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The Last Best Hope of Earth: Abraham Lincoln and the Promise of America
Mark E. Neely, Jr., gives us the first compact biography of Abraham Lincoln based on new scholarship. Neely, a Pulitzer Prize–winning historian, vividly recaptures the central place of politics in Lincoln’s life. Richly illustrated, nuanced and accessible, written with attention to the age in which Lincoln lived, yet ever alert to universal moral questions, this book provides a portrait of Lincoln as an extraordinary man in his own time and ours.
320 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1993
About the author
Mark E. Neely Jr.
24 books10 followersMark E. Neely, Jr. is an American historian best known as an authority on the U.S. Civil War in general and Abraham Lincoln in particular. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1991. He earned his undergraduate degree in American Studies at Yale University in 1966 and his Ph.D. in history at the same school in 1973. Yale's Graduate School would award him with a Wilbur Cross Medal in 1995.
From 1971 to 1972 Neely was a visiting instructor at Iowa State University. In the latter year, he was named director of The Lincoln Museum in Fort Wayne, Indiana, a position he held for twenty years.
In 1992, Dr. Neely was named the John Francis Bannon Professor of History and American Studies at Saint Louis University. And, in 1998, he was made the McCabe Greer Professor of Civil War History at Pennsylvania State University.
Neely is best known for his 1991 book The Fate of Liberty: Abraham Lincoln and Civil Liberties, which won both the Pulitzer Prize for History and the Bell I. Wiley Prize the following year. In March 1991, he published an article in the magazine Civil War History, entitled Was the Civil War a Total War?, which is considered one of the top three most influential articles on the war written in the last half of the 20th Century.
- from Wikipedia
From 1971 to 1972 Neely was a visiting instructor at Iowa State University. In the latter year, he was named director of The Lincoln Museum in Fort Wayne, Indiana, a position he held for twenty years.
In 1992, Dr. Neely was named the John Francis Bannon Professor of History and American Studies at Saint Louis University. And, in 1998, he was made the McCabe Greer Professor of Civil War History at Pennsylvania State University.
Neely is best known for his 1991 book The Fate of Liberty: Abraham Lincoln and Civil Liberties, which won both the Pulitzer Prize for History and the Bell I. Wiley Prize the following year. In March 1991, he published an article in the magazine Civil War History, entitled Was the Civil War a Total War?, which is considered one of the top three most influential articles on the war written in the last half of the 20th Century.
- from Wikipedia
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
August 27, 2017
A good concise biography of Lincoln that shows, among other things, his absolute indifference to constitutional niceties in the defense of an idealized American nation
June 8, 2026
To conduct a free people through a long war may be a leader’s hardest job. I borrow this phrasing from Charles Stillé, who in 1862 published his pamphlet “How a Free People Conduct a Long War.” He summarized the challenge this way: “The popular idea of war is a speedy and decisive victory, and an immediate occupation of the enemy's capital, followed by a treaty of peace by which the objects of the war are permanently secured...It is, therefore, not unnatural that at the first reverse they should yield at once to an unmanly depression, and, giving up all for lost, they should vent upon the government…and upon the army and its generals...an abuse as unreasoning as was their original enthusiasm.”
The only reason I’m aware of this pamphlet is because Mark E. Neely, Jr. uses it for the title of the fifth chapter in his compact study of Abraham Lincoln’s war presidency. For his earlier, narrow study of constitutional liberties under Lincoln, Neely won the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for History. In “The Last Best Hope of Earth,” written for a wider audience and as a companion piece for a Lincoln exhibit at the Huntington Library, Neely expands on the thing that most interests him: the president’s leadership of a free, restless, and sometimes violently dissatisfied people through a long and uncertain civil war.
Neely frames his goals through a somewhat “old man yells at cloud” dismissal of a modern tendency to psychoanalyze past people. In his opening, Neely blames this on “the obsession of our age with psychology,” the rise of specialized fields such as women’s studies, and what he calls “the turning inward of the ‘me generation.’” Personally, these things don’t bother me. My favorite holistic biography of Lincoln (Meacham 2022) analyzes the streams of spiritual and ethical thought that contributed to his psychology and morality, as well as the way his marriage to an ambitious woman acted as a force multiplier of his own ambition. However, Neely’s insistence on constraining his study to speech, acts, and consequences does lend itself to a fast-paced and insightful narrative of how Lincoln governed.
