Richard Striner has attempted, as many have done before him, to turn a decent man, a fairly good politician and a successful President into a saint. He celebrates Lincoln's more progressive pronouncements, whilst ignoring or glossing over those that might prove embarrassing by today's standards. He makes no mention of the speech in which Lincoln dismissed the possibility of racial equality (at Charleston, southern Illinois in September 1858). He glosses over Lincoln's letter to Horace Greeley in August 1862 when he bluntly asserted that if he could maintain the Union without freeing the slaves, he would do so. Indeed, Lincoln's attitude to slavery was very much of his time; while he did not like it, he was unwilling to jeopardize his – or America's – future to free the slaves. Nor did he free them until it was politically expedient to do so.

Striner also garlands Lincoln with other people's flowers. It was Seward, his secretary of state, who suggested a national Thanksgiving Day, not Lincoln. Lincoln merely implemented it. Nor was this Lincoln's only borrowing from Seward; his position on slavery was heavily influenced by a speech Seward gave in 1848, long before Lincoln took the selfsame position on the issue.

When Lincoln is indecisive, Striner says he is weighing up the options; when he is duplicitous, Striner contends that he is being clever. In his enthusiasm, Striner overlooks the fact that Lincoln was very indecisive on several occasions: over Fort Sumter, over the Trent affair, over his choice of generals, and even over the Emancipation Proclamation. Lincoln equivocated when it came to Reconstruction; even today no one is sure what his actual policy would have been had he lived.

All in all, it is probably just as well that Lincoln's legacy is not reliant on books such as this. Not only does such hagiolatry do both Lincoln and his contemporaries a disservice, it is also faintly embarrassing. Striner's argument is clearly defeated by the simple fact that if the Confederate states had agreed to return peacefully to the Union fold in 1861 they would have done so with their “peculiar institution” fully intact and with Lincoln's blessing.