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The Lincoln Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Legacy from 1860 to Now

Edited by Harold Holzer

“A thrilling book. Here at last is the living portrait of Lincoln that has eluded photographers and painters for 200 years. Only this great chorus of poets and playwrights, novelists and essayists, historians and statesmen could capture the protean spirit of the man.” — Daniel Mark Epstein, author of The Lincolns: Portrait of a Marriage

Overview
News & Views
Table of Contents
Contributors

Overview

Video Thirteen Days: Abraham Lincoln and the Crisis of Presidential Succession
December 28, 2020

Story of the Week Frederick Douglass, “Eulogy for Abraham Lincoln”
February 11, 2020

Interviews Harold Holzer on The Lincoln Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Legacy from 1860 to Now
February 11, 2016

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The Lincoln Anthology brings together for the first time 110 insightful and imaginative selections by a diverse array of 95 writers from William Cullen Bryant to E. L. Doctorow. Here is a composite portrait of our greatest president told by the journalists, biographers, satirists, essayists, novelists, clergymen, poets, play-wrights, historians, memoirists, and statesmen who have shaped our understanding of Lincoln and his complex and crucial legacy over the last 150 years.

The collection includes fascinating firsthand observations by Emerson and Hawthorne, satirical sketches by Artemus Ward and Petroleum V. Nasby, and surprising contemporary commentary by Harriet Beecher Stowe, Karl Marx, George Templeton Strong, and Horace Greeley. Moving eulogies by Henry Ward Beecher and George Bancroft join poetic tributes from James Russell Lowell, Henrik Ibsen, and Walt Whitman. Dramatically contrasting views of Lincoln are provided by his presidential secretaries, John G. Nicolay and John Hay, and his law partner, William H. Herndon. Lincoln’s views and deeds on race and emancipation are examined by Frederick Douglass with keen critical candor, while his democratic virtues are extolled by Whitman in luminous prose.

As Lincoln faded from personal memory his legacy grew, becoming more deeply resonant of abiding American themes—and also more contested. The Lincoln Anthology traces this evolution through the works of Lincoln’s path-breaking biographer Ida Tarbell; through the defining poems of Edwin Arlington Robinson, Vachel Lindsay, and Edgar Lee Masters; through the political rivalry of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, as they vie to lay claim to Lincoln’s political mantle; and through the powerful writings of Booker T. Washington, Robert R. Moton, and W.E.B. Du Bois, who testify to the continued power of Lincoln’s memory for African Americans struggling with the unfulfilled promise of emancipation.

Later in the 20th century, Carl Sandburg, Robert E. Sherwood, and Mario Cuomo discover in Lincoln a democratic hero for new periods of crisis and conflict; Jacques Barzun, Marianne Moore, and Garry Wills explore his greatness as a writer; and Delmore Schwartz, Edmund Wilson, and Lerone Bennett Jr. make provocative contributions to the anti-Lincoln tradition. As the book draws to the present, Richard Slotkin, Adam Braver, and E. L. Doctorow exemplify the renewed vigor of fictional depictions of Lincoln at the beginning of the 21st century, and Barack Obama lays claims to an unfinished legacy as he announces his bid for the office that Lincoln so memorably transformed.

Harold Holzer, volume editor, is one of the country’s leading authorities on Abraham Lincoln and the political culture of the Civil War era. A prolific writer and lecturer, author of Lincoln and the Power of the Press and The Civil War in 50 Objects, among many other books, Holzer served for six years (2010–2016) as Chairman of The Lincoln Bicentennial Foundation. For the previous ten years he co-chaired the U. S. Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission, appointed by President Clinton. President Bush awarded Holzer the National Humanities Medal in 2008. And in 2013, Holzer wrote an essay on Lincoln for the official program at the second inauguration of President Obama. He is now co-chairman of The Lincoln Forum.

Project support for this volume was provided by The National Endowment for the Humanities and The Bodman Foundation.

The Lincoln Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Legacy from 1860 to Now is kept in print by a gift from Paul Alexander Wagner to the Guardians of American Letters Fund, made in honor of his wife Jeanette Sarkisian Wagner on her 80th birthday.
News & Views

Video Thirteen Days: Abraham Lincoln and the Crisis of Presidential Succession
December 28, 2020

Story of the Week Frederick Douglass, “Eulogy for Abraham Lincoln”
February 11, 2020

Interviews Harold Holzer on The Lincoln Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Legacy from 1860 to Now
February 11, 2016

Interviews Lewis Dabney on Edmund Wilson, “a storyteller, a master of exposition and compressed intellectual analysis”
December 28, 2015
Table of Contents

William Cullen Bryant
Introduction of Abraham Lincoln at Cooper Union (1860)

William Dean Howells
From Life of Abraham Lincoln (1860)

Henry Villard
From Lincoln on the Eve of ’61 (1860)

