DJH, pp. 78, 146.
John W. Forney, Anecdotes of Public Men, 2 vols. (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1873, 1881), 1:283; Harper, Lincoln and the Press, pp. 109–12, 175, 179–84.
Frank Freidel, ed., Union Pamphlets of the Civil War, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1967), 1:1–24.
CW, 6:264; Neely, “The Civil War and the Two-Party System,” pp. 93–94.
CW, 6:267–68.
Smith, “The Presidential Election of 1864,” pp. 53–54.
DJH, p. 129; Smith, “The Presidential Election of 1864,” pp. 88–100.
Northwestern Christian Advocate, 13, 28 Aug., 16 Oct. 1861.
James H. Moorhead, American Apocalypse: Yankee Protestants and the Civil War, 1860–69 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), pp. x, 39. See also Peter J. Parish, “The Instruments of Providence: Slavery, Civil War, and the American Churches,” in W. J. Sheils, ed., Studies in Church History, vol. 20: The Church and War (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983), pp. 291–320.
Moorhead, American Apocalypse, pp. 96–104, 112; Northwestern Christian Advocate, 12 June, 4 Sept. 1861; Victor B. Howard, Religion and the Radical Republican Movement, 1860–1870 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1990), pp. 11–67; John R. McKivigan, The War Against Proslavery Religion: Abolitionism and the Northern Churches, 1830–1865 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984), pp. 183–201; West Wisconsin Annual Conference of the Wesleyan Methodist Connection of America to AL, 11 Oct. 1862, ALP. The conservative Charles Hodge presents a shimmering example of how the fear of Union defeat worked to blur the line between abolition as legitimate end and emancipation as morally justified means. Charles Hodge, “The General Assembly,” Biblical Repertory and Princeton Review 36 (July 1864), pp. 538–51.
DJH, p. 89; CW, 6:486–87; Brooks D. Simpson and Jean V. Berlin, eds., Selected Correspondence of William T. Sherman, 1860–1865 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), pp. 500–1.
I. Leeser to AL, 21 Aug. 1862; Board of Delegates of American Israelites to AL, 6 Oct. 1862, 8 Jan. 1863, ALP.
The issue was neither new nor unique to Methodism. The case of S. B. McPheeters had troubled Lincoln since late 1862. This pro-Confederate Presbyterian minister had been forced from his St. Louis pulpit by Unionist troops, though he had not preached rebellion from the pulpit. Lincoln disapproved and countermanded the order. Lewis G. Vander Velde, The Presbyterian Churches and the Federal Union, 1861–1869 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1932), pp. 305–24.
M. Simpson to D. P. Kidder, MEC Bishops’ Autographs and Portraits, United Library, Garrett Evangelical Theological Seminary, Evanston, IL [hereafter IEG]; Donald G. Jones, The Sectional Crisis and Northern Methodism: A Study in Piety, Political Ethics, and Civil Religion (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1979), pp. 36, 40, 42; Robert D. Clark, The Life of Matthew Simpson (New York: Macmillan, 1956), pp. 224–35. When the delegation of Methodists met Lincoln in May 1864, Ames, in an informal moment, turned the conversation to the issue of the southern Methodist churches, but Lincoln avoided a direct response.
George Peck, The Life and Times of Rev. George Peck D.D. (New York: Nelson and Phillips, 1874), p. 380; Lincoln Observed, p. 145; Howard, Religion and the Radical Republican Movement, p. 71; Noyes W. Miner, “Personal Recollections of Abraham Lincoln,” Illinois State Historical Society.
E. Nason to AL, 16 April 1861, O. H. Browning to AL, 30 April 1861, ALP; N&H, 6:322–23; HI, p. 602; CW, 7:535–36; Burlingame, ed., At Lincoln’s Side, p. 135; DJH, p. 132; D. H. Wheeler to D. P. Kidder, 14 Dec. 1863, Kidder Papers, IEG.
