Daily Inspiration Quote by David Herbert Donald

Donald’s sentence performs the historian’s version of a stage whisper: after the apparatus of explanation has rumbled by, he pauses to admit what the apparatus can’t quite capture. “But having said all of that” is a polite clearing of the throat that signals exhaustion with tidy causality. He’s acknowledging the standard toolkit for Lincoln’s rising popularity - politics of reunion, the civil religion of emancipation, the needs of different eras to draft Lincoln into their arguments - then turning the screwdriver toward something more slippery.

The key move is “still doesn’t account,” a quiet rebuke to structural accounts that want greatness to be legible as outcome. Donald isn’t denying context; he’s flagging the remainder: the part of historical influence that survives even when you’ve explained everything you can measure. That remainder, he suggests, is “Lincoln’s personal characteristics” - not as sentimental biography, but as a set of performative traits that translate across generations. Lincoln’s melancholy as moral seriousness. His plain style as democratic credibility. His capacity for humor as pressure-release in a catastrophic war. These qualities don’t just decorate the story; they help produce the story by shaping how Lincoln communicated power without sounding intoxicated by it.

Written by a historian known for resisting hero-worship, the line’s subtext is methodological humility. Donald is carving out space for charisma, temperament, and voice - the historically consequential “feel” of a person - while warning readers that popularity isn’t fully explainable by events alone. Lincoln endures not just because Americans need him, but because he keeps meeting them halfway.