"First Among Equals": Abraham Lincoln's Reputation During His Administration.

"First Among Equals": Abraham Lincoln's Reputation During His Administration. By Hans L. Trefousse. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005. Pp. xvi, 199. $27.95, ISBN 0-8232-2468-6.)

Few historians have contributed more to our understanding of Civil War politics and leaders than Hans L. Trefousse, the author of many important biographies and syntheses, most notably on the Radical Republicans. Trefousse called the Radicals "Lincoln's vanguard for racial justice" and demonstrated that they worked closely with Lincoln and viewed him more favorably than less sympathetic historians had argued (The Radical Republicans: Lincoln's Vanguard for Racial Justice [New York, 1963]). Now Trefousse has turned to the question of how Lincoln's contemporaries--not just the Radicals--saw him. The result is an important addition to scholarship on nineteenth-century America.

As Trefousse points out in his introduction, Merrill Peterson's Lincoln in American Memory (New York, 1994) superbly depicted how succeeding generations revered the martyred president. But, Trefousse writes, "Whether Lincoln's reputation was in any way comparable while he was still alive is a question that remains to be answered" (p. ix). J.G. Randall, a legendary Lincoln scholar, suggested an answer with the title of his classic essay, "The Unpopular Mr. Lincoln" (Abraham Lincoln Quarterly, 2 [June 1943], 255-80). Trefousse agrees that Lincoln's opponents regularly attacked him in print and in private as everything from a dictator to an ignoramus who should return to the obscurity from which he unfortunately had emerged. Yet Trefousse found that Lincoln was hardly an unknown whom events conspired to make famous but instead was "a source of interest for those who watched political developments" (p. 1).

More important, Trefousse argues that Lincoln's reputation during his lifetime was far better than many scholars have asserted. Trefousse does so largely by letting the sources tell the story. Although short--about 145 pages of text--"First Among Equals": Abraham Lincoln's Reputation During His Administration contains a rich collection of comments about Lincoln from politicians, newspapermen, soldiers, foreigners, and private citizens. Not all of the comments are favorable; Trefousse is too scrupulously fair a historian to overlook criticism, even from Lincoln's allies. But often the detractors were southerners or Democrats who would have criticized any Republican president. Fellow Republicans who wanted Lincoln to move more slowly or more quickly on certain issues generally came around out of party loyalty, personal friendship, or pure common sense, or they wound up supporting him on other matters. Trefousse shows that on every issue from the firing on Fort Sumter to his final speech three nights before his assassination, from proclamations to political and military appointments, Lincoln could and did find support for his policies and himself. Even more significantly, Trefousse concludes, "unlike his successors and predecessors, he was compared to George Washington almost from the beginning" of his presidency, and "his future renown was often predicted" (pp. 138-39).

No book is likely to be perfect, and this one suffers from an occasional error. A bigger problem suggests the book's value: the reader will come away hankering for more. As a highly respected historian whose half century of research has given him an almost unparalleled knowledge of the era, Trefousse could have offered his own judgments more frequently in addition to those of Lincoln's contemporaries. But anyone interested in Lincoln, the Civil War, or politics will find this book not only a must but a delight.

MICHAEL GREEN 

Community College of Southern Nevada