Order of Lincoln (the State's highest honor) by the Governor of Illinois in 2008 in the area of Communications and Education. In 2000, Donald received The Lincoln Forum's Richard Nelson Current Award of Achievement. Works In his introduction, Carl Sandburg, the poet and Lincoln biographer, hailed Donald's first book as the answer to scholars' prayers: "When is someone going to do the life of Bill Herndon. Isn't it about time? Now the question is out." David M. Potter, a Civil War scholar, said that Donald's biography of Charles Sumner portrayed "Sumner as a man with acute psychological inadequacies" and exposed Sumner's "facade of pompous rectitude." Donald's evenhanded approach to Sumner, Potter concluded, was a model for biographers working with a difficult subject. "If it does not make Sumner attractive [the book] certainly makes him understandable." Personal life and death Donald lived in Lincoln, Massachusetts, with his wife Aida DiPace Donald, who is an historian and author. His wife also served as a senior editor and then as editor-in-chief at the Harvard University Press. He died of heart failure in Boston on May 17, 2009. Donald was survived by his wife, his son Bruce Donald and two granddaughters. Books Lincoln's Herndon (1948) Divided We Fought: A Pictorial History of the War, 1861—1865 (1952) Editor, Inside Lincoln's Cabinet: The Civil War Diaries of Salmon P. Chase. (1954) Lincoln Reconsidered: Essays on the Civil War Era (1956, 2nd edition 1961, 3rd edition 2001) (). Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War (1960). Pulitzer Prize-winning scholarly biography to 1860. The Civil War and Reconstruction (1961; 2001) (), 2001 edition with Jean H. Baker & Michael F. Holt; 1961 edition with James G. Randall. Editor, Why the North Won the Civil War (1962) () (revised ed. 1996). Editor with Aida DiPace Donald, Diary of Charles Francis Adams, Volumes 1 and 2, January 1820 - September 1829 (1964), Harvard University Press. The Politics of Reconstruction, 1863-1867 (1965) Charles Sumner and the Rights of Man (1970). Biography after 1860. Look Homeward: A Life of Thomas Wolfe (1987)(). Lincoln (1995) Lincoln at Home: Two Glimpses of Abraham Lincoln's Domestic Life (1999) . We Are Lincoln Men: Abraham Lincoln and His Friends (2003) (). Sources Paul Goodman, "David Donald's Charles Sumner Reconsidered" in The New England Quarterly, Vol. 37, No. 3. (Sep., 1964), pp. 373–387.online at JSTOR Ari Hoogenboom, "David Herbert Donald: A Celebration," in A Master's