Introduction: Lincoln in American Writing

"Now he belongs to the ages," Secretary of War Edwin Stanton famously declared moments after our sixteenth president had drawn his last breath. Posterity has abundantly fulfilled Stanton's prediction. Two centuries after his birth, Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) has achieved an unrivaled preeminence in American history, culture, and myth. The sudden shock of his death gave rise to superlatives that took root and have been perennial in American letters ever since. Lincoln has been variously considered our greatest president, our greatest orator, the Great Emancipator; the foremost exemplar of the vitality of the American frontier and the promise of American democracy; the central actor in the Civil War, our greatest national drama; our most tragic statesman, whose martyrdom has become inextricably linked to his own incandescent vision of our national redemption.

While these characterizations have endured over time, the story of Lincoln's posthumous reputation is by no means simply hagiographic. During his presidency Lincoln was repeatedly denounced as a tyrant who suspended habeas corpus, trampled on civil liberties, and brought about the needless deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans, accusations that persist as part of the equally enduring anti-Lincoln tradition in our national memory. For many of his critics, Lincoln's legacy is defined by what are seen as the grim consequences of the Civil War: the destruction of the "Old Republic" based on state sovereignty, the brutal ascendancy of industrial capitalism, the triumph of a self-righteous militant American nationalism. For other critics, Lincoln is a symbol of the hollowness of emancipation, a white supremacist who continued to advocate the colonization of black Americans until the end of his life.

Whatever one's point of view or historical situation, it seems there is always something more to be said-to be written-about Abraham Lincoln. For 150 years writers-journalists, biographers, historians, novelists, memoirists, satirists, essayists, poets, statesmen, playwrights, screenwriters-have shaped and reshaped the image of Lincoln, engaging in an open-ended conversation about his significance. It is telling that so much of this conversation has taken place in literary works. For a century and a half, Lincoln and his legacy have beckoned to writers who have explored the fertile terrain between memory and imagination, history and folklore. Whether apostrophizing Lincoln as the "New birth of our new soil, the first American," as did James Russell Lowell, or having the young Lincoln call himself "the Bull of the Lick from Pigeon Crick! Half-horse, half-alligator, and blood-nephew to the meanest son of a bitch west of the mountains," as does Richard Slotkin, in engaging the image of Lincoln these writers have engaged the deepest meanings and symbols of national identity.

That this would be the case could not have easily been foreseen in February 1860, when Lincoln, after being introduced by William Cullen Bryant, went to the podium of Cooper Union and delivered the address that made him a national figure. As a self-educated westerner, Lincoln was alien to the cultural elites of New York and New England. For much of his presidency, whatever admiration Lincoln won from established American writers for his wartime leadership was often mixed with condescension regarding his uncouth frontier manners, his questionable taste for popular humorists such as Artemus Ward and Petroleum V. Nasby, and his inability to conform to established models of oratorical excellence.

The president's death came five days after the Palm Sunday triumph of the Union cause at Appomattox. Lincoln was shot on Good Friday, and the first sermons preached in his memory were heard on Easter Sunday, helping to bring about what historian Merrill Peterson has described as his "apotheosis" as a Christ-like martyr, redeeming with his sacrifice a suffering nation. His death elicited scores of eulogies and elegies, ranging from the commonplace to Walt Whitman's sublime "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd."

The vision of Lincoln as American Redeemer served a complex and contested historical function. In his brilliant commemorative address of 1876 on Lincoln, race, and emancipation, Frederick Douglass cast the martyred president's "great mission" as the preservation of the Union and the destruction of slavery. But others saw his legacy differently. While Lincoln's assassination was initially seen in the North as one more crime for which the South should be punished, the failure of Reconstruction strengthened the alternate view that Lincoln had been martyred so that North and South could be reunited and reconciled-an interpretation that inevitably pushed slavery and emancipation into the background of historical memory. This desire for sectional reconciliation was expressed by Richard Watson Gilder in his poem "To the Spirit of Abraham Lincoln (Reunion at Gettysburg, 1888)," by the fictitious Lincoln who appears at the climax of Winston Churchill's historical romance The Crisis (1901), and by President Theodore Roosevelt in his 1909 centenary address at Hodgenville, Kentucky.

Lincoln's death began decades of remembrance and reappraisal by contemporaries such as Carl Schurz, Horace Greeley, and Ulysses S. Grant, and prompted three of his close associates to undertake significant literary projects. John Nicolay and John Hay, Lincoln's former presidential secretaries, wrote a lengthy official biography carefully designed to enshrine the president's reputation as a great statesman. William Herndon, Lincoln's Springfield law partner for sixteen years, embarked on a far different course. Determined to discover and record the truth about Lincoln's early years, Herndon corresponded with and interviewed dozens of informants in Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois, and merged their recollections with his own first-hand observations. Herndon challenged pious and sentimental views of Lincoln by describing his former partner's cold logic, formidable ambition, and lack of orthodox religious belief. (He also became the source of the most romantic of Lincoln stories, the tale of young Lincoln's desperate love for the doomed Ann Rutledge.) The influence of Herndon's unsentimental appreciation of Lincoln's formidable intellect and will can be seen in such later writers as Edmund Wilson, whose Patriotic Gore (1962) explores the relationship between Lincoln's personal ambition, his unconventional religiosity, and his mystical devotion to the Union. Wilson's demythologized Lincoln, notoriously compared to Bismarck and Lenin, embodied a deep skepticism about American exceptionalism, the amoral nature of national power, and the role of the United States in the Cold War. Wilson's critique has been extended by Gore Vidal, who assigned Lincoln a central role in his series of historical novels on the rise of American imperialism.

Herndon's influential fascination with the pioneer village of New Salem and with Lincoln's frontier origins would be carried forward by Carl Sandburg, in his poetic blending of fact and folklore, by self-improvement writer Dale Carnegie, in his unflinching evocation of the filth and squalor of Lincoln's impoverished childhood, and by Richard Slotkin in his recent novel Abe, which depicts Lincoln coming into his own in New Salem as he confronts both intellectual and physical challenges. As these examples suggest, the image of Lincoln as frontiersman has itself embodied sometimes contradictory ideas: Americans as self-made and self-making; America as a land of equality and opportunity; the idea that Americans, like Lincoln, can carry with them the mythic independence and egalitarianism of the frontier even as they urbanize; or, puncturing this romantic myth, the frontier as symbol of a restlessness and coarseness in American life, conditions which heroic individuals must strive to overcome.

Lincoln as frontiersman led to Lincoln as exemplary Common Man, the test and validation of American democracy. In 1916 President Woodrow Wilson made his own pilgrimage to Lincoln's birthplace. There he eloquently paid tribute to Lincoln's life as a proof of democracy, demonstrating that Lincoln no longer belonged to just the Republican party-a truth reinforced in the 1930s when the playwright Robert Sherwood (later a speechwriter for Franklin Roosevelt) created a Lincoln who was suspicious of wealth and a friend of labor. In the 1980s Mario Cuomo similarly enlisted Lincoln as a foe of economic injustice. Along with other continuities-the statesman extolled by Nicolay and Hay can clearly be seen in the shrewd and resolute politician depicted in popular novels of the 1980s by Gore Vidal and William Safire-there were also new engagements between the past and present, such as Adam Braver's vision in Mr. Lincoln's Wars (2003) of a hard-boiled Lincoln, near the ebb of his political career in 1849, teetering on the brink of neo-noir cynicism.