Basic Themes and Questions

1. Lincoln as Literary Genius

1. Harriet Beecher Stowe, writing in 1864, described Lincoln's state papers as "informal and undiplomatic" and praised them for their brevity and condensation, while in 1889 William Herndon wrote that Lincoln's mind was characterized by common sense, directness, and inflexible logic. Jacques Barzun hailed Lincoln in 1959 as the maker of a style "unique in English prose, and doubly astonishing in the history of American literature," and in 1961 Marianne Moore said that Lincoln wrote with a "'grasp of eternal grace.'" In 1962 Edmund Wilson argued that Lincoln created himself as a poetic figure. What may account for the difference between the appraisals of Lincoln's literary contemporaries and those of commentators writing a century later?
2. Herndon gives an extremely vivid description of Lincoln's speaking style during the 1850s. What in particular stands out in his account? How do you think Lincoln would have come across on television?
3. How do you think Lincoln's political success was related to his greatness as a writer? What is the relationship between political leadership and political language?
4. What do the writers in this booklet have to say about Lincoln's literary style, its sources and techniques, and its impact on the American language?

2. Lincoln: Legacy of the Great Emancipator

1. In a famous 1876 oration Frederick Douglass declared that Abraham Lincoln "was preeminently the white man's President, entirely devoted to the welfare of white men," and that African Americans were "at best only his step-children, children by adoption, children by force of circumstances and necessity." Nevertheless, Douglass hailed Lincoln as "a great man" who had transcended the prejudices of his day and helped free a people. Nearly fifty years later W.E.B. Du Bois wrote that Lincoln "was big enough to be inconsistent-cruel, merciful; peace-loving, a fighter; despising Negroes and letting them fight and vote; protecting slavery and freeing slaves." For Douglass and Du Bois, as well as for Booker T. Washington and Robert Russa Moton, writing about Lincoln raised larger questions about identity, citizenship, and the legacy of slavery. How have these writers mixed criticism and praise in their treatment of Lincoln, and how have they used the memory of Lincoln to challenge American society?
2. How does their treatment of Lincoln's role in emancipation compare with that of Reinhold Niebuhr, who praised Lincoln for acting as "a responsible statesman" and not as "a moral prophet" in regard to slavery?

3. Lincoln as American Redeemer

1. How do the pieces by Hale, Stedman, Howe, and Melville, who write about Lincoln's assassination in relation to the Christian drama of death and redemption, differ from Whitman's, who views Lincoln's martyrdom from the perspective of classic Greek tragedy?
2. In his historical romance The Crisis (1901), the American novelist Winston Churchill has President Lincoln tell the novel's Confederate heroine: "I have not suffered by the South. I have suffered with the South." In turn, she finally sees in Lincoln the "pain of a crown of thorns worn for a world that did not understand." What role did the desire for sectional reconciliation after the Civil War play in shaping Lincoln's image, especially in emphasizing his role as a martyr/redeemer figure and in deemphasizing the importance of slavery and emancipation in the war?
3. What tensions exist between Lincoln's image as a figure of compassion, forgiveness, and mercy, and the determination with which he wielded political power and waged the Civil War? How do writers such as Richard Watson Gilder, the novelist Winston Churchill, and Theodore Roosevelt address or evade these tensions and contradictions?

4. Lincoln as Self-Made Man

1. In her 1864 essay Harriet Beecher Stowe described Lincoln as "in the strictest sense, a man of the working classes," while in 1865 Ralph Waldo Emerson said of Lincoln's presidency, "This middle-class country had got a middle-class President, at last." What do the pieces in this booklet by Stowe and Emerson tell us about the way Americans have defined opportunity and "class"?
2. Why did James Russell Lowell call Lincoln "New birth of our new soil, the First American"?
3. In 1916 Woodrow Wilson spoke at Lincoln's birthplace: "This little hut was the cradle of one of the great sons of men, a man of singular, delightful, vital genius who presently emerged on the great stage of the nation's history. Such are the authentic proofs of the validity and vitality of democracy." Why does the image of Lincoln's birth in a log cabin have such enduring power? What does it say about us as a people? Is the "proof" of democracy to be found in the "common people," or in the uncommon genius who emerges from them?
4. Is there a tension between great political ambition and democracy, as Lincoln suggested in his 1838 Springfield Lyceum Address, a speech critically examined by Edmund Wilson in Patriotic Gore? Is Wilson persuasive when he argues that Lincoln was unconsciously warning his audience against himself, and that Lincoln's need to play a heroic role in a great national drama was partially responsible for the Civil War?
5. How does the excerpt from Richard Slotkin's Abe address the issues raised by Woodrow Wilson's 1916 address?

4. Lincoln and His Critics

1. How are the criticisms of Lincoln made by Horace Greeley, Karl Marx, and George Templeton Strong similar, and how do they differ?
2. The anti-Lincoln author of Abraham Africanus I and the pro-Lincoln Petroleum V. Nasby were both satirists. How similar are their portraits of Lincoln? Do you think one of these satiric pieces is more effective than the other?
3. How persuasive is H.L. Mencken's argument about Lincoln and self-determination?
4. Generations of Lincoln admirers have extolled him as a representative American, whose virtues reflect the best in the national character. How does Delmore Schwartz invert this tradition of praise?
5. Edmund Wilson argues that the common Northern view of the Civil War was an "epic" Lincoln consciously created, and one that obscures other possible choices and historical outcomes. Do you find his argument persuasive? How much of what Americans believe about the Civil War was shaped by Lincoln's actions, especially by what he wrote and said?
6. Does MacKinlay Kantor's fictional depiction of a disgraced and defeated Lincoln help illuminate the possibilities Wilson believed the "epic" obscured, or is it merely an exercise in historical fantasy? What does it mean in terms of Lincoln's continuing legacy to imagine a world in which he failed completely?
7. Robert Lowell directs both praise and criticism at Lincoln in his poem. Do you think his poem arrives at a final judgment, or does it remain fundamentally unresolved in its consideration of Lincoln?