Honor's Voice

[Liz Rosenthal]

I'll add my vote for Honor's Voice, too! It's near the top of my list of favorite Lincoln books! Douglas Wilson is a wonderful writer with a fine, analytical mind. He shows in Honor's Voice how to cut through a lot of the b.s. and solve some of the little but interesting questions of Lincoln's early years.

Incidentally, I also agree with Wilson's disagreement with Harold Holzer about Lincoln's extemporaneous speaking ability. I think the debate is really about Lincoln's ability to "think on his feet." Holzer believes, and when David Herbert Donald was alive, Donald believed, that Lincoln was only good at speaking from prepared texts or texts he'd memorized. Donald went as far as to say that there was no evidence that Lincoln was an effective extemporaneous speaker at trial, and then claimed that, although, in modern times, lawyers do have to be able to talk about any number of things that might come up at trial or in an appellate matter, it was different back on the frontier. Except that, in all the reading I've done about Lincoln as a lawyer, a political speech-maker and as a president dealing with all sorts of difficult people, I've gotten the opposite impression. And, orally, lawyers were pretty much expected to do the same things then as now.

The reason - it appears - that Donald insisted that Lincoln couldn't think on his feet was that he made what some scholars believe to have been inane speeches during the train trip to Washington in February '61. However, I think Lincoln conveyed what he needed to convey to the local audiences he met along the way. And as we all know, he refused to specify what he would do after his inauguration, insisting that his statements and speeches prior to receiving the Republican nomination for president spoke for themselves. So he endeavored not to say anything that could be construed or misconstrued as new.

Anyway, the point I'm making is that Douglas Wilson disagrees with Holzer and Donald, and I'm pleased about that! (I highly recommend Wilson's book, Lincoln's Sword, which is about Lincoln as wordsmith. Definitely read this one over Ronald A. White's similarly-themed book, The Eloquent President, which is completely forgettable.)