LAND OF LINCOLN: Adventures in Abe’s America
By Andrew Ferguson. Illustrated. Atlantic Monthly Press. 279 pages. $24.
Reviewed by David Madden
Standing on the front porch of the three-room farm house that is my father’s home place on a high ridge next to a Civil War fort in South Knoxville, I gazed directly across the Tennessee River upon the ridge in Lincoln Park, North Knoxville, where I was born in a three-room railroad shack that is my mother’s home place.
Mindful of the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial coming up in 2009, I recalled the United States Bicentennial of 1976 when I drove north to Springfield, Illinois to give the first of twenty readings from my fiction across the country and back to Baton Rouge in the month of May, sleeping in my car. Visiting Lincoln Land was an early inspiration for my Civil War novel
“Sharpshooter.”
What do those Lincoln moments among many I could recite have to do with “Land of Lincoln”? Andrew Ferguson, mindful of similar moments in his Chicago childhood, was inspired to retrace in 2005 his odyssey during the Civil War Centennial of the early 1960’s over much the same territory in Lincoln Land, searching for the man and the myth, listening to “what Lincoln means to me” testimonials by Lincoln “buffs” and even Lincoln “haters,” officials of Lincoln libraries and museums, and “innocent” bystanders.
“If you’re interested in politics, war, civil rights, literature, economic, the law, religion, romance, human psychology, celebrity, or the infinite application of the graphic arts,” says Ferguson, “then your interest will likely bring you into contact with Lincoln the politician, the commander in chief, the emancipator, the writer, the rhetorician, the free marketer, the lawyer, the martyr, the husband of Mary, the manic depressive, and the most celebrated and most graphically depicted man in American history.”
In describing his adventures and misadventures in Lincoln Land, Ferguson employs a truly witty style that seldom verges on sarcasm, a wit that becomes an ambience for a tough lyricism that never wallows in easy sentimentality. He leaves glib sarcasm and shallow irony to the large cast of characters (his wife, son, and daughter included) who provide contrast to those much fewer men and women encountered along the way who express trenchant insights and poignant feelings about their own personal Lincolns.
He controls and mutes his own criticism, scorn, outrage, sadness, and helplessness, letting historians, museum directors, relic collectors, Lincoln look-alikes, commercial exploiters, and other types gesticulate and expatiate.
Each of his 275 pages elicits a rush of cringing delight. I have seldom before so overwhelmed a captive audience of one (my wife) with quotations from a reading-in-progress—characters speaking and Ferguson commenting.
Ferguson moves from wisecracks to insights to lyrical moments. He delves into the mentality of collectors of Lincoln memorabilia. Famous actress Laura Keene’s dress, stained with Lincoln’s blood as she held his head in her lap, is one example. Imagine the effect on Laura’s life and on the life of the collector?
Ferguson is respectful of Louise Taper, a collector of collections, including Mary Todd Lincoln items. Louise is very real, striking a balance of tough talk and depth of feeling. “There’s mysticism at the heart of most Lincoln collecting… a connection between the collector and collected that crosses space and time and infuses bits of matter with its opposite…. The interest is inexhaustible, the radiance is inexhaustible as well.”
The Land of Lincoln is densely with symbols, paradoxes, ironies, and incongruities, such as Mary Todd’s house in Lexington, Kentucky, which became a whorehouse in the 1940’s. But it is now a fine example of how Ferguson wishes all Lincoln sites were.
Another example is the annual national convention of the Association of Lincoln presenters in Santa Claus, Indiana. As Ferguson walked through the door of Santa’s Lodge Motel, 175 Lincolns—both tall and short--were staring at him. This is a scary chapter, unless you revel in 175 types of surrealism.
An example of incongruity is Lincoln’s simple birth cabin, encased in a magnificent marble Greek Temple in Hodgenville—after a few feet were lopped off to make it fit. Even so, to early Lincoln biographer Ida Tarbell it was very patriotic, very apt, for Lincoln was both simple and magnificent. But 80 years later, the park ranger informed Ferguson that recent experts have proven the cabin to be a “fake”; nevertheless, it is offered as “symbolic.” Yes, says Ferguson, it is “a symbol of the fate of any search for Lincoln.”
Ferguson’s examples seem inexhaustible. “Against all odds, Lincoln has become a business guru” for Tigrett Corps, which conducts workshops in “Lessons from Lincoln.” Ferguson revisits Dale Carnegie’s worshipful promotion of Lincoln in his ‘Lincoln the Unknown,” the success of which inspired “How to Win Friends and Influence People.” Donald T. Phillips’ recent “Lincoln on Leadership” became “perhaps the best-selling Lincoln book ever.” Ferguson concludes that as they were teaching business strategies, Carnegie, Phillips, and the workshops were teaching history, and transcending that, moral instruction. “You can always try to become a better person.”
“Land Of Lincoln” may remind readers of Tony Horwitz’s “Confederates In The Attic.” But Ferguson’s is a much more personal book, with personal implications for anyone, worldwide, who is responsive to Lincoln as both fact and fiction.
As he moves across country from Richmond to Beverley Hills, Ferguson, like an ancient mariner who is both light-hearted and heavy-hearted, tells us more than one story, mostly about how others are killing the albatross (Lincoln) over and over. Lincoln haters convened in Richmond while Lincoln lovers were unveiling a new Lincoln statue, adding to hundreds of other statues worldwide. This latest one looked to Ferguson “puny and absurd.”
Lincoln revisited his Indiana home place only once but he was deeply moved. “Lincoln was the first Lincoln tourist.” As a boy, Ferguson read Lincoln in bed by flashlight; as a boy, Lincoln read Reverend Weems’ biography of Washington by firelight. For Ferguson’s grandfather, his father, and himself, Lincoln sites provided much more about Lincoln than for Ferguson’s own children. In a combative process, many changes had been made, and “Lincoln was the most prominent casualty.”
Ferguson describes those several unintentionally irreverent depictions of Lincoln with deliberate irreverence. For instance, everything that made him love and revere and want to revisit Lincoln at the Chicago Historical Society building was gone, stored underground “in an old bomb shelter on a farm forty miles northwest of Chicago.” From each disastrous return to Lincoln landmarks that had moved him deeply in his childhood, Ferguson drove full of memories and hope to the next site, where he encountered yet another sad spectacle.
As he drove on to Springfield, Illinois, where Lincoln lived almost half his life before moving into the White House, and to which he returned in his funeral train, Ferguson’s hopefulness and eagerness aroused my own--to see “the most important Lincoln tribute to be built in eighty years.”
What he saw was purpose-driven lives creating an “immersive visitor experience” for the ordinary person, on the “principle that says the surest way to get someone wet is to drown him.” The inspired goal is to present Lincoln as an ordinary man among ordinary people to appeal to ordinary people, raising the question, Do ordinary folks “want to come to museums to see themselves”? It is, for Ferguson, the disneyfication of Lincoln triumphant: “Cute and chilling and sad and chipper—and fun! —and never, not for a moment, more realistic than an animated movie.”
