by Gore Vidal
Copyright (c) 1984
Lincoln is our nation’s savior and helped free an entire race of people from slavery. As such, he has risen to near-saint status. Most books by American historians – and even those takes like that in the British HG Well’s A Short History of the World – essentially form a hagiography. Fortunately, our age has Gore Vidal’s work of historical fiction, which places Lincoln as a politician and lawyer first. Lincoln, like all truly great politicians, was a realist and a pragmatist. He is not saint to Vidal, but cunning, wise, and shrewd.
Vidal captures Lincoln’s spirit by frequently nicknaming him as the “Tycoon.” Vidal captures Lincoln’s racism (and the racism of others in that day) in portraying Lincoln’s suggestion that slaves be sent to colonize another country. His rationale, however, proved true: The American South simply could not live with whites side-by-side with blacks.
American history’s great unanswered question – what would have happened if Lincoln would have lived? – is briefly tackled at the end of this novel. The Radical Republicans in Congress would have been kept more at bay by the man who fulfilled their egalitarian dreams. Reconstruction would have gone easier. Perhaps Jim Crow laws would never have come about. Or perhaps this comprises more hagiography.
In truth, whites and blacks could not live side-by-side with each other in the rebellious south in 1865. It took a full century (and another American saint Dr. Martin Luther King) for this balance to be definitively reshaped. The fifty years since Dr. King reminds us that the American South’s history may have been reshaped, but it cannot be erased. I suggest that Mr. Lincoln would not have been able to change this dynamic as much as one might hope. His present legacy as the best American President cannot be greater given history’s unfolding. Vidal reminds us in his realistic take on Lincoln that Lincoln is a man – a rare man, but a man still.