Donald, Considered.

"I was able to sit at Lincoln's side and see how he thought and how he acted, and how he felt about what was going on around him. I felt the pressures that were on him. You can see what people were writing to him, how they were nudging him." Historian David Herbert Donald, 1920-2009. "'It is the most balanced of the biographies out there," Mr. Foner said in a telephone interview Monday. 'It is not a work of hero worship, nor does it have a prosecutorial brief. He presents Lincoln as a rather passive figure, not at all in charge of the forces raging around him, which is quite accurate.'"