Some new-thinking historians have contributed new approaches to Lincoln museums. But to Ferguson, the new history perspective is boring. “Follow the footnotes in most Lincoln biographies and you’ll find yourself slogging through a … thicket” of “contradictions and inconsistencies—the murkiness of how we know what we know about Lincoln--” that “can lead a sensitive soul into a kind of despair of postmodernism….”
Every night in what seemed the same motel, Ferguson re-read “In the Footsteps of the Lincolns” by Ida Tarbell, leading muckraker at the turn of the twentieth century. She was Ferguson’s Virgil throughout his tour of the Lincoln Heritage Trail, over three states; he then became our Dante. You will, naturally, as will I, go see for yourself.
Ferguson closes with “In Defense of an Icon,” the Lincoln monument in Washington. He often heard the words “myth” and “icon” uttered in derisive tones. For him, icons resonate down the ages to us--shattered, they are simply there, soon discarded. What do we think we know and what do we really know about Lincoln? Fact and myth are not exclusive; they are two complementary ways of knowing.
Among the thousands of books on Lincoln, Ferguson provides a totally fresh way of meditating on his life and work. Over a hundred new books each year join the some 14,000 already published. Seldom has a story been so often rewritten. Ferguson calls himself “just a journalist, not a scholar.” He often wryly repeats the phrase, “scholars disagree.” A writer for The New Yorker and other major magazines, Ferguson offers neither footnotes nor an index, and few photographs, but out of the vast archive in his head, many lucid images flash before us.
The postscript embodies the essence of the preceding 267 pages. One of the most memorable testimonials is that of a Czech Jew who survived the concentration camp by holding onto his living vision of Lincoln as the emancipator who reminded him daily that all men are created equal. He saved his money for 60 years to come to the Land of Lincoln, to place flowers on the
Great Emancipator’s grave, arriving in Springfield a week before the opening of the new Lincoln Museum, and on the eve of what witnesses assumed might well be his own death.
Ferguson merely alludes to the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial, which starts now and goes on through 2009, but his book implicitly pleads with us to make that a corrective occasion. Perhaps to deal with the questions he implicitly raises—among many that others are raising--would be a valuable mission for participants. Each reader might pose this question: In what ways may I revisit and rewrite Lincoln’s story in my own mind, make it in my own way my own story as well? In the course of his journey, Ferguson listens to and quotes a multitude of other Americans. I imagine his readers adding, as I did, their own voices.
From moment to moment “this is the saddest story I have ever heard,” the voices of representative citizens contributing, Ferguson’s own voice sounding as if coming across a table in a highway diner. Simultaneously, from moment to moment, something transcendent hovers, behooving us as listeners to turn to the resources of our own emotions, imagination, and intellect to resurrect, enhance, and transmit into the future a more profound and more complex record and vision of the Abraham Lincoln who lives in each of us and thus in the consciousness and the conscience of our nation.
Novelist-historian David Madden is a member of the advisory committee for the federal Lincoln commission in Washington and chair of the Louisiana Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission, located in the office of the Secretary of State. He is LSU’s Robert Penn Warren Professor of Creative Writing.
Friday, February 15, 2008
LOST LINCOLN
REDISCOVERING CIVIL WAR CLASSICS
By David Madden
LINCOLN BOOKS THAT SHOULD GET REPRINTED
A good many books on Lincoln are out of print, lost in the Land of Lincoln. A book out of print, especially a very rare one, is a little like a tree prone in the forest that nobody heard fall. In this year leading up to and in the year of the Lincoln Bicentennial when so many new books are coming out, increasing our sense of guilt or frustration at not having read all 14,000 or so books on Lincoln, we do well to explore the “lost Lincolns” for perspectives that may now seem very fresh.
Having given reasons in my last column for recommending to publishers that Lincoln Under Enemy Fire be reprinted, I decided to devote this column to the recommendations of three major Lincoln institutions: the venerable Abraham Lincoln Library and Museum at Lincoln Memorial University, Harrogate, Tennessee; the two year old Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library; and the justly famous Lincoln Bookshop in Chicago.
Ever since I discovered it in my own backyard at Cumberland Gap (I was raised in Knoxville) in 1960, I have been moved to call attention to the Lincoln library and museum at every opportunity and this is only one of them. As late as a visit in the 1990’s, I discovered an elderly docent making data entries with a number three pencil in a Tarzan notebook (my memory may be a little faulty on the details). Appalled, I turned to my little brother, who looks like Fred Thompson, to appeal to Fred Thompson for a computer. I expect it is by now outmoded and cannibalized for parts. Go to http://www.lmunet.edu/museum/programs/index.html and you will enjoy a very up-to-date web site that describes the Lincoln Library and Museum thus:
“From its earliest days, LMU began to receive and put on display Civil War and Abraham Lincoln memorabilia. In 1929, a room in Duke Hall of Citizenship was dedicated to house the growing collection. The Lincoln Room served as a showcase for the collection until the early 1970s.
“In 1973, University President H. Y. Livesay and Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Board of Trustees Dr. Frank G. Rankin shared their dream of a permanent facility to house the Lincoln Collection. Colonel Harland Sanders, a trustee, responded by providing $500,000 to construct the library and museum. The Board of Trustees secured another $500,000, and on December 31, 1974, the University completed the building's fundraising campaign.
“The Lincoln Room was retired and a few months later, groundbreaking for the Abraham Lincoln Library and Museum was held. The facility was completed in 1977. Today, the museum sees an average of 14,000 visitors per year.”
Thomas Mackie, the recently appointed director, and his staff provided me with the following recommendations for reprint. The notations are his:
Bancroft, George, ed. Our Martyr President, Abraham Lincoln/Voices From the Pulpit of New York and Brooklyn. (New York: Tibbals and Whiting) 1865.
A great collection of sermons on Lincoln dealing with his assassination and the desire for revenge on the South. It gives a great depiction of the sectional hatred of the Radical Republicans and their use of Lincoln’s murder for their purposes.
Oldroyd, Osborn H., To the American People, these Literary Immortelles to Abraham Lincoln the President. (Chicago: W. B. Conkey), 1882.
Oldroyd, Osborn H. Lincoln's campaign: Or, the political revolution of 1860. 1896.
As a public historian I am interested in Oldroyd’s efforts to honor Lincoln during the 19th century and create an early biography museum. These items collected are often very interesting but unfortunately undocumented.
Randall, J. G. & R. N. Current. Mr. Lincoln. (New York: Dodd, Mead & company) 1957.
Some of his works on Lincoln have been reprinted but I do not believe this one volume edition has made it in a new life.
