Nigel Hamilton is a New York Times bestselling biographer and historian. He has written books about General Bernard “Monty” Montgomery, President John F. Kennedy, President Bill Clinton, and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, among other subjects. He has won the Whitbread Prize and the Templar Medal for Military History. The third volume of his FDR at War trilogy was longlisted for the National Book Award.
What’s the big idea?
Civil War academics have left a critical, central conflict marginally chronicled. The struggle between Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis underscored the entirety of this era, yet the personal complexity of two men at odds with national consequences at stake has been of little focus. An award-winning biographer investigates this untapped side of history.
Below, Nigel shares five key insights from his new book, Lincoln vs. Davis: The War of the Presidents. Listen to the audio version—read by Nigel himself—in the Next Big Idea App.
1. Originality in biography.
I didn’t intend to write this book, at least not how it transpired. In 2019, I’d just finished a three-volume study of President Franklin Roosevelt as Commander in Chief in World War II— FDR at War—and was visiting the Civil War battlefield of Gettysburg, a very haunting place. That night, I conceived the idea of researching and writing a similar study of Abraham Lincoln as the nation’s Commander-in-Chief in that earlier war.
It didn’t turn out that way, though! Ideas change, and in my case, I happen to spend my winters in New Orleans, where my wife’s family comes from. When I told people there that I’d begun writing a book about Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief in the Civil War, they said, “What about our President, Jefferson Davis?” It was clear that President Jefferson Davis was still very much alive in Southern memory.
I realized that I was writing the wrong book. The real story of President Lincoln as Commander in Chief in the Civil War had never been told: his struggle with his opposing President and Commander in Chief in a war which the two men declared on each other in April 1861 from their respective capitals.
There have been, it’s estimated, perhaps 20,000 books about Abraham Lincoln, but never one about the contest between the two commanders in chief: President Lincoln in his White House, in Washington, and President Jefferson Davis, his adversary, at his White House—first in Montgomery, Alabama, and then, once Virginia joined the rebellion, in Richmond. The aspect of conception or originality in deciding to write a biography is crucial. Neither the writer nor the reader wants a book that only shares what we already know. Lincoln vs. Davis offers a wholly new lens on the Civil War and its primary protagonists.
2. Why AI can never take biography from humans.
A second aspect to highlight is the human factor in biography, especially in the dawning era of AI. Biography isn’t history. History is certainly important in understanding our past, but it’s mostly about numbers. Biography is different. A biographer is a human being called upon to examine, interpret, and narrate the actual life of a fellow, individual human being. Reading biography, we enter into an unseen collusion with the author as he or she narrates an individual’s real life story: identifying, empathizing, sympathizing, laughing at, at times repelled by the human subject, as well as by other persons gathered around the subject.
In this case, my chosen focus was two humans struggling to defeat each other. An alternating, developing portrait that not only encompasses the Presidents but their equally fascinating partners. Mary Todd Lincoln suffers from what might today be called bipolar disorder and is desperately affected by the death of their favorite son, Willie, in the White House. Her treasonous Kentucky family, meanwhile, mostly joins the rebellion against the U.S. Government, but Mary remains loyal to her husband, Abraham.
“A biographer is a human being called upon to examine, interpret, and narrate the actual life of a fellow, individual human being.”
Meantime, Confederate First Lady Varina Howell Davis, second wife of Jefferson Davis (his first wife died from malaria on their honeymoon), is considerably younger than her husband. For her part, Varina has relatives in the North. She does not favor secession and thinks privately that the South cannot win the war.
Though we say biography is the story of a human life in history, it embraces other real lives, too, with many commonalities, ironies, and differences between them. Women such as Mary Lincoln’s free black dressmaker or modiste, Elizabeth Keckly, who becomes Mary’s bosom companion and confidante, but a woman who’d been Varina Davis’s own dressmaker until only weeks before, when Varina left town, as a U.S. Senator’s wife, on the eve of war.
That’s the deep human factor of biography, which AI can try to copy or imitate, but may never be able to supplant because it’s written by a fellow human, invested with compassion, humor, and moral judgment. Biography written by humans, rather than robots, is the attempt of the author to reveal the humanness of real human lives and the trials they faced as fellow human beings. That is the heart of all great biography.
3. In thrall to the story.
Story, story, story! Whether in sound, print, or film—story remains the most compelling way we can convey not only information, but human individuality, emotion, and more. Once I had my framework for my study of Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis, I wanted to find what, in the end, was their unique war story and found it in the notion of a duel: the born politician, Abraham Lincoln, versus the born soldier, Jefferson Davis (a man who’d been trained at West Point, was a hero from the Mexican War, had been U.S. Secretary of War for four years, and was a general when appointed President of the Confederate States of America).
The story of the contest between the two leaders fascinates me in the same way that a twelve-round boxing match fascinates an audience, however much we abhor violence between individuals. In the first days of the Civil War, that was precisely how ordinary Americans saw the fight between the two presidents. A wonderful 1861 magazine cartoon by Morse depicts Mr. Lincoln, naked but in tiny boxing shorts with his fists up, facing Mr. Davis, also in brief boxing shorts. The twelve-round contest, the duel, is the story of Lincoln vs. Davis.
Which of them will win: the politician or the trained soldier? Throughout the course of their battle-filled fight, the book resounds with their punches and counterpunches, clean or dirty, good or execrable, backed by their cornermen, families, friends, and conniving saboteurs.
4. The most significant of turning points.
At the start of Lincoln vs. Davis, we encounter a newly elected U.S. president, a man filled with the highest moral aim: the holding together of a fast-fracturing nation. It wholly preoccupies his attention in the White House, day and night. But Lincoln lacks a commanding personality; is indecisive, vacillating, unwilling to hurt people’s feelings, and easily beguiled; he is, in short, too nice for the job and almost hopeless in appointing effective people.
“It wholly preoccupies his attention in the White House, day and night.”
Unfortunately for President Lincoln, he’s facing a competing president of the same age, born in the same state, tall and unyielding, who proves himself a brilliant commander-in-chief as the war unfolds on the battlefield—until he isn’t. At the height of his success, President Davis (like many autocratic individuals) gives way to hubris and thereby affords his hapless opponent in beleaguered Washington the completely unexpected chance that Lincoln needs to help get him out of the fix he’s gotten into.
The Vacillator-in-Chief finally gathers his courage and seizes the moment to issue his historic counter-proclamation, and it’s this moment in the book that wonderfully illustrates the turning point of a biography. This was a turning point for Abraham Lincoln, for Jefferson Davis, the armies and “nations” battling one another, and for three and a half million people enslaved in the South. If that is not a significant turning point, I don’t know what is.
5. The relevance of Lincoln vs. Davis today.
Biography has changed enormously in my lifetime. When I began my career, biography was a gentleman’s or gentlewoman’s profession, not known particularly for its scholarship or originality. Now, biography has changed beyond recognition, with more and more historians applying their forensic research methods to study a chosen individual in history. Not only because the story has color, life, humor, sadness, and humanness in its content but also because it still matters.
The significance of Lincoln vs. Davis resides in its similarity to our divided house today. In the early 1860s, millions of Americans would or could not accept the result of the presidential election, and this turned into violent insurrection, followed by civil war. How the commanders in chief of the two sides tried to defeat each other; what was at stake, in terms of the war’s outcome; as well as the lessons we can learn from this today, form perhaps the most important aspect of Lincoln vs Davis.
To listen to the audio version read by author Nigel Hamilton, download the Next Big Idea App today:
