Abraham Lincoln: A Biography

Foreword

FOREWORD Michael Burlingame --PUBLISHED OVER half a century ago, Benjamin P. Thomas's Abraham Lzncoln: A Biography remains the best single-volume life ofthe sixteenth president. The only other serious contender for that designation is David Herbert Donald's 1995 biography, but as critic Jonathan Yardley rightly noted, "in no significant way does Donald's Lincoln supplant Benpmin Thomas's." In Yardley's view, the Thomas biography is "the definitive work" for readers "looking for Lincoln at once in full and brief'" Prominent historians share Yardley's enthusiasm. In 1999, Allen C. Guelzo, two-time winner ofthe prestigious Lincoln Prize and author ofAbraham Lincoln: Redeemer President, Lincoln and Douglas: The Dpbates That DifinedAmerica, and Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation: Thl' End rifSlavery in America, described Thomas's Lincoln as "the finest onevolume survey biography" of the sixteenth president." Mark E. ~eely Jr., who won the Pulitzer Prize for his monograph The Fate rifLlberty: Abraham Lincoln and Civil Liberties, deemed Thomas's book "wonderful," a "masterpiece," an "elegant and balanced synthesis" resting on "the best research" and written in a "fluid and readable style.'" That style moved one literary scholar, James Hurt, to praise Thomas 's hiography for its restraint: "There is no sentimentalizing in the book.... Powerfully emotional scenes such as the First and Second Inaugural ceremonies and the deaths of Lincoln's children are told crisply and economically and thereby earn their emotional power by suggestion rather than by rhetorical violins in the background." Upon rereading the 548-page biography in 1992, Hurt was surprised by "how short it seemed," for "the organization is so straightforward and the style so bare and lucid that it moves quickly and purposefully.'" Xll Foreword Thomas worked hard on his prose. As a fellow Lincolnian, Paul M. Angle, noted: "In his own writing, Thomas developed the faculty of self-criticism, revising repeatedly for clarity and movement, especially movement.'" Thomas recalled that during a decade-long period when he abandoned historical research and writing to enter the business world, he used his spare time to "read widely in general literature, learning how a good novelist builds up his plot and something about literary grace and artful writing. I returned to history with a new perspective , a new appreciation of good writing, and a resolve to avoid the stuffiness and rigidity" that was "an occupational hazard to historical writers." He was dismayed that "all too often, academic biographers, and academic historians, too, refuse to face up to the fact that they work in a literary medium, and pay far too little attention to literary craftsmanship." He recommended that universities "teach our future historians how to write. Unless things have changed since my days in graduate school, it might almost be said that a man must slough off the ponderosity that adheres to him from graduate training before he can hope to write well."" There is no trace of"ponderosity" in Abraham Lincoln: A Biography. Thomas's superior literary craftsmanship owed much to the influence ofLogan Hay, a Springfield attorney and president ofthe Abraham Lincoln Association. As Thomas drafted his first Lincoln book (Lincoln's New Salem, published by the Association in 1934), Hay unsparingly critiqued the manuscript. "Mr. Hay took such a keen interest in it that he scrutinized every phase of the research and weighed and pondered every word I wrote," Thomas recollected. After one particularly grueling editorial session, Thomas exclaimed to a friend: "Damn it, I can't be that bad!'" This friend reported that Thomas "would manfully meet Mr. Hay's objections. In the end he would admit ... that the book was far better than it would have been without those sessions that so severely taxed his patience. Ben was particularly grateful for Logan Hay's tutelage because he believed that through it he learned a great deal about historical writing."8 After finishing Lincoln's New Salem, Thomas edited a volume in the Lincoln Day-by-Day series (1936) and wrote Portraitfor Posterity: Lincoln and His Biographers (1947). Work on those books, as well as his labors Foreword Xlll as executive secretary ofthe Abraham Lincoln Association (1932-36), prepared him well for writing Abraham Lincoln: A Biography. When the dean of Civil War historians, Allan Nevins, first read the manuscript of Thomas's Lincoln biography, he told the author that it "seemed to me quite beyond criticism" and that he had "read it with great enjoyment ... and with much real...