During the bleak months between Abraham Lincoln's election in November of 1860 and his inauguration the following March — what Henry Adams referred to as "the Great Secession Winter" — the president-elect sat for a sculptor named Thomas D. Jones. When Jones unveiled his almost-finished bust, Lincoln, an outsiderish Springfield, Illinois, lawyer anxious to make a good visual impression, proclaimed, "I think it looks very much like the critter."
With the approach of Lincoln's bicentennial year, two new books by two superstar historians offer portraits of the sixteenth president that are every bit as arresting as Jones's. In Lincoln President-Elect (Simon & Schuster), Harold Holzer tells the seldom-heard day-to-day story of that tense winter, giving us a Lincoln enduring an unprecedented 2,000-mile inaugural train journey to Washington as well as a deluge of hate mail: "We are going to put a spider in your dumpling and play the Devil with you."
This challenging overture would be nothing compared to the next four years, as Princeton's James M. McPherson makes plain in Tried By War (The Penguin Press), a rare look at Lincoln the military strategist. Here we find the president confronted by an unholy array of irritants — principally the delusional General George B. McClellan, who had a habit of referring to his boss as "the original gorilla" — while using his deft political chops to overcome the Army's countless blunders. As the author points out, the question of the commander in chief's success can be measured by his untimely end. "If Lincoln had been a failure," McPherson writes, "he would have lived a longer life."
