In August 1924, Carl Sandburg, at work on his biography of Abraham Lincoln, wrote to his publisher: “About three weeks ago we had Abe make his farewell speech at Springfield. And as the book now stands, he is crossing the state line of Illinois into Indiana, leaving the prairies, starting to grow whiskers. It is the end of the smooth-faced Lincoln, of the man whose time and ways of life belonged somewhat to himself; he is no longer a private citizen who comes and goes, but a public man who must stay put.” As the letter continues, Sandburg explains his conviction that the study of Lincoln he has been composing for some time has reached a point of natural conclusion; only three weeks “into the civil war stuff,” he has realized that following his subject out of Illinois on the way to Washington—and through the fateful turmoil of Lincoln’s five last years—would require “another book, of different style.”
Born less than thirteen years after the great man’s assassination, Sandburg had grown up on the Illinois prairie, where he had listened to old-timers who had known the “country lawyer and prairie politician” who was destined to occupy the White House. “The Lincoln lore of that time and place,” Sandburg would later write, “was of the man in his Illinois backgrounds and settings”; that lore, combined with prodigious research and rich poetic insight, was crucial to the shaping of The Prairie Years , the two-volume biography of the “pre-whiskers,” pre-presidential Lincoln that Sandburg published in 1927. It would eventually take the poet-turned-biographer more than a decade—and four volumes—to eventually contain The War Years between covers.
When the second installment of Sandburg’s portrait of Lincoln was published in 1939, it was met with enthusiastic acclaim. The historian Allan Nevins praised it as “homely but beautiful, learned but simple, exhaustively detailed but panoramic . . . [occupying] a niche all its own, unlike any other biography or history in the language.” In a New York Times review that— in what was surely an unprecedented variation from the paper of record’s
norm—stretched over two days, Charles Poore remarked that “It is written in the racy cadence of American speech by the most Lincolnian of our poets. ... It is the truest biography of the greatest American.” The Los Angeles Times expertly caught the book’s sweep and substance: “Patiently, step by step, Mr. Sandburg allows us to see a country in turmoil; discords within discords; the lack of unanimity in both North and South; fanatics, radicals, conservatives, moderates, all shouting advice, trying to dictate the policies of the President-elect. And, just as patiently, he shows us a hesitant, modest man of the people, bewildered by the shouting but determined to do the honest, the wise thing, to pursue a course that would preserve the Union and yet keep the government in the hands of the people.” Circumventing its own rules that prohibited the awarding of the biography prize to a work on Washington or Lincoln, the Pulitzer committee honored The War Years in the history category.
A monumental work (exceeding in length—by 150,000 words!— Shakespeare’s complete writings), the four-volume War Years was as “massive and subtle” as Lincoln himself. Writing to his publisher, Alfred Harcourt, when he was in the midst of composition, Sandburg suggested its imaginative dimensions: “It has lamentations and beatitudes enough to make an American Bible, has enough political wisdom to guide this country thru several crises and depressions, has a garland of short stories and a gallery of interacting characters, a handbook and manual of defamation, several sagas of action.” All that, and more.
It may seem hard to believe that the substantial book you hold in your hands represents just a quarter of the original War Years, and only the latter three-quarters of the one-volume biography. The Prairie Years and the War Years, that, in 1954, Sandburg distilled from the six volumes he had devoted to Lincoln. Even in its compressed form, however, this version of The War Years is astonishing in its breadth and comprehension, its extraordinary canvas of character and action, politics and military history, What a critic said of the complete War Years remains true of the present book as well: “[its] lasting value is as a new type of Lincoln Memorial—-not of stone and marble but of flesh and blood, not chilled by the austerity of reverence but warmed with the glow of friendly appreciation. Here, between these covers, Lincoln lives again.”
In his preface to the 1954 edition, Sandburg quoted a tribute to the 16th President delivered in the House of Representatives by Homer Koch of Kansas on February 12, 1923, the 114th anniversary of Lincoln’s birth: “There is no new thing to be said about Lincoln. There is no new thing to be said of the mountains, or of the sea, or of the stars. The years go their way, but the
same old mountains lift their granite shoulders above the drifting clouds; the same mysterious sea beats upon the shore; the same silent stars keep holy vigil above a tired world. But to the mountains and sea and stars men turn forever in unwearied homage. And thus with Lincoln. For he was a mountain in grandeur of soul, he was a sea in deep undervoice of mystic loneliness, he was a star in steadfast purity of purpose and service. And he abides.”
Turn the page, and you’ll find that he abides still in Sandburg’s telling, “crossing the state line of Illinois into Indiana, leaving the prairies, starting to grow whiskers,” coming to grips with the knowledge that the question “Whither Abe Lincoln?” is now subsumed in a larger one: “America Whither?”
James Mustich, Jr.
September 2005