George Washington may be revered as the tradition-setting first President, but Abraham Lincoln remains the President we turn to in dire times. His words and understanding have a timeless human sensibility–his accessibility makes him “present” when we need national reassurance.
Lincoln’s ability to remain high on our radar is reflected in how often he’s been showcased. In 1922, the Lincoln Memorial was dedicated on the National Mall. Architect Henry Bacon created a neoclassical temple, and Daniel Chester French designed the remarkable interior Lincoln sculpture that looms over the Mall.

In 1984, Washington National Cathedral installed an imposing statue of Lincoln by Walter Hancock, depicting him as the great unifier in “a house divided.”  Lincoln’s Cottage (right), three miles northeast of the White House, is where Lincoln and his family retreated from the heat of Washington’s summers. The President would ride on horseback to the White House’s “iron cage” every morning and return in the evening; Walt Whitman remembered tipping hats with him as he rode by. The Cottage is where Lincoln wrote a draft of the Emancipation Proclamation, and today visitors can almost sense his presence in the quiet rooms.

Lincoln is also the hero of an American music classic.  As World War II broke out, the New York Philharmonic commissioned Aaron Copland to write a musical portrait of “an eminent American.”  Copland chose Lincoln, and incorporated excerpts from Lincoln’s speeches and letters in his 1942 “Lincoln Portrait” (Ed. Note: Listen to a performance by the New York Philharmonic, below). Even today, Lincoln’s words resonate in the present rather than the past tense, as when he implores us to find “our better angels,” or declares that “the dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present….we must think anew and act anew.”

Giving his cultural ubiquity, it’s not surprising that Lincoln has often been a character in the movies.  His assassination was a focal point D.W. Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation” (1915); Walter Huston played him in “Abraham Lincoln” (1930); Henry Fonda was “Young Mr. Lincoln” (1939), left; Raymond Massey was “Abe Lincoln in Illinois” (1940); and Daniel Day-Lewis played him in Steven Spielberg’s 2012 epic, “Lincoln.”  Gregory Peck, Hal Holbrook, and Jason Robards, Jr. are among other eminent actors who have portrayed Lincoln onscreen.

There are over 16,000 books about Lincoln as well. Carl Sandburg’s (right) multi-volume series was highly popular in the 1940s and 50s, while today, David Herbert Donald’s LINCOLN (1996) is considered the “standard” biography. Donald conveyed Lincoln as a self-made man who displayed “an enormous capacity for growth” in a hard-scrabble life that began in poverty but, because of relentless determination to better himself, took Lincoln to the Presidency.

Despite the tsunami of Lincoln biographies, David S. Reynolds believes that none suitably portrays Lincoln within the culture of his times. ABE: ABRAHAM LINCOLN IN HIS TIMES is intended to fill that gap by arguing that Lincoln’s absorption and transformation of “roiling cultural currents” is what made him great.  A distinguished biographer and cultural historian, Reynolds has written or edited fifteen books on the Civil War era, including biographies of Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and John Brown; he was awarded the Bancroft Prize for WALT WHITMAN’S AMERICA; A CULTURAL BIOGRAHY.

In ABE, Reynolds departs from the familiar portrait of Lincoln as an exemplary self-made man. Instead, he maintains that Lincoln was shaped by America’s search for identity in the 1830s-50s. American democracy before the Civil War was formless, more “pluribus” than “unum,” and deeply divided over slavery.  In an earlier book, WAKING GIANT, Reynolds described Jacksonian America as full of “brashness and a sense of experimentation…(with) bumptious, nonconformist, roistering elements…its Barnum freaks, crime-filled scandal sheets, erotic pulp novels…earth-rattling actors” (WAKING GIANT, 3).

 
Continuing this theme In ABE, Reynolds immerses Lincoln in this atmosphere, arguing that Lincoln’s character grew as he absorbed the love of spectacle that surrounded him–the “sensationalism, violence, and zany humor…the penny newspapers, music, and popular exhibits full of strange, freakish images” (p. xv).

