Michael Burlingame's Abraham Lincoln
Sugrue, Thomas J.
Lincoln, Resurrected THOMAS J. SUGRUE Abraham Lincoln: A Life by Michael Burlingame Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008, Volume 1, 942 pp., Volume 2, 1,034 pp. In 1936, the great Lincoln...
...More recently, best-selling authors have expanded the genre, penning group biographies (like Joseph Ellis's generational study of the "founding brothers"), popular accounts of "founding mothers" and first ladies, and, most recently, biographies that bring together cutting-edge work in social and cultural history with more traditional biographical methods, most notably Annette Gordon-Reed's recovery of Thomas Jefferson's long-standing sexual relationship with his slave Sally Hemings and the mixed-race family that he and his white descen-dents never acknowledged...
...And for those Lincoln acolytes longing for national healing, he serves up a vision of Lincoln as national savior...
...Lincoln the unifier offers the medicine to heal a nation divided by black and white, red and blue...
...Burlingame is not the first, nor surely will he be the last, scholar to put Lincoln on the couch...
...Searching the past—or the present—for redeemers makes for good religion, but not very good history or politics...
...For Doris Kearns Goodwin, whose thousand-page account of Lincoln's cabinet found its way onto Barack Obama's reading list, biography has been a tool for limning the essence of presidential leadership...
...Beginning in the mid-twentieth century, Lincoln attracted some of the most talented historians of the age, among them Richard Hofs-tadter, David Donald, Eric Foner, and James McPherson...
...Barack Obama will not find lessons on how to manage his cabinet or how to conduct two wars or lead America toward a more perfect union in Burlingame's densely packed pages...
...And McPherson turned from finely grained histories of abolition to sweeping accounts of Lincoln's leadership in the first modern war...
...And Burlingame lingers over the difficult, often distant relationship between Lincoln and his wife, the troubled Mary Todd, whom he diagnoses as suffering from borderline personality disorder...
...he uncovered several wonderfully polemical, anonymous opinion pieces published by the young Lincoln in obscure Illinois newspapers...
...No one has probably come closer to exhausting the library of Lincolniana than historian Michael Burlingame, who has contributed his own massive oeuvre to the mountain of essential Lincoln books—in this case, a two-volume tome totaling just under 2,000 pages...
...he was among the first to have access to the complete records of the legal cases Lincoln argued...
...Burlingame's approach stands apart from the most influential recent books on Lincoln, most of which are explicitly presentist in their orientation...
...At a moment when close to four thousand Lincoln titles were already in print, it seemed a sensible question, but Randall's answer was, counterintuitively, "no...
...Many attributed Obama's decision to appoint Hillary Clinton as secretary of state to Goodwin's Lincoln...
...Those who want to follow Lincoln's dark moods will find lots of evidence here...
...Foner situated Lincoln's Republican Party in a decades-long struggle over labor, slavery, and territorial expansion...
...Thomas J. Sugrue is David Boies Professor of History and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania...
...Rather Burlingame compellingly depicts the suffering and everyday tragedies of life in the Kentucky backcountry, where Lincoln's feckless father hired out young Abe to do backbreaking menial labor for his slightly less impoverished neighbors...
...Burlingame's account of Lincoln's childhood offers more than the familiar opening act of the rags-to-riches drama that was Lincoln's life...
...Burlingame suggests that Lincoln's greatness— his leadership of the nation in a time of war— was the result of the politician's coming to terms with his damaged psyche...
...For those who are not satisfied with the book's copious annotation, Burlingame has posted the entire unedited version of the book and its citations online...
...The Lincoln theme is exhausted, but Lincoln, resurrected, lives for eternity...
...In an armchair psychiatrist's version of the redemptive histories of Lincoln, Burlingame resuscitates (for a therapeutic age) the theme of Lincoln as self-made man...
...Though there is considerable debate about when and why that conversion took place, many recent scholars portray a man morally transformed by his encounter with slavery's staunchest critics...
...Those interested in his style will learn that while giving a speech in the "sultry heat" one summer day, Lincoln removed his coat, tie, and vest, as one suspender slid from his shoulder...