Northwestern Christian Advocate, 2 Oct. 1861; C. B. Trippett to D. P. Kidder, 7 July 1863, Kidder Papers, IEG.
George Crooks, The Life of Bishop Matthew Simpson of the Methodist Episcopal Church (London: Wesleyan Methodist Book Room, 1891), pp. 377–86; J. Matthew Gallman, Mastering Wartime: A Social History of Philadelphia During the Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 148–51.
Northwestern Christian Advocate, 8 Jan., 12 Feb., 13 Aug. 1862.
George M. Fredrickson, “The Coming of the Lord: The Northern Protestant Clergy and the Civil War Crisis,” in Randall M. Miller, Harry S. Stout, and Charles Reagan Wilson, eds., Religion and the American Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 110–30; Moorhead, American Apocalypse, pp. 129–72; David B. Cheseborough, ed., God Ordained This War: Sermons on the Sectional Crisis, 1830–1865 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1991), pp. 6–8, 83–122.
CW, 7:368.
F. P. Blair, Sr., to AL, 18 Dec. 1862, ALP.
Lincoln Observed, p. 237.
Lincoln Observed, pp. 35–45, 92, 107, 235–36, 238.
William C. Davis, Lincoln’s Men: How President Lincoln Became Father to an Army and a Nation (New York: The Free Press, 1999), p. 130.
Davis, Lincoln’s Men, pp. 54, 56–57, 68, 134–35.
Davis, Lincoln’s Men, p. 141.
Davis, Lincoln’s Men, p. 87.
J. M. Palmer to D. Davis, 26 Nov. 1862, ALP; James M. McPherson, What They Fought For, 1861–1865 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994), pp. 4–6; Joseph Allan Frank, With Ballot and Bayonet: The Political Socialization of American Civil War Soldiers (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998).
Reid Mitchell, Civil War Soldiers (New York: Viking Penguin, 1988), pp. 11–12, 16–17, 20–21.
Davis, Lincoln’s Men, pp. 99, 101; RWAL, p. 429; McPherson, What They Fought For, p. 62.
Gerald Linderman, Embattled Courage: The Experience of Combat in the American Civil War (New York: The Free Press, 1987), pp. 216–29; Frank, With Ballot and Bayonet, pp. 166–68; McPherson, What They Fought For, pp. 5–6.
McPherson, What They Fought For, p. 43; Steven E. Woodworth, While God Is Marching On: The Religious World of Civil War Soldiers (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2001), pp. 98–99, 107, 110–11.
Frank, With Ballot and Bayonet, p. 170; Davis, Lincoln’s Men, p. 107; Robert Hubbard to wife, 25 Feb. 1863, Letters of Robert Hubbard, Civil War Manuscripts Collection, Yale University Library, quoted in Adam I. P. Smith, “Partisan Partisanship: The Northern Political Experience During the Civil War” (unpublished paper), pp. 16–17.
Davis, Lincoln’s Men, p. 106; Frank, With Ballot and Bayonet, pp. 171–73; Chicago Tribune, 8 Feb. 1864; Frank, With Ballot and Bayonet, p. 173.
Davis, Lincoln’s Men, p. 107.
DJH, p. 208; RWAL, p. 278.
RWAL, pp. 418, 506; Lincoln Observed, pp. 66–68.
Michael Burlingame, ed., With Lincoln in the White House: Letters, Memoranda, and Other Writings of John G. Nicolay, 1860–1865 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000), p. 139.
Burlingame, ed., With Lincoln in the White House, p. 131.
Smith, “The Presidential Election of 1864,” p. 109.
Carpenter, Inner Life, p. 283.
CW, 7:435, 451.
Burlingame, ed., At Lincoln’s Side, pp. 92–93; Burlingame, ed., With Lincoln in the White House, pp. 151–54.
H. J. Raymond to AL, 22 Aug. 1864, ALP; CW, 7:514.
RWAL, pp. 393–94; S. F. Cary to AL, 1 Sept. 1864, ALP.
