Their Lincoln (and Ours)

Eric Foner is exactly the kind of history professor from whom I wish I could take a class; erudite, serious and excited by his subject.  Reading his books, particularly A Short History of Reconstruction and Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction, I've become convinced that if there is anyone who can teach me what it meant to be alive in America then, and what the lives of Americans then might and ought to mean to us now, it is Eric Foner.  

His book  The Story of American Freedom is one of those titles I have been pressing into the willing and reluctant hands of customers and coworkers since it's original publication.  I know the title sounds like one of those well intentioned freshman Seminars, taught in an anonymous, drafty lecture hall by some dessicated old party with a slide projector, and actually conducted by weary TAs roaming the aisles with dusty pages of "supplemental readings," but you must trust me when I tell you, it is actually one of the most breathtakingly wide-ranging and scintillating acts of American intellectual history I've ever read.  Reading Foner as he traces the progression of "freedom" and "liberty" through our history, is not unlike spending time, at least as I imagine it, in the personal library of a great bibliophile and conversationalist who darts from his chair every few minutes to produce the exact text he's been quoting from memory, just to show you yet another surprising instance of our mania for, and wildly contradictory usage of, the great watch-words and shibboleths of representative democracy.  It is the author's enthusiasm, as well as his scholarship, that makes him such good company.

Now, for the Lincoln Bicentennial, Eric Foner has edited a new collection of popular essays from noted scholars -- no mean trick in my experience as a reader of history -- on subjects ranging from his own thoughtful consideration of the embarrassing topic of "Lincoln and Colonization," to James M. McPherson's brief summation of "A. Lincoln, Commander in Chief" (which I highly recommend if you don't intend to read McPherson's recent full-length treatment of the subject, reviewed in an earlier posting here.)  Foner's new book is called Our Lincoln: New Perspectives on Lincoln and His World, from W. W. Norton.  In addition to Harold Holzer on Lincoln and art, and Mark E. Neely, Jr. on Lincoln and the Constitution, there are names less familiar to me and essays I was surprised to find myself enjoying thoroughly.  David W. Blight, for example, I did not know.  The very title of his essay, "The Theft of Lincoln in Scholarship, Politics and Public Memory," made me jumpy.  That word "theft" has the spin to it of literary-theory and "historiology" --id est gab about rather than history written.  But it actually proved to be one of my favorites in the collection; taking on the Lincoln pietists, bully patriots, politicians and revisionists all at a go!  Now I must find Blight's latest book, A Slave No More; Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Narratives of Emancipation, from 2007, and put my embarrassing suspicions to rest.

I would encourage anyone interested in contemporary Lincoln scholarship to seek out this new collection, without a worry that the common reader will find anything therein but consistently well written, thoughtful, and "theory"-free American history of the best kind. (Foucault, for example, is blessedly absent entirely from the index.  Can I get an "Amen?")

Holzer & Company

In an earlier post, I already expressed my deep displeasure at just how awful the design of the dustjacket is.  But, as I suspected I would, I've now become convinced by the contents that I shall have to have my own copy of Harold Holzer's new Library of America title, The Lincoln Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Legacy from 1860 to Now.  It is a rich and varied collection -- boy howdy and how.

Where else, exactly, can one find, between two covers, H. L. Mencken's sobering and mirthful essay from his Prejudices: Third Series, in which one finds the "Lincoln legend" so perfectly described as "... a sort of amalgam of John Wesley and the Holy Ghost," and also Langston Hughes' poem "Lincoln Monument: Washington?"  Holzer has bundled together a wonderfully eclectic collection of people, from contemporaries to biographers, from cartoonists to politicians; from H. G. Wells to Dale Carnegie (!), from Emerson to E. L. Doctorow, and on and on.

Better yet, Harold Holzer has written a brief, often quite pithy preface for each entry.  This from the introduction to Woodrow Wilson's contribution: "Left entirely unmentioned in Wilson's eloquent address were slavery and emancipation -- omissions that were not surprising in light of Wilson's segregation of black government employees and his effusive praise for D. W. Griffith's racist screen epic The Birth of a Nation."

Unlike some earlier anthologies from the Library of America, and here I'm thinking specially of their truly weird collection of Sermons, this volume, in the very capable hands of Harold Holzer, manages to present the familiar and the unknown -- at least to me -- in an entirely satisfying and endlessly surprising way.

As tributes go, this is one of the best, if not the best to date on the occasion of the Bicentennial. 

Selections on Natural Selection

Beloved Helene Hanff, of 84 Charing Cross Road fame, when confronted by a book of excerpts from the sermons of John Donne, pleaded with her beloved bookstore to find her a complete edition of same. She knew her chances were slim. Having detailed her struggles to cobble together the full text on her own, she closed her letter with the following:

"i am going to bed. i will have hideous nightmares involving huge monsters in academic robes carrying long bloody butcher knives labelled Excerpt, Selection, Passage and Abridged."

I am, as always, with Helene. And yet...

There's a new anthology of Charles Darwin's work, called Evolutionary Writings, from Oxford University Press. Now I hate excerpts, selections, etc., as much or more than most, but this is a handsome hardcover and includes The Autobiographies, which one never sees in a hardcover of any kind. And there does seem to be quite a lot in this one fat volume.

