This re-examination of the Civil War, however, is not entirely a matter of emotional understanding. As David Donald points out, it is also a matter for the mental processes—for “rethinking,” as he expresses it, for taking the enormous mass of data and looking it over carefully, for trying to determine (now that the jury has all of the important facts) just what the verdict ought to be.

Mr. Donald contributes immeasurably to this task in his new book, Lincoln Reconsidered . In this collection of essays he remarks that “the future is not likely to see major discoveries of new facts or fresh sources in the Civil War period”; what it does need is a fresh examination of the basic issues involved, a conscientious attempt to evaluate what is already known in the light of the new perspective which is ours simply because we come on the scene nearly a century after the shooting stopped.

What Mr. Donald is out to do—and very well he does it—is to take a fresh look at the whole Lincoln story in the light of modern scholarship and see what it all amounts to. He examines Lincoln from many angles—as political leader, as a figment of folklore, as military man, as the hero of emancipation—and he has a knack for expressing judgments that sound as fresh as if the whole subject were unexplored territory.

Best of all, he has the insight to realize that hardand-fast judgments are not possible. Lincoln was one of the most complex and mysterious characters that America ever produced. His faults and virtues were strangely mixed, and sometimes what looks like a fault turns out to be a great source of strength. Lincoln was an opportunist, he drifted with the tide, he refused to be bound by doctrine or dogma, he handled each problem as it came to him—and if this sometimes drove his confreres almost to the point of madness, it was one of his chief elements of strength.

The popular picture of Lincoln is somewhat askew. We have been invited to look on him as the man who was hated by the politicians and loved by the people; yet there has not been in American history a cannier politician; the chance that was open to him to pose as the champion of the masses was simply missed, and Mr. Donald finds reason to doubt that in 1864 Lincoln held as tight a grip on the popular imagination as we usually suppose. What could have been done with the Lincoln myth, Mr. Donald suggests, by a modern publicity agent, is something to think about. He had everything—child of poor parents, born in a log cabin, a rail splitter and a painfully honest man, one who came up the hard way with no apparent advantages and everything against him—yet by modern standards almost no use was made of this in his political battles. Dipping