NF The Historiography of Lincoln Biography

Non-Fiction

Pat Young

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Allen Guelzo has an interesting history of Lincoln biography in the September 2018 issue of Civil
War History. I will excerpt a few snippets of what he has to say.
 
Guelzo begins with Lincoln's attitude towards biography-He didn't like it. He though biographies were false and misleading. And of course, the birst biographies of Lincoln fit that mold.

From the article:

Unhappily, Lincoln's first biographers were exactly the penny-dreadfuls he loathed—campaign biographies, a genre almost uniquely American and dedicated to one goal, which was motivating voters, either by a pristine presentation of the candidate's virtues to the electorate or discounting negative impressions. In all, sixteen campaign biographies of Lincoln appeared during the 1860 election season, several of them based in whole or in part on the campaign biography Scripps worked up from the outline Lincoln composed for Scripps. An entirely separate biography, commissioned by the Republican publishing house of Follett, Foster & Co. and written by the then-editor of the Ohio State Journal, William Dean Howells, was based on interviews and research conducted in Illinois by James Quay Howard and resulted in the Lives and Speeches of Abraham Lincoln and Hannibal Hamlin in June 1860.
 
The first real biography was produced only months after Lincoln's death:

Lincoln might have been more inclined to self-revelation if he had lived longer; but John Wilkes Booth's bullet put an end to any plans Lincoln might have entertained for writing postwar memoirs. This meant that anyone with ambitions to write a biography of Abraham Lincoln was going to have to plunge into serious and time-consuming research and interviewing on Lincoln's home ground in Illinois and Indiana or else rely on access to the vast accumulation of official papers from the Lincoln White House. The primary-interview challenge was taken up with surprising swiftness in 1865 by a Massachusetts journalist, Josiah Gilbert Holland (1819–1981), whose eloquent eulogy of Lincoln as "an instance of the power of genuine character and the wisdom of a truthful, earnest heart" four days after Lincoln's death spurred his publisher, Samuel Bowles, the editor of the Springfield (Massachusetts)Republican to commission a full-dress biography. Holland at once left for Lincoln's Springfield, arriving only three weeks after Lincoln's funeral there, and moved immediately in pursuit of interviews with Herndon and other Lincoln acquaintances. Despite stretching out to 544 closely-printed pages, Holland's Life of Abraham Lincoln was ready for distribution by February 1866. Holland's primary image was that of Lincoln the Emancipator, a vision rooted in Lincoln's 1837 legislative protest against slavery as "injustice and bad policy" and that Holland believed ran as a consistent bright line through the rest of Lincoln's life.
 
Enter Herndon:

Holland, unhappily, was a journalist with a deadline, and the signs of hurry are all over his Life of Abraham Lincoln. But he had at least understood that the only way to fill the vacuum of knowledge about Lincoln's prepresidential life was through on-the-ground investigation, and in large measure it was Holland who spurred into action the most intensive primary Lincoln researcher of them all, William Herndon (1819–1891). No one outside Lincoln's immediate household had been so close to Lincoln as Herndon, and at first, Herndon was happy to "have helped Doctor Holland to some of the facts of Lincoln's life, many in fact," and Herndon's only regret in 1865 was that Holland "could not have been with me 8 or 10 days Consecutively." Yet the material Holland unearthed convinced Herndon that Lincoln had been nearly as close-mouthed with him as with others. He was particularly incensed over a point that had appeared almost as a tangent in Holland's Life. In an effort to portray Lincoln's distress over the refusal of Springfield's clergy to endorse his presidential campaign because of his opposition to slavery, Holland cited an interview with Newton Bateman, the Illinois superintendent of public instruction, in which Lincoln protested: "I know there is a God & that he hates injustice & slavery. I see the storm coming & I know that His hand is in it. If He has a place & work for me, and I think he has, I believe I am ready. I am nothing, but truth is everything. I know I am right because I know that liberty is right, for Christ teaches it, and Christ is God."7

If there was one thing Herndon was sure he knew about his former law partner, it was that Lincoln had no religion more intense than a bland deism.
 
