Lincolns Boyhood: A Chronicle of His Indiana Years (review)

88CIVIL WAR HISTORY Adams has given a new perspective on her place in the world of letters. The result is not flattering. Without Uncle Tom's Cabin she would be only one of a number of minor women writers providing material for the popular religious and sentimental journals of her time. The dull, lackluster nature of her other works contrasts sharply with the dramatic impact of her great antislavery novel. Even when writing about slavery, Mrs. Stowe never approached the achievement of her first novel. Perhaps the extra ingredient in Uncle Tom's Cabin was indeed, as Professor Adams maintains, the author's personal manifesto of freedom. Larry Gara Wilmington College Lincoln's Boyhood: A Chronicle of His Indiana Years. By Francis Marion Van Natter. (Washington: Public Affairs Press, 1963. Pp. vi, 224. $4.50.) This volume is a disaster. "The twofold purpose of this book," the author explains, "is to present the story of Abraham Lincoln's early everyday life and to trace the influence of that early period upon his White House behavior." The result is neither history nor fiction. The author, now deceased, performed a labor of diligence but not of academic discipline; his book has the form but not the spirit of scholarship. A vast array of Lincoln lore passes in review for the reader, but often in disarray, as it were, with company commanders missing and volunteers fraudulently enlisted appearing in number, and marching to a dubious rendezvous. What we have here is an antiquarian scrapbook, lovingly filled with bits and pieces arduously and patiently collected from a hodge-podge of materials. The author was credulous about his sources, incorporating almost every anecdote about his hero's life until the day the Lincoln family moved from Indiana to Illinois. One of the most annoying features of the book is Van Natter's acceptance of dialogue recorded long after the event; at the same time he employs a colloquial style, emulative of the contemporary Hoosier dialect. On the first page the reader is affronted with: "Thomas Lincoln was telling them that he was fixing to move over into the big timber where he aimed to clear the land and do all kinds of crop raising. . . . 'I'll get along a heap better,' he explained." Sometimes the dialogue and other material are documented, often questionably , and sometimes not. It seems extraordinary that the works of Albert J. Beveridge and Benjamin Thomas are not listed in the bibliography . Even more remarkable is omission of Louis A. Warren's Lincoln's Youth: Indiana Years, Seven to Twenty-One—the standard scholarly work on this theme. The author is careless about his quotations, garbling Jefferson 's First Inaugural and the Monroe Doctrine, and Heaven knows how many more passages clothed in quotation marks. Fulfillment of the second purpose of the book is confined to the final chapter. Here is a procession of events during Lincoln's presidency, wherein BOOK REVIEWS89 Lincoln by doubtful attribution and amazing inference is seen shaping his course by drawing upon incidents of his boyhood. His perference for gradualism in extinguishing slavery is explained as the outcome of watching the slow erosion of the banks of the Ohio River and Pigeon Creek while he was a boy! At best, the author may be given good marks for effort and enthusiasm. At best, the publisher may be given good marks for producing a book relatively free from typographical errors. Beyond these charitable observations a conscientious reviewer may not go. James A. Rawley University of Nebraska Abraham Lincoln. By D. W. Brogan. (New York: Schocken Books, 1963. Pp. xvii, 143. $3.50 cloth; $1.45 paper.) D. W. Brogan has built an enviable reputation interpreting America for the British; his Abraham Lincoln was an early attempt in that direction. It has now been reissued with an apologetic introduction and a "do-it-yourself kit" bibliography of ten tides to bring it up to date. The author's introduction sketches some changes that three decades of intensive research by historians demand. For example, Brogan would revise downward his high opinion of Stephen A. Douglas and George B. McClellan and revise upward his low opinion of Mary Lincoln. Yet he...