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➢ 233 Lincoln and the American West: A Bibliographical Essay and a Bibliography The more than 15,000 books published about Abraham Lincoln and his major roles in American history have covered nearly every conceivable subject, person, or event associated with the sixteenth president. But only a handful of these volumes and very few essays deal with Lincoln’s important and extensive connections with the trans-Mississippi West. Even though from the late 1840s onward—for nearly two decades—Lincoln was linked with western issues and westerners, biographers and historians have been slow to treat those ties. That means a significant part of Lincoln’s manifold influences has been largely overlooked . This book is a modest attempt to remedy some of that oversight. A few scholars have discussed Lincoln’s western linkages, however. Their writings are discussed in this brief bibliographical essay, which has two purposes : to note the major books and essays treating Lincoln and the West; and to chart a few noticeable trends in this scholarship. I include full citations at the end of this essay for the sources discussed as well as other essays and books that touch on Lincoln and the West. In the seventy years following Lincoln’s nomination and election to the presidency in 1860–61, campaign biographers, memoirists, journalists, and popular historians rarely said much about Lincoln’s connections with the West. Although nearly all full-length books dealt with the Mexican War, the KansasNebraska controversies, the possible expansion of slavery into the territories, and congressional legislation impinging on the country beyond the Mississippi, most of the discussions were at best glancing and usually had a national rather than a regional focus. That meant readers encountered very little written about the connection between Lincoln and the West before the late 1920s. Surprisingly, the most extensive biography to date of Lincoln, appearing at the end of the nineteenth century, contained limited information on his ties to the West. Written by two men who served as Lincoln’s personal secretaries during his presidency, John G. Nicolay and John Hay, the ten-volume Abraham Lincoln: A History (1886, 1890) devotes well more than half of its gargantuan length to the military history of the Civil War. Although the first and second  Bibliographical Essay and Bibliography 234 volumes provide a good deal of information on Bleeding Kansas, these and subsequent volumes contain very limited discussion of the Mexican War, nothing on Lincoln’s western patronage appointments, and little on Lincoln’s dealings with Indians or the Mormons. Only the president’s ongoing political and military dilemmas in Missouri receive more than passing attention. This neglect of western topics is all the more inexplicable because Nicolay spent several weeks in the West during Lincoln’s presidency examining western subjects the president asked him to review. The nineteenth-century writer and journalist Noah Brooks of California dealt with western topics more than other authors. Perhaps Brooks’s position as a Sacramento newspaperman and his friendship with the Lincoln family helped him to gather more on Lincoln’s links with the West, especially for his book Abraham Lincoln and the Downfall of American Slavery (1888, 1894, 1904). Brooks not only dealt with pioneer influences on the young Lincoln but also discussed Lincoln’s Illinois connections with Edward D. Baker and Anson G. Henry, who later sent him so much useful political information from California and the Oregon Country. Brooks’s discussions of Lincoln’s rejection of the Oregon governorship, California’s role in the election of 1860, and the president’s troubled relationships with Missouri are more extensive than those in other early accounts. From the 1890s to the late 1920s, the emergence of the frontier school of American historians obviously influenced interpretations of Lincoln. The leader of the school, Frederick Jackson Turner, viewed Lincoln as the country’s “greatest frontiersman,” “the greatest American,” who “represented more fully than any other American the ideals and achievements of the pioneer stock” (Jacobs, Frederick Jackson Turner’s Legacy, 163, 141, 111). The West had thoroughly and positively shaped the character of Lincoln, “the very flower of frontier training and ideals” (Turner, Frontier in American History, 217). The leading U.S. historian of the early twentieth century, Turner put his mark on American historical writing from the 1890s onward, calling the historical profession as well as other lay historians and biographers to comprehend the shaping force of the West on American “traits.” Turner was convinced that Lincoln stood out as the prime example of...

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