Loathing Lincoln: An American Tradition from the Civil War to the Present by John McKee Barr (review)

As Abraham Lincoln drew his last breath, Edwin Stanton somberly observed, “Now he belongs to the ages.” So does Lincoln’s reputation, which has ebbed and flowed with the shifting tides of popular and scholarly opinion about the Civil War itself. Each generation has tried to forge its own “usable Lincoln,” an amalgam of contemporary historical scholarship, political debate, popular culture, and—increasingly—ideological intrigue. Between the Civil War era’s centennial, which produced Thomas J. Pressly’s seminal Americans Interpret Their Civil War (1954), and the war’s sesquicentennial, which has brought us John McKee Barr’s Loathing Lincoln, this evolving “Lincoln image” has undergone unprecedented scholarly scrutiny. Arguably the finest historiographical treatment of Lincoln’s shifting academic persona is Merrill D. Peterson’s Lincoln in American Memory (1994). Barry Schwartz’s two-volume examination of evolving popular views, Abraham Lincoln and the Forge of National Memory (2000) and Abraham Lincoln in the Post-Heroic Era: History and Memory in Late Twentieth-Century America (2008), reaches well beyond scholarly histories and biographies to assimilate monuments, fiction, poetry, portraits, caricature, politics, and films into a more inclusive and diffuse “collective memory” of the man and his meaning. A newly fashionable, and often whimsical, journalistic approach takes readers on a personal journey of discovery across the American landscape in search of an elusive “real Lincoln,” from Jan Morris’s Lincoln: A Foreigner’s Quest (2000), to James A. Percoco’s Summers with Lincoln: Looking for the Man in the Monuments (2008), to Sarah Vowell’s Assassination Vacation (2005). Through it all, this multifaceted “imagined Lincoln” has remained a fallible yet robustly unifying figure—a venerable, if supremely malleable, American icon.

Now, Loathing Lincoln takes us on a less familiar and more sinister journey through America’s collective memory, exposing the darker side of the scholarly, popular, journalistic, and political uses—and misuses— of the Lincoln image. Barr limits his study to exclusively negative representations of Lincoln, which he views as ideologically charged attacks on the essential values that Lincoln espoused and that Union victory in the Civil War solidified. Leaving aside Lincoln’s admirers and even his well-meaning critics, Barr explores what Don Fehrenbacher dubbed, a generation ago, the “anti-Lincoln tradition” in American culture. By definition, Barr’s “Lincoln loathers” seek to discredit him as part of a broader effort to repudiate what he stood for—emancipation, equality, opportunity for all, national unity, an activist state, and a more inclusive society. While the familiar Lincoln image portrays him as a potential source of unity, Barr’s subjects threaten to polarize and divide. “With few exceptions,” he writes, “loathing for Lincoln has meant loathing for an expanded notion of freedom and equality” (332). Too many of Lincoln’s defenders, at their own peril, have dismissed his detractors as an irrelevant fringe whose contrarian views scarcely merit scholarly attention, let alone a concerted response.

By contrast, Loathing Lincoln’s paramount virtue is Barr’s determination to take the Lincoln haters seriously, exposing their dissent as a carefully constructed “alternative narrative” whose oversimplified but internally consistent version of events represents a parallel history of America that appeals to a mounting audience at both ends of the ideological spectrum (329). At every step of his analysis, Barr relentlessly searches for Lincoln baiting across a broad spectrum of popular media—books, book reviews, newspaper editorials, letters to the editor, memorials, newsletters churned out by religious institutes and conservative think tanks, grade school textbooks, public opinion polls, and television commentary. Diving into every debate, he confronts each on its own substantive and intellectual terms and marshals the relevant evidence to offer an effective rebuttal.

He concludes that the bulk of Lincoln detractors are conservatives, who view Lincoln as the “Great Centralizer,” fomenting a war and ending slavery merely to establish an overbearing federal government whose primary mission was the...