January 2011

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.

A childhood visit to Antietam kindled a lasting interest in the Civil War. I studied history in college, decided without much enthusiasm to make my living as a lawyer, and then went back to school to study the Civil War for real.

As a graduate assistant for David Herbert Donald’s biography Lincoln , I was given a list of hundreds of “I saw Lincoln” articles to find in obscure nineteenthcentury periodicals, and in the course of collecting and reading those accounts of Lincoln from life, in the stacks of Harvard’s Widener Library, I “met” the man. I had left the law partly because I had found no role in the profession; had I met Lincoln sooner, I might still be a lawyer.

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.

My first contact with Abraham Lincoln came in 1924, when I was three. My mother gave me a new shiny copper penny, saying, “You can have this new Lincoln penny to play with, but don’t put it in your mouth.” The next thing I knew, I had the coin in my mouth and was choking on it.

A more rewarding association began when I was about twelve. I enjoyed displaying keepsakes in my bedroom—valentines and Christmas cards, for example. In February I put up pictures of Washington and Lincoln. The Lincoln was only a newspaper photo. But in March I found I did not want to take it down. Something about that rugged and interesting face held my attention and admiration. From then on I have been collecting and cataloguing Lincoln photos, drawing and painting my own Lincoln illustrations, and writing and lecturing on Lincoln. I thank God that today at age seventy-seven I am still at it.

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.

North of Gettysburg, only thirty miles from America’s greatest battlefield, I was born and raised. There a Scotsman, my eighthgrade teacher, maintained the tradition of annual student treks over the field to awaken in us the “mystic chords of memory” linking young Americans to the gravestones of the men who had given their lives that a great nation might live.

There, with my classmates, I recited the peer-less funeral oration delivered by the greatest American who ever lived. There, inspired by his examnle. I realized that onlv in America could anyone go to that house at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. There I learned that the untutored chief magistrate of a great nation could be the unsurpassed master of his enemies, above all the master of himself.

There for the first time I sensed the meaning of true American statesmanship.

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.

As part of a family immersed in Lincoln, I grew up surrounded by the haunting image of his face. My own first study of the sixteenth President came when I was a graduate student in theology. Strangely moved by his words, I came to see Lincoln as a secular prophet, an almost spiritual figure moving over the American landscape.

Later I became aware of Lincoln the wily pragmalist, far more ambiguous than his mythic image. But I remain fascinated by the moral dimension of Lincoln’s leadership, by his political imagination, and by his extraordinary, sometimes even revelatory, use of words.

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.”

Abraham Lincoln first captured my heart when I listened to my mother read aloud the classic “Blue Book” biography series, which focused on the childhoods of famous Americans, including of course Lincoln. Every night I would fall asleep to the sound of my mother’s voice, so much softer and less piercing than mine, as she rendered the tale of Lincoln’s childhood. In this version of the story, Lincoln’s mother was the person who taught him to read and write.

I pictured young Abe snuggled in his bed just as I was, listening to his mother read aloud. My identification with Abe’s childhood grew stronger when I learned that his mother had died when he was only nine, for my own mother had a damaged heart that bound her to our house as an invalid and caused her death when I was fifteen.