I may have to have it. Still, by way of recommendation, I'm neither more nor less likely to recommend this book than I am the book Edward O. Wilson edited and introduce, From So Simple a Beginning: The Four Great Books of Charles Darwin, from Norton. In the case of the latter, besides Wilson, the book also boasts complete texts, BUT all bound together in one handsome but cumbersome brick. (Not that I didn't have to buy the book when it came out, but I've honestly never tried to read it after I read Wilson's introduction -- just too clumsily made to rest on the chest at night or carry on the bus.)

At least the new Oxford is reasonably sized for bus travel and late night reading in bed. But ultimately, one might simply be better off with individual and unexpurgated paperbacks, much as I hate to admit it.

Lincoln Q & A

Back in 2000, Gerald J. Prokopowicz published All for the Regiment: The Army of the Ohio 1861 - 1862. Now that is exactly the kind of Civil War title I actively avoid; military history, narrowly focused, the kind of title marketed to Civil War "buffs." Well, I'm no kind of war buff. Having read Shelby Foote's 3 volumes, I really have no interest in reading other titles on the subject. And yet...

I think someone gave me the Prokopowicz. I don't remember how long I had it. Finally, one very long weekend, for want of other history to read, I picked it up and read it straight through. It is not a brief book. It was, however, a fascinating story, crowded with well-intentioned disaster, interesting men, and beautifully told.

Now Professor Prokopowicz has done another very good thing indeed. Did Lincoln Own Slaves? And Other Frequently Asked Questions About Abraham Lincoln, from the Vintage Civil War Library, has just been published and, as the title explains, it does a great service by answering all the questions, large and small, that tend to needle readers, teachers and anyone interested in Lincoln. Well illustrated, well organized, and well written, it is, at only $14.95, a considerable resource for so reasonable a price. Drop into it anywhere, and you're likely find something you either didn't know, couldn't remember or never thought to explain with such brevity and sense.

Tried By Fire

James M. McPherson is of the school of my favorite historians, the great popularizers; writers of sound and exciting prose narratives whose subject is history, whose audience is non-academics, and whose mission is to keep alive our history for the common reader.  Using the most comprehensive research, but not encumbered by endless footnotes detailing and rehashing the debates of point inevitable when historians disagree, McPherson's books are models of the kind of history that so seldom gets written nowadays, but always gets read. 

His new book, Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief, takes a more narrow focus than most of the new Lincoln biographies, and concentrates on how Lincoln ran the war; fighting his generals, shaping public opinion in the North, using, and possibly even abusing his powers as Commander in Chief, all with the single goal of preserving the Union.  Presumably taking Lincoln's dogged concentration as his example, McPherson refuses the thousand distractions -- philosophical, anecdotal, biographical -- to which any writing about Lincoln and the Civil War are prone, and keeps to a linear telling of one man's efforts to do an almost impossible thing and how he triumphantly did it; at the cost of thousands of lives, millions of dollars, and ultimately at the cost of his own life.  It is the most remarkable individual story in our history, and this is an aspect of that story too little understood and never told in quite this way before.

McPherson's book is one of the best of the new Lincolns, and I can not imagine a better writer to tell it.   I am not a reader of military history.  I have too little sympathy with the men who make war and not the right kind of brain to follow troop movements and tactics and the like.  But by placing Lincoln at the center of his book, and by telling the story of the war as it passed through Lincoln's hands, McPherson has managed the very difficult task of making this a thrilling, frustrating and even a very moving story of an individual man, a great man, without diminishing in any way the enormity of what happened or the sacrifices and tragedies of the millions who fought and suffered at his behest.  Lincoln emerges from McPherson's pages as a commander, not trained or experienced to conduct war, but determined to do whatever had to be done and doing it.  It is a fascinating portrait. 

A (Forthcoming) Story for Younger Readers

In, I think, the second grade, already the consummate ham, I organized a "play" to commemorate Lincoln's Birthday at a PTA meeting. Aided by my pals Jeff (as Lincoln) and Joel (as Booth,) we re-enacted the tragedy of Lincoln's assassination. When Booth jumped from the scene of the crime to the stage, he nearly took the bunting and the Presidential Box -- made of cardboard -- with him. Luckily the dying Lincoln thoughtfully grabbed our falling set and held it throughout the rest of the action. Now why we chose the assassination as our tribute on the man's birthday, I do not now recall. I do remember that I was the narrator and Jeff was cast as Lincoln because, unlike me, he must have already been well over three feet tall.

I am not a big fan of assassination histories. Most tend to be written by conspiracy theorists and like minded paranoids. So when a great book does come along dealing with Lincoln's untimely end, it takes me awhile to warm to it.

Well, there is such a book on Lincoln's assassins, and I'm recommending here, a bit late. James L. Swanson has written the definitive history of the flight of John Wilkes Booth, Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln's Killer. Published in 2006, it is in paperback now. Terribly exciting, and full of information previously unknown to me, Swanson's book managed to tell a familiar story in a remarkably fresh way; taking the flight of Booth as an opportunity to detail both the hunt, and the immediate consequences of the assassination.

