Abraham Lincoln: His Life in Print

The David M. Rubinstein Americana Collection is the reason for this gorgeous volume. He is widely known as a supporter and patron of historical research: In 2007 he bought the only privately held (by Ross Perot) thirteenth-century copy of Magna Carta for long-term display at the National Archives. So the Civil War is not his only focus, but you would be forgiven for thinking so after seeing his hundreds of rare, or representative, or just graphically interesting books, broadsides, photographs, newspapers, maps, and printed ephemera that were exhibited in Manhattan's best showplace for booklovers. They are given a backbone of context in this volume by twelve essays by leading Lincoln scholars. The free exhibit ran for only the last three months of 2024, and it is a boon to our field that this volume eventuated, illustrated so copiously and organized so intelligently—if with miscues both preventable and endemic.It proves to be two distinct books. The editor, in evidently his first publication, wrote the captions, possibly with input from Mr. Rubinstein. Those words form more than half of the total, and some of them display the highest level of insight and literary ability. Others will follow, but one example here, iridescently expressed, for a death notice: “As Lincoln softly died into the morning, and Seward awoke to his wounding, the federal government teetered for an hour of uncertainty. To Stanton we . . . owe the running of the country in the days after April 15,” then lists seven dull chores Stanton took on—administrative, legal, focal chores, of the non-headline-making variety. (p. 235) On such is serious history built. Two pages later, levity (for us) filters in from the Baton Rouge army order of a funeral procession, in which “snolly gosters” lined up fourteenth.The twelve essayists are Joshua Claybourn on Lincoln the Westerner; Robert Bray on Lincoln's reading; Ted Widmer, the politician 1850–1860; Jonathan Earle, the candidate 1859–1860; Harold Holzer, the chosen, 1860–1861; Chandra Manning then Glenn LaFantasie, parts I and II, the wartime president; Lucas Morel, the emancipator 1863; Edna Greene Medford, the antislavery president, 1863–1865; Edward Steers, Jr., the target, 1864–1865; Martha Hodes, the martyr, 1865; and David S. Reynolds, the subject, 1866–present, that is, biographies.These provide a wholesale narrative of Lincoln's life, with some unavoidable repetition. The writers worked at a signal disadvantage, for they did not know and had no hand in choosing what books, maps, orders, etc. would enhance their margins and then form the lengthy “portfolio” of printed items that follow each chapter. Here Mr. Boroujerdi exercised needful oversight but also, from the sound of it, revised some passages (noticeably in Claybourn and Widmer) to create what in filmdom is called “continuity.” Perhaps this is where miscues in the essays slipped in: Lincoln born in Indiana (p. 40)? Pronouns garbling Junius, Edwin, and Wilkes Booth (p. 213); Gabor Boritt's name misspelled (p. 252). I doubt that the judicious Claybourn assigned grandfather Abraham's murder to a Shawnee “tribesperson.” If so, will Steers soon pick up the tune and call Booth a “gunperson?” Among neologisms I am grateful to learn “bibliocosm,” (p. 13), the universe of books wherein a life or era can live. On “interstate combat” (p. 123) and “foremostly” (p. 48), a future rhetorician will have to rule.Each of the essays offers a clear thesis. Widmer cites the “logicalness” that Lincoln discovered about himself after reading Euclid (p. 55), and holds, relatedly, that the supposed fallow period of 1849–1860 did not represent a “banishment” but rather afforded more roots in Springfield, “the political exemplification of mid-nineteenth-century America and a natural training ground for a national leader” (p. 58), since it (not Washington City!) was linked in nearly equal parts to the North, South, East, and West. Admirable also is Medford (it is her wont to be letter-perfect and measured in such exercises): “Only after his calls for state action had failed did he embrace the idea of military emancipation.” The irony yet the centrality of a state's right and power is thereby asserted—and found, by Lincoln—to have collapsed on a central point, as did Congress in 1862. She concludes: “His actions affirm the presidency's power for good and exemplify that effective leadership requires a balance between caution and boldness” (pp. 188, 191).Holzer, whose essay and footnotes are the longest, cautiously offers that Lincoln was “perhaps inspired by Frederick Douglass's recent editorial comment” in the November 1859 issue of his newspaper to borrow the phrase “right makes might,” three months later, for the peroration of his speech at the Cooper Institute (p. 92). If true, ’twas a risky political move to tie not just his party but his words to a man much disdained by the bulk of the nation, while also gambling that no one was likely to notice a loan from a little-read