| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Lincoln and Whitman: Parallel Lives in Civil War Washington. By Daniel Mark Epstein. (New York: Ballantine, 2004. xx, 379 pp. $24.95, ISBN 0-345-45799-4.)

It is an exciting possibility to contemplate—the influence of America's poet on America's most rhetorically gifted president. In chronicling Abraham Lincoln's and Walt Whitman's crossed paths in the nation's capital at midcentury, Daniel Mark Epstein takes as his point of departure Lincoln's early familiarity with Whitman's Leaves of Grass and argues for Whitman's formative role in moving Lincoln's oratory from "the cold light of rhetoric into the warm iridescence of dramatic literature, with its multicolored rays, its distinct shadings" (p. 17). In Lincoln's June 26, 1857, speech on the Dred Scott decision, for example, Epstein finds evidence of "an orator who grasps the charm of poetry and its power to unleash the emotions of both speaker and audience" (p. 23). At its best Lincoln and Whitman builds its story on such episodes as Whitman's hearing Lincoln's remarks following the Union victory at Fort Anderson, North Carolina, in March 1864 (pp. 261–66). But, while Epstein has read widely in both the primary materials and the standard secondary works, his story sometimes hinges precariously on stretched connections that seem insufficiently supported or nuanced ("But if Whitman had no luck, Lincoln's situation was even worse," p. 117). For this reason the book is best suited to generalist readers rather than professional scholars.

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