Becoming Lincoln

Awkward prose overwhelms whatever new insights Freehling (The Road to Disunion), humanities professor emeritus at the University of Kentucky, seeks to share in this Lincoln biography. He focuses on Lincoln’s life before he assumed the presidency, reviewing his failures in detail rather than concentrating on his better-known successes. He starts with Lincoln’s “dismal youth” and follows the vicissitudes of his political career, which included several electoral defeats and multiple unsuccessful terms as a state legislator. But this period of Lincoln’s life is well-trodden ground, reexamined recently in books such as Sidney Blumenthal’s multivolume The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln and David Herbert Donald’s Lincoln. Rather than charting new paths, Freehling fills the text with diversions, giving his subjects awkward epithets (“the internal improvement apostle”) or explaining why it is easier to wield an axe blade attached to a handle, and burying in a footnote a more substantive critique of Donald’s portrayal of Lincoln as passive and fatalistic. The prose too often gets in its own way. (“The giant, no longer appearing to be all legs, now looked closer to all head, largely self-trained to tower.”) This biography fails to justify its existence. (Sept.)