Tarbell, Ida M., The Life of Abraham Lincoln. (New York: McClure, Phillips & Co.) Vols. 1 & 2, 1900.
The great “muckraker” against Standard Oil did several magazine articles on Lincoln based on extensive oral interviews with family and friends of the President’s family. Her work shows her skills as a reporter and talents using oral history to reconstruct Lincoln’s young life and ancestry.
Whitney, Henry C. Life on the Circuit with Lincoln. With Sketches of Generals Grant, Sherman and McClellan, Judge Davis, Leonard Swett, and Other Contemporaries. Illustrated. Boston: Estes & Lauriat, 1892. viii, 601 pp. Reprinted 2001 by The Lawbook Exchange, Ltd. ISBN 1-58477-115-1. Cloth. $110. (Recommended for reprint because the price is too high. DM)
Fascinating first hand account of Lincoln's life on the Eighth Circuit from 1854 to 1861, as told by one of his colleagues who traveled the circuit and tried cases with him. Whitney also accompanied Lincoln during his campaign, the debates with Douglas, and the events prior to his nomination. He reminisces about these events here in an easy style that shows the warmth of his friendship with Lincoln and illuminates the man behind the scenes in his portrayal of Lincoln as a politician, Lincoln and slavery, Lincoln and labor, Lincoln as President.
Williams, Kenneth P. Lincoln Finds A General: A Military Study of the Civil War. New York: 1949-1959. 5 vol. set. (Volume one is reprinted but not the 5 volume set. DM)
That ends Thomas Mackie’s list of recommendations.
Given the mission of this regular column—to inspire folks to discover or rediscover and reread key books and to persuade publishers to reprint them (with good success over the past 12 years)—I want to quote an Amazon customer’s comment on Mackie’s last choice.
“Excellent analysis of beginning of Civil War and McClellan's rise/beginning of his fall. Williams’s book is an easily readable, yet thorough analysis of the political and military goings-on just prior to the fall of Fort Sumter through Antietam. It makes one anxious to read the complete set of Lincoln Finds a General. Obviously no fan of McClellan, Kenneth Williams makes an eloquent case against "the redoubtable McC" and gives a clear picture of the difficulties he made for Lincoln by his hesitancy and obtuseness. In this volume, Williams paves the way for other volumes illustrating the further trials of Lincoln in his search for a military man who could help him save the nation--one who was not overawed by Bobby Lee. One can imagine his thankfulness and relief when he found Grant: "I can't spare this man--he fights!" As a Civil War buff of 40 years, I was enchanted by this book and have spent over 10 years searching for the complete set--I found it once in an antique book store in Columbia, SC for $350 (first edition set of the complete original volumes) at a time when that seemed a fortune to me. I wish I had gotten that set, as I have never seen it again, but I have re-read this little volume so many times that it is greatly worn--proof of its readability and texture. A real treat for any Civil War buff.”
Mr. Mackie’s list reached me as I was reading Andrew Ferguson’s Land of Lincoln, in which he tells us that every night in his motel while revisiting the Lincoln Heritage Trail, he read Ida Tarbell’s In the Footsteps of the Lincolns (1924). He inspired me to order it. It is indeed a splendid-looking book to hold in hand and inspiring (in the best sense) to read in this first year of commemorations leading into Lincoln’s Bicentennial in 2009.
James M. Cornelius, Curator, Lincoln Collection [a.k.a. Lincoln Curator] Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library, put his list in the form of a narrative:
“I am much less a Civil War expert than a Lincoln librarian and fan. The pressing need is for Mark E. Neely's The Abraham Lincoln Encyclopedia to be reprinted. McGraw-Hill 1982; Da Capo pbk. 1983, both hard to find. Dr. Neely probably does not have the energy or time to update it, either. Frank Williams has been assembling something like it, but we do not know what shape that might take. From a previous life I know that the owner of Plenum Press / Da Capo is a very tight-fisted sonofagun, but perhaps the company has passed into other fists by now. McGraw-Hill ought to be alerted, and probably has been, so perhaps Dr. Neely holds rights? Univ. of Nebraska Press has done good work in reprinting rather old Lincoln titles. So too Southern Illinois Univ. Press, and a few from White Mane, www.confederatereprint.com, and even a couple from U. of Illinois. Perhaps post-1924 books are off limits to most people, but the D.C. Durman or the F. L. Bullard works, both 1951/1952 I think, on Lincoln in Sculpture, would be much appreciated. Updating is perhaps what they really need. Albert Beveridge, Abraham Lincoln: 1809-1858 was reprinted about 1970, and fiched I think about a decade ago. Fiche is useless.
“Do the Gutenberg or the Google online projects make reprinting unnecessary? I don't think so, since fiche was nearly useless, and although many more people have a laptop than have a fiche reader, the era is still not upon us, and never will be really, when real readers want to look at long books on a screen. Does this help? I don't really have a top ten. We have enough difficulty keeping up with new publications from the scores of publishers in the field. One more: Robert V. Bruce, Lincoln and the Tools of War, 1956, pbk, 1986.”
I hope I have a strong reason (even a weak one) to show up on the streets of Chicago fairly soon, so I can satisfy my desire to visit the Abraham Lincoln Book Shop. Established in 1938, it “serves the needs of collectors and scholars, professional historians and independent writers, dedicated first edition hunters and casual history enthusiasts.”
When I called to request their choices of out-of-print Lincoln books that they would most like to see come back into print, Daniel Weinberg, the owner, a member of the Lincoln Bicentennial Commission, and his assistants Thomas Trescott and Sylvia Castle, readily responded.
Here are the ALBS choices:
Ben Purley Poore, editor, Conspiracy Trial of the Murder of the President
Senator Paul Simon, Lincoln's Preparation for Greatness
Don Fehrenbacher, Lincoln in Text and Context
Harry Carman and Reinhold Luthin, Lincoln and the Patronage
Rufus Rockwell Wilson, Intimate Memories of Lincoln
Rufus Rockwell Wilson, Lincoln Among His Friends
Donald Phillips, Lincoln on Leadership
Ichabod Codding, A Republican Manual for the Campaign
John Nicolay & John Hay, Lincoln: A History
Harold Hyman, A More Perfect Union
Wayne Riddle, Congressman Abraham Lincoln
“In addition,” says Daniel Weinberg, “it is the conviction of the ALBS that the following should be completely redone: Ostendorf, Lincoln's Photographs, and Neely, The Lincoln Encyclopedia.”
"Also," says Ms. Castle, "I, personally, would like to see Ostendorf, The Photographs of Mary Lincoln, redone, especially in light of Donna McCreary's solid research into the costumes, jewelry and other adornments worn by Mary Lincoln in the images. Using the lens of Victorian fashion trends, her book, Fashionable First Lady, makes a solid and great case that some of Ostendorf's dates are just plain wrong!"
