The Early Printings of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and what they Reveal about his Spoken Words, and: Mr Lincoln’s Book: Publishing the Lincoln-Douglas Debates. With a Census of Signed Copies (review)

Famously, Lincoln never published a book. Historians, biographers, and writers of all stripes have been making up for this ever since, and the bicentenary of Lincoln’s birth has been a spur to their efforts. Oak Knoll Press has published two interesting studies of the publishing history of Lincoln’s most famous literary interventions, the ten sentences of the Gettysburg Address (1863) and the 268 pages of Political Debates (1860), the record of the seven debates of the 1858 Senatorial campaign between Lincoln and the incumbent Democrat, Stephen Douglas, along with several speeches. Fittingly, the books under review here reflect their respective subjects’ lengths: John Carbonell’s Early Printings of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address is a large stapled pamphlet, while Leroy’s Mr Lincoln’s Book is a more solid, hard bound affair, accompanied by a CD-ROM containing copies of contemporary political cartoons, relevant letters and transcripts, and Lincoln’s scrapbook, which formed the basis for the published Debates. (The quality of these digitized materials — which include the binding of the scrapbook — more than makes up for the slight lack of clarity of the illustrations included in the printed book.)

Leroy, a former prosecuting attorney, makes the case that Lincoln was very much the ‘author’ of the Debates, shepherding the volume into print and desiring a wide, popular audience for his great battle with Douglas on the issue of slavery. Between 30,000 and 50,000 variant copies and editions were sold by Follet, Foster and Company of Columbus. Using a series of letters in verbatim between Lincoln and his supporters, he shows how the future president gathered newspaper accounts of the debates, was temporarily separated from the scrapbook, found a printer and aroused the ire of Douglas by the ‘unfairness of this publication’. We learn much of the subsequent printing history, such as the offer to allow Douglas to edit or correct the text, and some estimates of the number of copies printed and sold. Among these are forty-two known copies that Lincoln signed, and for which Leroy provides an annotated listing. Finally, Leroy investigates the mystery surrounding the scrapbook, which now rests in the Library of Congress. Is it the only scrapbook of the debates, or was there another used for the typesetting? Again, the lawyer in Leroy takes to the floor, lays out the evidence in numerical points and leaves the reader with a series of questions and the conclusion that perhaps ‘the mystery will never be solved’.

Carbonell’s essay is also concerned with a puzzle. Although the Gettysburg Address remains perhaps the most famous of all examples of American oration, there is no certainty as to exactly what Lincoln said on 19 November 1863. The version commonly anthologized today derives from the so-called Bliss manuscript, written by Lincoln several months after the address and now displayed in the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., and is known to contain some words not spoken by Lincoln at the ceremony. The four other known manuscripts, newspaper reports, and printings all differ slightly, providing clues for textual detectives to trace the recension of the ten sentences and possibly recapture the exact words used on the day. The differences, on the whole relatively slight, may not much alter our understanding of what Lincoln said but do allow Carbonell to come to some relatively certain conclusions, even if these conclusions are that there is no definite evidence either for or against one word...