Why We Keep Reinventing Abraham Lincoln

Why We Keep Reinventing Abraham Lincoln

From Honest Abe to Killer Lincoln, revisionist biographers have given us countless perspectives on the Civil War President, Adam Gopnik writes. Is there a version that’s true to Lincoln’s time and attuned to ours?

A Vibrant Past: Colorizing the Archives of History

For this week’s issue of TIME, Sanna Dullaway digitally colorized archival images of America’s 16th president in hopes of bringing history to life. Here’s a look back on the iconic images she’s revisited.

40 Facts About the Man on the Penny

Today, Abraham Lincoln takes most of the credit for ending slavery through the Civil War; however, this is not an entirely true fact. While the Civil War had a large hand in ending slavery, as did Abraham Lincoln, it was actually the 13th Amendment that officially put an end to slavery. Senate passed the 13th …

Abraham Lincoln, Napoleon Bonaparte And Other Historically Famous Politicians Get A Contemporary Photo Treatment (9 Pics)

You’ve probably seen or heard of many different ways people use AI. You’re probably also aware of AI image and art generators, which recreate images with an impressive amount of detail or create new material altogether. Today’s post is an amalgam of these two different aspects of AI generators. The theme itself is very fascinating and might pique your interest.

Quiz: Only 1 in 50 Americans Can Get 26/26 On This A-Z Quiz

You may be American, but do you know it from A-Z?

U.S. Presidential Fun Facts

One of President George Washington’s favorite foods was ice cream. Read on for more weird facts about our country’s leaders.

Lincoln 1865

Explore klimbims’ 4004 photos on Flickr!

