SIX ENCOUNTERS WITH LINCOLN A President Confronts Democracy and Its Demons By Elizabeth Brown Pryor Illustrated. 480 pp. Viking. $35.

A rare visit to the front: Antietam, 1862.CreditMPI/Getty Images

SIX ENCOUNTERS WITH LINCOLN
A President Confronts Democracy and Its Demons
By Elizabeth Brown Pryor
Illustrated. 480 pp. Viking. $35.

At a moment when questions about the efficacy of democracy are on everyone’s lips, this book eerily reflects some of today’s key issues. Among them are the military’s part in domestic policy; the protections appropriate to noncitizens (in Lincoln’s case, Native Americans); the limits of female citizenship; the meaning of free speech; and states’ rights to contravene personal liberty.

Abraham Lincoln confronted these and other issues during his tenure as president, often choosing between expanding democratic potential and adhering to constitutional mandates. Deploying humor as a weapon, Lincoln emerges from the history books as a benign and democratic figure, ultimately a champion of slave emancipation.

A different Lincoln inhabits the pages of “Six Encounters With Lincoln.” Here we meet the skilled raconteur whose tales promote vacillation, and whose humor disguises costly indecision and delay. Many of his contemporaries labeled him cowardly and vulgar, an illegitimate ruler and despot. Elizabeth Brown Pryor, the author of two previous Civil War-era biographies, sees him as none of these, and yet she has produced a portrait of a president whose failures to act often undermine the democratic ideals and the moral values to which he claims commitment.

Uncertainty manifested itself in a complicated stance, sometimes fostering democracy and at others sticking to the letter of the Constitution. Convinced that states had a right to determine their economic and social priorities, Lincoln debated the use of military force to coerce recalcitrant states to remain in the Union. He wavered only when states’ rights threatened national unity. But once decided, he acted unilaterally to increase the size of the Army without elucidating lines of command. From that followed Lincoln’s dragging his feet on the issue of slave emancipation because he hoped that he could bring the South back into the Union with compromise rather than military victory. The dilemma inherent in using force to ensure liberty emerged most starkly in loyal border states that continued to legitimize slave owning. To ensure their commitment to the Union, Lincoln simply turned a blind eye, dashing the democratic aspirations of thousands of enslaved people.

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In other instances, Lincoln did not hesitate to curtail constitutional rights in the interests of an initially controversial war. He famously ignored habeas corpus, claiming the right to seize suspicious individuals in wartime, and he attempted to control flows of information: acts that placed him at odds with the principle of safeguarding informed criticism in a democratic society.

Nor did Lincoln imagine extending democracy to Native Americans or to women. Pryor tells us that the greatest contradiction he faced was between the ideal of democracy and prevailing negative views of Indians. Like others of his generation, he thought all men were created equal except for Indians and women. He did not hesitate to abrogate Indian treaties, though he sometimes expressed concern for Indian life. He consistently rebuffed or denigrated women’s efforts to participate in wartime activities, rarely acknowledging even their heroic work as nurses.

Pryor died in 2015, and so she could have hardly intended this posthumously published book to suggest any parallels between Lincoln’s ambivalent politics and contemporary efforts to limit suffrage, spread fake news and eliminate federal efforts to protect the civil rights of women, African-Americans and the poorest wage earners. Yet the notion that democracy involves compromises resonates today. Lincoln’s dilemmas illuminate how apparently benign federal mandates — like universal health care, paid maternity leave or federal land acquisition — that seem on their face to extend democratic possibilities, can be viewed from within state borders as coercive. Fascinating reading on its own terms, “Six Encounters With Lincoln” nevertheless confronts readers with startlingly relevant questions.