I came to this review armed with a full battery of opinions about Lincoln's political career: Lincoln and the Republican Party, Lincoln and slavery, Lincoln and the south, etc. But I needn't have bothered. Such views are largely irrelevant to a book like this. It belongs to a series on American Studies, a subject which has one foot in politics and the other in literature and culture. Befitting this, the authors have tried to see Lincoln through a wide‐angle lens, exploring facets of the sixteenth president which go beyond his life in the White House. A sure sign of this is the subject affiliations of the men and women who have helped to write the book: out of a dozen contributors, we have one art historian and one political scientist. All the rest are literary critics and professors of English, including the editor, Professor Shirley Samuels (English and Women's Studies, Cornell). Professor Samuels does not contribute a piece herself by the way.
We already have libraries full of books on his political life, so a wider reading of Lincoln the man is welcome. Essays like Professor Faith Barrett's on his liking for poetry or Harold Bush's piece on Lincoln and the Spiritual Crisis are a nice change. Carol Payne examines the visual depictions of the president. He liked having his picture taken. Anybody who wants Lincoln the war leader or party politician should look somewhere else; but those who want to study Lincoln in the round might rather like this book.
Having said that, readers who want a lot of political analysis should not dismiss these essays out of hand. At least seven out of the 12 have some political relevance, albeit indirect. Some pieces are fairly descriptive (Lincoln's international reputation), whereas others are more discursive (British‐American Relations during the War; Lincoln and the Indians). Two of the authors analyse Lincoln's outlook: his concept of a nation and his view of the US constitution. Two others write about Lincoln's rhetoric. Whilst Union troops might have thought they were simply crushing a rebellion, Lincoln saw it differently. In his speeches and writings he tried to make sense of the civil war. His efforts in this regard seemed to strike a chord with the American people, certainly with those living in the north, and it is partly this which has made him so cherished in the American memory. Its impact has probably been greater among later generations than it was at the time.
Lincoln is a big figure and has had a consistently big reputation ever since 1865 – a big hero in the north and a big villain in the south. Today his image is uniformly bright: any leader who prevents his country falling apart is bound to get a pretty good rep. That is not to say he may be taken at face value. The traditional picture of Lincoln was a backwoodsman who took his simple but robust morality in to the snakepit of national politics. He was a real‐life “Mr Smith goes to Washington” who viewed politics as a sordid necessity. Once there he emerged as the voice of courage and moderation and an apostle of national unity. Along the way he became “Father Abraham”, the man who freed the slaves.
In fact, much of this picture has been discarded. There was nothing simple about Lincoln. He was no amateur but a politician to his fingertips. He detested the backwoods: frontier life and the hard manual labour it entailed were hateful to him. He was a man of words and books, politics and the law. He became a master of fine rhetoric – too rich for our twenty‐first century blood, that is true, but fine nonetheless. As for the ‘snakepit’, Lincoln could writhe and squirm, plot and scheme with the best of them. He did not end up in the White House by accident but had “had the taste of it in his mouth” for some time.
We are left with a politician who was an expert wordsmith and, if not a wheeler‐dealer, then as shrewd a practitioner of the political arts as you could meet. And there are other things which grab your interest: Lincoln's depressive moods, his unorthodox and still disputed views on religion, his unfailing patience with visitors (his “public opinion baths” as he called them), his belief in destiny and his poetical leanings. The gangling, raw‐boned man in the stovepipe hat was not what he seemed.
This is a slender book, each author being allotted around twenty pages to say his or her piece. The bibliographical notes at the end of each chapter enable readers who are interested in the theme to follow it up. But if there is one problem with historical companions, it is their extreme selectivity in the choice of topics. This results in a feeling of arbitrariness. The truth is that we need a longer book. Cambridge have done Samuels and the other editors no favours by imposing such a modest limit on them – 200 pages plus. Wiley‐Blackwell's “Companions to Presidents” run to 600 odd pages, which is a more realistic allowance. Ideas flood into one's mind about chapters that might have been: a study of Lincoln's personality and character traits, the influence of his early life and work on the mature adult (surely an omission here), Lincoln the family man, Lincoln's reading, his style as Commander‐in‐chief; what he was like to work with – his relations with colleagues and subordinates. The list goes on.
This is a sewn volume and well made: a standard octavo with a fashionable laminated casing which bears a picture on the front – Lincoln superimposed on what looks like a swamp. There is a Guide to Further Reading and a short index. It is a book without illustrations – the natural exception being Payne's chapter on the pictures of Lincoln. I cannot see why this book, in its hardbound incarnation, should cost £50 but the softcover version is affordable. Many students of Lincoln will come away disappointed by the book's oblique treatment of his mainstream career but it must be taken on its own merits – as an examination of certain aspects of the man which are often lost in the endless coverage of party politics and war.
