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Lincoln Reconsidered
Michael F. Holt
| I am neither an Abraham Lincoln scholar nor a biographer, and I find I have little interest in new findings about Lincoln's youth, his inner private life, his religious views, his sexuality, or his relationship with his wife. However, as a longtime student of nineteenthcentury political life and partisan competition and as a historian of the Whig party to which Lincoln loyally adhered until its demise, I am interested in what the new Lincoln literature tells us—and fails to tell us—about him as a politician before and during the Civil War. This preference for the public, rather than the young or private Lincoln, shapes my comments that follow. |
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Let me start with those aspects of Matthew Pinsker's analysis with which I agree, if sometimes only guardedly, and then move on to quibbles with his argument, if not outright dissent. I have read the Douglas L. Wilson and Rodney O. Davis edition of Herndon's Informants. Therefore, I heartily agree with Pinsker's assessment that one of the most important developments in Lincoln scholarship since the appearance of David Herbert Donald's Lincoln in 1995 has been the willingness of Lincoln scholars to give credence to oral and written testimony about Lincoln given after, and often long after, Lincoln's assassination. I studied as a graduate student with Donald a quarter of a century before Pinsker did, but at that time we were trained to regard such post hoc testimony as toxic.1 |
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In this regard, however, I am puzzled by Pinsker's assertion that Michael Burlingame's massive new two-volume biography—I confess I have made my way through only onethird of the first volume as I write—"will force scholars to confront their increasing reliance on recollected material in ways that might alter the ongoing reinterpretation of Lincoln's private life." Burlingame does reject some recollections as spurious, but as I read him, say, on the controversial Ann Rutledge affair, his modus operandi is not to reject recollected evidence but rather to pile quotation upon quotation from these posthumous witnesses. The implicit rule of evidence implied here, as I see it, is that if eight or ten "witnesses," as opposed to only two or three, recall essentially the same thing, then it must qualify as historical fact.2 |
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To return to Pinsker's stimulating essay, I applaud his singling out of Michael W. Kauffman's brilliant biography of John Wilkes Booth, American Brutus, that began as an undergraduate senior thesis under my direction.3 More important, I agree that there is much about Lincoln's political career that bears further scrutiny. Pinsker cites Lincoln's role in the nitty-gritty, behind-the-scenes nomination of candidates and subsequent campaigns those candidates ran as well as the election of 1860 as in need of further investigation. |
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I agree, but other aspects of his political career strike me as equally in need of reconsideration. In getting to that list, I should now mention the few parts of Pinsker's analysis with which I disagree. Pinsker asserts that the proliferation of books and articles about Lincoln since the appearance of the Donald biography in 1995 "does not just come down to profiteering."4 In one sense, this assertion is surely valid. Yet just as surely it seems a mistake to ignore, as Pinsker does, the stimulus given to Lincoln scholarship by the annual $50,000 Lincoln Prize awarded by the Gilder-Lehrman Institute since the early 1990s. |
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