On this Presidents’ Day weekend, at least some of us will think about Abraham Lincoln (February 12, 1809 and George Washington (born on February 22, 1732) and again wonder how they would resolve the several challenges our nation now faces. Here is a brief excerpt from an especially interesting article by Joseph Epstein for the Wall Street Journal. To read the complete article, check out others, and obtain subscription information, please click here.

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Books about Abraham Lincoln are legion and usually lengthy. The most famous of these books and the longest is perhaps also the worst: Carl Sandburg’s multivolumed biography, a repository of folklore and myth-making that Edmund Wilson called “the cruelest thing that happened to Lincoln since he was shot by Booth.” Lincoln books continually — one is tempted to write “continuously” — appear. Such is the appetite for these books that an old joke among publishers had it that a sure-fire American best-seller would have the title Lincoln’s Mother’s Doctor’s Dog.

The best book about Lincoln was written not by an American but by an Englishman named Lord Charnwood. His Abraham Lincoln (1916) is a work in the distinguished tradition of brilliant books by foreign writers on American subjects. Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, Lord Bryce’s The American Commonwealth and George Santayana’s Character and Opinion in the United States are books in this line. These foreign observers were able to tell us things about ourselves that we Americans were likely to overlook or perhaps did not wish to know.

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These words from the concluding paragraph of Lord Charnwood’s masterly biography capture Abraham Lincoln better than any other I know:

“For he was a citizen of that far country where there is neither aristocrat nor democrat. No political theory stands out from his words or actions; but they show a most unusual sense of the possible dignity of common men and common things.…If he had a theory of democracy it was contained in this condensed note which he wrote, perhaps as an autograph, a year or two before his presidency: “As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy.”

Great men and women do not always get the biographers they deserve. In Lord Charnwood, Abraham Lincoln found his.

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Here is a direct link to the complete article.

Joseph Epstein’s latest book, co-authored with Frederic Raphael, is Distant Intimacy: A Friendship in the Age of the Internet (Yale University Press, 2013).