But he also needed money and found a job working as a research assistant to a leading Lincoln scholar, James Garfield Randall.ĭonald’s mentor encouraged him to write about Lincoln’s law partner, William Herndon. Having grown up in a segregated town, he was interested in race relations and planned to study the post-Civil War era.
He majored in history and sociology at Millsaps College in Jackson, Miss., then went to the University of Illinois for graduate school. His books included “Lincoln,” a single-volume biography of the president published in 1995 “Lincoln at Home,” a study of his family life and “We Are Lincoln Men,” essays about Lincoln’s friends and associates.ĭonald, the grandson of a Union cavalry officer, was born into a farming family in Goodman, Miss., in 1920.
Much more than a political biography, Lincoln seats us behind the desk of a president who was both a master of ambiguity and expediency and a great moral leader, as he makes the decisions that preserved the Union and shaped modern America.Donald published his first Lincoln book in the late 1940s and kept at it for more than 50 years. And he depicts a man who was basically passive by nature, yet ambitious enough to take enormous risks and overcome repeated defeats.
He reveals the development of the future president's character and shows how Lincoln's enormous capacity for growth enabled one of the least experienced men ever elected to high office to become a giant in the annals of American politics. In the best-selling tradition of Truman, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer David Herbert Donald offers a new classic in American history and biography - a masterly account of how one man's extraordinary political acumen steered the Union to victory in the Civil War, and of how his soaring rhetoric gave meaning to that agonizing struggle for nationhood and equality.ĭonald spent 50 years studying Lincoln, tracing his rise from humble origins to the pinnacle of the presidency.
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