How I Met Lincoln

When the Russian tanks finished pounding my family’s apartment building, a grand piano lay on top of the rubble; a music teacher had lived on the third floor. The image has grown into an icon in my mind and will never leave. Budapest, November 1956. The revolution had been defeated, and my father said that the country would stay Communist for the rest of my life. “Leave. You have no future here. Go to an English-speaking country.” I was sixteen years old.

I was born in Hungary during the Second World War and born again in South Dakota, a free man. There I put myself through a small college, doing such executive jobs as washing dishes to working in the fields. Along the way I discovered Lincoln. He helped teach me English—and much more. I wrote my first term paper as a sophomore on his economic views. Years later it became my first book, Lincoln and the Economics of the American Dream.

When people used to ask, “Why Lincoln?” I would reply that I merely followed my instincts. I chose to study Lincoln the way I chose to drink my coffee black or marry a girl with big blue eyes. Now, after thirteen books on Lincoln and the Civil War era (and thirty years of marriage), I know better. All along I was looking for the heart of America. And I have found it. Of course, such a journey holds both great advantages and great dangers for a historian.

Gabor S. Boritt is director of the Civil War Institute at Gettysburg College, where he also serves as Robert C. Fluhrer Professor of Civil War Studies. He is currently working on a book called Storm of Battle, Storm of Heaven: Gettysburg.

I became acquainted with Lincoln the way everyone else does—in school. But I didn’t have a particular interest until my older sister, Marie, who is much smarter than I, thought I should know Lincoln better. She bought me the nine-volume Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln.

At the time I had no money of my own. We didn’t even have an encyclopedia in the house until we had our third child. The Collected Works to me was a treasure. And I actually read it—all of it. I still have it—the History Book Club edition, gray binding with blue trim—in my study at home, along with sixty or seventy other Lincoln books I keep close at hand.

My interest has never waned. I suppose part of the fascination is that Lincoln started from the bottom, and I started from the bottom. But there is more. Like Sir Thomas More, another man I admire deeply, Lincoln was extraordinarily talented, did extraordinary things, was mostly high-minded, but also profoundly imperfect. Both men were subject to all the frailties with which the rest of us suffer. Without those imperfections they would seem more like statues, difficult to embrace as useful models because of the distance between us and them. But they were human, which allows me to relate to them. Lincoln suggests that imperfect people can make important contributions.

Mario M. Cuomo served twelve years as governor of New York, co-edited Lincoln on Democracy, and delivered acclaimed addresses on Lincoln at both Springfield, Illinois, and Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.

As a boy growing up in Mississippi, I never had much interest in Abraham Lincoln, and it was not until graduate school at the University of Illinois, when I became the research assistant of Professor J. G. Randall, the great Lincoln scholar, that the subject really attracted me.

At that time Professor Randall was working on his account of the Fort Sumter crisis (which later appeared in his Lincoln the President). Sitting beside him in his study four hours every day, I came to see how his mind worked and learned that history was not just a stringing together of names, dates, and anecdotes; it was more like a working out of an elaborate jigsaw puzzle, where every one of thousands of pieces had to fit.

The process began to fascinate me, and it has done so ever since.

David Herbert Donald, professor emeritus of history at Harvard University, wrote the 1956 classic Lincoln Reconsidered and the acclaimed 1995 biography Lincoln. He is currently at work on a book tentatively titled Lincoln Men: A Meditation on Friendship.

In 1970 I became choral director at the high school in Sandusky, Ohio. Beards were popular then, and I thought I would start one over Christmas break. As it filled in, people said they saw a Lincolnesque profile there.

That’s when it occurred to me that I might be able to do a presentation on Lincoln, something like Hal Holbrook’s one-man show Mark Twain Tonight. So I began doing research, my first steps on an excursion that has brought my wife, Joanne, and me to make our home in Gettysburg. I think I’ve played Lincoln eightyfive hundred times over the past twenty-one years.

Recently we purchased a cemetery lot and headstone within seventy-five yards of the spot where the President made his “few appropriate remarks” in November 1863. How is that for fulfilling the promise of a “final resting place”?

