However much he preferred to avoid controversy, Lincoln relentlessly dedicated his political life to deploying a domestic agenda of tariffs, banking and economic infrastructure-building that deliberately overturned six decades of Democratic economic policy and set the country on a new path, which endured until 1932. At the same time, Avlon plays down the highly ideological Lincoln. These are not unfamiliar tales to students of Lincoln, but Avlon makes the retelling affecting and powerful. Campbell with his “genuine sympathy for the bereavement, destitution, impoverishment, waste and overturn that war had occasioned at the South.” But this is also the Lincoln who tells the African American soldiers of the Black 29th Connecticut that “you are now as free as I am,” and if they meet any Southerners who “claim to not know that you are free, take the sword and the bayonet and teach them that you are for God created all men free, giving to each the same rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” To read these chapters is to discover Lincoln’s rare compound of “empathy, honesty, humor and humility.” This is the Lincoln who surprised the Confederate judge John A. Studding this story are abundant examples of Lincoln’s determination at war’s end to blend justice with reconciliation, lest justice alone become punishing and reconciliation alone produce a peace that made the war’s horrendous loss of life “meaningless.” And, Avlon believes, the Lincolnian example could be a similar balm for our political wounds today.Īvlon devotes much of “Lincoln and the Fight for Peace” to the last six weeks of Lincoln’s life, from his eloquent Second Inaugural (and its memorable exhortation, as the Civil War folded to its close, to show “malice toward none” and “charity for all”) to his assassination on April 14, 1865.

In this elegant, almost conversational, exposition of Lincoln the “soulful centrist,” the 16th president appears as the reconciler in chief, who not only saved democracy from destruction in war but also pointed the way to saving it from inertia and futility in peace.

John Avlon - who edited The Daily Beast from 2013 to 2018, is now an analyst for CNN and has published serious studies of American political centrism - believes he has a solution to polarization, if not polar weather, and that is the figure of Abraham Lincoln. Political polarization and the weather have this in common: Everyone talks about them, but nobody seems to do anything about them. LINCOLN AND THE FIGHT FOR PEACE By John Avlon

Abraham Lincoln by Allen C. Guelzo