Mr. Trescott, Ms. Castle, and Mr. Weinberg are excellent examples of the ideal role of rare book dealers, that they operate not only from high standards buying and selling but also out of convictions that give them a position of leadership among the experts who write the books they sell.
Other nominations from other institutions and individuals are welcome as inspirations for this column throughout the Lincoln Bicentennial commemoration years, 2008 and 2009. My email is dmadden@lsu.edu.
Each of us has his/her own Lincoln Heritage Trail. Reprinted, these books can guide and nourish us on our way.
Novelist-historian David Madden is a member of the advisory committee for the federal Lincoln commission in Washington and chair of the Louisiana Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission, located in the office of the Secretary of State, which is also the location of the national Civil War Sesquicentennial Initiative, for which he is chair. Founding director of the United States Civil War Center and creator of the Civil War Book Review, he is LSU’s Robert Penn Warren Professor of Creative Writing.
By David Madden
LINCOLN BOOKS THAT SHOULD GET REPRINTED
A good many books on Lincoln are out of print, lost in the Land of Lincoln. A book out of print, especially a very rare one, is a little like a tree prone in the forest that nobody heard fall. In this year leading up to and in the year of the Lincoln Bicentennial when so many new books are coming out, increasing our sense of guilt or frustration at not having read all 14,000 or so books on Lincoln, we do well to explore the “lost Lincolns” for perspectives that may now seem very fresh.
Having given reasons in my last column for recommending to publishers that Lincoln Under Enemy Fire be reprinted, I decided to devote this column to the recommendations of three major Lincoln institutions: the venerable Abraham Lincoln Library and Museum at Lincoln Memorial University, Harrogate, Tennessee; the two year old Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library; and the justly famous Lincoln Bookshop in Chicago.
Ever since I discovered it in my own backyard at Cumberland Gap (I was raised in Knoxville) in 1960, I have been moved to call attention to the Lincoln library and museum at every opportunity and this is only one of them. As late as a visit in the 1990’s, I discovered an elderly docent making data entries with a number three pencil in a Tarzan notebook (my memory may be a little faulty on the details). Appalled, I turned to my little brother, who looks like Fred Thompson, to appeal to Fred Thompson for a computer. I expect it is by now outmoded and cannibalized for parts. Go to http://www.lmunet.edu/museum/programs/index.html and you will enjoy a very up-to-date web site that describes the Lincoln Library and Museum thus:
“From its earliest days, LMU began to receive and put on display Civil War and Abraham Lincoln memorabilia. In 1929, a room in Duke Hall of Citizenship was dedicated to house the growing collection. The Lincoln Room served as a showcase for the collection until the early 1970s.
“In 1973, University President H. Y. Livesay and Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Board of Trustees Dr. Frank G. Rankin shared their dream of a permanent facility to house the Lincoln Collection. Colonel Harland Sanders, a trustee, responded by providing $500,000 to construct the library and museum. The Board of Trustees secured another $500,000, and on December 31, 1974, the University completed the building's fundraising campaign.
“The Lincoln Room was retired and a few months later, groundbreaking for the Abraham Lincoln Library and Museum was held. The facility was completed in 1977. Today, the museum sees an average of 14,000 visitors per year.”
Thomas Mackie, the recently appointed director, and his staff provided me with the following recommendations for reprint. The notations are his:
Bancroft, George, ed. Our Martyr President, Abraham Lincoln/Voices From the Pulpit of New York and Brooklyn. (New York: Tibbals and Whiting) 1865.
A great collection of sermons on Lincoln dealing with his assassination and the desire for revenge on the South. It gives a great depiction of the sectional hatred of the Radical Republicans and their use of Lincoln’s murder for their purposes.
Oldroyd, Osborn H., To the American People, these Literary Immortelles to Abraham Lincoln the President. (Chicago: W. B. Conkey), 1882.
Oldroyd, Osborn H. Lincoln's campaign: Or, the political revolution of 1860. 1896.
As a public historian I am interested in Oldroyd’s efforts to honor Lincoln during the 19th century and create an early biography museum. These items collected are often very interesting but unfortunately undocumented.
Randall, J. G. & R. N. Current. Mr. Lincoln. (New York: Dodd, Mead & company) 1957.
Some of his works on Lincoln have been reprinted but I do not believe this one volume edition has made it in a new life.
Tarbell, Ida M., The Life of Abraham Lincoln. (New York: McClure, Phillips & Co.) Vols. 1 & 2, 1900.
The great “muckraker” against Standard Oil did several magazine articles on Lincoln based on extensive oral interviews with family and friends of the President’s family. Her work shows her skills as a reporter and talents using oral history to reconstruct Lincoln’s young life and ancestry.
Whitney, Henry C. Life on the Circuit with Lincoln. With Sketches of Generals Grant, Sherman and McClellan, Judge Davis, Leonard Swett, and Other Contemporaries. Illustrated. Boston: Estes & Lauriat, 1892. viii, 601 pp. Reprinted 2001 by The Lawbook Exchange, Ltd. ISBN 1-58477-115-1. Cloth. $110. (Recommended for reprint because the price is too high. DM)
Fascinating first hand account of Lincoln's life on the Eighth Circuit from 1854 to 1861, as told by one of his colleagues who traveled the circuit and tried cases with him. Whitney also accompanied Lincoln during his campaign, the debates with Douglas, and the events prior to his nomination. He reminisces about these events here in an easy style that shows the warmth of his friendship with Lincoln and illuminates the man behind the scenes in his portrayal of Lincoln as a politician, Lincoln and slavery, Lincoln and labor, Lincoln as President.
Williams, Kenneth P. Lincoln Finds A General: A Military Study of the Civil War. New York: 1949-1959. 5 vol. set. (Volume one is reprinted but not the 5 volume set. DM)
That ends Thomas Mackie’s list of recommendations.
Given the mission of this regular column—to inspire folks to discover or rediscover and reread key books and to persuade publishers to reprint them (with good success over the past 12 years)—I want to quote an Amazon customer’s comment on Mackie’s last choice.
“Excellent analysis of beginning of Civil War and McClellan's rise/beginning of his fall. Williams’s book is an easily readable, yet thorough analysis of the political and military goings-on just prior to the fall of Fort Sumter through Antietam. It makes one anxious to read the complete set of Lincoln Finds a General. Obviously no fan of McClellan, Kenneth Williams makes an eloquent case against "the redoubtable McC" and gives a clear picture of the difficulties he made for Lincoln by his hesitancy and obtuseness. In this volume, Williams paves the way for other volumes illustrating the further trials of Lincoln in his search for a military man who could help him save the nation--one who was not overawed by Bobby Lee. One can imagine his thankfulness and relief when he found Grant: "I can't spare this man--he fights!" As a Civil War buff of 40 years, I was enchanted by this book and have spent over 10 years searching for the complete set--I found it once in an antique book store in Columbia, SC for $350 (first edition set of the complete original volumes) at a time when that seemed a fortune to me. I wish I had gotten that set, as I have never seen it again, but I have re-read this little volume so many times that it is greatly worn--proof of its readability and texture. A real treat for any Civil War buff.”
