This is not straight biography. In fact, it is scarcely biography at all: more a succession of impressions and musings - sometimes almost hackneyed, but more often illuminating - on probably the greatest of all American Presidents. At the same time, Jan Morris has not shirked the necessary hard work and has visited virtually all the places associated with Lincoln's life - and death, since the small Washington theatre where he was shot in the head by John Wilkes Booth still functions nightly, as it did then.
This assassination, the act of an embittered, muddle-headed Southern actor, recoiled savagely on the defeated South, whose leaders were believed (wrongly) to have been mixed up in the plot. Not only were some innocent peopled hanged, but with Lincoln gone, there was nobody of the necessary stature left to save the South from the revengeful radical wing of the Republican Party. He was the only man who could have "bound the nation's wounds", though he still might have found it hard, or even impossible, to control his more rabid political followers and colleagues.
We tend to see Lincoln's career in terms of the Civil War, which he partly provoked but also saw through to its bitter end. It aged and saddened him terribly, but it also matured and spiritualised him, burning out the rather vulgar ambition and political horse-trading which had marked his earlier career as a State senator. However, there is much more to his life than the last four years of it. Lincoln was the true self-made man of American myth, rising from a humble logcabin background to become a successful, notably shrewd lawyer and state politician, and to marry a Kentucky belle who came from a higher social caste than himself (she always remained very conscious of the fact). He had a truly "democratic" apprenticeship to life, including his spell as a flatboatman on the Mississippi, and was even remembered popularly as "Abe the Railsplitter."
Yet, as Jan Morris shows, Lincoln, in spite of his populist sentiments, was no mere personification of the Common Man, nor was he a kind of larger-than-life Huckleberry Finn. He was, in fact, a most uncommon man and she is surely right in saying that under his outward show of modesty, Lincoln knew himself to be somebody exceptional and destined for greatness. Like most great men, he was full of contradictions - an idealist, yet a sharp and sometimes unscrupulous manoeuverer; a conscientious lawyer who in wartime played fast and loose with the Constitution; a humanitarian who jailed thousands without trial. He was capable of writing a fine, simple, almost Biblical prose, and equally capable of bombastic or flowery oratory. He was harsh with his military commanders and intervened constantly and sometimes ignorantly in the Civil War fighting, though many of the less able Northern generals had been chosen by him personally for purely political or opportunist factors.
FROM early on he carried a deep fatalism which anticipated his violent death in his fifties, and of his four sons two died young, while his favourite, Tad, barely attained to literacy. His wife, Mary, was loyal and loving but also indiscreet, snobbish and silly; in his last years, plainly she was partly unhinged (though Jan Morris might have pointed out that apart from losing two sons, she also had to suffer the deaths of almost all the menfolk of her own family while fighting for the South). Still, Lincoln carried the immense load of the Civil War right through to the last shot fired, and Walt Whitman's poem "Oh Captain, my Captain" records not only the nation's mourning at his death, but also the end of a four-year Calvary. Though many or most of his party colleagues had considered him a lightweight choice for the Presidency, he was fully able for its burdens and proved himself a shrewd diplomat as well as a sound, though unorthodox administrator.
He also had an intuitive sense of timing and could read, usually better than anybody else, the American public's mind and probable reactions. In that sense, he can certainly be considered the spokesman of the Common Man, whom he understood perfectly. Jan Morris - in common with most other Lincoln commentators - considers that his great inner driving force was his total, almost mystical belief in American-style democracy and its superiority to other methods of government. One wonders exactly what Lincoln would make of the quasi-imperial superpower which straddles the world today, and which is partly his own creation.
Brian Fallon is an author and critic