We Are Lincoln Men
Abraham Lincoln and His Friends
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5.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
In this brilliant and illuminating portrait of our sixteenth president, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner David Herbert Donald examines the significance of friendship in Abraham Lincoln's life and the role it played in shaping his career and his presidency.
Though Abraham Lincoln had hundreds of acquaintances and dozens of admirers, he had almost no intimate friends. Behind his mask of affability and endless stream of humorous anecdotes, he maintained an inviolate reserve that only a few were ever able to penetrate.
Professor Donald's remarkable book offers a fresh way of looking at Abraham Lincoln, both as a man who needed friendship and as a leader who understood the importance of friendship in the management of men. Donald penetrates Lincoln's mysterious reserve to offer a new picture of the president's inner life and to explain his unsurpassed political skills.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Donald delivers a highly readable portrait of Lincoln's closest friendships in a volume that nicely complements his preeminent biography of our 16th president. Donald's focus is on six key players: Joshua Speed, William H. Herndon, Orville H. Browning, William H. Seward and the president's private secretaries, John Nicolay and John Hay. With regard to the young Springfield entrepreneur Speed, Donald astutely dismantles the so-called "evidence" for a homoerotic relationship, pointing out that during the four years Speed and Lincoln shared a room and a bed (then a common practice among budget-conscious young men) both were quite energetically involved in quests for wives. Interestingly, no less than three of the six friends delineated by Donald also became Lincoln's biographers. William H. Herndon about whom Donald has previously written a book started out as Lincoln's law partner in the fall of 1844 and wound up doing vital, sometimes scandalous, sometimes spurious research culminating in a seminal biography published in 1889. The work of Nicolay and Hay was primarily intended to refute much of Herndon's scandalous accounts regarding Lincoln's lineage, frontier romances and unhappy marriage. Perhaps the most complex and informative of Donald's portraits is that of Orville Browning, a longtime Springfield associate and fellow attorney who served briefly as senator from Illinois during Lincoln's first term and whom Lincoln passed over no less than three times when given the opportunity to nominate him to the Supreme Court. Friendship had its limits.
Customer Reviews
We Are Lincoln Men An Essential Read
I have read over 50 biographies of A. Lincoln by my finger in the wind calculation including "Lincoln" by the same author. This is a book about the nature of his closest relationships which provided a huge surprise for me. Judge David Davis of Bloomington,Illinois almost single handedly gave Lincoln the Republican nomination. He was a mastermind. He himself said that Lincoln never thanked him. This is not the Abe Lincoln I knew? Mary Owens a former girlfriend tells a story of a time when a young Lincoln in the company of other young men finds a bird that has fallen from it's nest. He picked up the baby bird and returned it to the nest. When asked why he did that Abe says that he just wouldn't be able to sleep that night knowing that the bird was lying in the grass.
I was also surprised to learn that Lincoln's 1st friend in Springfield and his only lifetime intimate friend Joshua Speed was indispensable in keeping Kentucky a Union State.
" We Are Lincoln Men" exposes us to a darker and more complex Lincoln.
The author Donald also gives us a glimpse into the mind and analysis that a highly skilled biographer uses to tease out truth from fiction. After Lincoln died biographies came pouring out.
Some of the skills are in the manner of the language Lincoln used. While Donald doesn't think the Bixby letter an important work. I do. Remember the movie " Saving Private Ryan" ? The letter is quoted in it's entirety by an actor playing John Marshall. The controversy comes when Hay one of Lincoln's secretaries claims to have written it himself. Donald comes down on the side of Lincoln. The letter has powerful biblical language that only the author of the Gettysburg Address could write.
Author Donald doesn't just want to write a good story which he does. He wants to tell the real story.
Harvey Andersen