Herndon, friend of Lincoln for decades, understood that he did not know the young Lincoln well at all. He embarked on a prolonged set of interviews with those who did know Lincoln in his early years. His research convinced him of the following, according to Guelzo:

  • • Lincoln was born out of wedlock (or at least his mother was), and that Thomas Lincoln might not have been his biological father.
  • • Lincoln was subject to fits of depression, bordering on the suicidal.
  • • Lincoln's one great romance was a village girl of New Salem, Ann Rutledge, whose death nearly deranged him.
  • • Lincoln had pursued several other women for marriage: Mary Owens, Sarah Rickards, Matilda Edwards.
  • • Lincoln's marriage to Mary Todd in 1842 was loveless and political, was almost broken-up, and then reinstated, and that when Mary Lincoln learned of Lincoln's real love, she made their marriage a hell-on-earth in retribution.
  • • Lincoln was a religious unbeliever who, at least in his twenty-something years, mocked Christianity and had even written a "book" attacking Christianity (which his friends prudently destroyed before it could damage him politically).
 
• Lincoln's marriage to Mary Todd in 1842 was loveless and political, was almost broken-up, and then reinstated, and that when Mary Lincoln learned of Lincoln's real love, she made their marriage a hell-on-earth in retribution.

A discussion of how marriage was approached in the first half of 19th century America may be helpful here. This quote does not strike me as unusual, but I ain't the scholar in the room.
 
Herndon sold his research to Ward Lamon, resulting in scandal:

In deepening financial distress and diminishing hope that he would ever be able to turn his "Lincoln Record" into a full-fledged biography, Herndon sold a copy of his "Lincoln Record" to Ward Hill Lamon (1828–1893), one of the inner circle of friends whom Lincoln had brought to Washington in 1861 and made marshal of the District of Columbia. After Lincoln's death, Lamon stayed in Washington and joined a law practice with Jeremiah S. Black, who had served as attorney general in James Buchanan's administration. Lamon aspired to turn his personal connection with Lincoln into a profitable biographical enterprise, and he promised Herndon to do the writing himself. He didn't; instead, he turned Herndon's "Record" over to Jeremiah Black's son, Chauncey F. Black, who proceeded to make the first volume of the Lamon biography, The Life of Abraham Lincoln; From His Birth to His Inauguration as President, into a sensationalistic screed. The Blacks, pere et fils, had many old political scores to settle with Lincoln's Republicans, and they did not mind exposing the antislavery martyr as a coarse frontier politician who real opinions were closer to James Buchanan's. Lincoln was "morbid, moody, meditative, thinking much of himself and the things pertaining to himself . . . a man apart from the rest of his kind, unsocial, cold, impassive." So unsocial, in fact, that Lincoln's "engagement to Miss Todd was one of the great misfortunes of his life and hers." They were content enough not to trouble each other with infidelity, but in every other respect they were ships on different courses. "They were married; but they understood each other, and suffered the inevitable consequences, as other people do under similar circumstances. But such troubles seldom fail to find a tongue; and it is not strange, that, in this case, neighbors and friends, and ultimately the whole country, came to know the state of things in that house." Above all, it gave tremendous satisfaction to the Blacks to say that Lincoln "was no Abolitionist," and "had no notion of extending to the negro the privilege of governing him and other white men."10
 
The response to Lamon's Life was, if anything, even more howling than to Herndon's lectures. The publisher, James Osgood, had qualms about the book's reception even as it was moving through the press, and he was so apprehensive about the final chapter—which amounted to a defense of the Buchanan administration's acts in the final months before the attack on Fort Sumter—that he stripped the chapter from the final version and eventually declined to publish the planned-for second volume. These precautions did nothing to avert the bolts of critical thunder from the Atlantic Monthly—"We cannot see what there was in the career or the character of[End Page 245] Lincoln that justifies Mr. Lamon in dragging from the dead man's grave the miserable fact of his unhappy marriage"—and Scribner's, where Josiah Holland attacked Lamon's Life as an "outrage upon decency" and urged other critics to "be prompt and unsparing." Even Herndon quailed at the wave of denunciation, assuring the Chicago Tribune, "You never detected any work of mine in the book."
 
