According to writers with a weakness for self-pity–which is to say, writers–writing a book is a dispiriting, unhappy enterprise. “No one who ever did it would willingly go through it again,” said George Orwell, who nevertheless managed to get out eight books before the last one finished him off at age 46. So when I decided that what the world needed was another book about Abraham Lincoln and that I was just the man to write it, I was prepared for some discouraging moments.
But not quite so discouraging as this: a conference about Lincoln, held in Springfield, Illinois, filled with a hundred or so buffs, historians, curiosity seekers, retirees, and people in off the street, plus a moderator, who suddenly asked for a show of hands.
“How many people here are working on a book about Abraham Lincoln?” he said.
I confidently raised my arm–and so did half the people in the room.
Nobody likes excessive competition, but if you venture into the world of Lincoln book-writing you need to be prepared for a crowded field. At least 14,000 books have been published about Abraham Lincoln since the unpleasantness at Ford’s Theater transformed him from politician to martyr, saint, and goldmine. The pace shows no sign of slackening. The last few years alone have brought us books pondering Lincoln’s sex life, his psychological depressions, his finances, his religious beliefs, his political acumen, his prose style, his vacation house (two books! within a year of each other!), and even his eating habits. This last, called The Taste Is in My Mouth a Little, was written by the greatest living Lincoln historian, Wayne C. Temple, who has also produced a seminal work on Lincoln’s pets.
My own bright idea for a Lincoln book was to ask, in effect, why so many Lincoln books should have been written in the first place. Put another way: Why can’t we get over him? No other American inspires the same inexhaustible fascination–not Washington, who may have been more important historically, and not Jefferson, who was more complicated intellectually, and not Kennedy, who was much cuter and had a nicer looking wife. Lincoln stands alone, an object of unparalleled interest and curiosity. I thought I might be able to explain his uniqueness by approaching him from an untried angle: indirectly, through the people who revere him, imitate him, study him, obsess over him, and, in some cases, despise him.
This proved harder to do than I would have thought, because it quickly became apparent that there were almost as many different Lincolns as there were Lincoln enthusiasts. He has been claimed by Democrats and Republicans, Communists and libertarians, Bible-thumpers and pagans, neocons and One Worlders, all with equal fervor and always with the deep conviction that he was one of their own. This elasticity can breed a certain cynicism. “After years of living with Abraham Lincoln,” one Lincoln expert told me, “I can give him to you any way you want–cold or hot, jazz or classical. I can give you scandalous Lincoln, conservative Lincoln, liberal Lincoln, racist Lincoln, Lincoln over easy or Lincoln scrambled.”
By the time the expert told me this I knew precisely what he meant. Nosing around, I’d wound up at a convention of Lincoln impersonators, sat cross-legged on the floor of the vault of a Lincoln collector in her Beverly Hills mansion, and faked my way through a leadership-training seminar where Lincoln was held up as a sage of corporate management. I’d held a handwritten copy of the Gettysburg Address, and stood dumb as an elderly immigrant couple on the west side of Chicago laid out a full meal before his likeness, as an offering of thanks for the blessings he had bestowed on them. Lincoln people were invariably charming and sincere, helpful and open, but at times I despaired of finding, amid the many privatized, cut-to-fit Lincolns that each of them had built for himself, a Lincoln Lincoln–a plausible and universal Lincoln, a real man with significance for the rest of us.
I did finally find him, though. At least I think I did. That’s what the book is about, anyway. And when I finished I realized how silly I was to have been discouraged by the show of excessive competition I’d seen in Springfield. Our enduring preoccupation with him is evidence of robust national health, a sign that we still respond to the most important things. The day we become indifferent to him, on the other hand–the day a moderator like the one in Springfield asks who’s writing a Lincoln book and no hands go up–is when we should get discouraged. But somehow I think that day is a long way off.
ANDREW FERGUSON