The interpretation that emerges is not uncommon in modern biographies of the sixteenth president, but rarely is it stated as baldly as Neely does: “Lincoln had demonstrated from the start a quality that is not easily squared with his kind and forgiving nature—he possessed an instinct for the jugular.” Lincoln might on the one hand personally suspend capital sentences for young deserters, and on the other he might ignore the depopulation of entire Missouri counties so long as the Unionist junta running the state kept the population pacified. This unusual blend of magnanimity and ruthlessness proved vital for the survival of a republic that, under a man less able to keep those qualities in balance, could easily have sued for a catastrophic peace or fallen to despotism.
Though these nightmarish scenarios might provide gainful employment to novelists of alternative history, they were never in play so long as a man of Lincoln’s caliber manned the helm of state. From the outset, even before South Carolina seceded, the incoming president urged a Republican senator, “Stand firm. The tug has come, & better now, than any time hereafter.” As Neely writes, “Lincoln…thought challenges should be met and not avoided. Avoidance to him was mere procrastination.” This was a cardinal sin for the railsplitter from Illinois: “Lincoln despised avoiding rather than surmounting difficulties—it was the same offense he had accused his shiftless stepbrother of committing. It constituted, as Grant remembered Lincoln’s phrase, ‘procrastination.’ This was a characteristic way for Lincoln to think.” By the summer of 1864, Lincoln’s determination to face down the storm was the reason Confederates, resources dwindling and hopes of European support fading, pinned their hopes on a Democratic win in that year’s presidential election. They knew Lincoln would never stop unless his electorate stopped him. They didn’t, so he didn’t, so the Confederacy fell.
At least, this is one way to look at it. Neely is careful to rehabilitate the image of Unionist Democrats, often defamed as a disloyal opposition who would’ve wrested defeat from the jaws of victory under President McClellan. The truth is that most Democrats supported Lincoln’s war aims even if they opposed him on policy or partisan grounds. Although the 1864 Democratic party platform labeled his administration of the war a failure, their own candidate disowned that plank; and no one endorsed a peace that would recognize two independent nations. As for Lincoln, he believed that a president elected on Democratic terms could not fail to lose the Union; but he never considered suspending elections and never attacked Democrats as traitors: “Though a politician throughout his adult life and a dedicated party adherent, Lincoln retained a firm understanding of the line separating party loyalty and patriotism. On the one hand, he usually sought partisan advantage mercilessly when he could; on the other, he usually recognized that opposition to him was not necessarily unpatriotic.”
This raises the question: if Democrats were willing to restore the Union through armistice and negotiation, was Lincoln really necessary to save it? My answer is the same one I always give: Lincoln was necessary to save a Union cleansed of slavery. Neely quotes Frederick Douglass, who in 1876 characterized Lincoln as “pre-eminently the white man’s President, entirely devoted to the welfare of white men…the Union was more to him than our freedom or our future.” Yet in the same speech, Douglass looks again: “Viewed from the genuine abolition ground, Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent; but measuring him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined.”
Emancipation seems like a natural evolution as we look backward from the 21st century; but in the white supremacist culture of 19th-century America, it took the will of an Abraham Lincoln to get it done. This speaks to one challenge of reading history; namely, remembering that they didn’t know what we know. To us, the past as edited and compressed feels obvious and inevitable. To them, the words of Lincoln’s second annual message in 1862 represented a fork in an untraveled road: “Fellow-citizens, we can not escape history. We of this Congress and this Administration will be remembered in spite of ourselves…We shall nobly save or meanly lose the last best hope of earth.”