Burlingame, ed., With Lincoln in the White House, pp. 157–58.
J. Conkling to AL, 6 Sept. 1864, T. Tilton to J. G. Nicolay, 6 Sept. 1864, H. Wilson to AL, 5 Sept. 1864, ALP.
Carpenter, Inner Life, p. 275; J. W. Forney to AL, 14 Sept. 1864, ALP; DJH, pp. 229–30, 359.
See, for example, The Scioto Gazette [Chillicothe, OH], 1 Nov. 1864; Chicago Tribune, 18, 19 Oct. 1864.
Granville Moody, A Life’s Retrospect: Autobiography of Rev. Granville Moody, D.D., ed. Sylvester Weeks (Cincinnati: Cranston and Stowe, 1890), pp. 441–45; Peck, Life and Times, pp. 378–81; Crooks, Life of Bishop Matthew Simpson, p. 396.
Howard, Religion and the Radical Republican Movement, pp. 68–89; James M. McPherson, The Struggle for Equality: Abolitionists and the Negro in the Civil War and Reconstruction (Princeton: Prince
ton University Press, 1964), pp. 260–86; RWAL, p. 446.
Scioto Gazette, 20 Sept. 1864; T. M. Eddy Diary, IEG.
Independent, 27 Oct. 1864; Gilbert Haven, Sermons, Speeches and Letters on Slavery and Its War: From the Passage of the Fugitive Slave Bill to the Election of President Grant (New York: Carlton & Lanahan, 1869), pp. 481–82.
CW, 7:533–34, 8:55–56; Joel H. Silbey, A Respectable Minority: The Democratic Party in the Civil War Era, 1860–1869 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), pp. 75–76. Davis called nine days of national fasting. Cheseborough, God Ordained This War, p. 226.
Independent, 1 Sept., 27 Oct., 3 Nov. 1864; Clark, Life of Matthew Simpson, pp. 240–43. Mark Hoyt, a wealthy Methodist layman and Union-Republican party activist, judged that Simpson’s speech, just five days before the presidential ballot, would “give ample time for it to produce its result on the election.” Jones, The Sectional Crisis and Northern Methodism, pp. 42–43. Gulliver’s panegyric to Lincoln in the columns of the Independent, he explained in a letter to the president in the dark days of August, was designed to counteract “the present vacillating feverish state of feeling in the Republican party toward you.” The article prompted cries of “hoax” from Democrats, but the Yankee clergyman was real enough. His church deacons included Governor William A. Buckingham; his acquaintances numbered Theodore Tilton, who urged Gulliver to let him publish the article immediately on the heels of the Democratic convention. J. P. Gulliver to AL, 26 Aug., 12 Sept. 1864, ALP.
L. E. Chittenden, Recollections of President Lincoln and His Administration (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1891), pp. 446–51; William Sutton, “Seeing Through a Glass Darkly: Abraham Lincoln and the Northern Evangelical Clergy, 1860–1865” (unpublished typescript, University of Illinois, 1985), pp. 24–25; Moorhead, American Apocalypse, pp. 141–42.
J. B. Maxfield to AL, 21 Oct. 1864, ALP.
Northwestern Christian Advocate, 12 Oct. 1864; Chicago Tribune, 8 Nov. 1864.
Chicago Tribune, 4 Aug., 28 Sept. 1864.
Chicago Tribune, 19 Oct. 1864.
Christian Advocate and Journal, 25 Aug., 27 Oct. 1864; Address of the National Union Executive Committee, Chicago Tribune, 19, 22 Oct. 1864.
R. E. Fisk to J. Hay, 22 Sept. 1864, ALP; Burlingame, ed., With Lincoln in the White House, p. 158 (summarizing Grant’s views as set out in the New York Times); Northwestern Christian Advocate, 26 Oct. 1864.
