Lincoln memorials

The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of Antislavery Politics
By James Oakes
Norton, 328 pp., $26.95

Lincoln and Chief Justice Taney: Slavery, Secession, and the President's War Powers
By James F. Simon
Simon & Schuster, 324 pp., $27

Lincoln's Sword: The Presidency and the Power of Words
By Douglas L. Wilson
Knopf, 343 pp., illustrated, $26.95

Two score and 15 years ago, a then-young David Herbert Donald wrote in Harper's about Americans' periodic need for "getting right with Lincoln." In the wild election of 1948 even Dixiecrats and communists had claimed his legacy. Lincoln's plastic image owed much to his flexible approach to politics. The "absence of dogma" in Lincoln had allowed the leader to be led.

Had Donald discovered the Lincoln everyone could live with? In 1995, when the Harvard historian finally published his own biography (still the best), the theme of Lincoln the pragmatist led by events seemed a bit tired if not forced. Reviewers complained, respectfully. Lincoln the emancipator had come back into fashion, trailed by a different take: Lincoln the racist. The virtues of the vital center seemed treacly at the dawn of the culture wars.

Lincoln still inspires new ways of coming to terms with America's virtues and flaws. He still inspires good writers. Three new books by veteran scholars give us fresh takes on who Lincoln was and how he became American history's indispensable man.

One wouldn't expect much inspiration in seeing Lincoln as a lawyer. James F. Simon, who has written books comparing John Marshall with Thomas Jefferson and Hugo Black with Felix Frankfurter, sets the greatest president against the infamous chief justice whose reputation declined as Lincoln's rose. "Lincoln and Chief Justice Taney" works because the law professor respects the great jurist. Restoring some humanity to Taney only makes Lincoln look that much better.

Without rehabilitating the infamous Dred Scott decision, Simon explains why the path to civil war took the form of a major constitutional crisis. Taney, a devout Catholic Marylander who saw slavery as evil, had a gift for making compelling legal arguments. He helped Andrew Jackson attack the Bank of the United States on constitutional grounds, only to be turned down by an angry Senate for the post of Treasury secretary. But the Democrats won the Senate and Marshall died, enabling Taney to be confirmed as the new chief justice. The tide seemed to have turned against judicial supremacy and the national government.

Taney shocked and delighted his critics by refusing to lead a judicial revolution against Marshall's nationalism. By the 1850s he was revered as a non partisan defender of the Constitution. That very reverence for the process of constitutional adjudication set the aging jurist on his collision course with Lincoln. Simon artfully paints Lincoln as a young lawyer from Illinois looking for a good case. Brilliant and passionate when he believed in his clients, Lincoln represented a Kentucky slaveholder who liked to bring his slaves back and forth from his farms on both sides of the Ohio River, until several ran away. He lost the case. As a congressman, Lincoln vainly demanded that the pro- war and proslavery Polk administration name the exact spot where Mexican forces had supposedly crossed the Rio Grande and attacked -- earning himself the nickname "Spotty." Only in 1854, with the Kansas-Nebraska crisis, did Lincoln find a fight worthy of his gift for conceding every point but the crucial one. He began to argue that slavery in the new territories went against the intentions of the Founding Fathers and could be legally excluded.

Taney argued nearly the opposite: The founders had made slavery the law of the land and its regulation a state matter. Had he been a pure states-righter or a party hack, though, he would not have wanted the Supreme Court to even hear a fugitive slave case like Dred Scott. Precisely because he wanted to preserve the Union as he saw it, Taney tortured the historical evidence in his famous declaration that blacks could never be citizens and had no rights. But Simon does not stop there. He follows the story into the Civil War, when Lincoln magnified the war powers of the presidency to save the Union and the Constitution from those he saw as its enemies. Taney, ailing and impoverished, stayed on the bench and vainly tried to save the states, and his Maryland friends, from the long arm of Lincoln's law. War, he argued, does not change the constitutional limits of the federal government. In 1864, Lincoln went to his funeral -- and a few weeks later appointed his Treasury secretary, the abolitionist Salmon P. Chase, to Taney's seat on the court.

