Sandburg in the Civil War Monitor

[Rob Wick]

Quote:I wish some of his obscure facts and verbatim speeches by some of the characters were footnoted. That would have helped me a lot. I like to know sources.

Of course the issue of Sandburg and footnotes came up almost immediately after Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years appeared in 1926. The problem, though, is that the book was never intended by Sandburg or Alfred Harcourt to be a scholarly study of Lincoln's life. It was a poetic interpretation based on fact. Both The Prairie Years and Abraham Lincoln: The War Years were so fact-laden that footnotes, or endnotes, would have been too great a burden for the audience it was trying to appeal to (which it did very successfully). Even some academic historians recognized what Sandburg was trying to accomplish, and while they would never have let one of their graduate students get by with what Sandburg did, they were tolerant of Sandburg because they knew that he was the best spokesman for their own work getting wider recognition.

In 1943, James G. Randall, the preeminent academic scholar on Lincoln during the mid-20th century, wrote to Sandburg lamenting how the stigma of being an academic hurt his publishing opportunities. "I seem unable to overcome the stigma of being a professor," Randall wrote. "Walter Kiernan said the other day in his point-sized column: 'What this country needs is a good five-cent history book.' The public needs our products, but we don't seem quite adequate in putting it across to the millions."

Sandburg's attitude toward his work underwent something of a change between 1926 and 1939 when The War Years came out. The biggest reason for this, in my opinion, was the embarrassment caused by his role in the Wilma Minor affair. However, Sandburg also was amenable to the criticism of people who, instead of attacking him for being something he never claimed to be, gave him constructive criticism without demeaning his overall efforts. One of the best was Harry E. Pratt, who along with his wife, Marion, received special recognition from Sandburg in the single-volume condensation of the six volumes for his tireless effort to correct the errors that crept into the book.

In the course of my research on Sandburg, I came across a poem written by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow that I will use in some way as an epigram. It comes from the poem "John Endicott."

“Nor let the Historian blame the Poet here,
If he perchance misdate the day or year,
And group together events, by his art,
That in the Chronicles lie far apart;
For as the doubled stars, though sundered far,
Seem to the naked eye a single star,
So facts of history, at a distance seen,
Into one common point of light convene.”

Best
Rob