‘Abraham Lincoln: A Life’
By Michael Burlingame
Edited and Abridged by Jonathan W. White
Johns Hopkins University Press, 703 Pages

“The author knows more about Lincoln than any other living person,” a distinguished Civil War historian, James McPherson, writes of Michael Burlingame. Another well regarded Lincoln biographer, Jon Meacham, calls Mr. Burlingame “peerless.” This one-volume condensation of his two-volume 2009 biography of Lincoln has been skillfully abridged, adding the “attraction of accessibility to greatness,” yet another esteemed Lincoln biographer, Allen C. Guelzo, declares.

A biography that weighed in at more than a million words is now 300,000 words, Mr. Burlingame reports, praising Jonathan W. White’s “creative destruction.” At the same time, “much new information has come to light,” the biographer notes, “some of which has been added.”

After that fanfare, it has to be noted that even the greatest biographies are fallible and promote fallacies. David Hackett Fischer said as much more than 50 years ago in his book, “Historians’ Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought.”

Mr. Fischer’s book demonstrates that sooner or later, historical and biographical narratives break down. The biographer/historian claims to know too much — more than the empirical evidence can support. Or the biographer, so steeped in a subject, scarcely realizes how much of the narrative is suppositional. The strain is signaled when what “must have” happened, or was felt, or thought, obscures what is actually not known.

A good deal can be learned about Lincoln by tracking the way he courted Mary Todd, and to know more about Mary Todd also becomes a way to understand Abraham Lincoln.

Abundant evidence exists of her childish but also shrewd behavior, her high intelligence, her charm, her mercurial temperament, her manipulative tendencies. But Mr. Burlingame wants to say more than that about her, having formed an adverse assessment of what he considers to be an unfortunate human being.

Mary’s mother died when she was  6; her father remarried and Mary did not get along with her stepmother, but as to her father she was silent. Mr. Burlingame cannot abide that gap in the evidence: “Mary evidently felt betrayed, abandoned, and rejected by her ‘impetuous, high-strung, sensitive father,’ who apparently withdrew from Mary emotionally to please his new wife.” If it is so evident and apparent, why doesn’t the biographer cite one of her letters, or the testimony of friends or enemies?

Now off the reservation of fact, Mr. Burlingame suggests that Mary “might have sought a surrogate father in Lincoln.” Well, the tall man did tower over Mary, and later in the marriage he sometimes acted like a protective and indulgent father. But that is later. That Mary might have changed over time is not acknowledged in what Mr. Fischer calls the “essentialist fallacy,” wherein the biographer portrays a fixed character that he knows.

With no evidence at hand, another option is available to Mr. Burlingame: “deep-seated anger at him [her father] and her stepmother seemingly smoldered in Mary Todd’s unconscious.” With the shaky backing of all that supposition, Mr. Burlingame diagnoses Mary Todd as having the “symptoms associated with narcissism and with borderline personality disorder.” The “associated with” is a way to elide what evades the biographer’s understanding.

During this diagnosis of Mary Todd, Lincoln remains passive in Mr. Burlingame’s plot, a victim of his “tyrannical conscience” that makes him resume his courtship after he broke it off, saying he was not sure he loved her but succumbing to her need to be fathered.

Then Mr. Burlingame supposes that Mary seduced her Abraham by having sex with him, and then pleading pregnancy. So, to save her 19th-century honor, he married her. What is the evidence? That Lincoln had, in the words of a close friend, “terribly strong passions for women” and that the Lincolns’ first born, Robert, arrived slightly less than nine months after the marriage.

Not for a moment does Mr. Burlingame consider the possibility of premature birth, which is only slightly premature at that. All the evidence, if it can be called that, is marshaled to showcase her in the poorest light — not to mention making the shrewd Lincoln look like a fool. This surely is an untended consequence of a tendentious interpretation.

Writing biographies is a parlous enterprise, made sometimes even more dodgy when the biographer knows so much that can turn into knowing so little.

Mr. Rollyson is at work on “Making the American Presidency: How Biographers Shape History.”