Lincoln on Lincoln (review)

154CIVIL WAR HISTORY slavery. Liberty and Union were for him, as they had been for Daniel Webster before him, one and inseparable. Jones demonstrates an excellent command of the relevant primary and secondary sources, and although he has written primarily a history of U.S. foreign relations, his treatment of British and French policy is nuanced and highly perceptive . Abraham Lincoln and a New Birth ofFreedom provides a great service to other historians by painting in bold relief the Unkages between Lincoln's domestic and foreign thinking. Mary Ann Heiss Kent State University Lincoln on Lincoln. Selected and edited by Paul M. ZaIl. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999. Pp. xiii, 198. $25.00.) Since Abraham Lincoln did not live to write his memoirs, Paul M. ZaIl has performed the task for him by gathering up fragments of self-description from Lincoln's letters and speeches and stitching them together with a series of notes to form a brief pseudo-autobiography. The result is a clever volume, but one that students of Lincoln will find more entertaining than enlightening. For those already familiar with the details of Lincoln's life, the book quickly becomes a sort of parlor game of trying to identify the sources of the various passages without turning to the endnotes. Zall's editorial notes provide some basic context and an occasional flash of insight, as when he quotes Weems's Life ofWashington (which Lincoln read as a child), describing the approach to Trenton in 1776: "The object before them was too vast to allow one thought about difficulties" (13). How long did that phrase lie fallow in Lincoln's mind until his 1862 letter to Cuthbert Bullitt: "What I deal with is too vast for malicious deaUng"? Unfortunately for the more casual reader, the notes linking the passages are often short, to the point of being cryptic, and sometimes misleading. The quote from Weems, for example, is presented without reference to Lincoln's later use of the same phrase. The editor summarizes Lincoln's complex relationship with George McClellan in a single sentence by stating that Lincoln was frustrated because McCleUan "persisted in fighting a war of attrition" (128), when attrition was the strategy McClellan avoided at all costs. Another note claims that after Lincoln's mother died, his father left Lincoln and his sister "alone on the frontier for nine months while he courted Sally Bush Johnston"; they were actually left in the admittedly questionable care of cousin Dennis Hanks, almost certainly for less than nine months. Further, as ZaIl acknowledges, the story of Lincoln's Ufe is unavoidably distorted by the fact that Lincoln was not given to self-revelation. In the eleven volumes of his collected writings he never once mentioned Ann Rutledge, arguably the great romantic love of his life, who accordingly does not appear in the BOOK REVIEWS155 body of this work. In contrast, a relatively trivial 1841 murder trail occupies four and a half pages, simply because Lincoln sent a long, amusing account of it to his friend Joshua Speed. The problem of selection becomes worse in the later chapters, since there is little material from Lincoln's presidential years as intimate as his more personal letters to Speed or as descriptive as the two brief campaign autobiographies he wrote in 1859 and i860. Despite the limitations inherent in its concept, the book does add to our understanding ofAbraham Lincoln by demonstrating how consistent he was in his self-image and self-description. Although his ambition drove him to become in turn storekeeper, surveyor, postmaster, legislator, lawyer, and ultimately president , at each step he remained true to himself and his past. That Lincoln could accurately state in i860 that his position on slavery was essentially the same as it had been in 1837 (and that ZaIl could seamlessly weave together phrases from both years into a single sentence) is evidence that beneath the pragmatism of the man who said "my policy is to have no poUcy" lay a hard core of unchanging principle. Gerald J. Prokopowicz The Lincoln Museum LincolnAs IKnew Him: Gossip, Tributes, andRevelationsfrom His Best Friends and Worst Enemies. Edited by Harold Hölzer. (Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books...