Lincoln’s Virtues: An Ethical Biography
Recommended by: Duncan Newcomer
Posted in: Abraham Lincoln
Purchase →In William Lee Miller’s “Lincoln’s Virtue: An Ethical Biography” Lincoln is a master of ethics. Ethics is Miller’s theological and academic province. The book is about an un-moralistic moralist and a realistic political idealist. As always, Lincoln leads the biographer to his own political purposes.
The Civil War gave us two kinds of angels, Killer Angels and Braver Angels, and the war gave us hard moral choices between war and politics. Abraham Lincoln was a master of both kinds of angels and he became a master of war and politics.
Miller has a creative book title: “Lincoln’s Virtues: An Ethical Biography.” He joins the long list of Lincoln writers who have deep theological and religious roots, usually deeply buried. Lincoln is, to him, an extraordinary thinker, particularly about moral political subjects.
While Lincoln was a master of language he was equally a master of ethics. This book is deeply detailed and thoroughly thoughtful. And original. Not only does Miller lift up Lincoln as a philosopher of ethics but as a practitioner of a noble calling: to be a politician.
Miller wants us to see what a great politician Lincoln was. He wants us to see what a great ethical calling being a politician is. Miller is in the school of Reinhold Niebuhr and his brother Richard (also at Yale Divinity School, as was Miller). These were Neo-orthodox Christian realists, enamored of Lincoln, and realistic about what Reinhold called the plight of “moral man in an immoral society.” There are, wrote Niebuhr, children of light and children of darkness, braver angels and killer angels.
Lincoln’s thinking, asserts Miller, was “purposive—personally, politically, morally.” Quoting a former editor of the New Republic, Herbert Croly, Lincoln’s distinction was not his rustic rise to the White House but the focus of his thinking. “….his thoughts and his actions looked towards the realization of the highest and most edifying democratic ideal.”
Here is a collection of Miller’s chapter titles that might make for a good package of refrigerator magnets:
Moral Reasoning. He will be good—but God knows when. The Awkward Age of Goodness. I Want in All Cases to Do Right. The Gem of his Character. Self-Improver. Was This Man a Politician? Rising Public Man. Politics and Morals. Monstrous Injustice. Men Are Not Angels but They Have a Sense of Justice. The Worthy Work of Party-Building. Once a Friend and Still Not an Enemy.
Don’t you just want to know what he wrote about all those topics?