Herndon took no more steps toward writing [End Page 246] "the inner life of Mr L." until 1875, when an Asbury College student, Jesse W. Weik (1857–1930), wrote to him to ask for a Lincoln autograph. Herndon obliged, and the response turned into an ongoing correspondence. In 1882, Weik moved to Springfield as a Pension Bureau agent and proposed restarting Herndon's project with Weik as ghostwriter. Herndon still had his three bound volumes of interviews, letters, and depositions, which he supplemented in thirty-five long letters of personal Lincoln reminiscence to Weik between October 1885 and January 1886. From this, Weik spun out Herndon's Lincoln: The True Story of a Great Life in 1889. As with the Lamon Life, the critics were scandalized by what appeared as disloyal and unseemly revelations of Lincoln's shortcomings, and Robert Todd Lincoln—then the American minister to Great Britain—bought up and destroyed every copy shipped there. In fact, Herndon's Lincoln might have disappeared entirely when the publisher went bankrupt in September, 1889. Weik, however, came once again to the rescue and in 1891 negotiated a new contract with Charles Scribner's Sons. Robert Lincoln again interposed his influence and persuaded Scribner's to back out. But the resourceful Weik found yet another publisher in D. Appleton & Co., which brought out a second edition of Herndon's Lincoln, just after Herndon's death in March 1891. It certainly was, as the title proclaimed, Herndon's Lincoln. The book ends, for all practical purposes, with the end of the Lincoln-Herndon partnership and Lincoln's departure from Springfield for his inauguration in 1861. But not even Weik could squeeze into it all of Herndon's research materials; Weik would later go on to write a Lincoln book of his own, The Real Lincoln, utilizing much of the material left out of Herndon's Lincoln.
 
By the 1890s, the old antagonisms among whites that festered after the Civil War were dying off, along with the Civil War generation. As the country moved towards reconciliation, Lincoln's secretaries Hay and Nicolay headed in the other direction.

Unlike Lamon's and Herndon's preoccupation with the prepresidential Lincoln, Nicolay and Hay devoted only 272 of their 4,709 pages to the first forty years of Lincoln's life. Neither were the two staff veterans interested in revisiting the shade of Mary Todd Lincoln, whom both had loathed in the White House as "the Hell-Cat" and "Her Satanic Majesty." They were, after all, critically dependent on the silent partnership of Robert Todd Lincoln, who owned trunksful of correspondence—eighteen thousand documents, forty-two thousand pieces of paper, which his father's administration had generated—and who was tired of Herndon-like excursions into his parents' traumas. So, as much as Hay protested, "We must not show ourselves to the public in the attitude of two old dotards fighting over again the politics of their youth," that was exactly what they did. Every word, Hay assured Robert Lincoln, would be "written in a spirit of reverence and regard."
 
There was never any question that Nicolay and Hay considered themselves "Lincoln Men all the way through," and the 1.5 million words they bestowed on their subject made the whole project read like a Republican Party campaign tract. "We must write like two everlasting angels," Hay urged Nicolay, although what they wrote cast them more in the role of avenging angels. The Union cause, they proclaimed, was the noblest upon which the sun had ever shone, and neither Hay nor Nicolay could understand "how any secession conspirator can ask the tolerance of reasonable minds." Unlike that of Lamon and Black, Hay and Nicolay's Buchanan is a dolt who imagined he was pursuing a policy of "conciliation but practically of ruinous concession," while George McClellan was guilty of "mutinous imbecility." Salmon Chase, likewise, was an inveterate conspirator. "The surest way to his confidence was to approach him with conversation derogatory to Mr. Lincoln." Chase "cultivated . . . the closest relations with those generals who imagined they had a grievance with the Administration" and who sowed mischief by advice "so reckless, and so disloyal to his constitutional chief, that if it were not printed by his authority it would be difficult to believe he had written it."
 