Artemus Ward
Artemus Ward on His Visit to Abe Lincoln (1860)

Ralph Waldo Emerson
From The Journals (1862)

Nathaniel Hawthorne
From Chiefly About War-Matters by a Peaceable Man (1862)

James Sloan Gibbons
Three Hundred Thousand More (1862)

Horace Greeley
The Prayer of Twenty Millions (1862)

Karl Marx
On Events in North America (1862)

George Templeton Strong
From The Diaries (1862)

Ralph Waldo Emerson
From The Journals (1863)

James Russell Lowell
The President’s Policy (1864)

Harriet Beecher Stowe
Abraham Lincoln (1864)

Anonymous
From Abraham Africanus I (1864)

Petroleum V. Nasby
Has an Interview with the President (1864)

Anonymous
The Federal Phoenix (1864)

George Templeton Strong
From The Diaries (1865)

Edward Everett Hale
Sermon Preached in Boston (1865)

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Remarks at the Services Held in Concord (1865)

William Cullen Bryant
The Death of Lincoln (1865)

Henry Ward Beecher
Sermon Preached in Brooklyn (1865)

George Bancroft
Oration in Union Square, New York City (1865)

Edmund Clarence Stedman
Abraham Lincoln: Assassinated Good Friday, 1865 (1865)

Tom Taylor
Abraham Lincoln Foully Assassinated, April 14, 1865 (1865)

Henrik Ibsen
Abraham Lincoln’s Murder (1865)

Karl Marx
Address of the International Working Men’s Association to President Johnson (1865)

Richard Henry Stoddard
Abraham Lincoln: An Horatian Ode (1865)

Julia Ward Howe
“Crown his blood-stained pillow” (1865)

Noah Brooks
Personal Recollections of Abraham Lincoln (1865)

James Russell Lowell
From Ode Recited at the Harvard Commemoration (1865)

Victor Hugo
Notebook Entry (1865)

Herman Melville
The Martyr (1866)

William H. Herndon
Abraham Lincoln, Ann Rutledge, and New Salem: A Lecture (1866)

Frederick Douglass
Oration in Memory of Abraham Lincoln (1876)

John Greenleaf Whittier
The Emancipation Group (1879)

Richard Henry Stoddard
Abraham Lincoln (1880)

Walt Whitman
From Leaves of Grass (1881)
When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d
O Captain! My Captain!
Hush’d Be the Camps To-day
This Dust Was Once the Man

Walt Whitman
From Specimen Days & Collect (1882)
Abraham Lincoln
Death of President Lincoln
No Good Portrait of Lincoln
Death of Abraham Lincoln

Edmund Clarence Stedman
The Hand of Lincoln (1883)

Ulysses S. Grant
From Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant (1886)

Frederick Douglass
From Reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln by Distinguished Men of His Time (1886)

Richard Watson Gilder
On the Life-Mask of Abraham Lincoln (1886)
To the Spirit of Abraham Lincoln (1888)

Walt Whitman
From November Boughs (1888)

William H. Herndon & Jesse W. Weik
From Herndon’s Lincoln: The True Story of a Great Life (1889)

John G. Nicolay & John Hay
From Abraham Lincoln: A History (1890)

William O. Stoddard
From Inside the White House in War Times (1890)

Carl Schurz
From Abraham Lincoln: An Essay (1891)

Bram Stoker
From Lecture on Abraham Lincoln (1893)

Ida M. Tarbell
From The Life of Abraham Lincoln (1900)

Winston Churchill
From The Crisis (1901)

Edwin Markham
Lincoln, the Man of the People (1901)

Mark Twain
A Lincoln Memorial (1907)

James Whitcomb Riley
Lincoln—the Boy (1907)

Leo Tolstoy
Tolstoi Holds Lincoln World’s Greatest Hero (1909)

Theodore Roosevelt
Centenary Address at Hodgenville, Kentucky (1909)

Booker T. Washington
Address on Abraham Lincoln Before the Republican Club of New York City (1909)

Julia Ward Howe
Abraham Lincoln (1909)

Edwin Arlington Robinson
The Master (1910)

Vachel Lindsay
Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight (1914)

Edgar Lee Masters
From Spoon River Anthology (1915)

Anne Rutledge
Hannah Armstrong

Carl Sandburg
Journey and Oath (1915)
“Paint his head against lavender shadows.” (1915)

Woodrow Wilson
Address at Hodgenville, Kentucky (1916)

Witter Bynner
A Farmer Remembers Lincoln (1917)

John Gould Fletcher
Lincoln (1921)

Robert Russa Moton
Draft of Speech at the Lincoln Memorial (1922)

W.E.B. Du Bois
From The Crisis (1922)

H. G. Wells
From The Six Greatest Men in History (1922)

H. L. Mencken
From Prejudices: Third Series (1922)

William Carlos Williams
From In the American Grain (1925)