source. Editor Boroujerdi mixes it up a little with author Holzer on a different topic. Author: Lincoln “craftily decided to resupply Fort Sumter, provoking the attack” (p. 97) Editor: Lincoln neither capitulated nor pushed, but “chose a third way: he sent a small squadron captained by a civilian” (p. 111). Conundrums like this make the field of Civil War studies endlessly young.Earle alerts us to a faulty prognostication by showing that D. W. Bartlett, an 1860 biographer, did up a pamphlet in 1859 outlining the twenty-one likeliest candidates in 1860; Lincoln was not among them. Soon, we can blame “the nation's voters” for causing the war, posits Earle, by preferring the “less, not more, compromise” candidates Lincoln and Breckinridge over laissez-faire men Douglas and Bell (pp. 75, 79). Other unpleasant news comes from Steers, in relating how eight assassination plots existed, spanning the presidency, then making plain that Samuel Mudd was an accomplice and that John Surratt worked as a courier for Judah Benjamin, the Confederate Secretary of State.Among the most potentially fructifying of the essays—also the most debatable, given the anciency or slimness of its sources—is Bray's on Lincoln's reading. He intuits that Lincoln could have drawn two of his public personae, philosopher and magistrate, from a trio outlined in the first pages of Edward Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–1789). When “president, he generally spoke and acted as the pragmatic magistrate to a dogmatized population” (p. 40). Some readers may think this an elastic interpretation based on the decade of the Declaration of Independence. Yet it stems from an Enlightenment mood that young Lincoln shared early on, from Gray's “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” (1751) about “the short and simple annals of the poor.” Whether Lincoln read a few pages or entire volumes of, say, Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations or Francis Bacon's Essays Moral remains a live question, but it is sustaining merely to look upon the beautiful first U.S. printings of each in the portfolio. Thinner evidence, it seems to me, is a 1920 statement by a wholly unrelated party that Lincoln in 1859 was reading Homer (alright, perhaps son Robert had it assigned, and father was catching up?).Under “Wartime President, Part I,” Manning elects to focus on race, bypassing such matters as the currency, the draft, Supreme Court picks, the transcontinental railroad, the Trent Affair, the Morrill Act, or the Homestead Act. The portfolio pulls the cart back on to the road with a good selection on recruitment and conscription, the Merryman case, the blockade, two items about days of humiliation and prayer, two Confederate imprints about Manassas, and a third—a rarity, from the Presbyterian Committee of Publication in Richmond—about the 4th Texas Infantry, which by 1863 had already seen action across the southland. Manning does provide a telling argument in showing that “Lincoln's conservatism on race complicated but did not negate his opposition to slavery” (p. 115).“Wartime Part II” is taken up by LaFantasie. (For all an outsider can tell, parts I and II might originally have had more natural flow before the editor intervened.) Now we get the straight dope on battles, generals, the drama and the growing sense, during 1863, that Lincoln's hopes would prevail. Not that he was always right. After the Battle of Gettysburg, “Lincoln misunderstood Meade's good sense. His regiments were in shambles. The President's desire to annihilate Lee's army was totally unrealistic” (p. 158).1 His more critical point for today is to assert the difference between the “hard war” that Sherman waged and the “total war” that too many in the twentieth century accused the Union of conducting (p. 162).Morel mostly sticks to Lincoln's own words in discovering the most potent defense of presidential policy. Adhering to the Constitution and not acting simply on humanitarian grounds, he showed that “violating consent . . . would undermine the very self-government that American slaves needed.” Emancipation thus conjoined ends and means (p. 141). Hodes, coming near the end, rescues the essays from a startling absence of address to Lincoln's, or the nation's, religious feelings, when in her sixth of sixteen paragraphs she finally notes that he was killed on Good Friday (p. 230). (No one mentions Palm Sunday for Lee's surrender.) Reynolds's workmanlike summations of a dozen biographies, and instancing of a dozen other thematic works, also compensates for this lacuna by concluding his list with eleven lines about Jon Meacham's emphasis on Lincoln's religious underpinnings. Earlier, he mentions Gore Vidal's novel under “biographies”; gives a mere two lines to Douglas Wilson but twelve to Sidney Blumenthal, whose three volumes thus far (of five promised) add interpretation for politics but do not palpably advance the field as Wilson and Rodney Davis have done. Moreover, how list Benjamin Thomas and then