The Emancipator's Inner Journey

...I am a living witness that any one of your children may look to come here as my father's child has...

...Therein lies the heart of the book: the divided nation and the divided Lincoln required each other...

...Strozier pointedly comments that the son never got around to erecting a tombstone for Thomas, yet in fact Lincoln did memorialize him publicly in 1864: "I happen temporarily to occupy this big White House...

...Take, for example, Lincoln's letter of 1841, in which he described a group of slaves shackled together as being "like so many fish upon a trot-line...

...A letter from Speed reporting that he had married his betrothed, says Strozier, liberated Lincoln to follow suit...

...it is the substance of historical continuity...

...Speed and Lincoln, for more than three years, after the fashion of many early 19th-century males, shared the same bed...

...Strozier makes much of Lincoln's breaking his betrothal to Mary Todd on the same day that he and Speed separated (after Speed sold the store he owned in Springfield...

...This representative was George Washington Julian of Indiana, a leading abolitionist elected for the first time in 1860...

...The elder Lincoln would not vanish from his son's presence...

...Says the author, "Lincoln found his metaphor...

...This separation," writes Strozier, "apparently threw Lincoln into a panic that shook his fragile sexual identity...

...The author writes: "Certainly, one suspects that Lincoln's adult strengths?his flexibility, empathy, humor, and creativity—derived from a close, loving relationship with his mother...

...Finally, Strozier is positively extravagant in describing the triumph he thinks Lincoln achieved in 1858 in hitting upon the statement, "a house divided against itself cannot stand...

...Strozier observes that to "compare the slaves with fish on a trotline was to see them as objects...

...Such pairing is part of the lock step of history...

...his primary goal was to get elected...

...One might ask what constitutes a suitable monument to a father: only a gTave marker (as Strozier seems to think), or an eminent career whose origin is so eloquently recalled, or something else...

...Despite the interest of this section, the author's bold assertion is a construct depending solely on his say-so...

...Many politicians have been inspired in their careers—and even led to undertake them—by the model of a hero acquired in early manhood: Wood-row Wilson, for instance, fastened upon Gladstone, John F. Kennedy upon Churchill, Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan upon Franklin D. Roosevelt...

...Strozier has read anew the record of the early years, seeing the meaning for Lincoln of the death of his mother and, above all, plumbing once more the off-again, on-again engagement to Mary Todd...

...Still, this is no psychobiography based on guess and historical license...

...Reviewed by Henry F. Graff Professor of History, Columbia University THE UNCEASING fascination that Abraham Lincoln holds for Americans is a profound national fact...

...It is not easy, either, to be comfortable with the author's judgment that Lincoln's grandiloquent eulogy of Henry Clay in July 1852 must be comprehended in connection with the death of Thomas Lincoln a year and a half earlier, because that event turned Clay into "one of the glorious fathers who supplanted his own inadequate father...

...now he had turned the phrase that truly fitted the circumstances...

...Lincoln, for instance, had hostile feelings toward his father, whose lack of education deeply irritated the son...

...Making the connection between "public" and "private" performance will not be easy for every reader, because the knack of understanding public actions on the basis of personal neuroses (although Strozier avoids that word) requires rare, perhaps overweening confidence...

...In the present age—when Presidential failure is deemed the norm, when the media have stripped our Chief Executives of the mystery they require to lead, when the President's utterances are not his own but rather those of ghostwriters and assistants, when the major problems of the day defy precise definition because they flow into one another in-eluctably—Lincoln's labors instruct us that in the right hands the nation's greatest crises are manageable...

...Strozier dismisses Sandburg's magnificent study as "poetry, not history...

...It must be noted in this regard that Strozier's own grace and lucidity as a writer add immensely to his persuasiveness, and of course he has the aid of Lincoln's unsurpassed skill with words...

...Writing history is, after all, a business for artists, not scientists...

...The most intriguing and novel segment of the book concerns Lincoln's relationship with Joshua Speed, "the only intimate friend Lincoln ever had...

...In his autobiography he offered the important observation that public office holders of his era were "lifted up and ennobled by the great cause they were commissioned to serve...

