Memories of Lincoln and the Splintering of American Political Thought by Shawn J. Parry-Giles and David S. Kaufer (review)

This book is novel because it connects firsthand memories of Abraham Lincoln to America’s two dominant political ideologies. To begin, three points warrant mention. First, the distinction between firsthand memories (reminiscences of those having been in the physical presence of Lincoln) and indirect memories mediated by historians, artists, and personal acquaintances is itself a conceptual advance, for insider knowledge and outsider knowledge of any historical person yield different kinds of understanding. Second, while much contemporary social science conceives ideology as a false pattern of ideas that legitimates a dominating political power, the present work is founded on a non-evaluative conception of ideology: a pattern of distinctive ideas around which ordinary people orient their beliefs, feelings, and judgments. Third, ideology is sustained by language as well as power. Opposing ideologies and their historical aspects cannot be described by the same rhetoric. Rhetoric must be the lens, therefore, through which Americans make sense of Lincoln’s life and relate it to their own.

Shawn Parry-Giles and David Kaufer make these points admirably, aligning the assorted portrayals of Abraham Lincoln to the tension between the patrician ideology of George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison and the egalitarian ideology of Thomas Jefferson, George Mason, and Patrick Henry. The authors apply the term “democratic” to the egalitarian Republicans and their Democratic successors and the term “republican” to the paternalistic Federalists, Whigs, and their immediate Republican successors.

Separate cultural worlds produce separate reminiscences. The reminiscences of democrats emphasize Lincoln’s frontier life and alleged poverty. Republican reminiscences, in contrast, minimize reference to personal characteristics and dwell on Lincoln’s air of decorum and gravity, manifested by his distance from the common man, superior mental powers and morality, disinterestedness, patriotism, and political success in the face of determined resistance. During the last third of the nineteenth century, the “reminiscence generation” laid down the foundation for these vernacular and elite memory patterns. That reminiscences were drawn from the full spectrum of social classes is among their most important features. Wide representation makes for a bond between not only the people and Lincoln but also the people’s shared attachment to the presidency.

Dual rhetorical analysis using the computer software DocuScope (see http://vep.cs.wisc.edu/ubig/) and the authors’ own qualitative interpretations connect the differing contents of Lincoln reminiscences to republican and democratic values. This method leads to conclusions about Lincoln’s character, rhetorical style, and class-linked behavior. A growing newspaper and magazine industry spread each portrayal throughout the nation.

The core of Parry-Giles and Kaufer’s rhetorical analysis is a pair of representative case studies. William Herndon and Jesse Weik’s Abraham Lincoln: The True Story of a Great Life is based on Herndon’s familiarity with Lincoln as a man of the people whose frontier experiences explained the greatness of his presidency. Half of Herndon and Weik’s sources included Western men, almost 30 percent of whom had known Lincoln personally before 1850, when he emerged as a national figure. Allen T. Rice’s Reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln by Distinguished Men of His Time is composed of essays by men who saw in Lincoln a self-made man above the people who excelled in life despite the frontier world into which he was born. Only 6 percent of Rice’s 33 witnesses knew Lincoln before 1850. Contrasting images of Lincoln were produced by utilizing the observations of men differing in their relation to Lincoln and using different clusters of words to describe him. “Herndon and Weik and Rice favored different versions of the English sentence,” the authors contend, “because they were trying to bring out ideologies—republican and democrat—about what the presidency meant and should mean” (83–84). This does not necessarily mean that the distribution of readers’ beliefs about Lincoln was bimodal. Nor does it mean that the...