So do scars from the childhood deaths of two of their four sons. Lincoln’s hardscrabble log-cabin childhood and his marriage to the oft-troubled Mary Todd appear. But it boasts more than 200 additional pages of endnotes and bibliography in support of an interpretation of Lincoln that focuses on the moral life of the politician and statesman. The book is not especially long for a contemporary biography it clocks in at just over 400 pages of text.
It is thoroughly researched and highly readable, written with all the artful craftsmanship of a veteran writer and editor. The book aims to recraft a usable mythology of Lincoln for political leaders in the 21st century, when dissension and loose talk of civil war have returned. Meacham’s new Lincoln is not just a text it is an event. Since Biden’s election, Meacham has been something of an insider historian for the White House, helping to organize occasional dinners with historians at which the president seeks to take stock of the historical moment. Biden gave Meacham a coveted four-minute slot on the final evening of the Democratic National Convention. His 2018 book “ The Soul of America,” a spirited defense of the promise of America for the Trump years, captured the attention of Joe Biden, who used the title as a catch phrase in his 2020 presidential campaign while relying on Meacham for speechwriting counsel. Bush, “ Destiny and Power,” maintained a respectable critical distance while treating his subject with sufficient dignity that the Bush family asked him to deliver the eulogy at the National Cathedral. His 2008 biography of Andrew Jackson, “ American Lion,” won a Pulitzer Prize for balancing Jackson’s many faults, including his relentless efforts to destroy Native American Indian tribes, with his success in holding together a country whose “ protections and promises,” as Meacham asserted, eventually extended to all. He is almost certainly the most well-connected presidential biographer of the moment. Meacham bids to be the redeemer in chief of the narrative of American exceptionalism: the venerable if now-shopworn story in which the United States has a providential and world-historic role as a nation distinctively dedicated to human liberty.
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