Harvard president Drew Faust caused a stir the other day when she reviewed Richard Brookhiser’s new book, Founder’s Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln.

Faust clearly didn’t think much of Founder’s Son, which argues that Lincoln was motivated and inspired by a philosophical allegiance to the Founding Fathers. She writes:

By casting Lincoln as simply a derivative of the founders, Brookhiser obscures one of the most salient features of his life and character: the way he himself changed and the manner in which his ideas developed and shifted in the course of his life. By the end of the Civil War, Lincoln not only differed from the founders; he also differed from his earlier self. “The dogmas of the quiet past,” he told Congress in December 1862, “are inadequate to the stormy present. . . . As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew.”

It’s the kind of review which, if taken at face value, would strongly discourage one from reading the book.

But Brookhiser is fighting back. He has already prompted the Times to issue a correction about one point; Faust charges that Brookhiser’s treatment of Lincoln’s generals is superficial and that they are “left unnamed.” In fact, as the Times is forced to concede, they are not.

Brookhiser also facilitates (“plants” is probably too strong) is the subject of an article by gossip columnist Richard Johnson in the New York Post in which he alleges that Faust got something else wrong. Update: I sent Brookhiser, this post, and he informs me that he never talked to the Post, so—mea culpa. It discusses a letter Brookhiser wrote to the Times.

Brookhiser writes: “Faust asks, as if I had not considered the question, ‘what would Lincoln have thought about Sally Hemings?’ But I devote a chapter to Lincoln’s thoughts about Thomas Jefferson, including his relationship with Hemings.”

For what it’s worth, I used Amazon’s “search inside the book” feature to try to fact-check this—not a very good research method, but I haven’t read the book—and found two references to Sally Hemings; both were brief, and didn’t appear to address the question Faust poses. So Faust may come out ahead on that one.

Faust is also tough on Brookhiser’s argument that Lincoln felt a connection to the Founding Fathers because the writers of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence hoped to set slavery on a course to extinction. But Faust disagrees with that assessment of the Founding Fathers:

This is a portrait of the founding fathers not as masters — which so many of them actually were — but as captives of slavery. In connecting them to Lincoln, Brook­hiser makes them seem part of a long antislavery tradition, liberating them from a recent and powerful historiography that has detailed sharp and troubling contradictions between their rhetoric of freedom and the realities of everyday lives lived close to the darkest aspects of human bondage and exploitation. Yet, one wonders, what would Lincoln have thought about Sally Hemings?

Is this fair? Again, with the caveat that I haven’t read Brookhiser’s book (I have read Faust’s latest, and found it oddly flat and much overrated), I don’t think so. If Brookhiser makes the FF’s seem “part of a long antislavery tradition,” that would indeed be overstating the case. On this subject, they were generally conflicted and conservative. As Faust points out, many of them were also hypocritical. But hypocrisy does not disqualify them from sincere belief that slavery was a profound moral wrong. It just means they couldn’t always practice what they preached.

(Of all the Founding Fathers, probably John Adams most wrestled with bridging the gap between daily living and revolutionary idealism, and while it made him admirable and admired in many ways, it also caused him enormous psychological stress—particularly when he felt he had failed to live up to his own words.)

It is also true that the Founding Fathers who opposed slavery in theory—most of them, I believe—did not know how to end it in reality. They were racist, as was the norm at the time, and they could not imagine black Africans living self-sufficiently in the new country; one of the reasons that Washington didn’t free his slaves until his death was that he did not believe they would survive on their own. This is, from a modern perspective, an appalling thought. That does not make it an insincere one—and in fact Lincoln himself went through a phase in which he was inclined to believe that freed slaves would have to be returned to Africa. (If memory serves, Jefferson had considered the same thing; which would make an interesting connection between Lincoln and the Founders.) If you take seriously the Founders’ racism—and there’s no reason not to, they were perfectly upfront about it—it’s perfectly possible for the Founding Fathers to have been both “masters”—a term Faust uses literally—and “captives” (she makes this figurative) of slavery.

So while Faust writes with a great deal of well-earned confidence about Lincoln and the Civil War, she does not inspire (in me, anyway) a great amount of confidence in her understanding of the Founding Fathers. Her book review feels a bit to me like the work of a president who has repeatedly and convincingly said that the downside of being president of Harvard is the fact that she can no longer practice the writing of history. It lets her keep her toes in—while other muscles deteriorate.