were relatively indifferent to the issue” of slavery and the westward expansion of the slave states, Lincoln was determined to settle it, even at catastrophic cost. Goodwin indicates that Lincoln knew that war was coming, and he knew why: He’d been vigorously opposed to slavery for his entire public career, and even if “many Northerners. Thus it was smart politicking to recruit erstwhile opponents Salmon Chase and William Seward, who had very different ideas on most things but who nonetheless served Lincoln loyally to the point of propping him up at times during the fraught Civil War years. Lincoln was, if anything, melancholic-possibly as the result of abuse on the part of his father-and sometimes incapacitated by depression. Goodwin, an old-fashioned pop historian of the Ambrose-McCullough vein, quotes from his law partner, William Herndon: “Lincoln had terribly strong passions for women-could scarcely keep his hands off them.” End of discussion. Was Lincoln gay? It doesn’t matter, though the question has exercised plenty of biographers recently. Well-practiced historian Goodwin, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in history for No Ordinary Time (1994), examines Abraham Lincoln as a practical politician, focusing on his conversion of rivals to allies.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |