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

In Memories of Lincoln, Shawn Parry-Giles and David Kaufer study a form of life writing they term the "Lincoln reminiscence": a "complete text containing a first-person memory (or memories) of Lincoln after his death" (3). The Lincoln reminiscence crosses traditional formal boundaries to bring together a textual archive that ranges from the newspaper snippet to the essay to the book-length biography, authored by individuals from across the socio-politico-economic spectrum of the United States. This diverse assemblage affords the authors a range of critical vantages on how the representation of Abraham Lincoln via personal memories published after his death shaped conceptions of US citizenship and the US presidency in ways that remain influential to contemporary experience.

Lincoln reminiscences, as Parry-Giles and Kaufer theorize them in the book's introduction, are works of life writing on at least two levels: as first-person narratives relating the memory of Lincoln, they represent the speaking "I" autobiographically while at the same time representing the spoken-of Lincoln biographically. Memories of Lincoln explicitly formulate national character as embodied in a president and implicitly formulate a relationship between the citizen-self and that president. Specifically, these texts were a site in which republican and democratic visions of leadership competed for prominence. A republican conception emphasized elite leadership of "noble leaders modeling ideal character traits for the nation's citizens to emulate" (5), while an emergent democratic conception driven by enfranchisement of an emerging white middle class emphasized the political agency of the common person. Debates over the qualities of citizens and leaders played out in competing conceptions of the presidency. Lincoln's relevance to these debates begins in the historical positioning of his presidency in this period, and is further heightened by his exceptional role in defining the nation through his Civil War leadership. Compounding this, his assassination spurred an outpouring of written memorial (and a market demand for that memorial), and because it cut his own life history short, left him a figure open to be claimed and interpreted in multiple ways by multiple constituencies.

The following chapters approach the Lincoln reminiscence archive with specific questions, contexts, and methods. Chapter 1 elaborates on the definition of the Lincoln reminiscence through an examination of the shorter-form texts, which tended to circulate in an expanding commercial press to a growing readership. Authors of reminiscences established credibility through claiming intimacy with Lincoln, thereby "reducing the psychological distance between the people and their president" (27). This intimacy could be direct, based on personal relationship, but it could also be indirect, based on interaction with someone else who had a personal relationship with Lincoln. Common rhetorical strategies emerge to bolster the performance of intimacy. Reminiscence authors often employed 1) the visual metaphor of the portrait or sketch; 2) an observational style that planted themselves as eyewitnesses to the scene; 3) explicit pledges of authenticity by the author, reviewer, or editor; 4) character dialogue; and 5) if the author was an acquaintance, material from a letter from Lincoln. As reminiscences circulated in newspapers and magazines, they became the raw material for another form, the scrapbook, created by individuals and organizations alike. The growing commercial press created the environment in which Lincoln reminiscences became a popular form and an accessible route to authorship.

Chapters 2 and 3 shift focus to longer examples of the form. Parry-Giles and Kaufer argue that full-length biographies become the sites of debate over presidential character via a debate over biographical practice. They offer the framework of Plutarchian and Boswellian approaches to biography as contrasting republican and democratic views of the requisite character of a public leader. The Plutarchian approach, favoring the exclusion of the leader's private life in favor of an evaluation of public works, contributes to the view of a leader as exceptional. The Boswellian approach...