Freedom: A NOVEL OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN AND THE CIVIL WAR <i> by William Safire (Doubleday: $24.95; 1,125 pp., illustrated) </i>

Abraham Lincoln had been elected the nation’s 16th President only a few weeks before South Carolina seceded from the Union, thus precipitating the bloodiest war this continent has seen, before or since. The core of the issue was, of course, slavery, and as every child over age 12 knows, Lincoln was “The Great Emancipator.” Or was he?

The South believed he was, and that’s why it seceded. But, in fact, at the time of his inauguration, Lincoln had no intention of freeing the slaves. No abolitionist himself, Lincoln’s position on slavery was that it should not be allowed to spread into the new states and territories that were being formed in the West. His personal views were against the institution, but he firmly maintained that the rights of the South to keep slaves were sacred under the Constitution.

So how did this enigmatic President come around to drafting the Emancipation Proclamation two years later and forever dooming the hope of a compromise peace between the two warring sections of the country? This is the question that the author of this enormous novel seeks to answer for us.

“Freedom: A Novel of Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War” is one of the longest pieces of fiction published in recent years--or for that matter in recent memory. At 1,125 pages, it ranks right up there with “War and Peace” in terms of size. The proofs weigh 3.5 pounds--more than a brick (I know, because I took them in and weighed them on the bathroom scales). The finished book will weigh more. I make the point because there is a certain onus attached to this kind of Refrigerator Perry of a novel. The reader cries: “Good Grief, it’s going to take me a month to get through this thing! Is it going to be worth it?

To which the reply must be first: Yes, it’s worth it; but, second, it’s not really a novel.

Safire, The New York Times columnist, has produced an important book, history fictionalized to liven up the characters. As far as the memory goes, it’s a story that ought to be read by every American, and for that matter everyone else in the world, because it so graphically presents how our grand experiment in democracy has actually worked in a time of extreme stress. The stereotypical presentation of the Civil War is that the South started it to keep its slaves, while the North fought it to free them. Of course, there was a lot more to it than that, and Safire regales us with the contradictions--all of them.

Lincoln began his term in office with the hope of preventing slavery from spreading, not abolishing it. Because of this, he was bitterly castigated by his own powerful Radical Republicans who wanted the slaves freed immediately. Lincoln answered them, in the dark days following the initial Confederate victories at Bull Run and elsewhere, by proclaiming that it was his intention to save the Union. If he could do so by freeing “one slave,” he would do it; if by freeing “no slaves,” he would do that, if by freeing “all the slaves,” he would do that, too--but he saw his main job as saving the Union.

He had his problems. First there were the slaveholding border states to contend with. Had he freed slaves in Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, Delaware and West Virginia, he knew full well what would have happened: Those states would have seceded, too, and the North would have lost the war. Moreover, many of his generals--McClellan, his most powerful leader, in particular--were opposed to fighting a war whose purpose it was to free slaves, and, in fact, Lincoln was at various times frightened that the Army might rebel against him over this issue.

In order to appease both sides, Lincoln came up with a plan that would abolish slavery by the year 1900. It was ambitious. First, it was his notion that the federal government would buy the slaves from their masters at $800 apiece over a set period of time. Next, to alleviate Northern apprehension that the slaves would move into their cities and take white people’s jobs, Lincoln proposed to resettle the freed slaves in colonies in Central America--mainly Panama. In a rather ironic touch, Safire sets up a scene in which Lincoln’s aides object to the plan on grounds that it would cost the government billions of dollars. Lincoln coolly counters that the war itself was costing billions of dollars and to boot was killing thousands of men every month.

In his effort to “novelize” the events surrounding Lincoln and the war, Safire bows to the conventions of modern-day fiction writing by drumming up some heroes and heroines and concocting a love story or two: That’s not a bad idea, considering that most of the truly historical characters around Lincoln are portrayed as dour, conniving, malicious, greedy, thieving poltroons.

For his heroine, Safire selects one Anna Ella Carroll, daughter of an old Maryland political family and a leading pamphleteer of the period. He gives her credit for devising a plan for the Union to take the Confederate stronghold of Vicksburg--thus securing the Mississippi River and, most historians believe, closing the noose that eventually would strangle the Confederacy. The problem with taking Vicksburg had always been that the slow gunboats of the day, once they were past the formidable Vicksburg battlements, would not be able to hold or turn around against the strong river current that flowed southward at approximately the same speed as they could make. Safire has Anna Carroll present Lincoln with a plan for attacking Vicksburg by using the northward flowing Tennessee River and then sending a force to reduce Vicksburg from the rear. Eventually, such a plan was partially employed, although by Safire’s own admission in his Notes and Commentary, most historians characterize Carroll’s alleged role in it as “hogwash.”