Lincoln exploited photography to a similar end, beginning on that same February day, when his portrait was taken at Mathew Brady’s studio. Lincoln was usually pictured not as a polished neoclassical man, like his political rivals, but as rough and frontier-made. Americans like a craggy guy in times of crisis. (Humphrey Bogart offered a similar look in the Second World War.) Even his decision to grow a beard seemed meant to evoke a log-cabin hygiene that was then seen as a sign of sincerity. Lincoln knew how to use the expressive forms of his time as a frame for his mythology. Emerson and Whitman, Reynolds demonstrates, understood Lincoln better, as a national figure, than most journalists could. Emerson saw in him the model self-reliant man and Whitman the ideal democratic leader.As the war begins, Reynolds’s lens widens in ways that are less appealingly whimsical than in the Barnum case but still more genuinely illuminating. He explains the old puzzle of Lincoln’s reluctance to fire the obstreperous and slow-moving General McClellan as a reflection of Lincoln’s enthusiasm for the new technology of war. Lincoln, a backwoods man forever forward-facing, loved state-of-the-art gizmos, even urging an early machine gun upon the Union Army that it wasn’t willing to use. McClellan shared Lincoln’s vision of an army modernized with telegraph communications, military balloons, and railroad transportation. The choice in 1862 was not yet between McClellan and Grant; it was between McClellan and chaos. The culture of war itself becomes a subject in Reynolds’s book: it explains the eventual turn from McClellan to Grant through a broader mid-nineteenth-century turn from elegant Napoleonic battle orchestrations to Clausewitzian frontal assaults.Sometimes Reynolds’s kind of cultural history demands more suppleness of mind than he displays. When, for instance, he proposes a parallel between Mary Lincoln locked up in the White House and Emily Dickinson isolated in her home, in Amherst, we feel that we are in the presence of a similitude without a real shape: Emily was a Yankee poet of matchless genius, Mary a bewildered Southern woman in an unmanageable role. All they shared was being alone in a big house. Elsewhere, Reynolds expresses perplexity that the pro-Lincoln satirist David Locke persisted in writing sketches in the voice of Petroleum V. Nasby, his impersonation of a Copperhead—an anti-Lincoln, pro-slavery Northerner. “Given Locke’s actual affection and respect for Lincoln, it must have been very hard for him to maintain the outrageous Copperhead pose,” Reynolds writes. But that’s like wondering why a pro-Biden comedian would keep on impersonating a MAGA-hat-wearing Trump supporter. Sticking to the joke is what comedians do.Even with Reynolds’s more compelling examples of anthropological patterns, small whitecaps of uncertainty may stir in the reader’s mind: a man who loses the love of his life does not need cultural license to mourn, and, though Booth undoubtedly choreographed his assassination with an eye to the crowd and to his father, his brothers Junius and Edwin were committed to the manner but appalled by his deed. Actors know overacting when they see it.Throughout “Abe,” the terms “culture” and “cultural” recur with such hammering relentlessness (four times on a single page, and in that chapter title as well) that one wishes Reynolds’s editor had given him a thesaurus. Not having enough words means not seeing enough types. Culture is a diffuse thing. Reading a book, choosing a costume, adapting a rhetorical style, transferring a code of conduct from one forum to another, just laughing at a joke—each of these forms of cultural transmission has its own vibration, its own dynamic, and its own web of associations.What counts is a sense of what counts. It’s true that, as Reynolds shows in his account of sensationalism, Lincoln loved sad parlor songs, but pretty much everyone in the period loved sad songs; to make much of this is like making the possession of an e-mail address a significant cultural token today. On the other hand, although the Shakespeare whom Lincoln loved was very much the Shakespeare beloved by nineteenth-century America—a strenuous moralist, devoted to the explication of characters in extreme emotional states—Lincoln was distinctive in turning this shared Shakespeare into a template for a new kind of oratory. The passionate phrasing and sharp summations of Lincoln’s speeches—“the better angels of our nature”; “of the people, by the people, for the people”—are shaped by the passionate soliloquies and monosyllabic end stops of Shakespeare’s most agonized characters. (Among Lincoln’s favorite passages was Claudius’s guilt-ridden “Oh, my offense is rank” speech.) The interpenetration of Abe and Will is real. It is important to recognize cultural set pieces, but it’s also important to see that they are malleable and self-created. Lincoln made his time as much as he lived in it. That, after all, is why we’re reading this book.Macro-history gives us a big picture, but politics, as “Hamilton” reminds us, happens in hidden rooms. Readers who seek the political micro-history can turn to Sidney Blumenthal’s multivolume Lincoln biography, now in its third installment—“All the Powers of the Earth” (Simon & Schuster)—with two more promised. Written by someone who bears the battle scars of modern democratic politics, the volumes are all about Lincoln as a battle-scarred democratic politician. (Blumenthal, who was once a staff writer for this magazine, worked as an adviser to President Clinton and distinguished himself in the Ken Starr wars.) Where Reynolds’s account of the most significant act in American political history—Lincoln’s insurgent victory over William Seward, a senator from New York, in the Republican-nomination battle of 1860—is necessarily summary, Blumenthal offers a vividly realized, slow crawl across the Convention floor by someone who has been there.The heroes of Blumenthal’s most recent volume are the so-called Lincoln Men, a group of boosters and advisers led by David Davis and Leonard Swett, who, with a comic brio right out of Mark Twain, employed every hardball trick in the book to win Lincoln the nomination. At the Wigwam, in Chicago—an immense wooden convention hall, capable of holding more than ten thousand people, and thrown together, American style, in a month—they boxed out the Seward forces, making it physically difficult for his delegates