Showing us how we can, like Lincoln, apply the legacy of the Founding Fathers to our times.

Abraham Lincoln as Plutarch Might Have Seen Him

by Matthew J. Franck

 

Thanks to its sympathy and its moral seriousness, Richard Brookhiser’s new biography of Abraham Lincoln is a fine study of statesmanship.


The Victorian poet and classicist Arthur Hugh Clough, in the introduction to his revision of John Dryden’s translation of Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans (still in print from Modern Library), offers a useful overstatement about Plutarch:

He is a moralist rather than an historian. His interest is less for politics and the changes of empires, and much more for personal character and individual actions and motives to action; duty performed and rewarded; arrogance chastised, hasty anger corrected; humanity, fair dealing, and generosity triumphing in the visible, or relying on the invisible world.

One could offer a similar judgment—with the overstatement toned down—of the works of Richard Brookhiser on the lives of noble Americans. A longtime journalist (still a senior editor and regular contributor at National Review), Brookhiser first turned to writing biography in 1996 with Founding Father: Rediscovering George Washington. He described that book as “not a life history of George Washington, but a moral biography, in the tradition of Plutarch, of Washington as a founder and father of his country.”

What interested Brookhiser was the mind and character of the statesman. Evidently, Brookhiser believes that there is such a thing as statesmanship, that there are great men deserving to be called statesmen, and that they are best understood both in terms of what they made of their own gifts of character and intellect and in terms of what they accomplished for their country by the use of those gifts. Brookhiser’s unabashed admiration for greatness was (and remains) unfashionable in the academy, where it is reflexively mistaken for boosterism or hagiography, but it is popular with ordinary Americans too intelligent to be taken in by academic fashion, and Founding Father was a considerable success.

So too was his next foray, Alexander Hamilton, American. Again Brookhiser nodded to Plutarch, noting that he was one of the favorite authors of Hamilton and his contemporaries, because he provided “lives examined in moral terms.” And though he continued in this second book to call himself a journalist-biographer rather than a historian, Brookhiser’s mastery of the American founding and of the interactions of its leading figures grew as he continued turning out his own vivid “lives examined in moral terms,” writing on the Adams dynasty, on the constitutional stylist and rake Gouverneur Morris, and on the “father of American politics” James Madison.

Two decades after he began, Brookhiser can rightly call himself, as he does in his latest book, “a historian of the founding.” But he still retains the spirit of the amateur, and of the moralist Plutarch, seeking above all to understand how the characters of great men are shaped, and how they in turn shape the politics of their time. And this time he has moved out of the founding period of our history, yet not out of it. His new book is Founders’ Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln, and his title is precisely chosen. Lincoln, in Brookhiser’s account, shaped his thoughts and actions in a continual dialogue with the founders who made the nation he worked to save from self-destruction. And from Brookhiser’s account we can learn a good deal about how to engage in such a dialogue ourselves, with the founders and with Lincoln, in order to meet the needs of statesmanship in our own situation.

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