Wrestling with His Angel: The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln, Vol. II, 1849–1856

In the second volume of his four-part Lincoln biography, Blumenthal (A Self-Made Man) immerses the reader in American politics in the years between Lincoln’s return to Springfield, after completing his term in the House of Representatives, and his contribute tofounding the Illinois Republican Party. Lincoln himself spends a significant amount of time offstage, and long sections of the book pass without a mention of the president-to-be. Despite this, Blumenthal justifies this volume’s length with a granular examination of the state of American politics in a period that he believes is essential to understanding Lincoln’s “presence in the transforming events that would eventually carry him to the presidency and their profound influence upon him.” The developments during these seven years were certainly significant—for example, the election of antislavery President Zachary Taylor, the Compromise of 1850, the Dred Scott decision, and the Kansas-Nebraska Act—even if their part in waking Lincoln “from his political slumber” is less known than earlier and later influences upon him. That relative obscurity justifies Blumenthal’s prodigious amount of detail, which he conveys accessibly, while making his case that the Civil War was not simply a calamity into which the country haplessly blundered. (May)