I should probably wait until I finish the Lincoln book I’m in the middle of now — “Team of Rivals” — before embarking on another one. But The New York Times Book Review today writes up a volume by British historian Richard Carwardine, “Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power.” The review, by novelist Kevin Baker, is worth a read (it’s available on the Times site for a week):
“In dissecting Lincoln’s triumph, Carwardine has provided us with a democratic version of Machiavelli’s ‘Prince,’ a primer on how power can and should be won and used in a free society. Lincoln, he shows us, expertly employed both the machinery of his new party and the authority of his office. He preferred peaceful and lawful means to his ends, but he did not hesitate to press constitutional bounds to the breaking point — for instance, suspending habeas corpus, shutting down the occasional newspaper and detaining thousands of Southern sympathizers — in the desperate struggle to keep the nation together.”