Mr. Mackie’s list reached me as I was reading Andrew Ferguson’s Land of Lincoln, in which he tells us that every night in his motel while revisiting the Lincoln Heritage Trail, he read Ida Tarbell’s In the Footsteps of the Lincolns (1924). He inspired me to order it. It is indeed a splendid-looking book to hold in hand and inspiring (in the best sense) to read in this first year of commemorations leading into Lincoln’s Bicentennial in 2009.
James M. Cornelius, Curator, Lincoln Collection [a.k.a. Lincoln Curator] Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library, put his list in the form of a narrative:
“I am much less a Civil War expert than a Lincoln librarian and fan. The pressing need is for Mark E. Neely's The Abraham Lincoln Encyclopedia to be reprinted. McGraw-Hill 1982; Da Capo pbk. 1983, both hard to find. Dr. Neely probably does not have the energy or time to update it, either. Frank Williams has been assembling something like it, but we do not know what shape that might take. From a previous life I know that the owner of Plenum Press / Da Capo is a very tight-fisted sonofagun, but perhaps the company has passed into other fists by now. McGraw-Hill ought to be alerted, and probably has been, so perhaps Dr. Neely holds rights? Univ. of Nebraska Press has done good work in reprinting rather old Lincoln titles. So too Southern Illinois Univ. Press, and a few from White Mane, www.confederatereprint.com, and even a couple from U. of Illinois. Perhaps post-1924 books are off limits to most people, but the D.C. Durman or the F. L. Bullard works, both 1951/1952 I think, on Lincoln in Sculpture, would be much appreciated. Updating is perhaps what they really need. Albert Beveridge, Abraham Lincoln: 1809-1858 was reprinted about 1970, and fiched I think about a decade ago. Fiche is useless.
“Do the Gutenberg or the Google online projects make reprinting unnecessary? I don't think so, since fiche was nearly useless, and although many more people have a laptop than have a fiche reader, the era is still not upon us, and never will be really, when real readers want to look at long books on a screen. Does this help? I don't really have a top ten. We have enough difficulty keeping up with new publications from the scores of publishers in the field. One more: Robert V. Bruce, Lincoln and the Tools of War, 1956, pbk, 1986.”
I hope I have a strong reason (even a weak one) to show up on the streets of Chicago fairly soon, so I can satisfy my desire to visit the Abraham Lincoln Book Shop. Established in 1938, it “serves the needs of collectors and scholars, professional historians and independent writers, dedicated first edition hunters and casual history enthusiasts.”
When I called to request their choices of out-of-print Lincoln books that they would most like to see come back into print, Daniel Weinberg, the owner, a member of the Lincoln Bicentennial Commission, and his assistants Thomas Trescott and Sylvia Castle, readily responded.
Here are the ALBS choices:
Ben Purley Poore, editor, Conspiracy Trial of the Murder of the President
Senator Paul Simon, Lincoln's Preparation for Greatness
Don Fehrenbacher, Lincoln in Text and Context
Harry Carman and Reinhold Luthin, Lincoln and the Patronage
Rufus Rockwell Wilson, Intimate Memories of Lincoln
Rufus Rockwell Wilson, Lincoln Among His Friends
Donald Phillips, Lincoln on Leadership
Ichabod Codding, A Republican Manual for the Campaign
John Nicolay & John Hay, Lincoln: A History
Harold Hyman, A More Perfect Union
Wayne Riddle, Congressman Abraham Lincoln
“In addition,” says Daniel Weinberg, “it is the conviction of the ALBS that the following should be completely redone: Ostendorf, Lincoln's Photographs, and Neely, The Lincoln Encyclopedia.”
"Also," says Ms. Castle, "I, personally, would like to see Ostendorf, The Photographs of Mary Lincoln, redone, especially in light of Donna McCreary's solid research into the costumes, jewelry and other adornments worn by Mary Lincoln in the images. Using the lens of Victorian fashion trends, her book, Fashionable First Lady, makes a solid and great case that some of Ostendorf's dates are just plain wrong!"
Mr. Trescott, Ms. Castle, and Mr. Weinberg are excellent examples of the ideal role of rare book dealers, that they operate not only from high standards buying and selling but also out of convictions that give them a position of leadership among the experts who write the books they sell.
Other nominations from other institutions and individuals are welcome as inspirations for this column throughout the Lincoln Bicentennial commemoration years, 2008 and 2009. My email is dmadden@lsu.edu.
Each of us has his/her own Lincoln Heritage Trail. Reprinted, these books can guide and nourish us on our way.
Novelist-historian David Madden is a member of the advisory committee for the federal Lincoln commission in Washington and chair of the Louisiana Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission, located in the office of the Secretary of State, which is also the location of the national Civil War Sesquicentennial Initiative, for which he is chair. Founding director of the United States Civil War Center and creator of the Civil War Book Review, he is LSU’s Robert Penn Warren Professor of Creative Writing.
Sunday, January 13, 2008
MYRIADMIND
SEE BELOW: LINCOLN UNDER ENEMY FIRE
David Madden
Writer [since 1957]
Teacher: [since 1957] Lousiana State University [since 1968] Robert Penn Warren Professorship in creative writing
Chair, Louisiana Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial [2009, active in 2008]
Co-ordinator, national Civil War Sesquicentennial Initiative
Founding Director [resigned 1999], the United States Civil War Center
Born and raised in Knoxville, Tennessee
Further information as of 2007
EDUCATION
University of Tennessee, B. S., l957. San Francisco State College, MA, l958. Yale Drama School, on a one-year fellowship, l960.
PUBLICATIONS:
Novels:
Sharpshooter: A Novel of the Civil War [U. Tenn. Press, 1996, Pulitzer Prize nominee]
On the Big Wind [Holt, 1980]
Pleasure-Dome [Bobbs-Merrill, l979]
The Suicide’s Wife [Bobbs-Merrill, 1978, Pulitzer Prize nominee; CBS Movie]
Bijou [Crown, 1974, a Book of the Month Club Selection]
Brothers in Confidence [Avon, 1972]
Hair of the Dog [Adam Magazine serial, 1968]
Cassandra Singing [Crown, 1969, N.Y. Times Selection. UT Press reprint, 1999.]
The Beautiful Greed [Random House, 1961]
Collections of Short Stories:
The New Orleans of Possibilities [LSU Press, 1982]
The Shadow Knows [LSU Press, 1970, a National Council on the Arts Selection]
Short Stories:
Over 60. Thirteen Short Stories in Twenty-four Anthologies, mostly textbooks, including Norton, Contemporary volume; two in Best American Short Stories.
