Lincoln A Contemporary Portrait

[Rob Wick]

Lincoln: A Contemporary Portrait, edited by Allan Nevins and Irving Stone. (New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1962) 226 pp.

This is a collection of twelve essays written at the height of the Civil War Centennial. Ably edited by Allan Nevins and Irving Stone, this book takes a broad view of Lincoln and (for the time) items that many historians weren't talking about. Like most edited collections, some are better than others. All are reminiscent of their time (no surprise there) but very few of these would be relevant to today's time. As I will discuss later, there is one deeply troubling omission from the book which further negates its usefulness.

My interest in this book stemmed from the first essay by Nevins entitled "Lincoln's Ideas of Democracy." As part of an article I'm writing for the Indiana Magazine of History on Tarbell's study of Lincoln's Indiana years, one of my contentions is that Tarbell viewed the Indiana frontier as the perfect birthplace for Lincoln's democratic spirit. Yet, trying to find details of how to define that spirit are maddingly thin. As Nevins points out, however, the reason for that is because Lincoln, like the vast majority of his predecessors and contemporaries, lived his democratic values rather than analyze them. Indeed, historians for several years have had a hard time agreeing as to what the term "democracy" even means.

Another interesting essay was contributed by Fawn Brodie. It was on the relationship between Lincoln and Radical Republican Thaddeus Stevens. Brodie, who in 1959 wrote a biography of Stevens entitled Thaddeus Stevens: Scourge of the South, brought out interesting and (at least to me) unknown points about Stevens. Most important was Brodie's contention that while Stevens and Lincoln disagreed on several different points of Reconstruction, neither would have wanted to execute Confederate leaders (which, as Brodie points out, was an about-face for Stevens). "It is not generally known that Stevens, who had many times demanded the hanging of the Confederate leaders, made an about face, near the end of the war, and insisted that they could not be legally hanged since Lincoln had granted the Confederacy belligerent rights," Brodie asserts. "Later he even offered his services as a lawyer to defend both Jefferson Davis and Clement C. Clay against the treason charge." However, while Lincoln's aversion to hanging stemmed from mercy, Brodie notes that Stevens used his as a weapon, noting that Davis declined his services because he saw it as well. "I was aware of his line of argument," Davis wrote later. "It would have been that the seceding States were conquered provinces...therefore their property was subject to confiscation and the people to such penalties and conditions as the conquerors might impose."

Other essays include Harold Hyman on the relationship between Lincoln and Edwin M. Stanton and Jay Monaghan on books and libraries in Lincoln's time. In addition to several noted academic historians, Nevins and Stone turn to non-academics as well, including playwright Norman Corwin on Lincoln and Stephen Douglas and a former judge, Sherrill Halbert, whose grandfather was a slaveholder, on Lincoln's suspension of the Writ of Habeas Corpus. Mort Lewis, a television personality on the west coast at the time, contributed an interesting essay on Lincoln's humor while Davis Miller's contribution on Lincoln and the Sioux outbreak was, for the time, groundbreaking and one imagines, somewhat shocking to the majority white population of the time.

Weaker essays include a survey of biographical studies of Lincoln by Andrew Rolle, who while praising Sandburg and Tarbell among others, has too much of the anti-Herndon bias inculcated to him by the Randall-Angle Springfield-Champaign Urbana axis so prevalent at the time. Poet Marianne Moore's essay on "Lincoln and the Art of the Word" seemed somewhat esoteric and didn't appeal to me. Neither did Justin Turner's critique of the Hampton Roads Peace Conference or William E. Marsh's biography of Henry W. Halleck.

Equally interesting as some of the essays was the appendix, where the authors were asked to comment upon their work. Most used the space to discuss their own travails in writing biography, especially of someone like Lincoln. One strong point in Rolle's otherwise lackluster critique of Lincoln biography was his contention that in a list of most-written about biographical characters, the four main figures (Lincoln, Washington, Jefferson, and Franklin) outnumbered in total books written THE NEXT 40 subjects on the list combined! Equally important, in Rolle's opinion, are the supporting cast of characters in the Lincoln story. Where is the biographer of Leonard Swett, or David Davis since Willard King's book written almost 60 years ago? What of Orville Browning or a group biography of those lawyers who rode with Lincoln on Illinois' Eighth Judicial Circuit? Such studies would only enrich our understanding of Lincoln by giving us a clearer picture of the times in which he lived, and those people whom he encountered.

"Concentration on the major figures has its drawbacks," Rolle argues. " As Michael Kraus sees it, in the public mind the Lincolns and Washingtons can do no wrong and their rivals can do no right. Distortion of history sets in , and myth-making supplants historical objectivity. We take our heroes and bend them to our wishes." While no one can disagree with that, it's instructive to see the arc of Lincoln biography since Rolle's assessment and how such biographers as Douglas Wilson, Rodney K. Davis, Michael Burlingame and Ronald C. White have met that challenge head on and given us a much more true-to-life picture of just who Abraham Lincoln was.

It's doubtful that if I wasn't interested in Nevins's analysis of Lincoln's view of democracy that I would have ever discovered this book. Given its age and certain weaknesses in both argument and style, it's hard to give this more than a passing grade. Yet, if one looks at it as a relic of its time, the value becomes much more apparent. It presents a detailed picture of the Nationalistic school of Lincoln studies that was at its zenith during the centennial of the war. Sadly, the most glaring omission of the book is that the editors failed to commission a study of Lincoln and African-Americans given that the collection came out the same year that Benjamin Quarles published Lincoln and the Negro. Given the growing militancy of blacks struggling for the rights that hundreds of thousands of soldiers, not to mention their commander-in-chief, died almost a hundred years earlier for makes that especially frustrating, given that Nevins was one of the most conspicuous of 20th century American liberals.

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Rob