Lincoln's forgotten middle years: as the nation was moving apart, he was coming together.

AuthorGuelzo, Allen

Wrestling with His Angel: The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln, 1849-1856

by Sidney Blumenthal

Simon & Schuster, 608 pp.

Six Encounters with Lincoln: A President Confronts Democracy and Its Demons

by Elizabeth Brown Pryor

Viking, 496 pp.

It would be difficult to find two books on Abraham Lincoln published in the same year and yet more unalike in their conclusions than Sidney Blumenthal's Wrestling with His Angel (the second installment in his multi-volume survey of Lincoln's "political life") and Elizabeth Brown Pryor's Six Encounters with Lincoln. Blumenthal's narrative of Lincoln's "wilderness years," from 1849 to 1856, begins with Lincoln at the lowest pitch of his professional life, returning to Illinois from his solitary term in Congress, an embarrassment to his fellow Whigs, only to rise, phoenix-like, from the firestorm of the controversy over slavery in "Bleeding Kansas." Pryor's Lincoln, on the other hand, makes his debut a week after his inauguration as president, in what should have been his greatest moment of political triumph, only to be exposed as a bumbling, awkward poseur incompetently stumbling from pillar to post. Blumenthal is urgent, unflagging, so full of a sense of an impending doom for the republic that, by the end of the book, it almost seems beyond belief that any one person could rise equal to the task of saving it. Pryor is prickly, condescending, and schoolmarmish, contemptuous not only of Lincoln but of everyone who sees him as more than an oafish political hack. One sees in Lincoln the political sorcerer; the other sees nothing but the sorcerer's apprentice. Here is biographical schizophrenia in spades.

Wrestling with His Angel is really two narratives, one about Lincoln's retreat into political oblivion in 1849, and the other about the nation's plunge toward civil war. Blumenthal's most extraordinary accomplishment lies in how he prevents these two narratives from drifting away from each other.

Blumenthal opens his first chapter in Kentucky, where the 1850s begin with an ominous foreshadowing of where the nation is heading. For the first half century of the life of the republic, virtually every serious American thinker was convinced that the country's economic reliance on slave labor was an anachronism that the principles of the revolution and the inefficiencies of slavery would gradually wipe out. There were elaborate plans for emancipations through state legislatures and the courts, and equally elaborate but less dignified plans for disposing of the freed slaves to the West African settlement of Liberia. And there should have been no better showcase for these plans than Kentucky, which in 1833 adopted a nonimportation law that turned off the spigot supplying slaves to Kentucky buyers.

The bill's authors regarded it as the first step on the path to statewide emancipation. But by 1833, cotton had emerged as the single most prized commodity in the transatlantic economy, accounting for more than half of all American exports, and slave labor was the most profitable way of satisfying the world's demand for it. Virginia had been rocked two years before by a slave rebellion, led by Nat Turner, which struck out murderously against all whites, slave owners or not. Slavery became an us-or-them scenario, and in 1849, the nonimportation act was repealed after a bitter...

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