Poems: Over 65 poems, several reprinted in anthologies.
Plays: Five plays won state and national contests and have been produced [Yale Drama School, Actor’s Studio, Barter Theater, etc.] and several published.
Screenplay: Cassandra Singing [Warner Brothers.]
Scholarly works:
Touching the Web of Southern Novelists [a collection of my essays, old and new], University of Tennessee Press, 2006. A Primer of the Novel, a major revision, Scarecrow Press, 2006, with two LSU graduate students as full co-authors. Also: eleven other fully authored scholarly works on six genres and two writers; eleven edited works on literature, specific writers, and civil war history; numerous literary essays; and twelve literature textbooks in four genres.)
2006: Readings from my fiction (4), lectures at conferences (6).
Work being submitted:
Abducted by Circumstance, a novel. (with my agent)
London Bridge Is Falling Down, first two in a trilogy.
Bijou, a major revision (with my agent)
Venice Is Sinking (book of poems)
London Bridge Nocturnes (poems) The Art of Innovative Fiction
O. Henry’s Southern Surprises (University of Tennessee Press is very interested.)
Work in Progress:
London Bridge Is Falling Down, a trilogy; first two novels completed. Three chapters published, Sewanee Review, etc.
PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE
Appalachian State Teachers College, instructor, l958-59; Centre College, instructor, l960-62; University of Louisville, instructor, l962-64; Kenyon College, instructor, l964-66; Ohio University, instructor, l966-68; Louisiana State University, 1968-2006.
AWARDS, PRIZES, LECTURESHIPS
Robert Penn Warren Award for Fiction, Fellowship of Southern Writers; Rockefeller Grant in Fiction [judges: Saul Bellow and Robert Penn Warren]; John Golden Fellowship in Playwriting, Yale Drama School National Council on the Arts Award for Fiction [Judges: Walker Percy, Hortense Calisher]; Gitlin Prize for best essay on Thomas Wolfe, Thomas Wolfe Society.
In 2006, UT Press published a book about my life and work, David Madden: A Writer For All Genres, essays by various novelists, poets, and scholars.
This is a start. More to come.
REDISCOVERING CIVIL WAR CLASSICS [in CIVIL WAR BOOK REVIEW--google it]
LINCOLN UNDER ENEMY FIRE
By John H. Cramer
Louisiana State University Press: 1948
By David Madden
Before he came under the direct, surprise enemy fire of the failed actor John Wilkes Booth while watching the comedy “Our American Cousin” in Ford’s theater on the evening of April 14, 1865, the Great Emancipator knowingly exposed himself nine months earlier on the afternoon of July 12, 1864 to enemy sharpshooters so that he could witness the national drama of our Civil War at Fort Stevens on the outskirts of Washington, D. C., during Confederate General Jubal Early’s daring, desperate assault on the Capitol.
The most popular account of “The Man for the Ages” under enemy fire at Fort Stevens is the one that involves “The Yankee from Olympus,” Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. Colonel Holmes was assigned the duty of showing the President the defenses around Washington. When the tall Commander in Chief, his height increased by his tall plug hat, exposed himself and bullets began to fly, Colonel Holmes yelled, “Get down, you fool!” Later, in the act of leaving, Lincoln walked back to say, “Good-bye Colonel Holmes. I’m glad you know how to talk to a civilian” (Cramer, 103).
Lincoln biographers and Civil War historians do not make much of this incident, when they mention it at all. John H. Cramer made very much of it, indeed, in his 1948 book Lincoln Under Fire: The Complete Account of His experiences During Early’s Attack on Washington (Louisiana State University Press). And complete it is, being Cramer’s gathering of many testimonials in letters, journals, and memoirs, published and unpublished up to 1948.
All recorded witnesses agree that Lincoln was there, along with his wife, the Secretary of the Navy, Gideon Welles, and a somewhat foolhardy crowd of Washingtonians and that he was either fired upon as a tall, exposed figure in a stove hat or that the actual target was the military doctor who stood beside him and who fell wounded.
The witnesses, who include soldiers, officers, members of Lincoln’s high-placed entourage, among others, differ among themselves only on relatively minor details. Historians seem to mistrust not only Holmes’ account but that of one or two less famous witnesses. Lucius Chittenden, Register of the Treasury, recalled that a young colonel of artillery was severely worried that the President had ignored his declarations of concern for his safety. He finally got up enough courage to say, “Mr. President, you are standing within range of five hundred rebel rifles. Please come down to a safer place. If you do not, it will be my duty to call a file of men and make you.” The President responded: “And you would be quite right, my boy!.... You are in command of this fort. I should be the last man to set an example of disobedience” (Cramer, 51). Elizabeth Thomas, an elderly African American, looked out the window of her basement nearby and saw Lincoln standing tall on the bank of the trenches and yelled to men near him, “My God, make that fool get off that hill and come in here!” She remembered later that the President only smiled (Cramer, 57).
Those images of President Abraham Lincoln exposing himself to enemy fire, told to cease and desist for his own good and thus for the good of the country, is the stuff of folklore, and sure enough B. A. Botkin quotes not Holmes but Chittenden, devoting also many pages to other Lincoln lore (A Civil War Treasury of Tales, Legends, and Folklore, 1960). And it was a newsworthy event, though not nearly an item of importance commensurate with its effect on the outcome of the war, given the severe consequences had sharpshooters hit their target in the theater of war before Booth’s aim was true in the theater of pretense. That consideration ought to have been enough to move more historians to make much of it.
One witness observed that never before had a president, the Commander in Chief, exposed himself to enemy fire. But several incidents do parallel the Lincoln one somewhat. General Lee exposed himself at Seminary Ridge just before Pickett’s charge
at Gettysburg. “ From three thousand lips at once burst the cry, ‘General Lee to the rear’ -- and not a foot would stir until he was led back through a gap in the line.” General Stonewall Jackson, riding recon at twilight with a few officers May 2, 1863 in a confused wilderness setting at Chancellorsville, was wounded by his own men, and died a few days later. General Nathan Bedford Forrest, “The Wizard of the Saddle,” leading his “Critter Company” against Sherman’s cavalry on the road to Corinth a few days after the battle of Shiloh, July 1862, charged ahead of his men, Union soldiers surrounded him, hundreds of rifles fired upon him, one shot got him in the hip, another hit his horse, but he shot his way back to his own men. The iconic image of reckless exposure to enemy fire is Winslow Homer’s famous painting of a Confederate private “Inviting a Shot Before Petersburg, Virginia, 1864,” daring the Union Troops to shoot him.
