Foreword

My sister Elizabeth Brown Pryor tragically lost her life on April 13, 2015. A manic-depressive driver, who thought that he could fly his car, was trying to “taxi” down a quiet city street in Richmond, Virginia, when he rear-ended her beloved Audi TT at 107 miles per hour. She was instantly killed. She left behind two completed manuscripts: one for this book and another for an article, “‘The Grand Old Duke of York’: How Abraham Lincoln Lost the Confidence of His Military Command,” which will be published separately.

I remember her sheer elation the previous January, when she called me in London to announce that she had finally finished Six Encounters with Lincoln. It had been a long, slow gestation that had begun with a chance discovery in 2008. The day that she received the Lincoln Prize for Reading the Man: A Portrait of Robert E. Lee Through His Private Letters, she had spent the morning doing research at the New-York Historical Society. When she arrived back at the flat where we were staying to change for dinner (into my new Armani jacket), she was ecstatic. Not in anticipation of receiving such a singular honor—although she was, of course, delighted to receive it—but because she had just discovered an unpublished drawing of Abraham Lincoln sketched in a letter written home during the Civil War. As she put it, “There sits Abraham Lincoln, with a familiarity almost unimaginable today, legs folded and tall hat in place, looking for all the world like a cricket perched on the nation’s front porch.”

What had been a brief encounter in 1862 between the President and one of his military guards turned out to be not only a fascinating tale, but a springboard for investigating a neglected but significant aspect of Lincoln’s administration. Over the next seven years Elizabeth submerged herself in the letters, diaries, and newspaper articles of the 1860s, carefully piecing together six episodes that explored Lincoln’s difficulty in managing a republic. Her own quarter-century career in the State Department gave her a unique perspective on how slowly the wheels of government turn and how our Founding Fathers’ insistence on a balance of power could cause the cogs of those wheels to lock in an unwelcome impasse. Few other Civil War historians can marry personal experience with scholarly insight in such a compelling way. She served as the foreign affairs adviser to both houses of Congress and so had an insider’s view of the government at work. When we read her criticism of Lincoln as commander in chief, we should remember that she was once the chief U.S. spokesperson for NATO and had earlier been deeply involved with Bosnia, serving in Sarajevo at the time of the siege. She experienced firsthand the importance of military discipline when one was under fire, and she understood that rank matters. As she was fond of saying, she had lived “real-time” history. It was her unique ability to tie the various threads of her life experience together and reflect upon the lessons she had learned that allowed her to render such a vivid picture of nineteenth-century American history. As one critic put it, “The sheer power of [her] language is as inspiring as a great painting.”

When I found the manuscript of Six Encounters with Lincoln after her death, the text, footnotes, and bibliography were virtually ready for publication. She had meticulously highlighted in yellow any quotations or page numbers that needed to be rechecked. Only the preface was missing. I undertook the task of checking the notes, quotations, and bibliography, but what appears in the following pages is completely her work in her words. She had ordered four or five photographs, but left no list of illustrations. I knew only that she had once told me that she wanted “a lot of pictures.” Luckily, since I am an art historian, ordering photographs is one thing I know how to do and my major contribution to this book was deciding what should be illustrated and where it should be placed within the text.

Elizabeth and I and our sister, Peggy, grew up listening to my mother’s tales of the Civil War with rapt attention. Not that Mother herself had been around then, but as a child she had spent hours sitting on the front porch in Terre Haute, Indiana, listening to the tales of her great-grandfather John Jackson Kenley. Grandpa Kenley, who according to family lore had lived to the ripe old age of 104 (his military records, however, show him to have been 96 at his death in 1938), had been a foot soldier in the Twenty-Fourth Indiana Regiment. He saw action at the battles of Shiloh, Corinth, Vicksburg, and Mobile as well as the occupation of New Orleans. The house was full of Civil War “heirlooms,” including the walnut bookcase made for his wedding in 1863, the fork from his mess kit, and a pile of letters, one of which Elizabeth quotes in this book. Yet as she often said, it was not the “stuff” that got her hooked on the Civil War, but Mother’s storytelling ability. “History” after all means “story” and Mother was able to make it seem very real to the three of us. Mother died just four months after Elizabeth, but for seven years she had been able to follow the progress of the book from beginning to end, listening to the chapters as they were written. She was inordinately proud that her middle daughter was just as good a storyteller as she was.