Jim Getty is one of the nation’s pre-eminent Lincoln portrayers. He has toured the country and played Lincoln on television, and he recites the Gettysburg Address each November 19 at anniversary observances at the Gettysburg National Cemetery.

Being a lifelong Republican, I feel as if I’ve always known Abraham Lincoln, but going to the U.S. Congress in 1971, I met the real Lincoln as I began to read about and understand his indefatigable leadership on behalf of the Union, his eloquence and magnanimity at Gettysburg, and his inspiration and courage in ending slavery.

Lincoln rarely spoke without mentioning the eternal ideals of democracy in the Declaration of Independence, his faith in the desire of all people to better their condition, and the universal essence of the American dream.

His Homestead Act and Morrill Land Grant College Act, among others, were guided by his lodestar of equality and opportunity and remind us on the eve of the twenty-first century that all people, everywhere, must have the right to dream, to be free, and to pursue happiness. It is only in this framework that we may truly practice “charity for all.”

Jack Kemp was a professional football star before winning a House seat. He later served as the U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development and was the Republican candidate for Vice President in 1996.

My real, personal introduction to Lincoln came during the 1992 presidential election. Reporters were constantly saying, “What we need for a decent political campaign is the Lincoln-Douglas type of debate, not the network TV things with sixtysecond answers.”

Right around then I happened to walk into a bookstore in Pentagon City, Arlington, Virginia. Propped up right in front of me was a book titled The Lincoln-Douglas Debates by someone named Harold Holzer. I went over and grabbed it. That began a process of total Abraham Lincoln immersion.

It led to a segment of the television series Booknotes, and that Booknotes episode led to the idea of our re-creating all the debates. We drove a thousand miles through all seven sites—on to Springfield—and eventually produced the re-creations in 1994. I had to see everything Lincoln, and I think I have.

Now we’ve had more Booknotes shows on Lincoln than on any other person. I’ve seen his log cabin, his stepmother’s and father’s graves, the place where he was born, the house in which he died, his son’s mansion in Vermont, and the Lincoln museums in Fort Wayne and Springfield.

But I think the high point for me was one unforgettable evening when I was invited to speak to a group of Abraham Lincoln impersonators at a Best Western hotel. I got up and faced fifty-seven human beings who looked, acted, and dressed like Lincoln. That’s what I mean by total Lincoln immersion.

Brian Lamb, cofounder, chairman, and on-air host of the C-SPAN cable television network, has collected some of the best of his television interviews for two books, Booknotes and Booknotes Life Stories. Today CSPAN offers frequent coverage of Lincoln conferences and symposiums around the nation.

I met Abraham Lincoln in Baltimore on his 150th birthday, February 12, 1959. I was a first-year graduate student at Johns Hopkins University, still academically wet behind the ears. About all I knew of Lincoln I had picked up from a cursory reading of Benjamin Thomas’s biography a year or two earlier and from a first-semester research paper I had done on Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton (which in fact focused on the 1865–67 period). But apparently that was more than anyone else in Baltimore was reputed to know about Lincoln at the time, for a local radio station invited me to answer call-in questions from listeners in a program commemorating Lincoln’s birthday.

I learned from that humbling experience that I did not know all the answers—or even most of them—about Lincoln. But the experience also motivated me to try to find many of those answers, and I have been happily involved in the quest ever since.

James M. McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom, which won the 1989 Pulitzer Prize, is considered the finest single-volume history of the Civil War. He has gone on to write several books about Lincoln.

My great-uncle played cornet for the 5th New York Artillery band, which performed at Gettysburg on November 19, 1863, when Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address. My uncle used to sit me down and tell me how he saw Lincoln that day; it was in a special way. As Lincoln spoke, his face was reflected in the shiny bell of my uncle’s brass horn. My uncle never forgot seeing that image of Lincoln floating in his instrument like some sort of vision, and neither have I. He died in his nineties—I was thirteen—and he left me all his Civil War things, including the horn. I still have it.

He remembered it was chilly that day and that even though he sat right down in front, he could hear Lincoln only faintly. He doubted whether the thousands of people gathered ever heard much of the speech. Afterward he walked around to the outskirts of the crowd and saw hucksters selling souvenirs. He bought a glass hatchet, printed on the blade of which was the little caption “Gettysburg 1863.” He gave me that too.

