| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

"We Are Lincoln Men": Abraham Lincoln and His Friends. By David Herbert Donald. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003. xviii, 269 pp. $25.00, ISBN 0-7432-5468-6.)
Abraham Lincoln was "the most reticent—Secretive man I Ever Saw—or Expect to See," said Judge David Davis, who was appointed by Lincoln to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1862 and was the executor of his estate (Douglas L. Wilson and Rodney O. Davis, eds., Herndon's Informants, 1998, p. 348). Lincoln's sister-in-law, Elizabeth Edwards, found him from long acquaintance to be "a cold Man—had no affection—was not Social—was abstracted—thoughtful" (ibid., p. 443). This was not a man who had a gift for making friends, and, as David Herbert Donald shows on the pages of this new book, only a handful of the legions who called Lincoln their "friend" were ever actually "on intimate terms with Lincoln" (Donald, p. xiv).	1
In Aristotle's morphology of friendship, there are enjoyable friends, useful friends, and only rarely complete or perfect friends. For Lincoln, the last category probably included no more than a dozen individuals, and those at varying points in his life. Some of these friendships—with Ward Hill Lamon, Leonard Swett, Joseph Gillespie—have so little documentation attached to them that Donald can make nothing beyond a gesture in their direction. But six others—Joshua Speed, Orville Hickman Browning, William H. Herndon, William H. Seward, and Lincoln's two White House staffers, John Nicolay and John Hay—have left more than enough in the way of diaries and letters to afford glimpses of the different ways Lincoln formed intimate bonds with other men.	. . .

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