...In the last decade, there has been a resurgence of interest in Lincoln, in part because of an insatiable popular hunger for great man biographies, many of them bestselling accounts of America's "Founding Fathers" or memorable presidents, among them Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, and John F. Kennedy...
...Goodwin's Team of Rivals, whose engaging if historically problematic account of Lincoln's inclusion of his political foes in his cabinet has sold at least a million copies, is one of the most successful of great-man bestsellers...
...he waded through dozens of manuscript collections and personal reminiscences, even second- or third-hand, produced by Lincoln's contemporaries...
...The North, Burlingame argues, had a "secret weapon in winning the Civil War," namely "that Lincoln was an effective leader because he achieved a level of psychological maturity unmatched in the history of American public life...
...He makes much out of Lincoln's attraction to motherly women, such as his New Salem, Illinois, landladies, like Polly Cannon, who became his "surrogate mother...
...Lincoln, a man known for both his extraversion and his solitary brooding, lends himself to posthumous psychological analysis...
...Donald produced what is still the best political biography of Lincoln to date...
...But as fine as post-Randall Lincoln scholarship was, it did not stanch the flow of new books...
...Literary critics have uncovered a pre-post-modern Lincoln, evidence of the power of discourse to transform society...
...Although there is no accurate count, by best estimate about sixteen thousand titles have been published on the sixteenth president of the United States...
...This life of Lincoln is too comprehensive, too attentive to the complexity and contradiction inherent in a single life to be proscriptive...
...Lincoln the war president is a role model for a nation in perpetual war...
...His most recent book is Not Even Past: Barack Obama and the Burden of Race (2010...
...Burlingame, who has spent his career editing the works of Lincoln and his contemporaries, is neither hedgehog nor fox, but rather mouse, scrounging in the darkest corners of the House Divided for every last morsel that refers to Lincoln...
...Even gays have found succor in Lincoln's homosocial world and his intense relationship with Joshua Speed, a Springfield shopkeeper with whom he shared both copious correspondence and, for a time in the 1840s, a bed...
...Burlingame is encyclopedic in his attention to detail, even if the book sometimes bogs down in a game of characterological Trivial Pursuit...
...Burlingame, by contrast, hedges his speculation with careful qualification, even as he delves into Lincoln's relationship with his mother, his troubled romantic life, and his awkward courtships...
...Burlingame accumulates detail upon detail upon detail, never content to let a single quotation stand in for five or six...
...For that enduring interest there are many reasons: Lincoln's compelling oratory, his leadership of the country in its greatest moment of crisis, the Civil War, and his role in abolishing slavery...
...Of Lincoln's political career, the part that resonates most deeply with audiences past and present is his relationship with America's long and troubled history of slavery...
...Lincoln the compelling orator counters our politicians' tendency to speak in sound bites...
...Obama has himself fashioned a political image as a latter-day Lincoln (launching his campaign in Lincoln's Springfield, Illinois...
...But Lincoln has also been demonized by black radicals and their white sympathizers as a stone-cold racist for his belief in black inferiority and his argument for the colonization of Africa by freed slaves...
...Character is destiny," Burlingame writes, in a rare epigrammatic moment...
...No one has ever pulled together so much material on Abraham Lincoln in a single place—and no one will again for a long time...
...One is the traditional biographer's journey through the minutiae of a life...
...Every major and minor moment in Lincoln's career is included in these pages, from Lincoln's famous debates with Stephen Douglas to his decision to fire a corrupt customs official in the Washington territory...
...Randall's seventy-five-year-old question with an emphatic yes...
...So many Lincoln biographies gain their traction not because they tell us much new about the man, but because they rearrange the familiar elements of the story into a form that speaks to our times...
...But he also offers a vivid portrayal of the alchemy of petty political ambition and a grandiose sense of the civic in the barely-constructed towns of southern Illinois and Indiana that provided extraordinary opportunities for rough-edged, uncouth, but intellectually gifted country boys like Lincoln...
...In 1936, the great Lincoln historian J.G...
...For their part, religious historians have claimed Lincoln for his copious biblical references, even if the man himself was rather skeptical of organized religion and self-conscious about his own feeble belief in an era of evangelical resurgence...
...Lincoln, he argued, needed to be brought into the academy and subjected to rigorous research...
