Abraham Lincoln's Wilderness Years: Collected Works of J. Edward Murr by J. Edward Murr (review)

Reviewed by: Abraham Lincoln's Wilderness Years: Collected Works of J. Edward Murr by J. Edward Murr Keith A. Erekson Abraham Lincoln's Wilderness Years: Collected Works of J. Edward Murr By J. Edward Murr, edited by Joshua Claybourn (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2022. Pp. 298. Appendix, bibliography. Clothbound, 60. 00; paperbound, 22. 00; e-book, 19. 99. ) In Abraham Lincoln's Wilderness Years, Evansville lawyer Joshua Claybourn offers an enigmatic selection of writings by a twentieth-century pastor about the childhood of a nineteenth-century president. Lincoln's boyhood began to interest Methodist minister J. Edward Murr (1868–1960) when he served churches in southern Indiana between 1897 and 1902. Murr was born near Corydon and desired first to practice law before feeling called to the ministry. He was licensed in Rockport in July 1897, and his assigned circuit for the next four years was based in Rome-Tobinsport. He went on to serve another forty years, including in congregations in Evansville and Indianapolis. Murr's body of Lincoln-themed work developed over a lengthy timeline. Seventy years after young Abraham left Indiana in 1830, Murr began talking with southern Indiana residents. Fifteen years later, Murr put his memories of those past conversations to writing in a rambling 137-page essay on "Lincoln in Indiana" that ran as a three-part series in the Indiana Magazine of History between December 1917 and June 1918. Still later, in Claybourn's estimate, "at some point, likely after World War II, Murr also wrote a book-length manuscript" that went unpublished before winding up, after his death, in the DePauw University archive (p. 8). Here's a representative sample of Murr in action from the IMH essay: "I interviewed a lady in 1901 who was born in 1830 near the Lincoln cabin. This lady claimed that her grandmother, whom End Page 160 she well remembered, was present in that Lincoln cabin on 12 February 1809, when Lincoln was born. My informant was a lady of good standing and character. I was her pastor for some years and thus knew her quite well. " The source is introduced with no name and thus no way to verify her identity. Murr continues, "This lady reviewed a number of statements made from time to time by her grandmother concerning circumstances connected with the birth of Lincoln. She described the evidence of poverty—the rude bedstead, the one-room log cabin—the bearskin placed on the bed by Tom Lincoln, and such other things that doubtless characterized that scene. " Almost as an afterthought, Murr adds, "Whether this reputed grandmother of my informant was indeed present on that notable occasion or not, I am not at liberty to say" (p. 58). The unnamed informant offers little of substance about Abraham Lincoln's life or experience. From Murr's gangly corpus of work, Claybourn selects for Part One of his volume four sections from the book-length manuscript—a few pages each on Thomas Lincoln, Nancy Hanks, Abraham's birth, and his Kentucky childhood. Part Two pulls out fifteen excerpts from the IMH essay about Lincoln's Indiana cousins and associates, poverty and religion, ambition and everyday life. Part Three of the volume presents five letters exchanged in 1924 between Murr and Indianasenator-turned-Lincoln-biographer Albert J. Beveridge, the most interesting of which is Murr's strongly critical review of a draft chapter on Lincoln in Indiana. Unfortunately, the selections do not bear direct citations to specific places in the original materials. The selections are lightly annotated and any editorial effort at contextualization would have benefited the volume greatly. Murr remembered and wrote about Lincoln within a lively period of Lincoln studies marked by competition, backstabbing, and interpersonal drama. The character of Indiana residents mattered greatly during the turn-of-the-century golden age of Hoosier literature and the rise of the Klan in the 1920s. But perhaps the largest missed opportunity would have been to assess Murr's contributions about Lincoln within subsequent Lincoln scholarship, about which much has been learned since the middle of the twentieth century. End Page 161 Keith A. Erekson The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints Copyright © 2024 Trustees of. . .