Book Review

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Book Review | The Journal of American History, 86.1 | The History Cooperative

Honor's Voice: The Transformation of Abraham Lincoln. By Douglas L. Wilson. (New York: Knopf, 1998. xi, 383 pp. $30.00, isbn 0-679-40788-X.)

Biographies of Abraham Lincoln sort themselves into what Benjamin Thomas once called the "realistic" and the "idealistic." At first, the most sensational Lincoln books clearly fell into the former category, focusing on the shape of Lincoln's personality or peculiarities of his private history that came directly from Lincoln intimates such as William Henry Herndon. But since the 1920s, when academic historians turned Lincoln into a subject of professional study, the most enduring work has been on the "idealistic" Lincoln, the wartime president and policy maker, and Herndon has been dismissed as unreliable. Douglas L. Wilson's Honor's Voice represents a return in Lincoln studies to the personal and private. Not only does Honor's Voice devote itself entirely to an analysis of Lincoln's personality but it also confines its attention to the eleven years between Lincoln's arrival in New Salem, Illinois, and his society marriage to Mary Todd in 1842, four years before his first attempt at national political office. . . .

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