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

Pryor (Reading the Man) does the impossible in this insightful, lucid book by teaching us something new about 16th U.S. President Abraham Lincoln (1809–65). Using new primary sources that reveal personal encounters with the president, the author points to the ambitions and partisanship that drove Lincoln throughout his life and the often contradictory, conflicted, and convulsive politics and problems of a democracy beset by overbearing self interests, weak federal institutions, vainglorious men, and incompetent military leadership. Pryor scores Lincoln for his constricted understanding of military matters, bungling of the Fort Sumter crisis, misreading of supposed Southern Unionism, and sometimes unprincipled partisanship, among other failures. She argues that Lincoln did not grow into and remake the presidency as many scholars have insisted, and that his speeches belied his inability to communicate clearly and effectively. The man Pryor reimagines is at once complicated, conflicted, and consequential.