Stephen Oates without pointing out the lengthy plagiarisms of the former by the latter, a crime proven by Robert Bray and others three decades ago? Reynolds frames other disagreement quietly: Ron White and Michael Burlingame on the Lincolns’ marriage, and David Donald's “passive” president vs. Carwardine's man of “strength and agency from his innate ambition” (p. 250).Only small injustice is done to the essayists by emphasizing that this volume's core are the 250-odd illustrations from the Rubinstein collection, all of which repay careful scrutiny because printed matter is the fundament of so much history-writing. Notice first that a “primary source” can mislead, as when Lincoln's Third Message to Congress cited “full 100,000” black soldiers in arms (printed for the 1864 re-election bid), which ballooned to “200,000” in another undated 1864 campaign document.2 Second, thank someone that color broadsides can now easily be seen, from your chair, of “The Massacre at Baltimore” and five different “Bird's Eye Views” of the theatre of war (both 1861). Swiss immigrant to New York John Bachmann tricked out the latter, as from eagle's wings. If we're friendly to immigrants in this vein, why not also name Alexander Ritchie, Scottish immigrant, whose ubiquitous mezzotint “The First Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation . . . ” is credited (p. 188) to oil painter Francis B. Carpenter, whose unique canvas hangs in the U.S. Capitol? Some hold that Ritchie was the better artist.Asking a newcomer to this maddeningly detailed field did invite a stumble or three, as both applause and hand-slaps are due for captions. Lincoln's speech in Springfield on July 17, 1858, is deemed the “opening salvo” (p. 67) in his senatorial campaign against Douglas, whereas speeches on June 16 in Springfield and July 10 in Chicago (Douglas spoke on July 9) preceded that oration. The July 10 speech was not separately printed, a pity for the collector. Then . . . Shiloh and Vicksburg won in the same calendar year; Lincoln first met Grant in May 1864; an albumen carte de visite “President and Cabinet” of “ca. 1861” includes Stanton and Usher (pp. 172, 174, 109).Deeper potholes in the captions or footnotes are noticeable on the otherwise well-paved road. Ongoing problems in our field recur with misspellings of Mathew Brady; the Soldiers’ Home; Stephen A. Douglas (on the website, not in the book); Elihu B. Washburne; the publisher Macmillan; the 1905 Tandy edition of the Complete Works as 12 volumes, not 1; the latter-day nonsense that agnostic Robert Ingersoll was associated with Lincoln—see the 1937 photo of a building in Shawneetown, Illinois, where they shared “law offices” (p. 56). (Ingersoll was 7, in New York, when Lincoln last stopped in Shawneetown for a debate, not the law.) Major Rathbone was not yet married to Miss Harris on the fateful night (p. 219). The imposition, only in captions, of her maiden name upon Mary Lincoln endorses an aristocratic conceit never seen in script or print until after her death, and then taking root between 1895 and 1931—ominously, the era of Jim Crow—and revived in the 1970s. That “style” remains a hangover of late Confederacy-ism and Abe-hating in our republic, like a malarial affect which the body historic cannot shake. More picking nits? In a book so conceived, and so dedicated, to Civil War-era printed words, why employ the U.S. Postal Service's 1960s machine-readable two-letter state names throughout? No one in the 1860s used MA, IL, MS, OH, TX. As for the literacy or otherwise of Lincoln's parents, this book, like most, does not reflect the documentation found a decade ago that Thomas Lincoln was elected a militia officer by his men because he was literate—just like, a lifetime later, his son.Enough fault-finding. Mistakes pale next to the editor's insights about the printed works and/or the public man. Who among us recalls (not this reviewer) that Washburne, Trumbull, Hamlin, and Augustus Frank of New York were not at the Wigwam, instead speaking in Washington, D.C., the next day—thanks to the telegraph—at the Republican “ratification meeting” at which Lincoln was endorsed? A useful pamphlet ensued, nearly ground zero of Lincoln's formal presidential campaign (p. 104). The First Inaugural Address is adjudged “the linguistic equivalent of an optical illusion: one could view it two ways” (p. 108). Mr. Boroujerdi is most daring in contending (p. 33) that Lincoln's First Inaugural drew inspiration not from Daniel Webster's 1830 speech that called for “Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable!” as scholars have long agreed, but instead Webster's last speech in 1850 on slavery, which pamphlet Lincoln could have read in preparing his First Inaugural. May that contention propel others to investigate the possibility, as we constantly battle over whether salvation of the Union or ending slavery was preeminent in Lincoln's mind.Graphically the volume is very attractive. 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