...Strozier dismisses the contrary stories of Lincoln's sexual athleticism that Billy Herndon, Lincoln's law partner and biographer, later collected...

...In this state, his fear of intimacy with a woman was revived, and he broke his engagement with Mary...

...Being episodic and topical (and therefore repetitious here and there), the book is patently no successor to nor substitute for the sterling 1977 biography by Stephen Oates, who set his narrative in the huge boiling cauldron of the Union in dissolution...

...The making of the human personality, including Lincoln's, remains unaccountable in the last analysis...

...There is a less complex explanation...

...Possibly in writing the life of a giant there is more than one route to the goal...

...To his credit, though, Strozier does develop layers of interpretation fresh even for Lincoln specialists, and he clarifies a number of issues the present generation takes particular interest in...

...Strozier is a follower of the psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut, who maintained that psychological health grows out of wit, warmth, inventiveness, and wisdom...

...Nonetheless, Lincoln deserves to be judged not merely by his words but also by how far ahead he was of most of his Northern office-seeking contemporaries in finding the best way to oppose slavery...

...Says Strozier, "It seemed to pain Lincoln to realize how dull his father was, which tells more about Lincoln's driving ambition than it does about Thomas's character...

...Carl Sandburg, it is useful to recall, stressed the importance in Lincoln's life of the same traits, reaching his opinion through a searching, six-volume chronology of the man's growth and attainments...

...Indeed, on the subject of slavery Lincoln remained remarkably consistent: He abhorred it...

...The latest Lincoln scholar to take up the challenge is Charles B. Strozier, an Associate Professor of History at Sangamon State University in Illinois and Visiting Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Rush Medical School in Chicago...

...The glory of the Emancipator's accomplishments is such that every few years another historian seeks to deepen our knowledge of them...

...We should be able to incorporate such a dynamic of history into our understanding of Lincoln's development as the Union careened from the Compromise of 1850 toward the attack on Fort Sumter...

...In the range of possible answers lies the difficulty in psychologizing the historical record...

...Yet the volume as a whole is full of delicate, suggestive shadings of the Lincoln story...

...For Lincoln," Strozier declares, "these [attributes] become the vehicles for his therapeutic transcendence of the core conflicts within his personality...

...It did more for them than it was possible for them to do for it...

...During his father's last days Lincoln expressed concern and said he wanted to visit, but managed not to do so...

...In a careful chapter, "The Domestication of Political Rhetoric," he scrutinizes in an original fashion the unfolding of Lincoln's attitude toward race and his conceptualization of the slavery problem...

...There was some ambivalence in the tie, too: " In a part of himself he seemed not to trust her...

...In subsequent years the two men drifted apart, leading Strozier to conclude that "once Lincoln was through his own crisis of courtship, Speed had little to offer and the friendship faded away...

...One is strongly tempted to ask whether there is enough here to mark Lincoln as significantly different from millions of other people who have felt such affection and ambivalence...

...Not everybody will agree with some of the inferences...

...No longer did Lincoln see slavery as a cancer or as a wen or as symbolized by various animals—the several figures of speech he had previously employed...

...It was a metaphor with personal integrity...

...Strozier's approach, however, is to relate the story by keeping it within Lincoln himself...

...Also heightening Strozier's effort is the unspoken tension of what a contemporary congressman called "the grand battle for the Nation's life...

...It blended his private self to public concerns in a uniquely creative way...

...Thus the chapters explicate the relationship of Lincoln to his frontier origins, to his father, to the several powerful women in his life, to his children, to the stormy national upheaval of the 1850s...

...His neat—possibly too neat?title captures the book's main thesis: Lincoln's work in saving the union of the states was made possible by his success in unifying his own riven persona...

...To invest it with broody words is merely to complicate the matter...

...This arresting notion is ultimately flimsy, a play on words instead of a flash of illumination...

...He offers some fruits from both of his disciplines...

...it is a historian-psychologist's study of the experiences and torments that the author believes were the formative forces in Lincoln's emergence as one of the supreme leaders of history...

...Some readers will render another decision, considering the trope as evidence of poignant sympathy with the victims it speaks of...

...Being a politician, he was not an abolitionist...