...Even if a mere 1 percent of the output on Lincoln is indispensable, it might be time, two hundred years after Lincoln's birth, to ask Randall's question again, but this time to answer it differently...
...comparing himself, a lanky lawyer and former Illinois state senator with a short track record, to Honest Abe...
...and he scavenged for revealing details in thousands of newspaper articles...
...An advocate of empirical, professional history, Randall lamented that the study of the sixteenth president had been dominated by amateurs...
...We return again and again to the Lincoln theme because of its role in affirming and reaffirming myths of self-made men and national unity...
...Lincoln, in this view, is a sort of analysand without an analyst, who lifted himself from his emotional bootstraps and thus "overcame the economic and emotional poverty of his childhood...
...Randall provocatively asked, "Has the Lincoln theme been exhausted...
...Lincoln's life, he goes on, provides "a model which can be profitably emulated by all...
...It is impossible not to admire Burlingame's perseverance: he has pored through Lincoln's writings, speeches, and letters...
...Randall's summons did not go unheeded...
...It is rather shorter than John G. Nicolay and John Hays's ten-volume life, published in 1890, or poet Carl Sandburg's six-volume, prairie-inflected populist biography published in 1926 and 1939, or J.G...
...That search for redemption and salvation is the American story that leads so many to turn back to Lincoln—and to his latter day heirs, especially Martin Luther King, Jr., and Barack Obama...
...Lincoln has been cast as a visionary whose greatness came from his ability to transcend politics and, most recently, in a perspicacious New Republic essay by Princeton historian Sean Wilentz, as the antithesis: a pragmatic and often ruthless politician whose career offers a rebuke to those (mostly liberals and independents) who denounce "mere politicians" for their cravenness and partisanship...
...and deploying the sixteenth president's soaring rhetoric in his 2009 inaugural address...
...Burlingame's story, for all of its fresh detail, is yet another version of the clich?d Lincoln whose redemptive suffering saved the soul of America...
...But Burlingame's emphasis on the personal leads him down a second path, through the trees and into Jungian shadows...
...Lincoln has been lionized for his 1863 Emancipation Proclamation, which liberated chattel slaves (actually about 80 percent of them...
...Or as the incomparable Hofstadter wrote: "Here is a drama in which a great man shoulders the torment and moral burdens of a blundering and sinful people, suffers for them, and redeems them with hallowed Christian virtues—'malice toward none and charity for all'—and is destroyed at the pitch of his success...
...But of all of these biographies, none have compared in their number and popularity to books on Abraham Lincoln...
...The results were extraordinary...
...Burlingame's massive biography aside, Lincoln's familiar story, the product of microhistory, as well as mythmaking and memory, will be one that Americans will surely tell again and again...
...But Lincoln remains compelling above all because of his place at the pinnacle of America's civil religion as the secular Christ who died to save America from its sins, who united the House Divided...
...And, most recently, he has been rehabilitated, bildungsroman style, for his "conversion" to racial enlightenment...
...For those strapped for time, the federally-funded Lincoln Bicentennial Commission compiled a list last year of 155 books that belong on the "essential Lincoln book shelf...
...Burlingame is far more cautious than many Lincoln psycho-biographers, such as Charles Strozier, whose fanciful psychoanalytical interpretation of Lincoln veers into incoherence when he subjects the entire national character to collective analysis, finding in both the politician and the United States itself a "search for union...
...But his method of hoarding scraps has its virtues, for in the sum of the details, we get a sense of Lincoln's peculiarities and, perhaps, best of all, the otherness of Lincoln's past...
...Burlingame's approach to Lincoln is relentlessly inward (this is a life, decidedly not a life and times) and grows out of a distinctly modern American fusion of the personal as political...
...Burlingame also conveys the chronic boredom, disease, and penury in the log cabin world that most modern Americans romanticize...
...Burlingame's emphasis on Lincoln's personality leads him down two paths...
...Randall's own four-volume study of Lincoln's presidency, but longer than nearly all the rest...
...Burlingame's biography turns on such nebulous concepts as presidential greatness and destiny...
...But in the case of Lincoln, it may be time to answer J.G...
...Burlingame's biography is refreshing for its relative lack of presentism...
Vol. 57 • October 2010 • No. 4