Then came the Progressive Era:

The first three decades of the twentieth century form the apogee of Abraham Lincoln's public historical reputation. They also formed the apogee of Progressivism, which was fed by an impatience with the slowness and ineptness of democratic government to deal with the novel problems of the new industrial age, with the failures of Reconstruction (in which democracy had been extended to the most uninformed sections of the populace and resulted only in humiliation and poverty for former Confederates), and with the fear of foreign subversion, which they believed could only be prevented by an unencumbered, pragmatic attitude toward the adequacy of the Constitution and federalism. In an effort to prove that their solutions were not simply warmed-up versions of Prussian state Hegelianism, many Progressives were strongly tempted to remake Lincoln along Progressive lines as a justifier for Progressive policies. "What comends Mr. Lincoln's studiousness to me," wrote Woodrow Wilson, was that he was purely pragmatic and "did not have any theories at all."
 
Neither Roosevelt nor Wilson nor Croly made an attempt at a Progressive Lincoln biography. But that role was easily filled, first by the journalist Ida Tarbell (1857–1944) and then by the historian who was at the same time the first academic Lincoln biographer, James Garfield Randall. Tarbell's Lincoln was actually undertaken not as a Progressive tract but as the promotional project of her boss, Samuel Sidney McClure, to produce a rival magazine serial to the Century's Lincoln for [End Page 252] his own McClure's Magazine in 1894. It was not, however, an uncongenial task, since Tarbell could remember, how when she was an eight-year-old, Lincoln's assassination had tragically affected people around her, and for her, Lincoln's "name spelt tragedy and mystery." Tarbell approached Nicolay and Robert Todd Lincoln for assistance, and both roundly rebuffed her as a "poacher" (although Lincoln tempered his refusal by allowing her to use a pair of matched daguerreotypes of his parents, which are still the earliest certifiable photographs of Abraham and Mary Lincoln). Unabashed, Tarbell hired a research assistant in Springfield to track down surviving neighbors and associates of the Lincolns and teased out three hundred new reminiscences and over two thousand pages of interview material. These discoveries became the foundation of a highly successful twenty-part biography for McClure's, which was later issued in book format in two volumes, with a generous appendix of Lincoln documents.
 
Reading Tarbell drew James Garfield Randall (1881–1953) into the Lincoln orbit, and after receiving his PhD at the University of Chicago in 1911 (with a dissertation on the Confiscation Acts) and serving briefly during the First World War in the Wilson administration, Randall took up a teaching position at the University of Illinois in 1920 and moved to stamp Lincoln with the image of Woodrow Wilson. His first book, Constitutional Problems under Lincoln in 1926, might well have been subtitled "How Abraham Lincoln Anticipated Woodrow Wilson's Abuses of Civil Liberties," because much of the book addressed Lincoln's handling of precisely the same challenge Wilson faced during World War I. "Can executive efficiency be maintained amid a crisis and constitutional government be still preserved? This, as I see it, was the central problem of Lincoln's administration, and in the period of dictatorships and reactionary governments that has followed the World War it is a problem of increased significance. To revert to the strong-man idea would be a backward step, but to harmonize constitutional guarantees with effectiveness of [End Page 254] governmental control involves many matters of political technique." From there, Randall turned to his magnum opus, the three-volume Lincoln the President (the last part of which had to be completed from Randall's sketches after his death in 1952). He imagined that "in [Lincoln's] credo was a kind of Jeffersonian liberalism," and he applauded Lincoln's use of executive power to override both southern zealots and a Congress dominated by "a more unlovely knot of politicians" than could be found anywhere. For three decades, Randall was the uncontested giant of academic Lincolnians, and in December 1934, he set out an ambitious agenda for Lincoln research and scholarship in his presidential address to the American Historical Association, "Has the Lincoln Theme Been Exhausted?" What Randall achieved as a scholar found popular viewing in the two multivolume Lincoln biographies by Carl Sandburg, The Prairie Years and The War Years, where Lincoln was portrayed as a midwestern populist and all ideological connection between Lincoln and the Republican Party he had led to its first presidential victory was erased.
 
