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Review Essay Telling the Story of “The Ages” Review Essay Telling the Story of “The Ages” KEITH A. EREKSON Philip B. Kunhardt III, Peter W. Kunhardt, and Peter W. Kunhardt Jr. Looking for Lincoln: The Making of an American Icon. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008. Pp. 474. Barry Schwartz. Abraham Lincoln in the Post-Heroic Era: History and Memory in Late Twentieth-Century America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Pp. 268. Standing at the foot of the bed in which Abraham Lincoln had just been pronounced dead, Edwin M. Stanton reportedly declared “Now he belongs to the ages.” For nearly 150 years “the ages” have perpetu- ated Lincoln’s place in American culture. Most of what we know about Lincoln has surfaced since his death. Much of what Americans have accomplished—both for themselves and for the world—has been done with one eye focused ahead and the other scrutinizing Lincoln in the rearview mirror. The two volumes under review assert that the story of “the ages” is worth telling. Both tell the story differently, but neither is the first to make such an attempt. The story began to be told at the turn of the twentieth century in the form of annotations, provenance descriptions, and debates about the authenticity of Lincoln manuscripts.1 Collectors created lists that grew into bibliographies with annotations—Jay Monaghan inventoried the published books and pamphlets about Lincoln, Frederick Hill Meserve tracked down photographs, F. Lauriston Bullard examined statuary.2 1. For early examples see John G. Nicolay and John Hay, Complete Works of Abraham Lincoln, 12 vols. (New York: F. D. Tandy Co., 1905); Gilbert A. Tracy, Uncollected Letters of Abraham Lincoln (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1917); Paul M. Angle, New Letters and Papers of Lincoln (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1930). The process continued in Roy P. Basler et al., eds., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 9 vols. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1953–1955), and continues in The Papers of Abraham Lincoln, a longtime project of the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency and the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, cosponsored by the Abraham Lincoln Association and the University of Illinois at Springfield. 2. Frederick Hill Meserve, The Photographs of Abraham Lincoln (New York: privately Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association, Vol. 31, No. 1, 2010 © 2010 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois JALA 31_1 text.indd 39 12/3/09 4:38:42 PM 40 Review Essay As academic historians moved into a very crowded Lincoln field in the 1930s, they revised the story into a historiographical justification for their belated interest in the sixteenth president. James G. Randall laid down the dominating divide by complaining that “the hand of the amateur has rested heavily upon Lincoln studies” and calling for the professionalization of the field. Randall’s student David Herbert Donald placed the work of William Henry Herndon on the amateur side of the line and Herndon’s informants on the extreme “lunatic fringe.” Benjamin P. Thomas polished the storyline by structuring his narrative about previous Lincoln biographers around a continu- ing struggle between idealists and realists.3 In time, other historians explored the development of Lincoln’s “legend,” his “theme,” his “im- age,” and the “tradition” of interpreting him.4 The end result placed the “objective” “truth” about Lincoln in primary sources and the work of modern scholars while consigning the “myths” and “legends” to the “ages” dominated by amateurs after his death.5 Two recent strains of scholarship have served to broaden the sto- ryline. First, Douglas L. Wilson and Rodney O. Davis have been work- ing for roughly two decades to publish transcriptions of Herndon’s in- formant testimony (1998) and correspondence (forthcoming), making a printed, 1911); Jay Monaghan, Lincoln Bibliography, 1839–1939, 2 vols. (Springfield: Il- linois State Historical Society, 1943); Frederick Hill Meserve and Carl Sandburg, The Photographs of Abraham Lincoln (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1944); F. Lauriston Bullard, Lincoln in Marble and Bronze (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1952). 3. J. G. Randall, “Has the Lincoln Theme Been Exhausted?” The American Historical Review 41 (January 1936): 270–94; David Donald, Lincoln’s Herndon (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1948), 174; Benjamin P. Thomas, Portrait for Posterity: Lincoln and His Biographers (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1947). 