Readers due for a feast on Lincoln
As bicentennial of birth nears, dozens of works to appear
There comes a point with historic figures where everything important has been published. But the rising wave of new books about Abraham Lincoln makes clear that that point hasn't arrived yet with the 16th president.
At least 50 titles about Lincoln are due out between next month and early 2010, not counting those recently published. The number is probably unprecedented for so short a period, and the range of angles is wide. There are three complete biographies; books of essays and photographs; books about Lincoln as a youth, as president-elect, as a military leader, as a writer, and as an inventor; books about Lincoln and his family, about Lincoln as victim of conspiracy, about Lincoln and his connections with others - his secretaries, his admirals, abolitionist Frederick Douglass, scientist Charles Darwin, even the poet Robert Burns. There are at least seven children's books on the way.
"The interest in Lincoln has been continuous in history," said Brandeis University historian David Hackett Fischer, "and there is a surge right now. Something is going on today."
One reason for the wave is that Feb. 12, 2009, marks the bicentennial of Lincoln's birth. But more important to publishers than the date is that the readers are there.
"People are hungry for details about Lincoln," said Alice Mayhew, editorial director of Simon & Schuster, who has edited about a dozen Lincoln books. "He's clearly the greatest hero, with a poignance and a sadness - what he had to endure as president and in his personal life." Beside the man is the dramatic arc of the story. "That this man happened to come along when he did, when he was the one essential person on the planet, is the fascinating thing."
Some historians say the fascination illuminates Americans' longing for an accessible human model in worrisome times. "We all seem to be searching for something in the past," said historian Kate Clifford Larson of Simmons College, author of the recently published "The Assassin's Accomplice," about the plot against Lincoln. "We have a void now for a great leader who can be bigger than everybody else. We look at the past with rose-colored glasses, but Lincoln stands incredibly tall."
And his words resonate today. In her recent interview with ABC anchor Charles Gibson, vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin said that her public comment last year about the Iraq war being "from God" was a version of a statement Lincoln made about God's intentions in the Civil War. Some historians took issue with that citation, but such use of Lincoln as a moral standard has a long tradition.
His appeal extends beyond American borders, too. Lincoln scholar Harold Holzer, cochairman of the Lincoln Bicentennial Commission, worked with Governor Mario Cuomo of New York in the 1990s and remembers attending a meeting with Cuomo and a delegation of Polish teachers looking for books for their impoverished school libraries. "We said, 'What books do you need?' " Holzer recalled, "and they said, 'We want books on Lincoln.' "
For Lincoln writers, it's easier than ever to get at the source material. The digital age has opened the trove. In a long-term joint project, the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency and the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library intend to digitize every available document.
"All the works of Lincoln are online," said Columbia University historian Eric Foner, editor of a forthcoming anthology of essays, "Our Lincoln: New Perspectives on Lincoln and His World." "You can research every time he refers to Shakespeare. All the letters written to Lincoln in the Library of Congress are online - with transcriptions so you don't have to read all that 19th-century handwriting - [and] all the congressional debates. There are newspaper articles, the writings of his secretaries, reminiscences of him as a youth."
Despite the excavations of thousands of scholars over 143 years, new source material is still turning up.
"When I started [writing about Lincoln], I assumed all the important material had been published," said Connecticut College historian Michael A. Burlingame, author of the two-volume "Abraham Lincoln: A Life," out next month. "But I was astonished at how much there was available - tons of new stuff." Researching his 1994 book, "The Inner World of Abraham Lincoln," Burlingame found an unpublished cache of interviews given after Lincoln's death by his secretary John Nicolay, full of revealing details about the president's early love life and marriage.
But why does the reading public care? Some historians say it's partly because of the kind of person Lincoln was and partly the kind of people we are.
To begin with, Lincoln had an apparent plainness and simplicity, as well as a warmth and good humor that make ordinary people identify with him. "He is one of us, not like a prince or a king," Holzer said.
Some are attracted by his emotional vulnerability and moral struggles.
"He was the most deeply spiritual person to hold the office before or since," said James A. Percoco, author of the recently published "Summers With Lincoln: Looking for the Man in the Monuments." Percoco cited Lincoln's agonized private 1862 reflection, "Meditation on the Divine Will," as evidence. "It's Lincoln wrestling with why the Civil War is happening. These things resonated deep in his marrow. You get a sense of his struggling with himself and his relation to the bigger picture."
Others are attracted by Lincoln's personal development. "He is an inspiration not just because of his hardscrabble background but because of the emotional poverty he overcame," Burlingame said. "He had a terrible relationship with his father. His mother died when he was 9, he had a god-awful marriage, incredible burdens - yet in spite of all that he grew up to be this humane, psychologically whole person."
Once a Republican Party icon, Lincoln has proved to be a nonpartisan model: Most recent presidents have been Lincoln aficionados. So have many foreign leaders.
"After World War II," said Fischer, "when Churchill was trying to preserve the British Empire, he was writing about Lincoln, and Nehru, leader of the Indian independence movement, kept on his desk the sculpture 'Abraham Lincoln's Hand.' "
Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, said Holzer, "used Lincoln to make the point that the Soviet Union should not be broken up."
Americans' heightened interest in Lincoln might say as much about our times as it does about the man.
It "comes at a political moment of transition, in which we may be looking for a different view of what a president is and can do," said Steve Forman, senior editor of W.W. Norton, which is publishing Foner's book next month. "Lincoln repays that questioning about what it means to be a leader in wartime."
Historian Robert J. Brugger, editor of history at Johns Hopkins University Press, said the interest goes beyond admiration for Lincoln. In a way, he said, it represents a search for ourselves.
"Lincoln is the American we would most like to believe represents what we stand for: fairness and equality, a deeply moving speaker with simplicity of expression, steadfast, durable, and fair-minded," Brugger said. "That appeals to us because today we feel that we are off-track, quite a distance from where we should be."
David Mehegan can be reached at mehegan@globe.com. 