GOOD LINCOLNIANA
Hesseltine, William B.
Good Lincolniana The Living Lincoln . . . Reconstructed from his own writings. Edited by Paul M. Angle and Earl Schenck Miers. Rutgers University Press. 671 pp. $6.95. Lincoln's Sons, by Ruth...
...6.50...
...Quite the contrary...
...The first is a volume which fills a real need for a selected body of Lincoln's writings...
...One, Eddie, died in Springfield before his father became prominent...
...Mrs...
...Paul Angle and Earl Miers have extricated Lincoln from the petty papers which cluttered his desk and selected the letters and speeches which can enable the general reader and the Lincoln fan to follow Lincoln's public career...
...Townsend's stories of the Lincoln tribe descending on the more orderly and better mannered Todd relatives in Lexington, Kentucky, is the same version as Mrs...
...Reviewed by William B. Hesseltine IT IS NOT to be understood, as the listing above might imply, that the Lincoln branch of literature is going into a slump...
...they wanted Abraham Lincoln's son...
...Little, Brown...
...A couple of, years ago Mrs...
...They were indulgent parents, spoiling the boys and showering them with affection...
...Randall came to a vigorous, motherly defense of Mary Todd Lincoln, portraying her with a more sympathetic pen than had ever been used before...
...They give, however, too little to permit the curious to pry into Lincoln's private life...
...373 pp...
...Taken together, these three Lincoln books give a better rounded, more personal picture of- the Civil War President than has appeared for a long time...
...The book contains an excellent set ot slave incidents in the Bluegrass, a superb cast of incidental characters, a spate of yarns spun by a fascinating raconteur, and a mint julep recipe that alone is worth the price of the book...
...The editors did a complete and careful job, but their aim was to be comprehensive rather than selective...
...Lincoln had regarded him skeptically, remarking that he was one of the "rare-ripe" type who were smarter at five than later...
...But perhaps as tragic as any of the family was Robert Todd...
...Randall's succession of stories —each told in a most solicitous manner—throws enormous light on the personalities of the . elder Lincolns...
...392 pp...
...Now she is back in the Lincoln household watching the antics of Mary's and Abraham's four, sons...
...No one wanted me," he once complained...
...The result was a monumental piece of scholarship, invaluable for Lincoln scholars, but so cluttered with the inevitable trivia of a busy lawyer's and a wartime president's life that the mass covered the man...
...A different view of the Lincolns comes in William Townsend's Lincoln and the Bluegrass...
...The Lincolns never recovered from Willie's death, early in 1862, but thereafter Tad was the unrestrained "monarch" of the White House...
...The others, Willie and Tad, terrorized the White House, harassed the servants, and exasperated all the officers of government from Presidential secretaries through Senators to Cabinet members...
...Tad died a few years after the war, and poor Mary Lincoln became unbalanced...
...Randall's...
...When he graduated, a shy, sensitive youth, he wanted to go in the army but Lincoln got Grant to take him on his staff...
...Lincoln and Civil War books are going into a boom period, and the publishers' lists are crowded with Lincoln, "Lincoln-and," and Civil War titles...
...This, it seems, is the particular province of Mrs...
...University of Kentucky Press...
...In later life he suffered from the criticism of his father's enemies, and almost as much from the kindnesses of his father's friends...
...Lincoln and the Bluegrass...
...It is not, however, different on the question of the misbehaving young Lincolns...
...President of the Pullman Company and twice a cabinet member, he lived until 1926, but always in the shadow of his father's greatness...
...It is only that, in the current crop, these three items have some distinction...
...But Town-send is less interested in the Lincoln and Todd family connections than he is in slavery in Kentucky...
...Lincoln's Sons, by Ruth Painter Randall...
...slavery and civil war in kentucky, by William H. Townsend...
...The boy grew up, morose and unhappy, in Springfield, flunked his entrance exams, and spent a year preparing for Harvard...
...Lincoln's much-famed temper seldom vented itself on her children, and Lincoln's patience with them was inexhaustible...
...Another, Robert, the oldest, was in (or trying to get in) Harvard during the Civil War...
...Three years ago the Abraham Lincoln Association, after ten years of labor, published a nine-volume Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln...
...It is Townsend's thesis that Lincoln's only personal knowledge of slavery came from his Kentucky connections and the Great Emancipator learned his hatred of slavery from observing the institution in his wife's home town...
...Randall, widow of the great Lincoln scholar, J. G. Randall...
Vol. 20 • March 1956 • No. 3