Carl Sandburg
From Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years (1926)

Stephen Vincent Benét
From John Brown’s Body (1928)

Honoré Willsie Morrow
From With Malice Toward None (1928)

Dale Carnegie
From Lincoln the Unknown (1932)

Langston Hughes
Lincoln Monument: Washington (1932)

Rosemary Benét
Nancy Hanks (1933)

Carl Sandburg
From The People, Yes: 57 (1936)

Marsden Hartley
American Ikon—Lincoln (c. 1939)

Robert E. Sherwood
From Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1939)

Carl Sandburg
Mr. Lincoln and His Gloves (c. 1942)

Melvin B . Tolson
The Dictionary of the Wolf (1944)

Carl Sandburg
The Long Shadow of Lincoln: A Litany (1945)

Adlai E. Stevenson
Remarks at Gettysburg (1951)

James Agee
From Abraham Lincoln—The Early Years (1953)

Irving Stone
From Love Is Eternal (1954)

Sir Winston Churchill
From A History of the English-Speaking Peoples (1958)

Mark Van Doren
From The Last Days of Lincoln (1959)

Jacques Barzun
Lincoln the Writer (1959)

Delmore Schwartz
Lincoln (1959)

Norman Corwin
From The Rivalry (1960)

MacKinlay Kantor
From If the South Had Won the Civil War (1961)

Marianne Moore
Abraham Lincoln and the Art of the Word (1961)

Edmund Wilson
From Patriotic Gore (1962)

John Dos Passos
Lincoln and His Almost Chosen People (1964)

Reinhold Niebuhr
The Religion of Abraham Lincoln (1965)

Lerone Bennett Jr.
Was Abe Lincoln a White Supremacist? (1968)

Shelby Foote
From The Civil War: A Narrative (1974)

Robert Lowell
Abraham Lincoln (1976)

Stanley Kunitz
The Lincoln Relics (1978)

Allen Ginsberg
Adapted from Neruda’s “Que despierte el leñador” (1981)

Donggill Kim
Lincoln and Confucian Virtues (1983)

William Kennedy
From O Albany! An Urban Tapestry (1983)

Tom Wicker
From Unto This Hour (1984)

Gore Vidal
From Lincoln (1984)

Mario M. Cuomo
Abraham Lincoln and Our “Unfinished Work” (1986)

William Safire
From Freedom (1987)

Garry Wills
From Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America (1992)

Richard Slotkin
From Abe: A Novel of the Young Lincoln (2000)

Adam Braver
From Mr. Lincoln’s Wars (2003)

E. L. Doctorow
From The March (2005)

Epilogue: Barack Obama at Springfield
Contributors

James Agee
George Bancroft
Henry Ward Beecher
Rosemary Benét
Stephen Vincent Benét
Lerone Bennett Jr.
Adam Braver
Noah Brooks
William Cullen Bryant
Witter Bynner
Dale Carnegie
Winston Churchill
Mario M. Cuomo
E. L. Doctorow
John Dos Passos
Frederick Douglass
W. E. B. Du Bois
Ralph Waldo Emerson
John Gould Fletcher
Shelby Foote
James Solan Gibbons
Richard Wilson Gilder
Allen Ginsberg
Ulysses S. Grant
Horace Greely
Edward Everett Hale
Marsden Hartley
Nathaniel Hawthorne
John Hay
William H. Herndon
Julia Ward Howe
William Dean Howells
Langston Hughes
Victor Hugo
Henrik Ibsen
MacKinlay Kantor
William Kennedy
Donggill Kim
Stanley Kunitz
Vachel Lindsay
James Russell Lowell
Robert Lowell
Edwin Markham
Karl Marx
Edgar Lee Masters
Herman Melville
H. L. Mencken
Marianne Moore
Honoré Willsie Morrow
Robert Russa Moton
Petroleum V. Nasby
John G. Nicolay
Reinhold Niebuhr
Barack Obama
James Whitcomb Riley
Edwin Arlington Robinson
Theodore Roosevelt
William Safire
Carl Sandburg
Carl Schurz
Delmore Schwartz
Robert E. Sherwood
Richard Slotkin
Edmund Clarence Stedman
Adlai B. Stevenson
Richard Henry Stoddard
William O. Stoddard
Bram Stoker
Irving Stone
Harriet Beecher Stowe
George Templeton Strong
Ida M. Tarbell
Tom Taylor
Melvin B. Tolson
Leo Tolstoy
Mark Twain
Mark Van Doren
Gore Vidal
Henry Villard
Artemus Ward
Booker T. Washington
Jesse W. Weik
H. G. Wells
Walt Whitman
John Greenleaf Whittier
Tom Wicker
William Carlos Williams
Garry Wills
Edmund Wilson
Woodrow Wilson

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