We know they didn’t lose, but they didn’t know that; and two weeks after Lincoln raised this specter of alternate futures, the Army of the Potomac staggered away from Fredericksburg with over 12,000 casualties from street fighting so horrific that Confederate General Robert E. Lee said, “It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it.” War is terrible, and slavery was terrible too. No one could know the ends of these things, and more than a few were willing to accept a devil’s bargain with the slaveholding South if it meant ending the carnage. Overcoming the twin horrors of war and slavery required a leader in possession of a paradox: a generous moral core and a ruthless determination to see terrible things through to a terrible end. Abraham Lincoln proved to be that leader. With his will, he saved the Union; with his heart, he preserved a Union worth saving.
The only reason I’m aware of this pamphlet is because Mark E. Neely, Jr. uses it for the title of the fifth chapter in his compact study of Abraham Lincoln’s war presidency. For his earlier, narrow study of constitutional liberties under Lincoln, Neely won the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for History. In “The Last Best Hope of Earth,” written for a wider audience and as a companion piece for a Lincoln exhibit at the Huntington Library, Neely expands on the thing that most interests him: the president’s leadership of a free, restless, and sometimes violently dissatisfied people through a long and uncertain civil war.
Neely frames his goals through a somewhat “old man yells at cloud” dismissal of a modern tendency to psychoanalyze past people. In his opening, Neely blames this on “the obsession of our age with psychology,” the rise of specialized fields such as women’s studies, and what he calls “the turning inward of the ‘me generation.’” Personally, these things don’t bother me. My favorite holistic biography of Lincoln (Meacham 2022) analyzes the streams of spiritual and ethical thought that contributed to his psychology and morality, as well as the way his marriage to an ambitious woman acted as a force multiplier of his own ambition. However, Neely’s insistence on constraining his study to speech, acts, and consequences does lend itself to a fast-paced and insightful narrative of how Lincoln governed.
The interpretation that emerges is not uncommon in modern biographies of the sixteenth president, but rarely is it stated as baldly as Neely does: “Lincoln had demonstrated from the start a quality that is not easily squared with his kind and forgiving nature—he possessed an instinct for the jugular.” Lincoln might on the one hand personally suspend capital sentences for young deserters, and on the other he might ignore the depopulation of entire Missouri counties so long as the Unionist junta running the state kept the population pacified. This unusual blend of magnanimity and ruthlessness proved vital for the survival of a republic that, under a man less able to keep those qualities in balance, could easily have sued for a catastrophic peace or fallen to despotism.
Though these nightmarish scenarios might provide gainful employment to novelists of alternative history, they were never in play so long as a man of Lincoln’s caliber manned the helm of state. From the outset, even before South Carolina seceded, the incoming president urged a Republican senator, “Stand firm. The tug has come, & better now, than any time hereafter.” As Neely writes, “Lincoln…thought challenges should be met and not avoided. Avoidance to him was mere procrastination.” This was a cardinal sin for the railsplitter from Illinois: “Lincoln despised avoiding rather than surmounting difficulties—it was the same offense he had accused his shiftless stepbrother of committing. It constituted, as Grant remembered Lincoln’s phrase, ‘procrastination.’ This was a characteristic way for Lincoln to think.” By the summer of 1864, Lincoln’s determination to face down the storm was the reason Confederates, resources dwindling and hopes of European support fading, pinned their hopes on a Democratic win in that year’s presidential election. They knew Lincoln would never stop unless his electorate stopped him. They didn’t, so he didn’t, so the Confederacy fell.
At least, this is one way to look at it. Neely is careful to rehabilitate the image of Unionist Democrats, often defamed as a disloyal opposition who would’ve wrested defeat from the jaws of victory under President McClellan. The truth is that most Democrats supported Lincoln’s war aims even if they opposed him on policy or partisan grounds. Although the 1864 Democratic party platform labeled his administration of the war a failure, their own candidate disowned that plank; and no one endorsed a peace that would recognize two independent nations. As for Lincoln, he believed that a president elected on Democratic terms could not fail to lose the Union; but he never considered suspending elections and never attacked Democrats as traitors: “Though a politician throughout his adult life and a dedicated party adherent, Lincoln retained a firm understanding of the line separating party loyalty and patriotism. On the one hand, he usually sought partisan advantage mercilessly when he could; on the other, he usually recognized that opposition to him was not necessarily unpatriotic.”
