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Reviews
Lincoln Reviews: Collections, Reprints, and Picture Books
Robert McColley
| "Lincoln's Humor" and Other Essays. By Benjamin P. Thomas. Ed. Michael Burlingame. (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002. Pp. 314. Illus., notes, index.
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Benjamin P. Thomas (1902–1956) was born in New Jersey, grew up in Baltimore, earned his Ph. D. in history at Johns Hopkins University, and taught in Birmingham, Alabama. He married a woman from Springfield, Illinois, and, in 1932, met Logan Hays, at that time an officer in the Abraham Lincoln Association. Hays needed a replacement for Paul M. Angle as executive director of the Association, and correctly judged that Thomas, though not a Lincoln scholar, could learn on the job. He certainly did, and even after taking several years to pursue successful careers in farming and insurance, continued to broaden his knowledge and literary skill. In 1952, Alfred A. Knopf published his Abraham Lincoln: A Biography. It was widely greeted as the best biography of Lincoln ever; many still think it the best. |
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Michael Burlingame, who also earned a Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins, became a leading proponent of psychohistory, and achieved fame for his psychobiography, The Inner World of Abraham Lincoln (Illinois, 1994). Simultaneously, he began editing a highly valuable series of books featuring the writings, many never before published, of men close to Lincoln, most notably his wartime secretaries, John G. Nicolay, John Hay, and William O. Stoddard. With Lincoln's Humor he turns to Lincoln's most widely read biographer of the mid-twentieth century. The book begins with a forty-page biography of Thomas, which also introduces us to the Abraham Lincoln Association and the Illinois State Historical Library as they were in the 1940s and 1950s. Having described the steps and publications by which Thomas gained a commanding knowledge of Lincoln, Burlingame presents us with a series of essays, some previously published and some published here for the first time. The important thing is that they give us a consistent and coherent interpretation of Lincoln from his early years to the end of his presidency. Even if one cannot, in 2008, believe completely in Benjamin Thomas's Lincoln, it is nevertheless refreshing, not because it is hagiography, but because it gives a complete and satisfying interpretation of a national hero, something more difficult to do today. |
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Thomas was more upbeat than more recent biographers about the six years Lincoln spent in New Salem. Though the town hardly outlived his departure for Springfield, it enabled the ambitious but ill-educated and unfocused young man who arrived in 1831 to benefit from meeting kind, helpful, and well-educated people, launch a political career, and find a profession. In his long introduction to Lincoln, 1847–1853. Being the Day-by-Day activities of Abraham Lincoln from January 1, 1847 to December 31, 1853 (Springfield: Abraham Lincoln Association, 1936), Thomas also made much more than other biographers of Lincoln's single term in the U. S. House of Representatives. (Association, 1936). Far from being the under-achieving freshman of standard accounts, Lincoln appears here as an experienced parliamentarian, working steadily and faithfully as an active Whig in order to advance his party's agenda. In 1848, Lincoln's devotion to Henry Clay gave way to an intense desire to win the presidency for the Whigs once more, with the slave-holding military hero from Louisiana, Zachary Taylor. Taylor won, but the Whigs lost in central Illinois where the Mexican War was popular, and Whig opposition to it was not. Worse, Lincoln was so poorly compensated - at least in his own view - in the distribution of federal offices, that he emphatically changed his priorities for the next several years. His legal practice now came first, Whig politics second. |
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Throughout the essays is a reminder of where Lincoln stood, among those who admired him struggling through the Great Depression and World War II. Freedom and democracy were then the ideal goals that prevailed, and in some sense seemed more attainable and noble after hundreds of thousands (among our allies and enemies, millions) of deaths. Lincoln - kind, patient, forbearing, yet determined and relentless in pursuit of those goals - never stood higher as a national hero. |
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The essay, "Lincoln's Humor," which gives the collection its title, is more than a collection of Lincoln's witty sayings. Thomas creates a convincing set of categories into which Lincoln's jokes, tall tales, and epigrams can be sorted, and offers a convincing analysis of both the sources and uses of Lincoln's humor. |
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