Volume 29, Number 12 · July 15, 1982
Lincoln and His Legend
By George M. Fredrickson
Lincoln's Quest for Union: Public and Private Meanings
by Charles B. Strozier
Basic Books, 271 pp., $17.50
Abraham Lincoln: The Quest for Immortality
by Dwight G. Anderson
Knopf, 271 pp., $16.95
Abraham Lincoln is by far the most written-about figure in American history. Indeed, a complete Lincoln bibliography would itself be a thick book. But some intriguing mysteries remain which continue to attract the interest of serious scholars, as well as providing raw material for popularizers and myth-makers. Now that all his papers are readily accessible and all the hard facts about him that we are ever likely to know have been subjected to orthodox historical analysis, the Lincoln industry is retooling. The new trend is toward psychological explanations of his thought and behavior. The great precursor of the psycho-Lincolnians was Edmund Wilson, who argued that Lincoln early in his life developed an exalted and mystical sense of his historical role.[1] More recently, the historian George B. Forgie offered 'A Psychological Interpretation of Lincoln and His Age,' based on the assumption that Lincoln's Oedipal conflicts meshed with the ambivalent attitude of his generation toward the Founding Fathers of the nation.[2] Now we have two more studies that try, in rather different ways, to put the Civil War president on the analyst's couch and uncover his hidden motives.
Review, 3992 words
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