If you took the almost 14,000 books published about Abraham Lincoln and put them end to end, you’d go about two miles. It is more books than have been written about any other American.
As Andrew Ferguson, a senior editor for The Weekly Standard adds yet another to the pile, the real question is why he would do that.
Like many before him, the author went searching for the “real” Lincoln. He thought it might be the Lincoln of his childhood, with his memories of Dad driving the family Olds on the Lincoln Heritage Trail. Since he was born in Illinois, and his father worked in a law firm founded by Lincoln’s son Robert, and since he had visited the requisite sacred places many times, Ferguson’s boyhood was entwined tightly with Lincoln. He strayed as an adolescent, discovering girls and whatnot, but in recent years found his way back – and hoped his children would follow him (in what he calls his “campaign of parental pedantry”).
He encountered various impediments. First, only tatters of the Heritage Trail remain and besides, Ferguson was told it had been a ploy by the American Petroleum Institute to get people into their cars in the early 1960s. So he chose venues to visit, then bartered (bribed) his children with a promise of a day at some water park or other attraction for a day of seeing Lincoln sites.
What he found was a mixed bag of the educational, funny and outrageous (his kids bought chocolate coffins at one site). It included a big dose of perspective on how we view Lincoln today.
Some of his experiences include:
Taper’s goal was to collect the “personal Lincoln,” so the huge array of stuff, in the biggest house Ferguson had ever been in, even includes Lincoln’s chamber pot. Taper has graduated from buying single items to buying whole collections; people talk about “before Louise” and “after Louise” in describing what she did to the market.
The museum has no guns (not politically correct) and no Confederate flags. So that women will stay interested, Rogers explained, there’s a whole room devoted to dresses, and another on the White House kitchen. “The Civil War was sort of a guys’ time, you know?” He explained that they were going for the emotional over the intellectual, the visual rather than the verbal. It’s called “emotional engineering.”
Ferguson concludes that everyone has his own Lincoln. A Christian writer finds Lincoln the Christian. A depressed writer finds that Lincoln was also surely depressed. Some teetotalers happily sanctified Lincoln, the teetotaler. Even Mario Cuomo, in a 2004 book, found himself in Lincoln. One group believes Lincoln loved séances. Another believed he was reincarnated as Charles Lindbergh. Dale Carnegie, of self-help book fame, decided Lincoln was the guru of management and wrote his first book about Lincoln.
Ferguson, who is very funny, includes two moving stories about people who thought of Lincoln in a spiritual way, as someone they believed in who had changed their lives.
The book is slightly disjointed, as the author goes hither and yon to pick up interesting tidbits or people, but all in all, it is fun to read. Does he find the real Lincoln? No – but he does explain why we’re probably never going to.
Diane Hartman is a principal with .
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NONFICTION
Land of Lincoln:
Adventures in Abe’s America
By Andrew Ferguson
$24
