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

The cover illustration chosen for this latest study of America’s sixteenth president is a chromolithograph print, dating from 1898, entitled Abraham Lincoln’s Return Home after His Successful Campaign for the Presidency of the United States in October, 1860 (see the Library of Congress version: http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2003677696/). The perspective in this lithograph is just slightly off and, even though he is foregrounded, Lincoln still seems out of scale with the horse he is riding (were he to dismount, he would be a head or so higher than the steed) and with the bystanders on the sidewalk. For this reason, if for no other, this celebratory image is an extremely appropriate one for a 2017 study of Lincoln in national and political memory. It is not simply the recent sesquicentennial of the Civil War that has brought Lincoln to the forefront of American consciousness again. In many respects, as the authors of this volume emphasize, he has never been away. Thanks to the efforts of what they term the “reminiscence generation,” the men and women who lived during the “period of reminiscences” that extended from Lincoln’s assassination in 1865 to the start of the twentieth century, Lincoln remains deeply embedded in American culture and politics: slightly larger than life, slightly out of scale with his surroundings, still at the center of the picture (2).

In this volume, politics is the particular picture under consideration, specifically the ways in which Lincoln reminiscences reinforced “competing conceptions of republican and democratic citizenship” in respect of popular understandings of, expectations about, and influence on “ideals of character, citizenship, and presidential leadership” (3). Very much a study for our times, this book is about how Lincoln, through the power of memory, became a man for all political seasons. The evidential base for the argument comprises some five hundred first-person reminiscences of the president produced by his contemporaries. These range from personal scrapbooks through brief newspaper articles to book-length monographs and have been interrogated via a combination of rhetorical and corpus research methods. The rhetorical methods locate the reminiscences in the context of their era in order to assess what particular themes and ideas percolated culturally at the time, with a view to tracing these forward generationally and politically, taking the story up to the Populist/Progressive platforms of the turn of the twentieth century. The second, the linguistic corpus method, utilizes a stylistic analysis tool, DocuScope, in order to identify the dominant stylistic attributes of these reminiscences. Together, the authors propose, these complementary approaches can enhance our understanding of Lincoln’s role in American culture and politics, specifically in respect of these competing conceptions of republicanism and democracy as each evolved from the nation’s founding in the eighteenth century.

“Entering the Lincoln memory market,” the authors assert at the beginning of their own foray into it, “was not for the faint of heart. Remembering Lincoln proved competitive and rancorous” (14). Then, as now, of course, it also proved lucrative. Lincoln memory, and its accompanying memorabilia, grew in ground already well-tilled by the peculiar American tendency not just to detail every piece of documentary evidence pertaining to the nation’s development but to track its traditions and trace its national and international trajectory through biographies and histories, etiquette guides and self-help manuals, slave narratives and war memoirs alike. In effect, Lincoln reminiscences were only one part of a burgeoning publications platform upon which the “imagined community,” to use sociologist Benedict Anderson’s famous concept, was constructed and from which it was disseminated across class, race, and time in the United States. Yet memories of Lincoln also stood apart from the mass outpouring of national narrative that flooded the nineteenth-century market, located as they were at the confluence of the two streams of political discourse, republicanism and democracy. “No president before or since,” the authors argue,”embodied paradigms of both opposing camps as consummately as Lincoln” (139).

Lincoln reminiscences, however, were also conceived in the context of a civil conflict itself fought, as Lincoln himself summed it up, over competing conceptions of liberty. This study, however, is less concerned with Lincoln’s moral message, and how that was memorialized, than it is with the act of memorialization itself. It is, in short, an exploration of the style over the substance as far as memories of Lincoln are concerned. So at first glance the questions it asks of these, concerning class and character, style and social mobility, may be of more interest to political scientists and linguists than historians as such. The answers it arrives at, however, have a wider resonance. This study offers an alternative and insightful angle on American political development in the Civil War era, broadly conceived. It traces an original path through the persistent tensions between republican elitism and democratic equality in American political and, indeed, social life. In particular, it is astute about the ways in which Lincoln’s memory was disseminated through the press to a wider public audience, and how this dissemination enabled the debate over Lincoln’s character and leadership style, his political agenda and his private, personal perspective, to speak to a wider national debate about language and presidential character. For that reason alone, Memories of Lincoln is likely to be of interest to a broad readership in 2017 and beyond as questions of class, character, and presidential leadership gain media traction once more.