This raises the question: if Democrats were willing to restore the Union through armistice and negotiation, was Lincoln really necessary to save it? My answer is the same one I always give: Lincoln was necessary to save a Union cleansed of slavery. Neely quotes Frederick Douglass, who in 1876 characterized Lincoln as “pre-eminently the white man’s President, entirely devoted to the welfare of white men…the Union was more to him than our freedom or our future.” Yet in the same speech, Douglass looks again: “Viewed from the genuine abolition ground, Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent; but measuring him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined.”
Emancipation seems like a natural evolution as we look backward from the 21st century; but in the white supremacist culture of 19th-century America, it took the will of an Abraham Lincoln to get it done. This speaks to one challenge of reading history; namely, remembering that they didn’t know what we know. To us, the past as edited and compressed feels obvious and inevitable. To them, the words of Lincoln’s second annual message in 1862 represented a fork in an untraveled road: “Fellow-citizens, we can not escape history. We of this Congress and this Administration will be remembered in spite of ourselves…We shall nobly save or meanly lose the last best hope of earth.”
We know they didn’t lose, but they didn’t know that; and two weeks after Lincoln raised this specter of alternate futures, the Army of the Potomac staggered away from Fredericksburg with over 12,000 casualties from street fighting so horrific that Confederate General Robert E. Lee said, “It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it.” War is terrible, and slavery was terrible too. No one could know the ends of these things, and more than a few were willing to accept a devil’s bargain with the slaveholding South if it meant ending the carnage. Overcoming the twin horrors of war and slavery required a leader in possession of a paradox: a generous moral core and a ruthless determination to see terrible things through to a terrible end. Abraham Lincoln proved to be that leader. With his will, he saved the Union; with his heart, he preserved a Union worth saving.
June 22, 2026
Neely advertises this as a biography of Lincoln. It really doesn't feel like that; it feels like a character study of him. And I think I enjoyed it more than a biography recounting his life step by step.
The tension Neely keeps coming back to is between Lincoln's ideals and his sense of politics: now playing down his views on slavery in debating Douglas, then holding his stance on emancipation in the dark days of 1864. Lincoln, Neely keeps coming back to, was a savvy practical politician. But, he (unlike Douglas, though Neely doesn't get into that) knew his ideals and kept ultimately coming back to them.
Another charm that I hadn't realized before was Lincoln's reserve about his personal life. He was happy to have some factors of it played up for campaign material, but didn't talk much about it himself. Apparently he didn't like studying the abstract law - but we'd never know that if not for one surviving letter, since he did it without apparent complaint and didn't bring it up again.
The tension Neely keeps coming back to is between Lincoln's ideals and his sense of politics: now playing down his views on slavery in debating Douglas, then holding his stance on emancipation in the dark days of 1864. Lincoln, Neely keeps coming back to, was a savvy practical politician. But, he (unlike Douglas, though Neely doesn't get into that) knew his ideals and kept ultimately coming back to them.
Another charm that I hadn't realized before was Lincoln's reserve about his personal life. He was happy to have some factors of it played up for campaign material, but didn't talk much about it himself. Apparently he didn't like studying the abstract law - but we'd never know that if not for one surviving letter, since he did it without apparent complaint and didn't bring it up again.
November 5, 2014
Competent and well researched history book that dealt with the surrounding history of Lincoln's contemporaries as much as with Lincoln himself. Though the book touches on some aspects of Lincoln's personal philosophies, it's title gives the impression that the reader will be taken into the mind of Lincoln, and that rarely happens here. It sets itself up to be a penetrating biography, but there is little new here. At times Lincoln seems almost incidental to what is being discussed.
January 10, 2014
took me a while to read but it was worth it. What courage (and stress!) it took to be president during the Civil War. Certainly wasn't what he expected when he was elected. There was a lot to learn and mistakes were made in the beginning but he soldiered thru. And to lose a child! Good insight and who knows - what would his legacy have been like if he hadn't been assassinated?
December 14, 2012
Well it was a bit like a play by play deep dive history class-- educational but not very entertaining... I learned more than I needed to know
August 18, 2017
Great read. I love Abraham Lincoln.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews