ABSTRACT
The historian’s art has been narrowed by the academies to the point of making people believe that there is only one right way of setting down a history. Sandburg’s way is as characteristically his own as Carlyle’s was when he wrote of Cromwell. Sandburg has evidently taken care not to write the sort of contemporary book that underlines the parallels between yesterday and today. He has given us Lincoln the man, Lincoln the war President, America in the war years. Lincoln has gone down in American history as one of the “strong” Presidents, who flouted constitutional restrictions and established a dictatorship in order to win the war. The view is not without its truth. Yet never has a government waged so fierce a war as Lincoln had to wage, and departed so little from the democratic spirit.