Nevertheless, the episode serves to set Carroll up as a woman of derring-do. Moreover, Safire involves Carroll romantically with several key figures of the day, including the “hero” of the story--if he can be called that--John Cabell Breckinridge, former U.S. senator, former vice president of the United States in the previous Administration and a soon-to-be general in the Confederate Army.

Breckinridge, a Kentuckian, is cast as the voice of reason in an unreasonable South. He is against secession--by the South as a whole and Kentucky in particular--and endeavors to hold Kentucky as a “neutral” state while at the same time trying to work out some compromise to end the war. However, Lincoln and his Administration have embarked on a somewhat Draconian plan to halt what they see as sedition, particularly in the border states, including the suspension of the right of habeas corpus . Under this martial law, practically the entire legislature of Maryland was arrested for fear they would vote secession; many citizens were arrested for speaking out; newspapers were shut down, and so forth. When Breckinridge objects publicly against this, soldiers are sent to throw him in jail, too, and reluctantly, we are led to believe he escapes to the Confederacy, where he is given an Army command.

Breckinridge was in fact one of the South’s dullest leaders, particularly when compared with the likes of Jackson, Lee, Stuart or Hood, but Safire gets good mileage out of him when he casts him in military situations. The battle scenes depicted in this book are quite vivid, although Safire in his haste to return to the politics of the war, too often neglects the details that would have made them come alive.

In essence, however, politics is what this book is all about. Every kind of politics imaginable: Lincoln against the Radical Republicans, the Radical Republicans against McClellan, the Radical Republicans for McClellan, Stanton against Chase, Seward against Wade and Wade against everybody. The politics of money, of race, of power, of war, of peace, of compromise, of no compromise--even the politics of sex.

But the book always returns to its common theme: How did Lincoln arrive at the decision to free the slaves? The question was apparently a tortured one for the President. Belabored right and left by political ramifications with respect both to the war and to the Constitution, by the Radical Republicans and the Peace Democrats, and always by the press, the President slowly comes around to the notion of an Emancipation Proclamation. Safire deliberately leaves murky the President’s personal commitment to freeing the slaves, although he hints that Lincoln was not altogether displeased at the idea.

Following the battle of Antietam, which at the time was viewed as a Union victory (and, it might be added, the first of any magnitude), Lincoln concluded that he would give the South three months to lay down its arms. If his offer was refused, he would abolish slavery in the disloyal states (but not in the loyal border states).

His reasoning was of the carrot and stick variety. The stick was the threat that the freed slaves might rise up and force the rebel army to return home to put them down. The carrot was the promise that if the South sued for peace, Lincoln would not free the slaves, and “The Union as it was” or something akin to it, would prevail. In any case, the rest is history. As predicted by the anti-abolitionists, the announced threat of an Emancipation Proclamation only served to whip the Confederacy into a higher frenzy and, according to many historians, forever doomed the hope of an early peace. The Radical Republicans were exultant because the Proclamation would now allow them to grind the South and the Southern aristocracy they so much hated into the dust.

Lincoln knew, Safire speculates, chances were slim that the South would bow before the stick. Chances that it would accept the carrot were even slimmer. This knowledge would have been enormous weight upon Lincoln because he was well aware of the horror that more months or years of war would bring. In fact, even Lincoln, who was a spiritualist and attended seances, could not have foreseen the final butcher’s bill: Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, the Wilderness, Atlanta, Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor, Petersburg and a hundred other smaller blood baths on the long road to Appomattox. Half a million boys, Northern and Southern, would die before it was finished.

But Lincoln was willing to take the chance; first, because he thought it might bring the South around to coming back to the “Union as it was”; second, because he thought it might disrupt the rebel army and speed a Union victory, and finally--though Safire doesn’t quite get around to saying this--because Lincoln had concluded that the die was cast, that the war actually was being fought over slavery and not exclusively for the preservation of the Union, and because he was now willing therefore to let the chips fall where they might.

So this 1,125-page, three-and-a-half-pound, $25 opus is worth buying after all. Often ponderous, tedious and maddening to plow through, it nonetheless enlivens and elucidates a period of American history that remains crucial for anyone with the faintest interest in what we, the American people, are all about.