This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from. Lincoln revisionism is not new. In place of smiling Honest Abe we got lynx-eyed Killer Lincoln.
The lovable Lincoln persisted through this period, but Lincoln was interrogated as much as admired. In the decades that followed, the tone of Lincoln biographies became remarkably more benign. In more recent years, however, Lincoln has been under assaultβnot for being a militarist but for not being militant enough, for not being as thorough an egalitarian as some of the radical Republicans in Congress.
Newer Lincoln biographies have been needed, and the need has been met. David S. Reynolds updates Lincoln by doing what scholars do now: he makes biography secondary to the cultural history of the country. Lincoln is seen as a man whose skin bears the tattoos of his time.
Instead of rising from one episode of strenuous self-making to another, he passes from one frame to the next, a man subsumed. Lincoln spent February 27, , the day he delivered his Cooper Union speechβthe speech that made him President, as he later saidβat a hotel across from P.
He even hosted a reception at the White House for Tom Thumb and his wife. Lincoln was usually pictured not as a polished neoclassical man, like his political rivals, but as rough and frontier-made. Americans like a craggy guy in times of crisis. Humphrey Bogart offered a similar look in the Second World War. Even his decision to grow a beard seemed meant to evoke a log-cabin hygiene that was then seen as a sign of sincerity.
