The inspiration to write a novel based on Abraham Lincoln’s life came in part from reading Jackie Hogan’s Lincoln, Inc.: Selling the Sixteenth President in Contemporary America. As a sociologist, Hogan explores the ways we employ Lincoln today (as American culture has done since his death) in our political, ideological, personal, and national struggles; the ways we simultaneously deify and commercially exploit him; the ways he is packaged and sold in the marketplace of American ideas. In Lincoln, Inc. we see our proclivity for projecting onto Lincoln the way we see ourselves, who we think we are, and who we wish we could be.
Lincoln Raw is a biographical novel in which I attempt to look at life through Lincoln’s eyes as he was coming of age. I focus on his humanity by dramatizing his responses to the world as he likely saw it, filtered through his sensitivities, emotions, and values. As we look at the events of his life—beginning with childhood—and keep our focus on how he responded to various forms of disorder, injustice, and abuse, we can better understand the passions that drove many of his policies and decisions as president.
I build Lincoln’s story around events that have been described by those who were close to him. When confronted with different versions of emotionally charged events, I do not discount those incidents, but synthesize the accounts to produce scenes which seem consistent with his development at the time they occurred. I am indebted to the biographical works of Michael Burlingame and Joshua Shenk, among others, for their insights into Lincoln’s personality and the events that shaped his character.
Every character in the novel—except one—is a real person with whom Lincoln interacted in some way. In each case, they are presented in a manner consistent with the way in which they were regarded by Lincoln. For example, throughout his life Lincoln demonstrated an attitude toward his father that suggested the elder Lincoln was abusive and unfair. The son’s assessment may not have been accurate, but it was the perception that he lived by. Lincoln also probably saw his marriage as being less blissful than might have been the case. As with all of us, perception is reality. We respond emotionally to our perceptions, and those responses contribute to the development of our character.
Writing about Lincoln is tricky, in part because today’s author must reconcile three distinct periods of Lincoln scholarship that take different slants on who he was and what he believed.
During the first period (the demi-God era, including biographies written from the time of his death until the early 20th century), Lincoln’s wife, Mary Todd, and son, Robert, wielded a great deal of influence (some say censorship) over what biographers should say in molding his legacy. The image Mary championed seems to have differed from how she treated him while he was alive. Robert, who was often embarrassed by his father’s backwardness (his unkempt appearance, frontier style of language, and lack of formal education), likely wanted to recreate his father in the image of the man he wanted to remember. After his father’s death, Robert committed his mother to an insane asylum for a brief time and destroyed many of her private papers and letters. Biographers of this period were also sensitive to the nation’s need for a narrative that would facilitate healing after the assassination and Civil War.
The result of these influences was a tendency to discredit perspectives that were not in sync with the needs of the era. Casualties of such biases included two people who knew Lincoln intimately: Billy Herndon, his law partner, and Hill Lamon, his friend and bodyguard. It was Herndon who first exposed the Ann Rutledge story based on extensive interviews with members of her family and people who lived in the small village of New Salem. Objections to the Ann Rutledge stories by Mary Todd and Robert contributed greatly to the efforts by biographers to discredit Herndon.
Ironically, in the current era of Lincoln studies, that discrediting has been discredited, and today's leading Lincoln scholars such as Michael Burlingame and Joshua Shenk suggest that sufficient evidence exists to support the hypothesis that a close bond between Lincoln and Rutledge existed. They also argue that proving whether the relationship rose to the level of an engagement is trivial compared to understanding the role her premature death, combined with the deaths of his sister and mother, played on Lincoln’s psychology.
The second era of Lincoln (the Romantic period) was dominated by efforts to convert the demi-god into a folk hero. Carl Sandburg made an indelible contribution to Lincoln's legacy by spotlighting his meager beginning (though he soft-pedaled it to a degree) and his meteoric rise to power.
The third era, beginning about the middle twentieth century, has focused on Lincoln's psychology and asks the question, what made this man?
Lincoln Raw draws mostly from the current era of scholarship and tries to show Lincoln's personality development by looking at events through his eyes. By most accounts he was emotionally sensitive, introspective, and melancholy. In his time, those characteristics often attracted awe, admiration, and respect. During Lincoln’s time, melancholy people were considered to possess special insights and consequently, were regarded as exceptional, rather than deficient.
Lincoln's misunderstood, almost conflicting, views on slavery and abolition are part of what attracted me to his story. In his speeches over decades in public life, he was equally critical of radicals at both ends of the spectrum. Despite his professed life-long hatred for slavery, Lincoln discouraged abolitionist policies. Instead, he repeatedly declared slavery should be allowed to die a slow death and drew a hard line against allowing "the extension of a bad thing [slavery].” To him, slavery was wrong, specifically because of its unfairness—It is wrong for a man to eat bread from the sweat of another man’s brow. Nonetheless, he held that it was protected by the Constitution where it was in place when the country was formed.
The same level of conflict that appears in his politics also shows up in his religious views, which when explored honestly and wholly, should give all of us pause when we claim that God is on our side. Lincoln declared more than once that he was not Christian (most prominently in a conversation with Newt Bateman which is captured in the latter third of this book), but he articulated and lived the teachings of Christ more fully than most people who claimed to be faithful in his day.
Much of the dialogue in these pages is drawn from original sources, including letters, speeches, journals, and notes from interviews with Lincoln’s contemporaries. Some original material, particularly italicized excerpts from speeches and writings, has been edited for clarity.
Like most of us, Lincoln employed a variety of voices. For instance, his oratorical voice, which matured over the years, was distinct from his conversational voice, just as his storyteller voice differed from his letter writing voice. He sounded different when engaged in formal conversations than in casual banter with an intimate. In Lincoln Raw, his narrator voice falls somewhere between his storyteller voice (especially in the use of present tense) and the style he might have employed when writing a letter. In each case, given how much language has changed over the past two centuries, I have found it helpful to adapt Lincoln’s voice so it is more attuned to modern readers. Even so, I tried to maintain as much as practical the colloquialisms and language style that were true to Lincoln’s times and usage. I was particularly surprised to learn that the expression “what’s up?” was in common usage in mid-nineteenth century America.
If reading Lincoln Raw prompts you to investigate his life in more depth, you’ll find an abundance of scholarly material in the sources I have listed at the end of the book under “Additional Reading.”
I hope you enjoy reading Lincoln Raw—a biographical novel and I look forward to your comments.
DL Fowler
March 25, 2014