The Historian's Lincoln: Pseudohistory, Psychohistory, and History, and: The Historian's Lincoln: Rebuttals. What the University Press Would Not Print (review)

BOOK REVIEWS The Historian's Lincoln: Pseudohistory, Psychohistory, and History. Edited by Gabor S. Boritt. (Urbana and Chicago: The University of Illinois Press, 1988. Pp. xxviii, 423. $24.95.) The Historian's Lincoln: Rebuttals. What the University Press Would Not Print. Edited by Gabor S. Boritt. (Gettysburg, PA: Civil War Studies, Gettysburg College, 1988. Pp. 43. $3.70.) These two volumes result from the Gettysburg College conference honoring Abraham Lincoln's 175th birthday. Noted authors summarized their contributions to current Lincoln scholarship. Commentators offered their critiques. Finally, some authors were allowed to rebut the commentators ' remarks. The University of Illinois Press's decision not to publish the rebuttals accounts for the second volume. These works have two stated purposes beyond the conference's obvious celebratory aspects. First, the editor intended to publish for the "general public" what he denominates as "the fruits of vigorous Lincoln scholarship from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s" {Historian's Lincoln ix). The second volume's purpose is, in the words of Major L. Wilson, to show "that historians are neither the Olympians they sometimes talk like nor the zombies they sometimes write like. If they are pricked, they bleed" {Rebuttals 9). When bleeding, they throw verbal bombshells at one another. In other words, when the authors' humanity starts showing (Wilson's objective), they forget the general reader (Boritt's audience) and descend immediately into historiography. Perhaps the University Press knew what it was doing in this case. In carrying out his first purpose, Boritt has grouped Lincoln scholarship since the mid-1970s into five major areas. First, in what he calls "The Common People's Lincoln," Boritt places Paul M. Zall's analysis of Lincoln's use of humor as an effective political tool; a selection of Lincoln portraits from James Mellon's work The Face of Lincoln; and the joint effort of himself, Harold Hölzer, and Mark Neely, Jr. on Lincoln's public images. The latter authors go beyond their 1984 volume, comparing the use and quantity of political prints in Lincoln's America with those in Louis Napoleon's France and Victoria's England. The general reader would have missed the importance of this kind of comparative history without Wendy Wick Reaves's excellent commentary. 66CTVTL WAR HISTORY The second section of the main volume focuses on one of two main currents of recent historical scholarship, the role of ideology in politics. Boritt summarizes his own work on Lincoln and economics, with more focus on the presidential years. Glen Thurow, comparing the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural to show the union of American political and religious traditions, differs sharply from earlier writers about Lincoln's religion. David Nichols gives a straightforward narrative account of Lincoln's role in the 1862 Sioux uprising in Minnesota. LaWanda Cox provides a model essay that puts historiographical analysis of Lincoln and race into her own summary of Lincoln's leadership in the wartime reconstruction of Louisiana. The third part of the main volume, on the psychohistorian's Lincoln, is the liveliest of the sections in terms of the historical debate, although the general reader may come away confused. The most controversial writer, Charles Strozier, opens the section by reviewing the relations between Lincoln's private life and his public persona in a human/political "quest for union." As in his 1982 volume, Strozier reviews Lincoln's relations with his parents and his concern over illegitimacy; Lincoln's relations with James Speed and the "crisis" both men faced over marriage ; Lincoln's complex relationship with Mary Lincoln and his increasingly frequent absences from Springfield in the 1850s; and Lincoln's changing use of agricultural metaphors in his literary output. What Strozier omits is his earlier analysis of a national collective paranoia and anger that plunged the nation into civil war. This omission allows commentator Herman BeIz to assert that Strozier has abandoned this facet of psychohistory, a charge which Strozier heatedly refutes. The real question is not whether Strozier has or has not abandoned a view, but why the general reader should care. Continuing the third section, Dwight Anderson focuses on the role played by Mason Weems's biography of George Washington in the...