With the collapse of Wilsonian Progressivism, exiting Progressives became critical of Lincoln. Edgar Lee Masters was one of the Progressive critics of Lincoln as a politician in the hands as was historian Alexander Beveridge who viewed him as a tool of capitalists:

But by 1922, Masters had begun to sour politically on Lincoln. In his novel Children of the Marketplace, he glorified Stephen Douglas as the only man "to sense the moralistic hypocrisy with which the republicans are draping their trafficking ambitions" and the only politician who could have held off the robber-baron trusts. Lincoln the Man turned its anger directly on Lincoln, dismissing the Ann Rutledge romance as a fable and denouncing Lincoln as a puritanical moralist who allowed capitalism to fatten in the Civil War and who foreshadowed, through his malignant hostility to the South, the imperialism of William McKinley. Lincoln was the living embodiment of "capitalistic America" and of the man American Progressives hated the most, Alexander Hamilton; Lincoln the Man was dedicated to the memory of Thomas Jefferson.
 
Enter Richard Hofstadter:

But, with much more malice than Beveridge or Masters, it remained for the Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter (1916–1970) to give Lincoln what was probably the unkindest Progressive cut of all. In his 1948 essay, "Abraham Lincoln and the Self-Made Myth," Hofstadter ruthlessly scorned Lincoln as "thoroughly middle-class in his ideas . . . intensely and at times inhumanly individualistic." He trampled down the Emancipation Proclamation with the infamous bon mot that it had "all the moral grandeur of a bill of lading." He prophesied in retrospect that, had Lincoln lived, he would have been revolted at the America he had helped create. "Had he lived to seventy, he would have seen the generation brought up on self-help come into its own, build business corporations, and begin to close off those treasured opportunities for the little man. Further, he would have [End Page 257] seen his own party become the jackal of the vested interests, placing the dollar far, far ahead of the man. . . . Booth's bullet, indeed, saved him from something worse than embroilment with the radicals over Reconstruction."
 
The 1960s saw further erosion of Lincoln's reputation on the Left:

Hofstadter's was only the most piercing voice in a chorus of Lincoln critics that in the 1960s included Edmund Wilson, Ralph Korngold, Howard Zinn, and William Appleman Williams. (Williams, in America Confronts a Revolutionary World, deplored Lincoln's "deadly skill" in riveting "upon America . . . the possessive individualism of marketplace capitalism" and inventing the idea that the United States had a democratic mission to foist on others; Wilson portrayed Lincoln as a megalomaniac, projecting himself in his prophecy of the emergence of a tyrannical "towering genius" in American politics "into the role against which he is warning them.") The most unusual dissenters, however, were African Americans. Until well into the twentieth century, Lincoln had no warmer defenders than the descendants of the slaves the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment had freed. Chicago lawyer William E. Lilly (1878–1948), who published the first full-length African American biography of Lincoln in 1932, was sharply critical of Randall and unreservedly declared that "the question of slavery counted continuously in making the man Lincoln." The 1837 Illinois legislative resolution was offered as "a complete indictment of the system of slavery," and Lincoln's aborted 1848 District of Columbia emancipation bill was "recklessly courageous considering both the time and place." Lincoln was the friend and rescuer of kidnapped black Illinoisans, and although Lilly closes his biography with Lincoln's inauguration in 1861, it is clear that this president "would not agree that slavery should pass beyond the boundaries of those States where the Constitution had permitted it to exist."28