On a road trip, Elizabeth retraced the Lincoln family’s journey from Virginia to Kentucky to southern Indiana; the same trip that the Kenley family had made in the early years of the nineteenth century. I remember her excitement at finding the gravesite of Grandpa Kenley’s mother, who had died as the family passed through the bluegrass country of Kentucky. In her eyes Lincoln’s history and our history were to some extent inextricably bound. Her trip to what she inevitably referred to as the dreaded CTZ, that is to you and me the Central Time Zone, was tainted only by the lack of three-star Michelin restaurants. For two months she was forced to subsist on a diet of monkey chow, which in her parlance meant Subway sandwiches, chocolate-covered cranberries, and Diet Dr Pepper. The upside, however, was that she saw firsthand the furniture made by Lincoln’s father and found new insights into the Rail-splitter's boyhood.

In the preface to her book on Robert E. Lee, Elizabeth paid me the compliment of saying that my work as an art historian had inspired her to look deep into the letters of Lee and place them within a larger historical context. “When an expert points out the factors that influenced the artist, how he or she mixed the paint and chose the colors, where the subject was found and what is behind the iconography, the painting becomes something more than it was. In the same way, interpreting Lee’s letters for the reader lends them context and heightens their value.” I would like to return that compliment now. I learned from her that “retread history” is never good enough. No matter how compelling another author’s arguments might be, it is imperative that one return to the original sources, judging them for their own merit. Too often the yellow varnish applied so thickly by scholars to enhance a story simply obscures the truth. Elizabeth would remind me that there was so little in Lincoln’s own words about his feelings that we were beholden to the observations of those around him. But she would warn me that Renaissance scholars like myself, who must often rely on the secondhand accounts of Giorgio Vasari, should be at once both grateful and skeptical of such observations. As a historian, she would say, you have no greater tool than your skepticism.

Even as a child, Elizabeth had an unquenchable thirst for knowing the facts. Shortly before my mother’s death, I spent an afternoon talking to her about Elizabeth. When I asked what she remembered most about her middle daughter, she said without hesitation, “She was always standing at the kitchen counter looking things up in the encyclopedia.” One often finds the phrase “meticulously researched” in reviews of her books, but from an early age she felt compelled to rummage for answers, to seek out hidden gems and to search for the truth. As a mature historian she never ceased exploring new topics with the same inquisitiveness, although the stakes became higher and the process harder. For Clara Barton, Professional Angel, she had some sixty-five thousand autobiographical documents, so many that she felt that at times she took on the role of editor as much as author. With Robert E. Lee, when she was led into doubt, contradiction, or subterfuge, she had his own words to quote and ponder as she laid out his life story. But with Lincoln, she was plunged into incertitude and became reliant on writers such as Dennis Hanks and William Herndon to supply interpretations of his character. Unsatisfied with these well-trawled sources, Elizabeth became something of a ferret, unearthing new nuggets of information in the most unlikely and far-flung places. The Museum of English Rural Life at the University of Reading in Great Britain springs to mind, but that was only one of some fifty libraries and archives that she worked in while researching this book. With a fine-tooth comb, she sifted through more than 350 unpublished collections of family papers and diaries. This was in addition to the sizable number of letters, memoirs, and chronicles that have already seen print, like those of Hanks and Herndon. “Leave no stone unturned” might well have been her mantra. As these pages show, she truly believed that one account or eyewitness report was never enough to prove a point. For each chapter of Six Encounters with Lincoln the evidence she presents is overwhelming—carefully crafted bricks piled one atop another until the wall is so high and impenetrable that we are obliged to stop and reevaluate every preconceived notion we hold of Lincoln.

I did not find a list of acknowledgments. I know that she had a fellowship from the Huntington Library and spent a good deal of time working at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library, Harvard University, the Virginia Historical Society, and, of course, the Library of Congress. But for me to create a list of the people I know she would have thanked or to thank only those who helped me as I finished work on her manuscript would be invidious. I would ask only that one day when you pull this book from the shelf that you will remember the question that you answered at the information desk, the heated debate you had over lunch, the glass of wine you shared at the end of day or the laughter over dinner, and know that she was profoundly grateful for your help, for your insights, for your friendship, and for your love.

Beverly Louise Brown

London, April 2016