlikely setting of frontier America. A strong point made by Miller is that Lincoln, from his earliest days, confidently rejected much of his milieu. In a society characterized by enthusiastic revivalism, he was a religous skeptic. In a place where Jacksonian democracts dominated political life, he became a Whig. In a state with the strongest anti-negro legislation of any nothern state, he was at least relatively unprejuidiced. Miller also defends Lincoln effectively against recent charges of racism and reluctant abolitionism, which Miller correctly sees as anachronistic.
This book does have some deficiencies. Because of the concentration on Lincoln, it has less background narration than Miller's prior books and it requires a decent background knowledge of 19th century American history to get the most out of this book. I don't think Miller has done quite enough to show why many in the North found the expansion of slavery so threatening. Miller shows well that Lincoln concluded that slavery was fundamentally immoral and un-American and opposed it on these grounds. What Miller doesn't convey, I think, is the fact that many in North felt, correctly, that slavery expansion was a way for the South to maintain its political grip on the nation. Both North and South perceived that restriction of slavery to its existing domain would break the hold of the South on the Federal government permanently and perhaps lead eventually to the extinction of slavery. Miller dealt with this issue at somewhat in his previous book, Arguing About Slavery, but it only comes up tangentially here. I think its this aspect of the slavery controversy that gave the events of the 1850 and the election of 1860 such urgency.
Rating: 5
Summary: Outstanding book
Comment: I am 2/3 of the way through this book and I feel it is one of the ten best books I've ever read. The author's writing style is very enjoyable -- non-patronizing and doesn't feel like he's forcing erudition (both impressive for an academic). The tone is very engaging in its informal, almost whimsical nature. You feel more like you're chatting with a brilliant professor (which he clearly is) over beers about a subject that truly enthralls and excites him, rather than being lectured to, and the excitement is infectious.
As far as subject matter, I find fascinating and well-argued the book's central premise: that the reputation for unique moral character which Abe Lincoln has gained was not a fluke or an accident, but the result of a lifetime of commitment to honesty and integrity in politics, and a long series of very specific, very practical choices to this end.
Personally I would have liked to have seen a little more by way of connecting Lincoln's morality to established moral philosophical theory (there is admittedly some of this), but then Miller's goal is clearly more a specific look at Abe Lincoln's practical decisions regarding morality than a more comprehensive abstract analysis.
I think the book has elements that would appeal to anyone interested in moral philosophy, Abe Lincoln specifically, politics, or U.S. History (including of course the Civil War and slavery). And if, like myself, you are interested in all of these topics, it is an absolute pleasure to read this book.
Rating: 3
Summary: Long-winded is an Understatement!
Comment: Okay, I admit it: I am a fan of Lincoln's. I was disposed to like this book. It's really not a BAD book, for it's very well researched, and Miller does know his subject well. However, his prose style is musty, circumlocutious, windy in the extreme, and almost deaf to any coherent narrative of Lincoln's life. The perspective on "virtue"--a subject I find fascintating--is also strained to the maximum. In all due respect, this author has been speaking to star-struck undergrads for a bit too long. A good editor might have saved all this research; as it is, it's a longish, flawed book on a great subject.
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Title: Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President (Library of Religious Biography) by Allen C. Guelzo ISBN: 0802842933 Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. Pub. Date: April, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.00 |
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Title: With Malice Toward None : Life of Abraham Lincoln, The by Stephen B. Oates ISBN: 0060924713 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 05 January, 1994 List Price(USD): $17.00 |
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Title: LINCOLN by David Herbert Donald ISBN: 068482535X Publisher: Simon & Schuster Pub. Date: 05 November, 1996 List Price(USD): $18.00 |
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Title: We Are Lincoln Men : Abraham Lincoln and His Friends by David Herbert Donald ISBN: 0743254686 Publisher: Simon & Schuster Pub. Date: 01 November, 2003 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
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Title: Honor's Voice : The Transformation of Abraham Lincoln by Douglas L. Wilson ISBN: 0375703969 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 25 May, 1999 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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