Lincoln in Private

[Rob Wick]

White, Ronald C., Lincoln in Private: What His Most Personal Reflections Tell us About our Greatest President, (New York: Random House, 2021) 328 pp.


During all of last year, I only read one book on Lincoln, i.e., Carl Sandburg's single-volume distillation of Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years and Abraham Lincoln: The War Years. This year, I have determined to do much better. My first attempt was White's book. He takes 12 of the 111 surviving fragments and chronologically studies them in greater detail. Here is my review.

Ronald C. White is best known for his biography A. Lincoln, published in 2009 and Lincoln's Greatest Speech: The Second Inaugural, published in 2002. Although the biography came out several years after David Herbert Donald's 1995 book with none of the fanfare that surrounded Donald's, it has always been my opinion that White's biography far surpassed Donald's. White focused on Lincoln's speeches, interpreting his political life by the words he spoke, from the early New Salem days up to the assassination. While I'm not saying that Donald's book is bad, it is my opinion that White did a far better job of capturing the "real" Lincoln as far as possible.

Lincoln in Private takes White's mission a step farther, as he focuses on those fragments that survive Lincoln in an attempt to plumb the depths of Lincoln's thought process by focusing on items that Lincoln never believed would ever see the light of day. That these documents did see the light of day is one of the many miracles of Lincolniana, given that Lincoln's papers spent several years in a Bloomington, Illinois, bank vault before being moved in 1874 to Washington as John Nicolay and John Hay began to write their multi-volume life of Lincoln.

It was Nicolay and Hay who first separated the documents into a pile called "fragments." Most of those fragments were undated and often started or stopped in mid-sentence. It was obvious to the two men that the documents were only for Lincoln. In discussing one of the fragments, one of the pair wrote, "It was not written to be seen by men." That these documents survived at all, given Robert Todd Lincoln's desire to burn many of his father's papers, is a boon to Lincoln students and scholars.

Many of the fragments, such as "A Meditation on the Divine Will" are well-known to students of Lincoln, but one of the strengths of White's book is his attempt to incorporate other fragments that seemingly have been missed. Unfortunately, only one fragment from the 1830s survives, while six from the 1840s are extant. White notes, "I believe that Lincoln wrote many more, probably hundreds more, adopting early in his life a habit of writing notes to himself that he never expected anyone else to see."

While White doesn't discount Robert discarding many of the fragments, he believes that given Lincoln's "itinerant lifestyle as a young adult," it's far more likely that they were simply discarded or lost by Lincoln himself. The first fragment he discusses came after Lincoln and his family visited Niagara Falls. That is followed by the notes on Lincoln's speech (never given) for young lawyers. The next 60 pages covers the 1850s when Lincoln made his comeback to the political arena after passage of the Kansas-Nebraska act, shepherded by Lincoln's long-time rival Stephen A. Douglas. The final section deals with the presidential years.

The one note that I found most intriguing is a speech that Lincoln prepared in Springfield after the election of 1860 that he hoped to give in Kentucky on his way to Washington to be inaugurated as the 16th president. I found this fascinating simply because of all the material I have ever read, I had never heard of this. "Because Lincoln never delivered this speech, for reasons unknown, it has been nearly erased from public knowledge," White writes. "This note has been sitting within the Lincoln papers for 150 years, largely unnoticed."

Lincoln had hoped to impress upon his fellow Kentuckians that although he respected them as American citizens, nothing would dissuade him from his oft-stated goal of preserving the Union, regardless of the cost. White writes:

"In this long-forgotten note, we listen as Lincoln does a delicate dance between his natural, inclusive magnanimous spirit, and his sense that at this moment he cannot walk back from the principles that elected him. Although the language and structure of this note differ from his inauguration speech, it echoes one of the most powerful ideas spoken in the conclusion of that address. Speaking to the audience gathered in the capital some weeks later, Lincoln proclaimed, 'In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war.'"

Lincoln, White argues, knew that while he only received 39 percent of the vote, the vast majority of his audiences in the northern states supported whatever would keep the Union together. In Kentucky, however, Lincoln "combined a cogent plea for the rule of the majority with an emotional appeal to the values of personal integrity and honor that he hoped would resonate with his 'fellow Kentuckians'."

I listened to the audio version of the book, although I own both the audio and physical editions. I would recommend the printed version, because White helpfully includes color photos of the 12 fragments he discusses, and also reprints all 111 of the fragments even though only the 12 selected are given in the greatest detail. I chose the audio version because I wanted to listen to it during my commute and while eating at work.

The book is available in paperback.

Best
Rob

[Steve]

Thank you for your wonderful review, Rob! I remember when this book came out a few years ago. I had seen the reviews at the time time and thought this looks really interesting and put it on my wishlist of books to buy --- but I never got around to it and I guess just forgot about it. I've put in my order for it today!