The Young Lincoln's Struggle for Distinction

The scholarly study of Abraham Lincoln has long been a cottage industry. However, until the last two decades Lincoln’s early life has not received the attention that it deserves. To a great extent this neglect is due to the perceived unreliability of William H. Herndon’s post-Civil War informants, the main contemporary source of information on Lincoln’s early life, and Herndon’s own presumed bias in the use of these reminiscences. By the 1970s historians seeking “the real Lincoln” had come to believe that, based on available documents, nothing new could be said about this great president’s formative years. Many of them accepted Don E. Fehrenbacher’s suggestion in his Prelude to Greatness: Lincoln in the 1850s (1962) that one need not look earlier than the last antebellum decade for evidence of Lincoln’s extraordinary capacity for growth and intrinsic qualities of leadership. Then, in 1979 with the publication of George B. Forgie’s Patricide in the House Divided: A Psychological Interpretation of Lincoln and His Age, followed almost immediately by two other psychobiographies, the Lincoln field received a jolt that is still sending out shock waves. ¹ Lincoln scholar Mark E. Neely, Jr., reflecting the unfavorable reaction of traditional historians to a largely negative psychoanalytic treatment of Lincoln, referred to these accounts as “unmitigated disasters.” ²

The psychobiographers focused on Lincoln’s early years in Indiana and in New Salem, Illinois, to find the key to his personality, character, and ambition. They have been criticized for their methods and their lack of historical knowledge and understanding. Primarily to provide a more historically grounded and dogma-free approach to the psychological study of Lincoln, Michael Burlingame wrote The Inner World of Abraham Lincoln (1994). Like his predecessors, Burlingame traced the origins of Lincoln’s personality to his childhood and his early adult years, but he also found contributing factors later in his life.

Douglas L. Wilson, co-director of the Lincoln Studies Center at Knox College, though not shunning psychological analysis, in Honor’s Voice: The Transformation of Abraham Lincoln paradoxically widens the study of the young Lincoln by limiting the period of his investigation to the years 1831–1842. He agrees with David Donald, whose 1995 book is the best one-volume biography of Lincoln, that these years were critical to Lincoln’s development. Wilson focuses on certain themes and episodes that figured prominently in Lincoln’s successful rise—Lincoln’s self-education, his search for a vocation, his relations with women, his venture into politics, and his controversial courtship and marriage. Wilson explores these themes mainly through the reminiscent testimony of Herndon’s informants. He admits that such evidence is problematical, but, he reminds the reader, without this material we would know little of Lincoln’s early life. To his great credit, Wilson uses this material judiciously and with a keen critical eye. In the process, he has rehabilitated Herndon’s reputation as a faithful recorder of Lincoln’s youth and has given us fresh insights into this remarkable man’s transformation from a poor, ambitious, and unlearned individual to a rising lawyer and popular political leader in central Illinois.

As Wilson indicates, the accounts of Herndon’s informants, especially the New Salem residents, were often based on vivid memories of a young Lincoln who possessed unusual attributes. Stories and observations about Lincoln would be remembered and told many times as he rose to prominence, These accounts were later repeated to Herndon, usually with only slight variations by his informants. Though Wilson does not claim that he has written a definitive study, his superb analysis of the sources, with careful regard for their historical context and for the culture in which Lincoln lived, provides a revealing account of the future president during this critical transitional period in his life. Indeed, this reviewer is struck by how much we really know about Lincoln during the 1830s and early 1840s, thanks in large measure to Wilson (who...