Christian Advocate and Journal, 11 Aug., 27 Oct. 1864; Harper’s Weekly, quoted in Northwestern Christian Advocate, 14 Sept. 1864; Chicago Tribune, 19, 20 Oct., 8 Nov. 1864.
DJH, pp. 40–41.
Northwestern Christian Advocate, 23 Nov. 1864.
Christian Advocate and Journal, 17 Nov. 1864; Independent, 17 Nov. 1864; Northwestern Christian Advocate, 23 Nov. 1864; Zion’s Herald, 24 Sept. 1864; Chicago Tribune, 4 Nov. 1864; Howard, Religion and the Radical Republican Movement, pp. 88–89; Dale Baum, The Civil War Party System: The Case of Massachusetts, 1848–1876 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), pp. 91, 95–100; Stephen L. Hansen, The Making of the Third Party System: Voters and Parties in Illinois, 1850–1876 (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1980), pp. 142–43; Independent 10, 17 Nov. 1864.
DJH, p. 252; Northwestern Christian Advocate, 2 Nov. 1864.
Burlingame, ed., With Lincoln in the White House, p. 157.
DJH, p. 196. Cf. M. Sutliff to AL, 4 Sept. 1864, ALP.
7. The Potency of Death
Nicolay, Oral History, p. 83.
Gideon Welles, Lincoln and Seward. Remarks upon the Memorial Address of Chas. Francis Adams, on the Late William H. Seward, with Incidents and Comments Illustrative of the Measures and Policy of the Administration of Abraham Lincoln (New York: Sheldon & Company, 1874), p. 32; HI, p. 167.
F. B. Carpenter, The Inner Life of Abraham Lincoln: Six Months at the White House (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995; originally published New York, 1866), pp. 148–49; DJH, p. 132.
CW, 6:538; HI, p. 166; John W. Forney, Anecdotes of Public Men, 2 vols. (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1873, 1881), 1:176.
Forney, Anecdotes of Public Men, 1:39; Robert S. Harper, Lincoln and the Press (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1951), p. 322.
HI, p. 165.
HI, p. 162.
Carpenter, Inner Life, pp. 30–31; CW, 6:16–17.
Reminiscences of Carl Schurz, 3 vols. (New York: The McClure Co., 1907–8), 2:91; Forney, Anecdotes of Public Men, 1:86; Carpenter, Inner Life, pp. 149–53, 278.
Michael Burlingame, ed., At Lincoln’s Side: John Hay’s Civil War Correspondence and Selected Writings (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000), p. 137; Don E. Fehrenbacher, Lincoln in Text and Context: Collected Essays (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987), pp. 157–63.
Lincoln Observed, p. 250; Justin G. Turner and Linda Levitt Turner, Mary Todd Lincoln: Her Life and Letters (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972), pp. 284–85.
Carpenter, Inner Life, pp. 62–67. In fact, Grant and his wife declined the invitation to attend.
Leaping from Lincoln’s box, Booth broke a leg and rode off in great pain, to take refuge with Confederate sympathizers. Twelve days later he was tracked down and shot by Union cavalry. Several of his band of accomplices—who failed in their assigned roles as assassins of the secretary of state and the vice president—were brought to trial and hanged. Subsequent theories, which have embraced in the plot the Confederate leadership and high-ranking Unionists (including Edwin Stanton), are as groundless as they are sensational.
David B. Chesebrough, “No Sorrow like Our Sorrow”: Northern Protestant Ministers and the Assassination of Lincoln (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1994), pp. 16–17; Northwestern Christian Advocate, 10 May 1865.
Merrill D. Peterson, Lincoln in American Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 21, 191; David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), p. 369.
Northwestern Christian Advocate, 10 May 1865; Chesebrough, “No Sorrow like Our Sorrow,” p. 67.
Chesebrough, “No Sorrow like Our Sorrow,” p. 30; Northwestern Christian Advocate, 10 May 1865.