4. Roy P. Basler, The Lincoln Legend: A Study in Changing Conceptions (Boston: Hough- ton Mifflin, 1935); David M. Potter, “The Lincoln Theme in American National Histori- ography,” in The South and the Sectional Conflict (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1968), 151–76; Mark E. Neely Jr., “The Lincoln Theme Since Randall’s Call: The Promises and Perils of Professionalism,” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association 1 (1979): 10–70; Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Changing Image of Lincoln in American Histo- riography: An Inaugural Lecture delivered before the University of Oxford on 21 May 1968 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968); Michael Davis, The Image of Lincoln in the South (Knox- ville: University of Tennessee Press, 1971); Harold Holzer, Gabor S. Boritt, and Mark E. Neely Jr., The Lincoln Image: Abraham Lincoln and the Popular Print, 2d ed. (1984; Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001); Don E. Fehrenbacher, “The Anti-Lincoln Tradition,” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association 4 (1982): 6–28. See also Thomas L. Connelly, The Marble Man: Robert E. Lee and His Image in American Society (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977). 5. For a recent example, see Edward Steers Jr., Lincoln Legends: Myths, Hoaxes, and Confabulations Associated with Our Greatest President (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2007). JALA 31_1 text.indd 40 12/3/09 4:38:43 PM Keith A. Erekson 41 case along the way for the reexamination of Herndon’s interviews and a revival of his reputation. Michael Burlingame and Allen C. Guelzo followed suit in their respective resuscitations of the interviews by John Nicolay and Josiah Holland.6 Second, the concept of memory—still contrasted to academic history—has opened new opportunities for analysis. In Lincoln in American Memory, Merrill D. Peterson surveyed in impressive fashion the wide-ranging interest in Lincoln expressed not only by academics, but also by collectors, enthusiasts, local historians, artists, playwrights, and community organizers. Peterson concluded that Lincoln’s memory continues to circulate in five themes: Savior of Union, Great Emancipator, Man of the People, First American, and Self- Made Man. David Blight and Barry Schwartz have employed memory to examine the deterioration of race relations in the late nineteenth century and the construction of American nationalism in the early part of the twentieth.7 The books under review continue to look for new evidence, expand the cast of participants, and contexualize interpreta- tions of Lincoln within American history, memory, and culture. Looking for Lincoln chronicles the first half of the “ages” by exploring the memory of Lincoln from his death to the death of his son Robert in 1926. The lavishly illustrated volume is organized, as the late David Donald explained in the foreword, as “a book of discovery”—it fol- lows not the life of Lincoln but the story of the revelation of facts and information about him after his death (vii). Part one of the book treats Lincoln’s assassination through the hanging of four of the conspira- tors, mingling the mourning of all Americans (Northern, Southern, and African American) with glimpses into the identities, pursuit, cap- ture, and trial of the alleged conspirators. Part two introduces an era from 1865 to 1876 (which coincidentally parallels Reconstruction) in which Lincoln’s friends and family begin to craft his image and biog- raphy. In part three, the memory of Lincoln is “betrayed” from 1876 6. Douglas L. Wilson and Rodney O. Davis, eds. Herndon’s Informants: Letters, In- terviews, and Statements about Abraham Lincoln (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998); Douglas L. Wilson, “William H. Herndon and His Lincoln Informants,” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association 14 (Winter 1993): 15–34; Rodney O. Davis, “William Herndon, Memory, and Lincoln Biography,” Journal of Illinois History 1 (1998): 99–112; Michael Burlingame, ed. An Oral History of Abraham Lincoln: John G. Nicolay’s Interviews and Essays (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1996); Allen C. Guelzo, “Hol- land’s Informants: The Construction of Josiah Holland’s ‘Life of Abraham Lincoln’,” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association 23 (Summer 2002): 1–53. 7. Merrill D. Peterson, Lincoln in American Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2001); Barry Schwartz, Abraham Lincoln and the Forge of National Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). JALA 31_1 text.indd 41 12/3/09 4:38:43 PM 42 Review Essay to 1889 by the abandonment of federal reconstruction, an attempt to rob Lincoln’s tomb, a flood of reminiscences by people more distantly connected with Lincoln, and the controversial biography by William Herndon. At the turn of the century, covered in part four, Lincoln is rescued by the massive biography by his secretaries John G. Nicolay and John Hay, the preservation of the Gettysburg battlefield, and the discovery of new sources. In the end, Lincoln’s “Unfinished Work” is redeemed in part five by the extensive celebration of the centennial of his birth in 1909, the reunion at Gettysburg in 1913, the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial in 1922, and the donation of his papers to the Library of Congress in 1923. By the time of Robert Lincoln’s death in 1926, Southerners “honored” Lincoln’s memory, and African Ameri- cans accepted Lincoln’s flaws but could “still admire, and even love him” (452, 455).
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