For students of the Civil War, the lone figure of Abraham Lincoln fills the place occupied by the entire founding generation for historians of the early republic. There is simply no other person of comparable stature during the war years. This has certain drawbacks. One of them is a problem of oversupply. In living memory, readers have been treated to Lincoln the theologian (William J. Wolf, The Almost Chosen People: A Study of the Religion of Abraham Lincoln), Lincoln the rhetor (Garry Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg), Lincoln the master politician (Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, winner of the Pulitzer Prize), and Lincoln the messianic figure (Allen C. Guelzo, Lincoln: Redeemer President, winner of the Lincoln Prize), to name but a few of the available works. A look at my own bookshelf shows probably half a dozen Lincoln biographies of various sorts.

And, as we approach the bicentennial of Lincoln’s birth this coming February, oversupply is about to become glut. By my current count, no less than twenty-seven new books on our sixteenth president are slated to appear between now and then. As one might imagine, new angles are hard to come by. There is Lincoln and literacy (Daniel Wolff, How Lincoln Learned to Read: Twelve Great Americans and the Educations that Made Them), Lincoln and technology (Thomas B. Allen and Roger MacBride Allen, Mr. Lincoln’s High-Tech War; Thomas Crump, Abraham Lincoln’s World: How Riverboats,