Given David Donald’s importance as a major Lincoln biographer, his 1948 review of Cramer’s book is a good argument for reprinting this Roshamon study of a so-called minor event. “With astonishing thoroughness Mr. Cramer has tracked down about twenty-five firsthand versions (and some fifteen secondary interpretations of those accounts) of what actually happened to Lincoln at Fort Stevens. The tales are confused and diverse…. Lincoln under Enemy Fire deals with what its author modestly terms an interesting but unimportant" episode of the President's career. But if it is no major revelation of Lincoln, it tells much about Lincoln biographers, their sources, and their methods. This little book is, in fact, a case study in historical evidence, and Mr. Cramer handles his material with an honesty
and a lack of pretentiousness that any scholar might envy. “
Having satisfied his fervent desire to gather all the facts as conveyed by eyewitnesses, Cramer apparently was not moved to delineate some of the implications of that extraordinary event. Nor have historians, having read Cramer’s research, been so moved.
Consider first that this is a supreme example of faulty human perception, the theme that inspired Ambrose Bierce’s short stories (In the Midst of Life, 1891). The vision of men and women under fire that day had to be affected by fearsome excitement, raising questions such as:
Who fired upon the exposed figure, sharpshooters or line soldiers?
Who did they think they saw, the enemy President or a tall, more-foolish-than-most civilian among the crowd of spectators?
Did a sharpshooter recognize him as the President of the United States of America and spare him out of a transcendent sort of respect and admiration or even fear?
If a sharpshooter recognized him as President Lincoln, did he correct his vision on the assumption that the president would never conduct himself in such a foolhardy way?
Were they shooting at the tall man in civilian clothes or at the man in uniform standing by him?
Did Lincoln realize how exposed he stood?
What was Lincoln’s mood that day?
Was there something in his mind that led him consciously or unconsciously to expose himself and the fate of the nation to enemy fire?
Was he trying to prove his courage to his wife, to military and civilian folks under his command as Commander in Chief?
Would we do well to subject each episode of the war to this sort of imaginative interrogation? For example, to learn what happened in the attack upon the crater at Petersburg we go to the historian of the hour, the one we expect to trust as the authority who has reviewed past research recorded in books by previous historians with, we hope, the addition of newly revealed information. But if we read six or so accounts by six historians we may very well feel, as Cramer did when he examined eyewitness testimonials, hat we are reading about six different battles (I have done that exercise myself). We would do well, I think, to imagine the possible implications—a role well suited to readers who do not feel the restraints historians perhaps need to feel.
As we stand at the window in view of the Sesquicentennial of the Civil War, I propose that as we read War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, 128 volumes and other eyewitness documents and the work of historians derived from them, we let this striking Lincoln example serve as a metaphor for the general unreliability or at least incompleteness of statements held up as factual and as an invitation to allow our emotions, imaginations, and intellects to come fully into play.
the unimagined life is not worth living
David Madden
Writer [since 1957]
Teacher: [since 1957] Lousiana State University [since 1968] Robert Penn Warren Professorship in creative writing
Chair, Louisiana Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial [2009, active in 2008]
Co-ordinator, national Civil War Sesquicentennial Initiative
Founding Director [resigned 1999], the United States Civil War Center
Born and raised in Knoxville, Tennessee
Further information as of 2007
EDUCATION
University of Tennessee, B. S., l957. San Francisco State College, MA, l958. Yale Drama School, on a one-year fellowship, l960.
PUBLICATIONS:
Novels:
Sharpshooter: A Novel of the Civil War [U. Tenn. Press, 1996, Pulitzer Prize nominee]
On the Big Wind [Holt, 1980]
Pleasure-Dome [Bobbs-Merrill, l979]
The Suicide’s Wife [Bobbs-Merrill, 1978, Pulitzer Prize nominee; CBS Movie]
Bijou [Crown, 1974, a Book of the Month Club Selection]
Brothers in Confidence [Avon, 1972]
Hair of the Dog [Adam Magazine serial, 1968]
Cassandra Singing [Crown, 1969, N.Y. Times Selection. UT Press reprint, 1999.]
The Beautiful Greed [Random House, 1961]
Collections of Short Stories:
The New Orleans of Possibilities [LSU Press, 1982]
The Shadow Knows [LSU Press, 1970, a National Council on the Arts Selection]
Short Stories:
Over 60. Thirteen Short Stories in Twenty-four Anthologies, mostly textbooks, including Norton, Contemporary volume; two in Best American Short Stories.
Poems: Over 65 poems, several reprinted in anthologies.
Plays: Five plays won state and national contests and have been produced [Yale Drama School, Actor’s Studio, Barter Theater, etc.] and several published.
Screenplay: Cassandra Singing [Warner Brothers.]
Scholarly works:
Touching the Web of Southern Novelists [a collection of my essays, old and new], University of Tennessee Press, 2006. A Primer of the Novel, a major revision, Scarecrow Press, 2006, with two LSU graduate students as full co-authors. Also: eleven other fully authored scholarly works on six genres and two writers; eleven edited works on literature, specific writers, and civil war history; numerous literary essays; and twelve literature textbooks in four genres.)
2006: Readings from my fiction (4), lectures at conferences (6).
Work being submitted:
Abducted by Circumstance, a novel. (with my agent)
London Bridge Is Falling Down, first two in a trilogy.
Bijou, a major revision (with my agent)
Venice Is Sinking (book of poems)
London Bridge Nocturnes (poems) The Art of Innovative Fiction
O. Henry’s Southern Surprises (University of Tennessee Press is very interested.)
Work in Progress:
London Bridge Is Falling Down, a trilogy; first two novels completed. Three chapters published, Sewanee Review, etc.
PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE
Appalachian State Teachers College, instructor, l958-59; Centre College, instructor, l960-62; University of Louisville, instructor, l962-64; Kenyon College, instructor, l964-66; Ohio University, instructor, l966-68; Louisiana State University, 1968-2006.
AWARDS, PRIZES, LECTURESHIPS
Robert Penn Warren Award for Fiction, Fellowship of Southern Writers; Rockefeller Grant in Fiction [judges: Saul Bellow and Robert Penn Warren]; John Golden Fellowship in Playwriting, Yale Drama School National Council on the Arts Award for Fiction [Judges: Walker Percy, Hortense Calisher]; Gitlin Prize for best essay on Thomas Wolfe, Thomas Wolfe Society.
In 2006, UT Press published a book about my life and work, David Madden: A Writer For All Genres, essays by various novelists, poets, and scholars.
This is a start. More to come.
REDISCOVERING CIVIL WAR CLASSICS [in CIVIL WAR BOOK REVIEW--google it]
LINCOLN UNDER ENEMY FIRE
By John H. Cramer
Louisiana State University Press: 1948
By David Madden
Before he came under the direct, surprise enemy fire of the failed actor John Wilkes Booth while watching the comedy “Our American Cousin” in Ford’s theater on the evening of April 14, 1865, the Great Emancipator knowingly exposed himself nine months earlier on the afternoon of July 12, 1864 to enemy sharpshooters so that he could witness the national drama of our Civil War at Fort Stevens on the outskirts of Washington, D. C., during Confederate General Jubal Early’s daring, desperate assault on the Capitol.
