Introduction: David Zarefsky and reasonable argument.

• Author: Leff, Michael

Michael Burlingame began his magisterial new biography of Lincoln with this passage culled from a letter of October, 1863:

No man resolved to make the most of himself can spare time for personal contention. Still less can he afford to take all the consequences, including the vitiating of his temper, and the loss of self-control. Yield the larger things to which you can show no more than equal right; and yield lesser ones, though clearly your own. Better give the path to the dog, than be bitten by him in contesting for the right. Even killing the dog would not cure the bite. (Burlingame, 2008, p. 1; Burlingame is quoting from a letter to James Madison Cutts, October 26, 1863).

Lincoln offered these remarks as advice to another person, but Burlingame, quite reasonably, regarded them as self-reflexive--as precepts to which Lincoln subscribed and by which he attempted to make "the most of himself."

As we all know, David Zarefsky is a devoted student of Lincoln's writings, and it is likely that he has read this letter and even possible that, at some point in his career, he adopted its advice for his own personal guidance. More likely, the match between the scholar and the writer he studies arises not from conscious appropriation but from a coincidence of character and temperament. In any case, Zarefsky's biography reads much like an embodiment of Lincoln's credo. Zarefsky has traveled at length along our disciplinary pathways, has made much of himself, and has had to confront a good many snarling obstacles. Yet, as he now enters retirement, he leaves no dead beasts on the trail behind him, and his mind and spirit remain as they were four decades ago--unscarred and unblemished.

This happy condition is hardly the result of reticence or timidity. As the essays in this issue demonstrate, Zarefsky has a consistent record as a controversialist, sometimes as an advocate of bold change, sometimes as a preservationist, but always as someone who has a position and who does not shrink from expressing it. The pattern of this involvement in controversy indicates a capacity to shift, balance, and modulate positions, and in this respect, we can detect a quality that distinguishes Zarefsky from many other controversialists in the field and that helps to explain why he has been able to argue for so vigorously and for so long without engendering destructive hostility. Each of our essays provides a notable example that illustrates this point.

In the domain of...