sandburg's "lincoln" within history

Sandburg's "Lincoln" within HistoryAuthor(s): James HurtSource: Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association, Vol. 20, No. 1 (Winter, 1999), pp. 55-65Published by: University of Illinois PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20148977 .

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Sandburg's Lincoln within History

JAMES HURT

Carl Sandburg's Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years and The War Years

is, for better or worse, the best-selling, most widely read, and most

influential book about Lincoln. Edmund Wilson, in Patriotic Gore, writes of how Grant's memoirs used to grace American book

shelves. "The thick pair of volumes of the Personal Memoirs/' he

wrote, "used to stand, like a solid attestation of the victory of the

Union forces, on the selves of every pro-Union home."1 In my own

childhood, several generations after Wilson's, the six slate-colored

volumes of Sandburg's Lincoln occupied the same place of honor,

celebratory not so much of Union victory as of the uniting of the

country under the heroic figure of Lincoln.

The two volumes of The Prairie Years were the publishing event

of 1926, and the four volumes of The War Years were an equal suc

cess in 1939. The books have been through many editions, includ

ing versions of a one-volume edition that Sandburg prepared in

1954. They have also provided the basis for a great many adapta tions for various media, including Robert Sherwood's Pulitzer

Prize-winning play Abe Lincoln in Illinois in 1938 and David Wolp er's six-part dramatization for television, Sandburg's Lincoln, in

1974, starring Hal Holbrook. Probably more Americans have

learned their Lincoln from Sandburg than from any other source.2

Sandburg's book has had an enormous impact on popular con

ceptions of Lincoln. In 1998, seventy-two years after the publica tion of its first part, it may seem to have aged rather badly: inac

curate factually, grotesquely distended, and lapsing rather too

frequently into a dated and forced "prose poetry" that charms less now than over

seventy years ago.

1. Edmund Wilson, Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War

(New York: Oxford University Press, 1962), 132.

2. Penelope Niven, Carl Sandburg: A Biography (New York: Scribner's, 1991), 536;

Merrill D. Peterson, Lincoln in American Memory (New York: Oxford University Press,

1994), 389.

Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association, Vol. 20, No. 1,1999 ? 1999 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois



56 Sandburg's Lincoln within History

Maybe enough time has passed for us to see The Prairie Years and The War Years in historical perspective, to historicize it against the

background of American history between the world wars. Sand

burg began writing The Prairie Years in 1922, less than five years after the World War I Armistice, and he completed The War Years in 1939 as the world was sliding inexorably into the holocaust of

World War II; the ambiguity of his title did not escape him. Read as a timeless masterpiece, Sandburg's Lincoln does not hold up; read as a timely response to a series of national crises that recalled the Civil War, the book still carries much of its original power.

I would like to approach a historical reading of Sandburg's Lin

coln gradually by first looking at it from three partial perspectives, each of which reveals part of the truth about the book. I do not

have thirteen ways of looking at this blackbird, but I do have three: as a biography, an American epic, and an American myth. Then I

would also like to look at the book from a fourth perspective, which

perhaps engages its historical context more directly: as an Ameri can testament, a secular analogy of scripture designed to provide inspiration for Americans as they endured trials that to Sandburg's

mind recalled the testing of the Civil War.

Most obviously, Sandburg's Lincoln is a biography of Lincoln.

Sandburg himself thought of it as a Lincoln biography, at least most

of the time, and that is the way that it has been read for the most

part. Yet from the beginning, critics have pointed out that if it is a

biography at all, it is a very eccentric and unconventional one.

When The War Years appeared, the noted historian Charles Beard

praised it as "a noble monument to American literature" but found it distinctly odd as historical biography: "Never yet," he wrote, "has a history or biography like Carl Sandburg's Abraham Lincoln: The War Years appeared on land or sea. Strict disciples of Gibbon,

Macaulay, Ranke, Mommsen, Hegel, or Marx will scarcely know

what to do with it."3 William E. Barton, who had published a life

of Lincoln himself the year before The Prairie Years was published, wrote that Sandburg's book "is not history, is not even biography" because of its lack of original research and uncritical use of evi

dence, but Barton nevertheless thought it was "real literature and a delightful and important contribution to the ever-lengthening shelf of really good books about Lincoln."4 Milo Milton Quaife, in

3. Charles Beard, "The Sandburg Lincoln," Virginia Quarterly Review 16 (Winter

1940): 112-16.

