Lincoln and His Biographers

Abraham Lincoln would not have thanked those who have made the pile of his biographies reach up through three floors of the Ford's Theatre education center in Washington, D.C. William Henry Herndon, Lincoln's law partner for fourteen years before his election to the presidency, believed Lincoln "had a contempt for all history and biography" in general, because "he knew how it was written; he knew the motives and conscience of the writers of history and biography" and that they were more interested in plaiting laurels and painting halos than delivering the things "Lincoln wanted to know," which were "the whole truth and nothing less." He did not expect to find it at the hands of biography writers, since, as a rule, "biographies as written are false and misleading."¹

Neither was Lincoln much more encouraging to people who wanted to write biographies of him. When John Locke Scripps, the coeditor of the Chicago Tribune, begged for a brief political biography to use for his presidential campaign in 1860, Lincoln at first balked. "Why, Scripps, it is a great piece of folly to attempt to make anything out of my early life. It can all be condensed into a single sentence, and that sentence you will find Gray's Elegy: 'The short and simple annals of the poor.'" The material he supplied to Charles Lanman in 1858 for Lanman's Dictionary of Congress contained only enough to fill six lines in a half-column, admitting that he had "received a limited education" and had been nothing more than "at one time Postmaster of a small village."²

But as in so many things Lincolnian, the substance is not always in agreement with the appearance. Even though he claimed his personal history amounted to nothing more than Thomas Gray's "short and simple annals," Lincoln was not incurious about his own ancestors, and when a political point was at stake, he would not hesitate to use his own career as an example. One of the great injustices of slavery, he maintained, was its absolute denial to the slave of any hope of economic betterment, whereas the Republican free-labor philosophy opened mobility to even the poorest—as instanced, very dramatically, by Lincoln himself: "When one starts poor, as most do in the race of life, free society is such that he knows he can better his condition; he knows that there is no fixed condition of labor, for his whole life. I am not ashamed to confess that twenty-five years ago I was a hired laborer, mauling rails, at work on a flat-boat—just what might happen to any poor-man's son."³ Despite his initial hesitations, he provided not only Scripps but Jesse Fell (a political booster whom Lincoln had first met in 1834) with autobiographical pieces to be used for campaign purposes. Nor was he quite as dismissive of all biography as he sometimes sounded. The teenaged Lincoln worked at pulling "fodder at 25c per day" when rain ruined a copy of David Ramsay's The Life of George Washington (1807) he had borrowed from a neighboring farmer. Speaking to the New Jersey state senate thirty-five years later, Lincoln cited the influence laid on him by his youthful reading of another Washington biography, Mason Locke Weems's A History of the Life and Death, Virtues and Exploits, of General George Washington (1802).⁴ He loves biography; he loves it not.

Unhappily, Lincoln's first biographers were exactly the penny-dreadfuls he loathed—campaign biographies, a genre almost uniquely American and dedicated to one goal, which was motivating voters, either by a pristine presentation of the candidate's virtues to the electorate or discounting negative impressions. In all, sixteen campaign biographies of Lincoln appeared during the 1860 election season, several of them based in whole or in part on the campaign biography Scripps worked up from the outline Lincoln composed for Scripps. An entirely separate biography, commissioned by the Republican publishing house of Follett, Foster & Co. and written by the then-editor of the Ohio State Journal, William Dean Howells...