Book Review/Lincoln As I Knew Him
Lincoln As I Knew Him
Gossip, Tributes & Revelations From His Best Friends & Worst Enemies
A collected biography
Edited by Harold Holzer
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
Paperback $14,95
“We cannot escape history. We…will be remembered in spite of ourselves.”
-Abraham Lincoln from his annual message to Congress, December 1, 1862
By BILL DUNCAN
The News-Review
This week’s Parade Magazine had a list of books President Barack Obama should read to prepare for his first one hundred days in office. An impressive list, but I would like to add one other, “Lincoln As I Knew Him,” edited by Harold Holzer. The book itself has nothing to do with Obama’s presidency, even though he patterned much of his inaugural around Lincoln’s legacy.
“Lincoln As I Knew Him,” is being released in February to coincide with Abraham Lincoln’s bicentennial as we prepare to celebrate his Feb. 12 birthday. In recent years his birth date has been downplayed and is now coupled with George Washington’s birthday as a combined holiday called President’s Day.
Holzer has published a fascinating collection of reminiscences of friends and enemies of Lincoln, the 16th President, a research project that was an enormous task, but Holzer is one of the country’s leading authorities on Lincoln. He is the author of 16 books about Lincoln.
In this work, however, Holzer compiled letters, diary entries, book excerpts and speeches by people who knew Lincoln. The result is a revealing and sometimes contradictory portrait of the complex man, Abraham Lincoln. The reader is introduce to a completely different man through the eyes of the famous and the not-so-famous individuals, like secretaries, bodyguards, a former sweetheart and even childhood playmates, making this an intimate portrait of a President we all thought we knew.
In the introduction, the only place Holzer intrudes in the book, he quotes Lincoln’s law partner, William H. Herndon, as describing Lincoln “The most reticent, secretive man I ever saw.” Therefore, Holzer concludes , “Lincoln disclosed as little about himself as he could and to as few confidants as possible.” Holzer said that adding to the historians, adding to their frustrations, Lincoln kept no diaries or journals and the nearest memoir came in terse phrases he used in campaign material. Even his speeches were not about himself and his famous anecdotes were just his gift of storytelling.
Yet he has been the most written about President of all. Others had plenty to say about him, not all praise, and in what must have been an exhaustive research, Holzer has compiled a book filled with short takes on Lincoln, even a vitriolic letter his assassin, John Wilkes Boothe, wrote to the “National Intelligencer” just hours before he killed the President calling Lincoln, “A disgrace to the seat he holds.”
Union General George B. McClellan, who Lincoln sacked because he wouldn’t take the fight to the Confederacy, wrote scathing criticisms of Lincoln in his diary long before Lincoln ordered him replaced, in which he described the President as a “baboon” and “an idiot.” Northern newspapers were seldom kind in their words about Lincoln and described his famous Gettysburg address as inane. His political rival Stephen A. Douglas said Lincoln “does not have character.”
Even his former sweetheart, Mary Owens, to whom he was once engaged, wrote to her sister that “Lincoln was deficient in those little links which make up the great chain of a woman’s happiness.” By far the negative things said about Lincoln are diminished by the praise others bestowed upon him and, in particular, a little known fact from Union General William Tecumsen Sherman whom Lincoln met in the battle zone to assess the war. “I was impressed by his kindly nature, his deep and earnest sympathy…and that his earnest desire seemed to be to end the war speedily, without more bloodshed or devastation.”
Holzer has done a magnificent job of pulling all these pieces about Lincoln into one book. In the back of the book is a Question and Answer interview by the publisher about how Holzer collected all of the Lincoln stories. There Holzer stated that he kept the editorial editing to a minimum in order to tell the big story of this mysterious figure in American history. He also gave an insight to his interest in Lincoln which he said began in the fifth-grade classroom when his teacher, Henrietta Janke assigned him to write a one-page composition. The subjects were randomly placed in a hat for the students to pick. Holzer drew the name Lincoln. “So my future was in Mrs. Janke’s hat. Who could have imagined.”
(Bill Duncan can be reached at bduncan@nrtoday.com or by writing to P.O. Box 812, Roseburg, OR 97470.)