Come February, Swanson has a new book coming out, for younger readers: Chasing Lincoln's Killer. The author has recast the whole story in language appropriate for this new audience without losing the excitement and serious scholarship of the adult version. The new book is handsomely designed, includes a number of large illustrations, and will sell in hardcover for only $16.95. A perfect gift for a younger history buff. Much better, no doubt, if less hilarious, than my production from the 2nd grade.

The New Standard of David Herbert Donald

What makes a biography the “standard life?” Most obviously, if the biography eventually eclipses the subject in fame – think of Boswell’s Johnson – then all subsequent biographies, no matter the additional information they contain, or the quality of the writing – and again Samuel Johnson comes first to mind – will always be something less than the standard. Generally though, if the fame of the subject is sustained across generations, then each generation will produce a new standard life to replace those that preceded it. And here no better example exists than the biographers of Abraham Lincoln.

From Nicolay & Hay in 1890, to Ida Tarbell in 1900, to Beveredge, to Sandburg, to James G. Randall, our 16th President has never lacked a standard life in print for each passing generation.

So what makes David Herbert Donald’s Lincoln the standard life for our times? First, Donald had access to the Lincoln Papers, which previous biographers did not. As a result of the materials available to him, but perhaps more importantly, because of the man who emerged from those sources, Donald’s portrait is of a very different, and much more accessibly modern man than the one we know from the earlier portraits.

I’ll let Donald (from his preface,) speak for himself:

“In focusing closely on Lincoln himself – on what he knew, when he knew it, and why he made his decisions – I have, I think, produced a portrait rather different from that of other biographers. It is perhaps a bit more grainy than most, with more attention to his unquenchable ambition, to his brain-numbing labor in his law practice, to his tempestuous married life, and to his defeats. It suggests how often chance, or accident, played a determining role in shaping his life. And it emphasizes his enormous capacity for growth, which enabled one of the least experienced and most poorly prepared men ever elected to high office to become the greatest American President.”

David Herbert Donald’s Lincoln is still our Lincoln, but in the hands of this extraordinary historian and biographer, Abraham Lincoln is once again his own man as well; flawed, sad, brilliant and profoundly human.

Trials of a President Elect

Harold Holzer is a remarkable scholar with more than forty books to his credit, the majority to do with Lincoln. Of his earlier books, I particularly enjoyed Lincoln at Cooper Union, which won him the Lincoln Prize, though that's just one of the many awards his work has won.  

Holzer's new book, Lincoln President-Elect: Abraham Lincoln and the Great Secession Winter 1860 - 1861, is a meticulous survey of one of the most difficult and controversial periods in Lincoln's life. At the time of his election, the 16th President of the United States was faced with a divided nation. He had received a substantial majority in the North, but in the South, and the West, Lincoln had no such mandate, in many Southern states his name had not even appeared on the ballot! Many secessionists were waiting for Lincoln's election to provide the final straw that would break the Union apart. As a result, even Lincoln's personal safety was to become an issue before he'd ever taken the Oath. Additionally, there was the curious custom, not to be abolished until FDR, that delayed the transition for months after the election was decided. All of these factors contributed to perhaps the worst presidential transition in the nation's history.

And then there was Abraham Lincoln himself. Holzer examines the historical consensus on this period, and Lincoln's performance as President Elect, and takes issue with much that has been written and assumed to date. In a genuinely fascinating account of what Lincoln and his contemporaries actually said and did during ridiculously difficult and mutable circumstances, the historian reconstructs both the period and the man in light of recent scholarship and the historical record. Holzer's conclusions can be startling as well as reassuring, and more importantly, they are never arbitrary. His portrait therefore is a careful one, of a very careful man in an all but impossible position. Holzer's Lincoln is still untried, not yet "Father Abraham," and that makes this one of the most interesting biographical studies to have seen print in this new season of Lincoln abundance.

Looking at Looking for Lincoln

In the ongoing Frenzy of Lincoln Bicentennial publishing, by far the biggest and most visually satisfying offering this year to date would have to be Looking for Lincoln: The Making of an American Icon.  Requiring the services of what seems to be nearly the whole Kunhardt family, who, according to their fascinating preface, have been in the business of Lincoln collecting and writing for generations, this volume brings together a truly cornucopian selection of photos, contemporary quotations, and memorabilia.  

Unlike their earlier (and sadly out of print,) Lincoln: An Illustrated Biography, this weighty volume from the Kunhardts is concerned less with his life than with witness and what one might call the afterlife of Lincoln.  As a result, there is much new here for even the devoted reader of Lincoln biography and post-Civil War history; Lincoln's children, the later lives of his friends and coworkers, his place in our history and hearts.

Boasting an introduction by Doris Kearns Goodwin, the author of the (again) bestselling A Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, and a forward by David Herbert Donald, the author of the best contemporary, one volume biography, titled simply Lincoln, this new book is a treasure trove of excellent scholarship, sound writing, and fascinating side-lights to the Lincoln story. 

At $50.00, this is not an inexpensive book, but it is a beautiful addition to any Lincoln library.