Abraham Lincoln

THE ABRAHAM LINCOLN PAPERS at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., consist of some twenty thousand Lincoln General Correspondence documents, both outgoing and incoming correspondence, speeches, and drafts of proclamations—the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863, among them—and some printed material. The earliest letters date from 1833 and run through to postmorten documents to 1916, though naturally enough the bulk of the papers comes from the period 1850-65. Series 1 of the papers consists of documents gathered by Lincoln’s son, Robert Todd Lincoln. Series 2 are papers gathered by Lincoln’s secretary John Nicolay, and Series 3 consists of material from other and more recently gathered sources. I have spent some time in the Library of Congress on other errands, but I live a global distance from it, and reside a four-and-a-half-hour drive from copies of the Library of Congress microfilms held at the National Library of Australia in Canberra. Thus it was a delight to find that the Library of Congress has now been able, through the generosity of benefactors, to place a substantial part of its Lincoln holdings, sixty-one thousand images (some visual items and documents, each page of a document counting as an image), online. It does seem, at least to this lay reader, that they have given us virtually every significant document, and even some ephemera as well.

Many of the documents accessible in microfilmed manuscript at the Library of Congress appear in printed form elsewhere. The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, edited in 8 volumes by Roy H. Basler (1953), with two subsequent supplementary volumes (1974, 1990), is the ultimate printed source on Lincoln. It is also available in electronic form. It was preceded by an abridged collection, Abraham Lincoln, His Speeches and Writings, in 1946, and this is still easily available in a paperback edition. An earlier and famous Complete Works of Abraham Lincoln, in 2 volumes, edited by Lincoln’s secretaries John Nicolay and John Hay, appeared in 1894.

A printed primary source on the Civil War is the U.S. War Department’s The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, in 128 volumes, 1880- 1901. Here, among numberless military reports, dispatches, memorandums, and returns of casualties can be found Lincoln’s pungent exchanges with generals. Using secondary sources as a guide, the reader can track down Lincoln’s graphic style to its place amid the mass of military clichés, evasions, triumphs, and desperations of his commanders.

But a third powerful element in the military equation was the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, led by Senators Benjamin Wade and Zachariah Chandler. The Joint Committee disapproved both of Lincoln’s conduct of the war and of much of the senior officer corps, which it saw as riddled with secessionist sentiment. Its Report of the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War was issued in three volumes in 1863, followed by another three in 1865. In these volumes we can see the Joint Committee trying frequently to force Lincoln’s hand on action to be taken or appointments to be made.

After the campaign biographies of 1860, and those rushed forth soon after his assassination, the first credible biography of Lincoln is that of J. G. Holland, Life of Abraham Lincoln, 1866. It is well detailed but hagiographic, and seems in part bent on defending Lincoln against those who accused him of not being “respectable” and of having lacked a settled Christian faith. Lincoln’s friend and self-appointed bodyguard, Ward Hill Lamon, published The Life of Abraham Lincoln in 1872. This book was actually written not by Lamon but by Chauncey Black, son of President Buchanan’s attorney general, and on the basis of materials and oral testimonies acquired by Lamon but gathered by Lincoln’s last law partner, William Herndon. Herndon himself had found it not to Springfield’s or the Lincoln family’s taste when he produced some of this material in the form of lectures. Originally Lamon intended to produce a second volume covering Lincoln’s presidency, but the first, raising matters of illegitimacy, marital unease, and theological doubt, became an object of abomination in the United States, not least to Mary Todd and Robert Todd Lincoln, and the second volume never appeared.

At last redoubtable William Herndon himself produced Lincoln: The True Story of a Great Life, having to it a credible and gritty texture, in 1889. For me one of the great values of the works of Holland, Lamon, and Herndon was that these were men who had lived in Lincoln’s world, particularly in Lincoln’s Sangamon County and Springfield. They understood at first hand the politics, the class issues, the tension between antislavery and racism (often in the same soul), and the whole fragile apparatus of backwoods civilization.