So I became just like my uncle, a horn player and a Lincoln collector.

Weldon Petz played trombone in the Jimmy Dorsey orchestra under the name of Tommy Weldon before becoming a career school administrator. In 1998 he donated his vast Lincoln collection to the Plymouth Historical Museum in Plymouth, Michigan.

Lincoln has assumed so many aspects in memory that it is hard to recall first impressions. Growing up in a historian’s household at a time when Civil War veterans were still marching in Memorial Day parades, I suppose I saw him early on as the President who won the war and freed the slaves. Later I came to see him as a man from the bleakest of backgrounds who rose to heights of intellectual and moral grandeur, thereby wonderfully embodying the potentialities of the American Republic and the potentialities of democracy—and that is the way I see him today.

Perhaps the nation’s best-known historian, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., has written many books, including The Imperial Presidency (1973).

For me it was Love is Eternal by Irving Stone. I read the book when my children were babies and I was home with them. And then I wanted to know all about Lincoln’s descendants: Did they marry, did they have children, were any alive? My quest took me to the Huntmgton Library, where I met a collector named Justin Turner. He was an elderly man thrilled that someone really young wanted to learn about Lincoln.

He took me under his wing, and I started doing research, learning about rare books and manuscripts. I got a job working for his son-in-law, who owned a manuscript gallery in Beverly Hills called the Scriptorium. They put a dollar value on my hours and paid me in manuscripts. In my first year I got my first Lincoln manuscript and a Thomas Edison eulogy on Lincoln.

Then I heard David Wolper was going to produce a six-hour mini-series on Sandburg’s Lincoln, and a producer friend introduced me to one of his people. I was hired immediately. I did research, worked with casting and makeup, and wheeled all my material around the Paramount lot on a trolley. Best of all, I got to Springfield, Illinois, to do research. And it all started with Irving Stone.

Louise Taper, who lives in Beverly Hills, is one of the most important private collectors of Lincoln. In 1997 she co-edited her first book, “Right or Wrong, God Judge Me”: The Writings of John Wilkes Booth.

My name begins with W, so when I started sixth grade, I was placed in the last seat in the last row, right beneath a large print of Abraham Lincoln. Years before, my mother had read aloud to me a Lincoln entry from a children’s encyclopedia, so I was already prepared. Now I was inspired. I began using my lunch money to buy Lincoln books. In 1951 twenty-five cents could buy used copies of Sandburg’s Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years or Dale Carnegie’s Lincoln the Unknown, two of my earliest purchases. At first I would bring them into the house secretly. We weren’t a collecting family.

While still a teenager, I decided to become a lawyer—just like Lincoln. When I was a college junior, a friend and I spent spring recess camping out at Lincoln sites. In Gettysburg Mr. and Mrs. William Barriga allowed us to pitch our tent near their house, then and now the only privately owned home on the battlefield. That night they felt so sorry for us that they invited us to stay indoors. Inside we saw a bullet that had pierced a door during the battle and had been lodged there ever since. I was hooked, firmly and forever. I’ve been collecting and studying Lincoln ever since.

Frank J. Williams, who is an associate justice of the Rhode Island Superior Court, owns a collection of twelve thousand books and ten thousand artifacts. He serves as chairman of the Lincoln Forum.

One day, when I was a young man in high school in New York, I walked by the gallery of an autograph dealer on Fifth Avenue—Walter Benjamin Autographs. I wasn’t a fan of Lincoln. I just wanted an autograph. So I bought my first: a little cut signature of Abraham Lincoln.

After that I became more and more interested in history, and more and more interested in Lincoln. I began reading everything about him. When people in my business would complain to me about how tough things were, I’d say: “Wait a minute! You got it easy, kid! Try to grow up in a lean-to, like Lincoln. Try to grow up in the life of Lincoln!” Talk about perseverance. He ran for office five times and lost, and then he became President.

Before producing the acclaimed mini-series “Roots,” David L. Wolper produced a 1973 American Heritage special, “Lincoln: Trial by Fire,” and then the miniseries “Sandburg’s Lincoln.” At one time his famous autograph collection included the handwritten letter from Lincoln to the eleven-year-old girl who first suggested he grow a beard.