But Lincoln was also determined to improve himself, and chose law as his path to a better life.  He attended no law school and, in those years, there was no bar exam. A person applied for a certificate from the state supreme court, and if found to be “morally upright,” was granted permission to be a lawyer. He began his career cramming over law books, and eventually became a reputable lawyer and negotiator. Reynolds pegs the years Lincoln practiced law in Springfield, between 1837 and 1854, as the formative period when “Lincoln became engaged with American culture in ways that would shape him into the Lincoln of history.”  (ABE, p. 204)  He joined Stephen T. Logan’s law firm in 1841, and Logan reported that though Lincoln’s knowledge of law was “very small when I took him in,” he constantly studied and “got to be a formidable lawyer.”  He was especially effective with juries, for he “seemed to put himself at once on an equality with everybody” (p. 209).

Traveling on the circuit, Lincoln took advantage of attending local musical performances. He liked Edgar Allan Poe’s work, and took a Poe collection with him as he rode the circuit. He especially enjoyed “The Raven.” 
Lincoln experienced the “spectacle” of his times. Reynolds writes that he embraced pop culture but avoided divisive politics with equal determination. In the 1850s, Lincoln resisted joining the Abolitionists, keeping a more centrist stance even while declaring that slavery was wrong. But his absorption of pop culture was enthusiastic, and he took notes on what worked and why.

In a chapter on “Blondin, Barnum, and B’hoys,” Reynolds describes how Lincoln enjoyed the daredevil feats of tightrope walker Charles Blondin (right). He compared himself to Blondin because, like the tightrope walker, Lincoln saw the need to balance on the center line–in his case, to promote unity.  The showmanship of P.T. Barnum attracted Lincoln because it showed how theatrics and spectacle drew crowds.  He also focused on the Bowery Boys–the “b’hoys” were a large new group of working class voters Lincoln understood could be cultivated to support his election (p. 494).

Reynolds focuses his discussion of the 1860 campaign on “The Reign of Image,” a theme Lincoln scholar Harold Holzer has discussed in such books as THE LINCOLN IMAGE, and in his essay on “The Photograph that Made Lincoln President.”  Holzer describes two vital stops Lincoln made in his trip to New York in 1860–his speech at Cooper Union, which transformed him into a serious presidential candidate, and his stop at Mathew Brady’s studio on Broadway.  Brady, gazing on the far-from-handsome Lincoln, decided to pull his camera back rather than pose Lincoln in a head shot; he rearranged Lincoln’s coat and tried to tame his hair. The resulting photograph (above, left, Collection Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC), as Holzer has explained, captured Lincoln “in all his Western vigor, but refracted by a new and convincing dignity. Its effect on the political campaign was profound.”   Brady himself later claimed that his Lincoln portrait “was the means of his election.”

Reynolds describes the Brady photographic session in detail, noting that Lincoln acknowledged how “Brady and the Cooper Union speech made me president” (p. 489).  But his description of the Brady session also exemplifies the essential problem with ABE:  at nearly 1,000 pages, it lumbers. At $45, why is this book so expensive?  Are there numerous illustrations? No, the cost is for 1,000 pages larded with detail. Yes, Professor Reynolds has done terrific research. But where is the graceful portrait? Where is any semblance of “the art of biography,” in which a personality emerges as in a portrait?  When one reads the “Prologue” of Edmund Morris’s first volume of his Teddy Roosevelt biography, it’s as if a cinema were unspooling TR’s personality on the page.  

Whatever personality lurks beneath,  ABE is hidden behind a mask of detail.  Ironically, this cultural biography celebrates Lincoln in an age of spectacle. But instead of a dazzling portrait, ABE is a log of a book.

By Amy Henderson, Contributing Editor 

                                                             
David S. Reynolds, ABE:  ABRAHAM LINCOLN IN HIS TIMES. Penguin Press:  New York, 2020. 1066 pages.