Since Herndon’s book there has raged an intense and never-ending conflict over the veracity of his sources, many of whom, by 1889, had already followed or were preparing to follow their great friend and acquaintance into the darkness. All the issues of contemporary testimony versus objective evidence or likelihood are brilliantly brought into focus by Douglas I. Wilson’s Honor’s Voice: The Transformation of Abraham Lincoln, 1998, a book that, by testing the legends and oral accounts, gives us the breathing pre-1860 Lincoln. Similarly Wilson’s 1997 collection of essays, Lincoln Before Washington, New Perspectives on the Illinois Years, deals with issues as diverse as Lincoln’s readings in the Library of Congress during his time as a congressman; Lincoln’s relationships with Joshua Speed, Mary Todd, and Ann Rutledge; and echoes and dissonances between his political life and thought and Jefferson’s.

For many foreign and indeed American readers of my age, their first extended contact with the Lincoln story was by way of Carl Sandburg, whose rich and rhapsodic prose seemed to echo Aaron Copland’s music in its evocations of pioneer life and politics. Sandburg’s Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years (2 volumes), 1926, and Abraham Lincoln: The War Years (4 volumes), 1940, still make splendid symphonic reading, though they are regarded by professional historians as uncritical in relation to the sources.

My favorite general, modern biography of Lincoln is With Malice Toward None by Stephen B. Oates, 1977. It seems to combine scholarship with a lively style and a welcome gift for place and character, and I recommend it as a starting place for general readers. Lincoln’s life was so complex that a useful tool to have by one’s elbow for keeping track of his legion of acquaintances, friends, relatives, place holders, opponents, and so on is Mark E. Neely’s The Abraham Lincoln Encyclopedia, 1984.

Allen C. Guelzo’s Abraham Lincoln, Redeemer President, 1999, is a superb work that, though a biography in a fully adequate sense, places all the incidents of Lincoln’s life in their philosophical, cultural, and theological context. Guelzo’s work makes of Lincoln’s story not merely a record of political and other deeds but a high expression of the conflict of ideas of the time. Guelzo’s explanation of Lincoln’s uneasy relationship to the old and new schools of Presbyterianism, and Lincoln’s spiritual torment over the doctrine of predestination, add greatly to the understanding of Lincoln’s soul. The impact of Lincoln’s reforms, and their philosophical basis, is similarly examined in James M. McPherson’s book of essays, Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution, 1991. With a debt to Guelzo and McPherson in particular, I have tried in my brief account to reproduce a sense of Lincoln’s governing political principles, since ideas such as those passed on by Henry Clay add a dimension to Lincoln’s public and private life that would otherwise go unexplained amid all the incidents.

It is obvious that both Lincoln and Mary Todd Lincoln were complicated and fretful souls. Lincoln seems to have been a sometimes acute depressive, whereas Mary exhibited a bipolar volatility. Perhaps the most famous work on Abraham’s psyche is Leon Pierce Clark’s Lincoln, a Psychobiography. Roy P. Basler considered it too glibly Freudian, tracing, for example, “Lincoln’s development of a powerful super-ego . . . to its Freudian source in father-fear.”

On the fascinating subject of the Lincoln marriage, apart from Herndon and other sources, we have Katherine Helm’s The True Story of Mary, Wife of Lincoln, 1928. This account, full of incident and written by Emilie Helm’s daughter, is influenced by the quarrel between Mary and her half-sister Emilie. Ruth Painter Randall’s Mary Lincoln: Biography of a Marriage, 1953, defends Mary’s roles in courtship and marriage, and is thus hostile to Herndon and others who depicted Mary as a virago and the marriage as “an ice cave.” Mary Todd Lincoln: A Biography by Jean A. Baker, 1987, is a skilled modern narrative of Mary Todd’s life from childhood to the bitterest end of her widowhood.