The book is a good example of the recent renaissance of constitutional history. It preserves a sense of suspense while conveying the nuances of legal arguments. Douglas L. Wilson's literary biography "Lincoln's Sword" is beautifully written, but not the same sort of page -turner. Wilson makes us linger over Lincoln's words, driving home his main point that Lincoln was perhaps above all things a careful writer. The literary Lincoln has not lacked for interpreters: A whole genre of books unpacks his great addresses and their occasions, most recently Gabor Boritt's "The Gettysburg Gospel." Wilson's special gift is to make a story out of what usually remains backstage. His Lincoln doesn't just write: He scribbles, prewrites , and rewrites. Those stories about pockets full of foolscap and a hat full of drafts are not just stories.

With dozens of photographs of pasted drafts and crossed-out corrections, Wilson reveals a distinctive 19th-century way of making, revising , and publishing speeches. Lincoln scholars know that he corrected transcripts of his debates with Stephen Douglas for the newspapers: Most editions of the debates are constructed from his files. But no one has ever explained how central this practice was to Lincoln's leadership, much less made a theme out of his lost nexus of oratory and the press. Trying out phrases and arguments, reading out loud, correcting typeset drafts on trains before the next whistle stop, Lincoln perfected the art of speaking to and for the people. By 1863 stuffy Harvard types like Ralph Waldo Emerson had to revise their condescension toward the backwoods-lawyer president and his plain style. Lincoln's public letters were shaping public opinion. The Emancipation Proclamation, once described by Richard Hofstadter as having "all the moral grandeur of a bill of lading," turns out to be an exception that proves the rule. Its boldness in action was only "enhanced by its rhetorical barrenness." Abolitionists loved it.

They had not always loved Lincoln. James Oakes hews closest to David Donald's view of Lincoln as a quintessential politician, yet "The Radical and the Republican " may be the most original and important of these three excellent books. Oakes has written what may be the first black-white-buddy political biography. As in the movies, the buddies are also antagonists.

The black co star tends to be confrontational and serves to make the white guy more lovable, especially after he decides the white guy is OK (read: not like the other white people). There's a sentimental ending (the white guy dies; the black guy keeps the memory alive). Stories like these are only part of the story. But we get a more accurate history when such relationships take center stage.

Oakes sets the stage with the common enemy: Douglas, an "accomplished race-baiter" who painted Lincoln as a lover of blacks, and of "Fred Douglass" in particular. Instead of focusing on those moments in the famous debates with Douglas when Lincoln tried to have it both ways, distancing himself from racial equality, Oakes notes that Lincoln asked his audience at Chicago (though not southern Illinois) to stop talking about "this race and that race." Lincoln, as Frederick Douglass eventually decided, was at heart not a racist: He was a politician. His occasional "strategic racism" should be discounted. While he agreed with the radical reformer Douglass that slavery was wrong and must be fought, his role in the process was different. Their convergence is an inspiring story about "what can happen . . . when progressive reformers and savvy politicians make common cause."

Oakes is at his best in showing the careful moves of both men in the minefield of Civil War politics. Lincoln sometimes played the race card, but always for antislavery ends. His partisanship served higher purposes. Douglass gradually moved into mainstream politics and came to argue, like Lincoln, that the founders had opposed slavery. Oakes has less patience for Douglass's flip-flops: denouncing the Republican Party, and later Lincoln, for compromises, only to have a change of heart near Election Day. Douglass's repeated changes of heart really only prove Oakes's larger point: He and his black constituents were becoming part of the American political process, even before they had the vote. As reformers, they became the tail that wagged the dog, to the dismay of party loyalists like Lincoln.

Lincoln's genius was to become someone who could go out of his way to invite Douglass to the White House and treat him as who he was: a brilliant man and a leader. Douglass's genius was to throw rhetorical bombshells at slaveholders, praise violent rebels like John Brown, and embrace the Republican Party while spending the postwar years trying to get the party, and the nation, to keep to the faith of Lincoln. When Lincoln's truly racist successor, Andrew Johnson, practically shouted Douglass out of his office, Lincoln's gradualism had come to seem radical enough. Oakes and Wilson both cherish the moment when the 16th president interrupted a long procession line to hear in detail what black America's greatest leader thought of his second inaugural address. "Mr. Lincoln, that was a sacred effort," replied Douglass. These three books give us Lincoln and others acting on principle, not partisanship, and that is more than enough to explain the continuing appeal of Lincoln, his friends, and his enemies.