Abraham Lincoln: A Legacy of Freedom - US Department of State

Lincoln in Print
Every phrase that can be detached
from Lincoln’s most famous
utterances has been stamped on a
cover, from A New Birth of Freedom to
With Malice Toward None, from With
Charity for All to Of the People, By the
People, For the People. I looked further
and discovered a kind of verbal daisy
chain, as though all Lincoln authors
had been given a limited number of
words and were forced to arrange
them in a different order. There was
The Sword of Lincoln and Lincoln’s
Sword; Lincoln and the Generals and
Lincoln’s Generals; The Inner World
of Abraham Lincoln, The Intimate
World of Abraham Lincoln, Abraham
Lincoln’s World, and Abraham
Lincoln’s Intimate World; Lincoln’s
Virtues and the Virtuous Lincoln.
There was In Lincoln’s Footsteps,
In the Footsteps of the Lincolns, and
— for variety’s sake — In Lincoln’s
Footprints. By my count, there are
three books called The Real Lincoln,
each of which presents a real Lincoln
utterly incompatible with the real
Lincoln described in the other two.
This surprised me less than it
might have, for the other thing that
struck me as I researched my own
book, Land of Lincoln — not to be
confused with The Living Land of
Lincoln, by Thomas J. Fleming, which
was published in 1980 — was just
how many Lincolns were running
around. I had been a boy in the
early 1960s when Lincoln loomed
large and inescapable, a common
possession, a touchstone for the
country at large. Now everyone
seemed to have his own Lincoln.
It was as if this great piece of our
national patrimony had been broken
up and privatized.
Again the books told the story.
Just in recent years we’ve had a book
proving Lincoln was a fundamentalist
Christian — this was written by a
fundamentalist Christian. Another
proved that Lincoln’s greatness
arose from his struggle with clinical
depression; the book was written by
a journalist who has struggled with
clinical depression. Most notoriously,
a gay activist published a book in
2005 asserting that Lincoln, though
not a gay activist himself, was at
least actively gay. Conservatives
have written books about Lincoln’s
8 ABRAHAM LINCOLN: A LEGACY OF FREEDOM