Lincoln

The novel opens as Abraham Lincoln arrives in Washington in 1861 to assume a presidency already threatened by secession. Vidal follows the new administration through the competing perspectives of Mary Todd Lincoln, William H. Seward, Salmon P. Chase, Edwin M. Stanton, John Hay and other figures around the White House. Cabinet rivalry, patronage and social life continue while armies are raised, defeats are absorbed and the conflict expands from a struggle to preserve the Union into a war that will also destroy slavery.

Rather than presenting Lincoln only as a distant national monument, the novel depicts a calculating and adaptable politician who must manage ambitious colleagues, public hostility and crushing personal loss. The narrative covers the Civil War, emancipation, Gettysburg, Vicksburg and Lincoln’s re-election before moving towards the Confederate collapse and John Wilkes Booth’s assassination plot. Political strategy and domestic strain remain inseparable, making the book both a portrait of Lincoln and an account of how presidential power changed under the pressure of civil war.