Yet, even as Lilly was writing in defense of Lincoln, W. E. B. Du Bois was sounding a more skeptical note. In 1917, in an address to the InterCollegiate Socialist Society, Du Bois offhandedly pointed to the irony of "the very man who is called the Emancipator," declaring that "his object was the integrity of the Union and not the emancipation of the slaves; that if he could keep the Union from being disrupted, he would not only allow slavery to exist but would loyally protect it." And in 1922, as editor of the Crisis, Du Bois was yet more acidic, describing Lincoln as [End Page 258] "a poor Southern white, of illegitimate birth, poorly educated and unusually ugly, awkward, ill-dressed." And for the next three decades, Du Bois mocked the naïve belief that Lincoln had any interest in the slaves for their own sake. "The Civil War resulted in emancipation for the slaves, not because the North or Abraham Lincoln fought for this, but because freedom for the slaves whose labor supported the South was the only way to win the war."29

Between 1956 and 1999, black opinion of Lincoln moved in Du Bois's direction rather than Lilly's, as among African Americans estimates of Lincoln as a "great" president skidded from 48 percent to just 28 percent. One of those for whom the skid was even steeper was Lerone Bennett, the editor of Ebony Magazine, who questioned more defiantly than Du Bois had why blacks should revere Lincoln. In a sensational blast at Lincoln in Ebony in 1968, Bennett attacked Lincoln "as the embodiment, not the transcendence, of the American tradition, which is, as we all know, a racist tradition." Three decades later, Bennett converted his critique into a full-length book, Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln's White Dream, which indicted Lincoln as a calculating bigot who issued the Emancipation Proclamation precisely to head off the real emancipation that abolitionists and blacks were pressing for: "He believed until his death that the Negro was the Other, the inferior, the subhuman, who had to be—Lincoln said it was a necessity—subordinated, enslaved, quarantined to protect the sexual, social, political, and economic interests of Whites. Everything he did . . . everything he said, even the speeches his defenders are always praising, was based on this racist idea, which defined his life [and] his politics." In the place of a Great Emancipator, a new generation of African American historians began substituting the slaves as their own emancipators.
 
Eric Foner developed the idea of Lincoln as a person whose ideas grew over time, a thesis Guelzo questions:

Eric Foner has attempted to hew a middle path between Progressive skepticism and the reality that "Abraham Lincoln has provided a lens through which we Americans examine ourselves," and indeed, no one has ever demonstrated a better mastery of the nineteenth-century free-labor liberalism that shaped Lincoln's mind than the author of Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War(originally the dissertation Foner wrote under Hofstadter's direction). But Foner's best prescription for that middle path lay in his plea that "we should first bear in mind that the hallmark of Lincoln's greatness was his capacity for growth." This is certainly true, if the alternative is to see "Lincoln as born with a pen in his hand ready to sign the Emancipation Proclamation or as entering the White House with a fixed determination to preside over the end of slavery." But what is striking in the corpus of Lincoln's writings is how relatively little intellectual "growth" there is and that the Lincoln whom we meet in the 1837 Illinois legislative resolution on slavery is still the same admirer of Wayland, Mill, and Henry Carey whom we meet on January 1, 1863, signing the Proclamation.
 
Conservatives after the Second World War were critical of Lincoln as the originator of the managerial state in the United States:

The American conservative intellectual movement that emerged after the Second World War took its bearings from free-marketeers and libertarians of the school of Frederick Hayek and Milton Friedman or from old-time Southern Agrarians, and together they demonstrated little affinity for, or interest in, Lincoln, and a deep well of resentment for the managerial state. Southern Agrarians, whether in their first wave in the 1930s or the postwar neo-Agrarianism championed by Melvin Bradford, saw Lincoln as the champion of a Yankee capitalism that was omnivorously dissolving [End Page 260] all traditional social connections in the cash nexus, while the disciples of Hayek, with their suspicion of the incompetence of state management of economies, saw Lincoln's presidency as the original model for an all-powerful, centralized welfare state. Lincoln, lamented Bradford, "played the central role in transforming" the federal government "into a unitary structure based on a claim to power in its own right . . . which, in the name of any cause that attracts a following, might easily threaten the liberties of those for whose sake it existed."
 
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