For Washington in the mid-eighteenth century, I had recourse to Charles Dickens’s ironic if not scathing portrait in American Notes, which I read in a 1996 edition of the original 1842 work. Washington in Lincoln’s Time, by journalist and Lincoln friend Noah Brooks (edited by Herbert Mitgang), 1958, is valuable both as testimony and as a palpable record of place and time. So is L. A. Go-bright’s Recollection of Men and Things at Washington During the Third of a Century, Washington, 1869. Mary S. C. Logan’s Thirty Years in Washington; Or, Life and Scenes in Our National Capital, 1901, and Mary Clemmer Ames’s Ten Years in Washington, 1874, are explicit in their praise and condemnation of a capital in which there were plentiful subjects on both counts. The extent to which the South called the shots socially in Washington in the 1840s and 1850s, and thus the extent to which Mary and Abraham would, during his term as a congressman, have been considered outsiders, can be gauged from such memoirs as that of Mary Boykin Miller Chesnut’s A Diary from Dixie, 1905; from Virginia Clay’s A Belle of the Fifties: Memoirs of Mrs. Clay of Alabama (edited by Ada Sterling), 1905; and from Sara Agnes Pryor’s Reminiscences of Peace and War, New York, 1904.

One of Lincoln’s secretaries, William O. Stoddard, wrote a series of vivid and engaging sketches of the Lincoln household, Lincoln’s visitors, and his work habits in Inside the White House in War Times: Memoirs and Reports of Lincoln’s Secretary (edited by Michael Burlingame), 2000. To see, from a trance medium’s point of view, the scale of the spiritualist shenanigans Lincoln permitted in the White House for the sake of Mary’s stability, there is a hair-raising account in Nettie Colburn Maynard’s Was Abraham Lincoln a Spiritualist? Curious Revelations from the Life of a Trance Medium, 1891.

And so to secondary sources on Lincoln’s war. Gabor S. Borritt has published a fascinating collection of essays, Lincoln’s Generals, 1994, to which he himself contributed the essay “Lincoln, Meade and Gettysburg.” Other contributors are Mark E. Neely, Stephen W. Sears, Michael Fellman, and John Y. Simon. Again, here are all Lincoln’s most incisive lines on military matters, and here too the prevarications of McClellan and Hooker, the doggedness of Grant, the ruthless, coruscating flourishes of Sherman. Henry Steele Commager’s The Blue and the Gray (2 volumes), 1973, and James M. McPherson’s The Battle-Cry of Freedom, New York, 1988, were sources of detail and overview. The latter, however, is more than mere military history—it places the war in its social, cultural, and political context, and seems to this lay writer to be a superbly comprehensive work.

There are innumerable works on individual commanders and battles, a few of which could be named here as having contributed to this work. Clarence E. N. Macartney’s Grant and His Generals, New York, 1953, gives a picture of the way U. S. Grant fought his remarkable, stubborn war to the end. Stephen W. Sears tells the story of the Peninsula Campaign in To the Gates of Richmond, 1992, of Antietam in Landscape Turned Red, 1983, and of Chancellorsville in Chancellorsville, 1996. Various works originally consulted for an earlier book of mine, American Scoundrel, were also useful here. These happened to include Julia Lorrilard Saffort Butterfield’s A Biographical Memorial of General Daniel Butterfield, 1904; Theodore Ayrault Dodge’s The Campaign of Chancellorsville, Boston, 1881; The Second Day at Gettysburg, edited by Gary W. Gallagher, 1993; and Walter Herbert’s Fighting Joe Hooker, New York, 1944. Henry Edwin Tremain’s Two Days of War: A Gettysburg Narrative, 1905, follows the experience of Sickles’s III Corps at Gettysburg, and Regis de Trobriand’s Four Years with the Army of the Potomac, 1889, the memoir of an officer who rose to the rank of general in that corps, certainly contributed to whatever background authenticity the account of Lincoln’s war possesses.