What if the South had won the Civil War, as MacKinlay Kantor speculated in his short 1961 novel of that title, an excerpt from which appears in “The Lincoln Anthology”? The questions Kantor raised in and the alternative viewpoint he brought to that fiction are the sorts of things that make the “The Lincoln Anthology” valuable to the general reader.
To many if not most Americans, Abraham Lincoln and his achievements are bathed in a golden mist of myth and sentiment. Several of the writers in “The Lincoln Anthology,” edited by Lincoln expert Harold Holzer and timed for the 200th anniversary of the 16th president’s birth, send a brisk wind clearing away the mist, giving us a better look at the realities.
Kantor, for instance, imagines Lincoln, not in the conventional view as a noble leader of the righteous but as a humbled “prisoner of State” of the Confederacy, an emasculation, Holzer says, “designed to evoke horror in readers accustomed” to seeing him “endowed with reassuring powers of tenacity and resistance.”
Holzer calls this anthology a conversation held — borrowing Lincoln’s own words — across “all distances of time and of space,” with the dozens of journalists, biographers, satirists, essayists, novelists, clergymen, poets, playwrights, historians, memoirists and statesmen collected herein; their varying ideas provide useful adjustments to our understanding of what is probably our most beloved president.
He supplies helpful introductions both to the entire volume and to each individual entry. In the general introduction, he sums up the shifting general perceptions of Lincoln across time:
• The postwar, post-assassination impression of him as a martyr, comparing him with Moses and Jesus, advanced by Edward Everett Hale, Julia Ward Howe and others.
• The generational change at the turn of the 20th century, when such writers as Ida Tarbell and poets such as Edwin Markham and Edwin Arlington Robinson saw Lincoln as a haunting spirit, a force of nature.
• In the 1920s and ’30s, poet and biographer Carl Sandburg, playwright Robert Sherwood and others turned him into a tribune of the common people.
Of course, there always were dissenters to the conventional view of any particular era. The vision advanced by Walt Whitman (liberally quoted here) of “Lincoln the sublime” was fiercely opposed by Lincoln’s onetime law partner and dedicated biographer William Herndon. He emphasized not piety and sentimentality but Lincoln’s ambition, lack of orthodox religious belief and love of Ann Rutledge.
Likewise, as early as 1876, the former slave and black abolitionist Frederick Douglass boldly stated that Lincoln “was pre-eminently the white man’s President, entirely devoted to the welfare of white men”; he had not been opposed to slavery, but to the extension of slavery. Holzer maintains that no speech on Lincoln and race, before or since, has been as provocative, influential or insightful as this one.
In a brief but powerful 1922 essay, H.L. Mencken attacked the growing propensity to mythologize, to convert “Abe into a plaster saint” or a “sort of amalgam of John Wesley and the Holy Ghost.” The Gettysburg Address, while superb as oratory, is absurd as fact, Mencken says: It was actually the Confederates, not the Unionists, who were fighting for the right of self-governance.
But the most searing iconoclasm came in the second half of the 20th century, with critic Edmund Wilson’s “Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War” (1962). Extremely influential yet still hotly disputed, this nevertheless well-documented and well- argued analysis saw Lincoln as more tyrant than saint. Wilson rejects Sandburg’s “romantic and sentimental rubbish,” emphasizing instead Lincoln’s ambition, sense of destiny and personal superiority, white-supremacist outlook and waffling (or worse) on abolition.
More of the same can be found in Lerone Bennett’s 1968 Ebony magazine article, “Was Abe Lincoln a White Supremacist?” Answering his title question in the affirmative, Bennett lights into the “Mythology of the Great Emancipator.” Lincoln, Bennett says, frequently used the N-word, considered blacks and whites better off separated and favored colonizing American blacks in South America or Africa; he wanted to “win the war without touching slavery”; and when he “freed” slaves, it was in areas where he had no power — where he had power, he left them in chains.
Well, to each his or her own conception of Lincoln. The foregoing is but a small taste of the array of depictions, some paradoxical — the leader of great sadness who loved to laugh, the steely warrior full of compassion and mercy — that would seem to ensure he will always belong to the ages.
Roger K. Miller, a novelist and freelance writer and editor, writes the blog .
Nonfiction
The Lincoln Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Legacy From 1860 to Now, edited by Harold Holzer, $40
