Lincoln's Campaign Biographies

3. Promoting Honest Abe, the Rail Splitter: Lincoln’s 1860 Campaign Biographies

45 c h a p t e r t h r e e Promoting Honest Abe, the R ail Splitter: Lincoln’s 1860 Campaign Biogr aphies Perhaps Abraham Lincoln truly believed that there was “not much of me” for a biography of more than a few pages in length. Several publishers and the authors they commissioned, however, thought otherwise. According to one source, within a day of Lincoln’s nomination on May 18 at least six publishers announced forthcoming campaign biographies of the rail-splitting candidate. Eight days after Lincoln’s nomination, a Republican newspaper in Erie, Pennsylvania, the True American, claimed there were four publishing houses with biographies in the works. There will soon be no lack of biographies of “Honest Old Abe” in the market, as well as no lack of readers to welcome them! W. A. Townsend & Co. will soon publish a life of our candidate with a steel portrait in a dollar volume, and a campaign edition for 25 cts. H. Dayton will issue about the 10th of June a biography with a portrait. Derby & Jackson will publish immediately another “Life” written by Bartlett, the Washington correspondent of the New York Evening Post, and Follett, Foster & Co. of Columbus, Ohio, are about to undertake a similar publication.1 As a Republican organ, the True American either received advertisements directly from publishers planning to issue Lincoln campaign biographies or its editor encountered such advertisements in other 46 | Promoting Honest Abe, the Rail Splitter Republican newspapers received through an exchange network. As it turned out, the newspaper’s source or sources only grazed the surface concerning plans for Lincoln biographies. This chapter will show that the publishers cited by the True American would soon be joined by several others interested in producing accounts of Lincoln’s life. By the time of Lincoln’s election, sixteen campaign biographies—a few in several editions and two issued only in German and Welsh—were published, with all but one appearing within a matter of weeks after Lincoln’s nomination. Lincoln’s 1860 biographies almost equal the number issued for his three opponents combined. These works, as was the case with biographies promoting Lincoln’s rivals, were issued in pamphlet or book form, bound in paper wrappers or cloth bindings, ranging in price from twenty-five to fifty cents for the paper versions to one dollar for the cloth editions, and, in most cases, included a wood or steel engraving or a woodcut of the candidate.2 The authors of the earliest campaign biographies used Joseph Lewis’s February 1860 Chester County Times account as the basis for their works. The first biographical account after the May Republican convention appeared in the Chicago Press and Tribune on May 19, the day after Lincoln’s nomination. Probably written—in haste—by John Locke Scripps, the multipage article was published on the same day in several Eastern newspapers, including Horace Greeley’s New York Daily Tribune, and in the May 26 edition of Harper’s Weekly, which featured a woodcut of Lincoln based on a photograph taken at Mathew Brady’s New York studio when Lincoln was there in February to give his Cooper Union speech. Despite working from the same article, some versions, including the Harper’s Weekly piece, got Lincoln’s first name wrong, referring to him as “Abram,” indicating just how little known he was to the Eastern press, not to mention Eastern readers.3 Not all biographical material presented in every Lincoln campaign life was borrowed directly from Lewis or other early accounts. Soon after Lincoln’s nomination, publishers’ agents and biographers either traveled to Springfield to interview the candidate and those who knew him or wrote to him seeking details of his life. While Lincoln made every effort to meet with writers, journalists, artists, and photographers, Promoting Honest Abe, the Rail Splitter | 47 he could not keep up with the mail from those wanting biographical information. As a result, his secretary John G. Nicolay prepared a generic letter that was used to respond to such requests: Dear Sir: Your letter to Mr. Lincoln of _________by which you ask his assistance in getting up a biographical sketch of him is received. Applications of this class are so numerous that it is simply impossible for him to attend to them.4 Several campaign biographies were issued in early June 1860. It appears that The Life, Speeches, and Public Services of Abram...