Abraham Lincoln and the Abolition of Slavery in the United States — A Closer Reading

A Biographer’s Dual Voice

Leland’s narrative voice oscillates between two registers. In the preface, he speaks as a moralist, holding up Lincoln as an example of “successful perseverance allied to honesty” for young men. But in the battle passages, he adopts a clipped, almost telegraphic style: “The first day of the battle was in favour of the rebels, but night brought Buell, and the morrow victory, to the Union army.” This shift is most pronounced when he turns to McClellan. Here Leland abandons restraint, calling the general’s correspondence “one of the most painful episodes of the war” and noting that “he wrote more despatches, and General Grant fewer, than any General of the war.” The contrast between Leland’s reverent treatment of Lincoln and his caustic assessment of McClellan suggests a biographer willing to let his own judgments color the historical record.

Pacing the War: From Set Pieces to Stalemate

The book’s rhythm mirrors the war’s own alternation between rapid action and frustrating inertia. Western campaigns are narrated in swift, cumulative sentences: “These great and rapid victories startled the rebels… They gathered together as large an army as possible… the opposing forces fought, April 6th, the battle of Shiloh.” By contrast, the Eastern theater is described through a series of delays—McClellan’s “endless and useless trenches,” his “excuses for inaction,” and the “tangled and wearisome correspondence” with Lincoln. Leland uses this structural contrast to imply a moral geography: the West is the site of decisive action, the East of political maneuvering. The reader feels the impatience that Lincoln himself must have felt.

Lincoln as Military Strategist

Leland repeatedly credits Lincoln with military insight, a claim that departs from more conventional portraits of the president as a reluctant commander. He writes that in the McClellan correspondence, Lincoln “displays not only the greatest patience under the most tormenting contradictions, but also shows a military genius and a clear intelligence of what should be done.” This is not merely praise; it is a specific argument about Lincoln’s role. Leland supports it by noting that Lincoln urged McClellan to advance on Richmond after Antietam, and that the president “set forth with great clearness the conditions of the military problem.” The biography thus positions Lincoln as an active strategist, not a passive figurehead—a view that aligns with Leland’s broader theme of a leader who “governed so great a country so thoroughly in detail.”

Readers should note that Leland wrote this biography while living abroad, relying on secondary sources such as Lamon, Raymond, and Holland. The publisher’s note acknowledges “a few errors in dates and proper names” in the first edition. This distance may explain the book’s occasional reliance on vivid set pieces rather than archival detail. For those interested in how Lincoln was remembered in the decades after his death—and how a popular writer shaped that memory—this volume offers a revealing portrait of the president as seen through the lens of 1879.

There’s a moment in Leland’s book where the pacing slows, and you feel him simply sitting with Lincoln’s weariness. I remember that same unhurried intimacy, oddly enough, while turning the pages of Over Periscope Pond — Inside the Classic. It’s that quiet feeling of watching someone think, on the page, long after the noise of the story has passed.