Which is the best inference about Lincoln’s assessment of his presidency? A. Lincoln thought he could have been a more decisive decision-maker. B. Lincoln did not believe he could have been a master of his own fate. C. Lincoln believed he was too passive to be president. D. Lincoln did not think that his term of office was valuable.
We too will have our own Lincoln, or Lincolns, and there is good reason to believe that ours will be as partial as anyone else’s. But we should not be content with such easy relativism1. Out of respect to the man, we should at least try to recover a sense of both the grandeur and the contingency2 of the history that he lived through and helped to shape. To see a statesman in full, and thereby learn something about the nature of statesmanship, one needs to see him not only in the overly clear light of retrospection, but in the shadowy and inconclusive light of the conditions he faced as they were unfolding. “I claim not to have controlled events,” Lincoln mused during the course of his presidency, “but confess plainly that events have controlled me.”