Reviews in American History

Every generation of historians struggles with the tyranny of presidential biographies. Often written by journalists, friends, and other “insiders,” these massive tomes map entire eras around the actions, habits, and thoughts of a larger-than-life president. The best of these books place the president in his context, describing how he came of age and imbibed the assumptions of his era, how he rose to power by capturing the imagination of his peers, and how he then used his power to change the country, and perhaps the wider world. Although authors will differ in their assessments of the presidents they chronicle, the genre privileges positive judgments—how the man in the White House transcended his circumstances and tried to improve his society. Most presidential biographies reject heroic claims, but few escape the supposition that their subject mattered enormously. Why else would anyone read more than five hundred pages about a dead man?

Of course, these dead (and some still not dead) men had enduring consequences for the country because of the power of the presidency. That much is clear. The nature of the presidency as an office, and how its power was defined and deployed—that remains uncertain, and frequently under-analyzed by biographers. Too often those who write about these men assume they matter without showing how. As the office and its larger national and international context have changed over time, the meaning of presidential power has undergone a series of transformations that re-shaped the impact of actions by the commander-in-chief.¹

To take the most obvious example, historians of the Civil War have meditated deeply on how that existential conflict allowed President Abraham Lincoln to assume presidential powers unthinkable even a few years earlier. He abridged rights of habeas corpus, directly conscripted thousands of citizens, and emancipated the slaves in secessionist territories. After the surrender at Appomattox, Lincoln and his successor appointed governors in the former [End Page 422] Confederate states and decided which secessionists were eligible to run for office. Lincoln made the president into a direct ruler over about half the country.²

In the following decades, the power of the presidency shrank as Congress and the states constrained these capabilities. Congress denied President Ulysses Grant the military resources to enforce civil rights in the South, and it pushed for large investments in railroad construction across the continent. In 1878, Congress went a step further in restricting presidential power, passing the Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibited the commander-in-chief’s use of the U.S. Army to enforce the nation’s domestic laws. During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, state governments largely determined the constitutional rights for their residents, backed by a Supreme Court that denied presidential authority over citizens. The states were able to exclude millions of Americans from certain forms of education, employment, residence, and most notoriously voting. Although the presidents of the “Gilded Age” were complicit, they had liitle leverage over Jim Crow laws or economic investments throughout the country.³

Power would shift back to the president in the early twentieth century with federal support for progressive reforms and anti-communist suppression, but it would recede again after the First World War. The point is not to track each ebb and flow, but to recognize that the personality, goals, and choices of the president often mattered less than the context in which he operated. After the bitterly contested 1876 election, for example, Rutherford B. Hayes could not deploy more federal force to the South even if he wanted to. Similarly, Presidents Chester Arthur, Grover Cleveland, and Benjamin Harrison—all largely forgotten—could not diminish the outsized role of the industrial barons who dominated the American economy in their days. The presidency reflects the power dynamics in American society; the moments when individual leaders can transform society are rare and context-dependent.

If biographers focus on personality, historians are partial to the influence of institutions and circumstances...