The most popular account of “The Man for the Ages” under enemy fire at Fort Stevens is the one that involves “The Yankee from Olympus,” Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. Colonel Holmes was assigned the duty of showing the President the defenses around Washington. When the tall Commander in Chief, his height increased by his tall plug hat, exposed himself and bullets began to fly, Colonel Holmes yelled, “Get down, you fool!” Later, in the act of leaving, Lincoln walked back to say, “Good-bye Colonel Holmes. I’m glad you know how to talk to a civilian” (Cramer, 103).
Lincoln biographers and Civil War historians do not make much of this incident, when they mention it at all. John H. Cramer made very much of it, indeed, in his 1948 book Lincoln Under Fire: The Complete Account of His experiences During Early’s Attack on Washington (Louisiana State University Press). And complete it is, being Cramer’s gathering of many testimonials in letters, journals, and memoirs, published and unpublished up to 1948.
All recorded witnesses agree that Lincoln was there, along with his wife, the Secretary of the Navy, Gideon Welles, and a somewhat foolhardy crowd of Washingtonians and that he was either fired upon as a tall, exposed figure in a stove hat or that the actual target was the military doctor who stood beside him and who fell wounded.
The witnesses, who include soldiers, officers, members of Lincoln’s high-placed entourage, among others, differ among themselves only on relatively minor details. Historians seem to mistrust not only Holmes’ account but that of one or two less famous witnesses. Lucius Chittenden, Register of the Treasury, recalled that a young colonel of artillery was severely worried that the President had ignored his declarations of concern for his safety. He finally got up enough courage to say, “Mr. President, you are standing within range of five hundred rebel rifles. Please come down to a safer place. If you do not, it will be my duty to call a file of men and make you.” The President responded: “And you would be quite right, my boy!.... You are in command of this fort. I should be the last man to set an example of disobedience” (Cramer, 51). Elizabeth Thomas, an elderly African American, looked out the window of her basement nearby and saw Lincoln standing tall on the bank of the trenches and yelled to men near him, “My God, make that fool get off that hill and come in here!” She remembered later that the President only smiled (Cramer, 57).
Those images of President Abraham Lincoln exposing himself to enemy fire, told to cease and desist for his own good and thus for the good of the country, is the stuff of folklore, and sure enough B. A. Botkin quotes not Holmes but Chittenden, devoting also many pages to other Lincoln lore (A Civil War Treasury of Tales, Legends, and Folklore, 1960). And it was a newsworthy event, though not nearly an item of importance commensurate with its effect on the outcome of the war, given the severe consequences had sharpshooters hit their target in the theater of war before Booth’s aim was true in the theater of pretense. That consideration ought to have been enough to move more historians to make much of it.
One witness observed that never before had a president, the Commander in Chief, exposed himself to enemy fire. But several incidents do parallel the Lincoln one somewhat. General Lee exposed himself at Seminary Ridge just before Pickett’s charge
at Gettysburg. “ From three thousand lips at once burst the cry, ‘General Lee to the rear’ -- and not a foot would stir until he was led back through a gap in the line.” General Stonewall Jackson, riding recon at twilight with a few officers May 2, 1863 in a confused wilderness setting at Chancellorsville, was wounded by his own men, and died a few days later. General Nathan Bedford Forrest, “The Wizard of the Saddle,” leading his “Critter Company” against Sherman’s cavalry on the road to Corinth a few days after the battle of Shiloh, July 1862, charged ahead of his men, Union soldiers surrounded him, hundreds of rifles fired upon him, one shot got him in the hip, another hit his horse, but he shot his way back to his own men. The iconic image of reckless exposure to enemy fire is Winslow Homer’s famous painting of a Confederate private “Inviting a Shot Before Petersburg, Virginia, 1864,” daring the Union Troops to shoot him.
Given David Donald’s importance as a major Lincoln biographer, his 1948 review of Cramer’s book is a good argument for reprinting this Roshamon study of a so-called minor event. “With astonishing thoroughness Mr. Cramer has tracked down about twenty-five firsthand versions (and some fifteen secondary interpretations of those accounts) of what actually happened to Lincoln at Fort Stevens. The tales are confused and diverse…. Lincoln under Enemy Fire deals with what its author modestly terms an interesting but unimportant" episode of the President's career. But if it is no major revelation of Lincoln, it tells much about Lincoln biographers, their sources, and their methods. This little book is, in fact, a case study in historical evidence, and Mr. Cramer handles his material with an honesty
and a lack of pretentiousness that any scholar might envy. “
Having satisfied his fervent desire to gather all the facts as conveyed by eyewitnesses, Cramer apparently was not moved to delineate some of the implications of that extraordinary event. Nor have historians, having read Cramer’s research, been so moved.
Consider first that this is a supreme example of faulty human perception, the theme that inspired Ambrose Bierce’s short stories (In the Midst of Life, 1891). The vision of men and women under fire that day had to be affected by fearsome excitement, raising questions such as:
Who fired upon the exposed figure, sharpshooters or line soldiers?
Who did they think they saw, the enemy President or a tall, more-foolish-than-most civilian among the crowd of spectators?
Did a sharpshooter recognize him as the President of the United States of America and spare him out of a transcendent sort of respect and admiration or even fear?
If a sharpshooter recognized him as President Lincoln, did he correct his vision on the assumption that the president would never conduct himself in such a foolhardy way?
Were they shooting at the tall man in civilian clothes or at the man in uniform standing by him?
Did Lincoln realize how exposed he stood?
What was Lincoln’s mood that day?
Was there something in his mind that led him consciously or unconsciously to expose himself and the fate of the nation to enemy fire?
Was he trying to prove his courage to his wife, to military and civilian folks under his command as Commander in Chief?
Would we do well to subject each episode of the war to this sort of imaginative interrogation? For example, to learn what happened in the attack upon the crater at Petersburg we go to the historian of the hour, the one we expect to trust as the authority who has reviewed past research recorded in books by previous historians with, we hope, the addition of newly revealed information. But if we read six or so accounts by six historians we may very well feel, as Cramer did when he examined eyewitness testimonials, hat we are reading about six different battles (I have done that exercise myself). We would do well, I think, to imagine the possible implications—a role well suited to readers who do not feel the restraints historians perhaps need to feel.
As we stand at the window in view of the Sesquicentennial of the Civil War, I propose that as we read War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, 128 volumes and other eyewitness documents and the work of historians derived from them, we let this striking Lincoln example serve as a metaphor for the general unreliability or at least incompleteness of statements held up as factual and as an invitation to allow our emotions, imaginations, and intellects to come fully into play.
the unimagined life is not worth living
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