Abe

David S. Reynolds is a Distinguished Professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is the author of Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography, winner of the Bancroft Prize and the Ambassador Book Award. His other books include Beneath the American Renaissance, winner of the Christian Gauss Award; John Brown, Abolitionist; Waking Giant: America in the Age of Jackson; Mightier than the Sword: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Battle for America; and Lincoln's Selected Writings.   

He liked to be called Lincoln, plain Lincoln, as one of his Illinois law associates reported. He was Mr. Lincoln to his wife, Mary Todd Lincoln; she also called him Father he affectionately called her Mother or Molly. He was the Tycoon to his wartime secretaries John M. Hay and John G. Nicolay. In a Civil War marching song, he was Father Abraham. He hated the formal Mr. President. As though to mediate between the different possibilities, he signed his name A. Lincoln.

But to the millions, he was Abe. Honest Abe. Old Abe. Uncle Abe. Abe the Illinois Rail splitter.

Lincoln did not especially like the Abe nickname, but he knew that without it he would not have won the presidency in 1860. His image as Abe, the approachable everyman from what was then the West, was promoted everywhere that year, and it swept him into office. He remarked, All through the campaign my friends have been calling me Honest Old Abe, and I have been elected mainly on that cry.

This book is the story of Abe a cultural biography of America s greatest president and its central historical figure. Placing Lincoln in his rich contexts, this book explores the ways in which his absorption and transformation of roiling cultural currents made him into the leader Leo Tolstoy hailed as the only real giant among all the great national heroes and statesmen of history, and whom Karl Marx called one of the rare men who succeed in becoming great, without ceasing to be good.

Among the some sixteen thousand books on Lincoln more books than on any other historical figure except Jesus Christ there are many biographies, a number of them superb and several that contain illuminating information about his era. From the earliest biographies, there has been an interest in Lincoln s politics; in recent times, that interest has expanded to include other aspects of the social and cultural scene. But there has appeared to date no full scale cultural biography, which alone can capture Lincoln in his historical fullness.

The limitations of standard biography are visible even in one of the finest single volume books on the sixteenth president, David Herbert Donald s Lincoln. The story Donald tells is by now familiar. Born in 1809 in a one room log cabin in frontier Kentucky, the son of undistinguished parents, Lincoln, with less than a year of formal schooling, rose to the pinnacle of power through hard work, intelligence, political shrewdness, and a good amount of luck. Donald relates the story amply and adeptly. But he doesn t go far beyond the facts of Lincoln s life. Stating that his is a biography written from Lincoln s point of view, he writes, I have stuck close to Lincoln, who was only indirectly connected with the economic and social transformations of the period.

Convinced, surprisingly, that nineteenth century America offered few nurturing materials, Donald presents Lincoln as the quintessential self made man, who displayed enormous capacity for growth, which enabled one of the least experienced and poorly prepared men ever elected to high office to become the greatest American president. Some version of this single handed climb from primitiveness to greatness narrative informs other biographies as well.

Even the popular culture around Lincoln, in Donald s view, was tame and uninteresting a cotton candy sea of maudlin writing and preachy effusions, as captured in Donald s generalization about the Civil War era: The feminine fifties were gone, but they were followed by the sentimental sixties and the saccharine seventies.

It s true that there was a sentimental strain in the culture that held appeal for Lincoln. But the cultural scene was also