Chesebrough, “No Sorrow like Our Sorrow,” pp. 16, 33–36, 39, 68–69; Gilbert Haven, The Uniter and Liberator of America: A Memorial Discourse on the Character and Career of Abraham Lincoln Delivered in the North Russell Street, M.E. Church, Boston, Sunday, April 23, 1865 (Boston: James P. Magee, 1865), pp. 4, 30.
Harriet Beecher Stowe reported Lincoln as telling her, “Whichever way it ends, I have the impression that I shan’t last long after it’s over.” RWAL, p. 428. Chase, Stanton, and Seward were all dead within eight years of the war’s end.
Chesebrough, “No Sorrow like Our Sorrow,” pp. 76–77.
Northwestern Christian Advocate, 10 May 1865; Chesebrough, “No Sorrow like Our Sorrow,” pp. 74, 106; Thomas Reed Turner, Beware the People Weeping: Public Opinion and the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982), p. 45.
Afterword
Benjamin P. Thomas, Portrait for Posterity: Lincoln and His Biographers (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1947), pp. 209–10.
Frank Owen, Tempestuous Journey: Lloyd George, His Life and Times (London: Hutchinson [1954]), pp. 28–29, 670; Thomas Jones, Lloyd George (London: Oxford University Press, 1951), pp. 204–6.
FURTHER READING
No short bibliography can possibly do justice to the rich and ever-growing trove of scholarly writings about Abraham Lincoln, let alone about the political era in which he lived. What follows is chiefly designed as a guide to some of the best and most influential works relating to Lincoln himself, and offers a fuller indication of the studies on which I have drawn than can be gleaned from the citations for each chapter.
Biographies
Amongst the shelf of modern one-volume biographies, three in particular stand out. Benjamin P. Thomas, Abraham Lincoln: A Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1952), is a s
uperbly crafted work of synthesis and was the first biography to benefit from the opening of the Abraham Lincoln Papers in the Library of Congress in 1947. Beautifully written, and offering a master class in the art of compression and storytelling, is David Herbert Donald, Lincoln (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), though it overstates the president’s “passivity.” Allen C. Guelzo, Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1999), treats Lincoln’s Whiggish ideas and personal beliefs with unusual but compelling seriousness. Beyond these, two succinct biographies are noteworthy: Mark E. Neely, The Last Best Hope of Earth: Abraham Lincoln and the Promise of America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), and William E. Gienapp, Abraham Lincoln and Civil War America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), which is especially good on Lincoln’s presidential leadership.
Of the several multivolume lives, two demand particular attention. If few today have the stamina to digest all ten volumes of John G. Nicolay and John Hay’s “official” work, Abraham Lincoln: A History (New York: The Century Co., 1890), and if its obvious bias and life-and-times approach appear limiting, it still remains an essential source, one characterized by scholarship and real candor. The finest multivolume modern biography is James G. Randall, Lincoln the President, 4 vols. (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1945–55), completed by Richard N. Current, which follows a “revisionist” line and presents Lincoln as a liberal and realist in vexatious conflict with the Radical Republicans.
1. Inner Power (1809–54)
Essential for Lincoln’s early life in Kentucky and Indiana, for his young manhood in New Salem, and for his nonpolitical life in Springfield are the mass of recollections which William Herndon elicited after Lincoln’s death, though in many cases it is a matter of fine judgment whether they offer a searchlight or a distorting mirror. The material informed William H. Herndon and Jesse W. Weik, Herndon’s Life of Lincoln, ed. Paul M. Angle (Cleveland: World Publishing Company, 1942), and is superbly set out in Douglas L. Wilson and Rodney O. Davis, eds., Herndon’s Informants: Letters, Interviews, and Statements About Abraham Lincoln (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998). Walter B. Stevens, A Reporter’s Lincoln, ed. Michael Burlingame (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), and Michael Burlingame, ed., An Oral History of Abraham Lincoln: John G. Nicolay’s Interviews and Essays (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1996), provide additional recollections.
Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power Page 48