to mingle and make deals.The Lincolnians also courted a now often overlooked interest group, the émigré Germans, including many exiled by the failed liberal revolutions of 1848. As Blumenthal notes, Lincoln had bought a German-language newspaper, in order to appeal to those key players of the “identity politics” of the time. (It was the equivalent of surreptitiously funding Facebook pages in 2020.) The Germans refused to support anyone who was known to have a pro-nativist taint, which ruled out a lot of dog-eared veteran politicians. At the same time, the nativists spurned Seward, who, as governor of New York, had backed state subsidies for Catholic education. In the end, it all came down to a single eve-of-battle meeting in Chicago between the Lincoln Men and a group of delegates from Pennsylvania, who proposed a flat-out political swap: they’d support Lincoln in exchange for a Cabinet post going to Simon Cameron, a corrupt Pennsylvania senator. David Davis agreed. Lincoln had officially warned him off such dealmaking, but, as he memorably said, “Lincoln ain’t here.” (Lincoln gave Cameron the War Office, not the Department of Treasury he wanted; Davis, for his efforts, got a seat on the Supreme Court.)Cartoon by Roz Chast
As with Kennedy in 1960 and the Obama campaign in 2008, a macro-moment met micromanagement. The background in each case was the elevation of a novice with a gift for speaking, an extraordinary personal story, and a political record too short to have incurred too many grudges. The foreground was sharp dealing. Blumenthal’s kind of intricate political history—providing all the details of how the sprockets and gears engage—feeds, in turn, the larger cultural perspective. It’s hard to grasp, today, the extent to which those émigré Germans were perceived as the soul of the educated élite. (In Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Women” series, it is the idealized German—and perhaps Jewish—Professor Bhaer, with his heavy accent and love of Goethe, who rescues Jo from conventionality and joins her in building a progressive school.) It may be an obvious truth, but it is still a truth worth telling: history needs both micro-political and macro-cultural perspectives. The room where it happened is part of a world where it could.Reynolds’s macro-history and Blumenthal’s micro-history coincide in their vindication of Lincoln as a profound radical. Lincoln was a single-issue candidate and a single-cause politician; that issue was slavery and the cause was its abolition. But he was a politician, not a polemicist: he created a broad coalition and placated its parts. He was a pluralist rather than a purist.His central understanding, registered in his home base of Springfield—where, Reynolds shows, there was a lot more African-American political activism than has often been imagined—was that racist Northerners who could not be driven to equality could still be coaxed toward humanity. Abolition annealed to a broader “Americanism”—an understanding of equality as rooted in the sacred documents of the country—might produce emancipation. This was an insight that Lincoln, with Machiavellian shrewdness, drove to an armed point. Lincoln was not a centrist politician who happened to find himself on top of an erupting volcano in 1861; his election caused the eruption. As Blumenthal shows, Lincoln, in his 1858 debates with the racist senator Stephen Douglas, tactically conceded points about segregation: “I do not understand that because I do not want a negro woman for a slave I must necessarily want her for a wife.” But he was emphatic on the central point, that “there is no reason in the world why the negro is not entitled to all the natural rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence—the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I hold that he is as much entitled to these as the white man.”In a speech in Peoria, Lincoln declared, about the indifference toward slavery he saw in Congress, “I hate it because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself. I hate it because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world . . . and especially because it forces so many really good men amongst ourselves into an open war with the very fundamental principles of civil liberty.” Reynolds, quoting this passage, remarks that “Lincoln’s loathing of slavery comes through as strongly here as it does in any work by the most radical abolitionist.” What separated Lincoln from most other abolitionists was the absence of rhetoric that was intended to frighten as much as teach—what Reynolds calls “dark reform” rhetoric—or that catalogued, graphically but accurately, the physical horrors inflicted by slave masters.This wasn’t because Lincoln did not know of these horrors. It was because he understood that moving the masses of the North to abolition could be done only by appealing to fundamental principles—reminding them that their own values were being violated, not merely another group’s interests. Reynolds writes that Lincoln, aware of the risks of the kind of nihilistic bloodletting that John Brown would produce, directed “this potentially anarchistic cultural current into two documents treasured by most Americans: the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.” By linking the fight against slavery to the extension of these documents, rather than to their repudiation, he could build a truly broad antislavery coalition—and an army brutal enough to enforce its mission. Every act of his Presidency, from the gathering of the militias to the speech at Gettysburg, moved toward this end.It worked, at a price. For Lincoln, the critical issue was the abolition of slavery; racism and its constraints were, for the moment, secondary. Reynolds addresses Lincoln’s supposed racism in considering colonization programs for freed slaves, noting that Martin Delany, the most radical Black activist of the time, had also championed relocating Black people away from the degradations they faced here. It was a back-to-Africa sentiment, a kind of Black Zionism, that both Lincoln and Delany contemplated. Similarly, Lincoln’s notorious letter to the New York newspaper editor Horace Greeley, saying that if he could save the Union without freeing any slaves he would do so, is situated as part of an ongoing joust between Lincoln and Greeley—and, Reynolds says, as a way for Lincoln to garb “his radical antislavery position in the dress of military necessity.”