Lincoln: A Foreigner's Quest.

Lincoln: A Foreigner's Quest. By Jan Morris. (New York and other cities: Simon and Schuster, c. 2000. Pp. 205. $23.00, ISBN 0-684-855515-1.)

Jan Morris is the latest in a long line of British commentators on Lincoln's achievements and reputation. She is the author of what remains one of the very best travel books on the United States and has written extensively on recent and contemporary America, but this is her first major venture into nineteenth-century American history and culture. Her book is an uneasy mixture of popular history, psycho-biography, myth, travelogue, speculation, and fantasy. She offers suggestive insights into aspects of Lincoln's early life and some intriguing reflections on the transforming effect upon him of four years of wartime presidency. But such attractive passages are intermingled with extraordinary flights of fancy--seeing herself as the judge in a famous Lincoln case, invoking Lincoln's ghost walking the streets of Springfield, describing the visit of a fictional English couple to the White House, and imagining a meeting between Lincoln and Robert E. Lee.

Doubts about the historical credibility of the book are enhanced by the number of factual errors and historical misconceptions. Ridiculing Lincoln's undignified entry into Washington in February 1861, Morris says that he was rushed to Willard's Hotel "instead of going straight to the White House" (p. 104), thus overlooking the fact that James Buchanan was still in residence there. There is the remarkable statement that Lincoln appointed to his cabinet "all of his four main rivals for the presidency, from both parties" (p. 119). She is unreliable on names and also on quotations. Morris mutilates Lincoln's much-quoted statement that "I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me" (p. 118). It would surely have been almost as easy to get such facts right as to get them wrong, but the underlying problem lies in Morris's uncertain grasp of the historical context. She never makes it clear that the key political issue in the 1850s was not slavery per se but its further extension. She is an uncertain guide to the process of southern secession and to the evolution of Lincoln's thinking on slavery and race. In a brief reference to the problem of Reconstruction, Morris demonstrates that, in spirit at least, she is back in the dark age of the Dunning school. What price black freedom in her scenario?

The theme that runs through the book is the struggle between Morris's deeply rooted antipathy to Lincoln and her attempt to come to terms with him as a towering figure in both history and legend. The antipathy dates back to the 1950s, when she was horrified by Americans' almost deranged obsession with their sixteenth president, for which she seems to hold Lincoln personally responsible. Hard as she struggles to arrive at a more charitable view, she cannot suppress feelings of condescension, and even disdain. She thinks, for example, that "an element of the mountebank" predominated in the Lincoln of the 1840s and 1850s (p. 82). In her conclusion, Morris blames Lincoln for sowing the seeds of the militarist, interventionist superpower of the twentyfirst century. "I may be unfair," she says, "for making Lincoln the originator of American hubris" (p. 200), and one can only agree, for this is a serious misreading of Lincoln's conception of the world role of the United States. He believed more in the power of the American example than in the assertion of American power.

This is a beguiling book, for Jan Morris is always very readable. She will charm the innocent or ill-informed reader at the same time as she is irritating or infuriating those who are better informed. This is not a book intended for professional historians of the Civil War era, of course, and they will learn nothing from it, but their students, and many other readers, may learn a good deal that is just not so.

PETER J. PARISH
University of Cambridge