4. William E. Barton, "Review of The Prairie Years," American Historical Review 31

(July 1926): 809-11.



James Hurt 57

the Mississippi Valley Historical Review, was not so generous. In one

of the harshest evaluations of the book, he attacked Sandburg's fail

ure to document his sources, his "naive conception of what con

stitutes evidence," and his "carelessness of statement." He cited

nine factual errors in four pages on the Black Hawk War and won

dered if the rest of the book was similarly inaccurate. The Prairie

Years, he wrote, was nothing but "a hodge podge of miscellaneous

information."5

Historians have continued to criticize Sandburg's free and easy

way with his sources and his failure to identify those sources ever

since, not only in The Prairie Years but in The War Years as well. He

did provide a list of "Sources and Acknowledgments" at the open

ing of The War Years, but it is so brief and general as to be almost

useless. He does identify many of his sources in the text of the

works, and the reader who is reasonably familiar with the Lincoln

literature is likely to recognize many of the rest of the sources.

Unfortunately, such a reader is likely to recognize such unreliable

or even fictional sources as the anonymous Diary of a Public Man

and Francis Grierson's Valley of Shadows, which were drawn on as

if they were authoritative.

A different, though related, charge against The Prairie Years and

The War Years is that they contain too much material that is nei

ther biography nor history but merely rather sentimental poeticiz

ing on Sandburg's part. Quaife was as hard on this aspect of The

Prairie Years as he was on the careless scholarship. He was espe

cially scornful of what Sandburg called the "moonlight chapters," sections in which he sketched in the historical context of Lincoln's

life by imagining what the moon might have seen at the time.

"Whatever else it may be," Quaife snorted, it is "not history."6

Sandburg's "poetical" interpolations were also the butt of Edmund

Wilson's famous attack on the book, first in The New Yorker and then

in Patriotic Gore. Wilson found Sandburg's treatment of Lincoln's

romance with Ann Rutledge particularly hard to stomach. He cit

ed Sandburg's line, "A trembling took his body and dark waves

ran through him sometimes when she spoke so simple a thing as, 'The corn is getting high, isn't it?'" Wilson's comment was, "The

corn is getting high indeed!"7

5. Milo Milton Quaife, "Review of The Prairie Years," Mississippi Valley Historical

Review 13 (September 1926): 287-91.

6. Ibid.

7. Wilson, Patriotic Gore, 116.




One critical strategy, faced with the uneasy blend of history and

poetry in Sandburg's Lincoln, has been to abandon the claim to bio

graphical accuracy and instead see the book as a large-scale nation

al poem, perhaps an American epic. This is the view taken by,

among many others, Penelope Niven, author of the massive and

authoritative 1991 Carl Sandburg: A Biography. "Abraham Lincoln: The

Prairie Years/' she writes, "is a vast, epic prose poem, with Lincoln

the central figure in the volatile pageant of nineteenth-century American life. A man and a nation simultaneously came of age, for

Lincoln grew into manhood as his country faced its own great cri

sis of character and destiny."8 It is also essentially the view that

Robert W. Johannsen takes in his wonderfully warm and sympa thetic 1978 essay on "Sandburg and Lincoln: The Prairie Years." He

frames Sandburg as a romantic historian rather than an epic poet, but the two are very similar in Johannsen's formulation. The Prai

rie Years, he writes, quoting Sandburg approvingly, "was a 'poem of America, the America of humble folk and rough pioneers, of

crude settlements ... of the corn lands and broad prairies ... a

poem of the human spirit, not Lincoln's spirit only.'"9

Sandburg himself saw his book as an American epic as often as

he thought of it as a mere biography. In a preface written for The

Prairie Years but dropped before publication, he wrote, "The facts

and myths of his life are to be an American possession, shared

widely over the world, for thousands of years, as the tradition of

Knute or Alfred, Lao-tse or Diogenes, Pericles or Caesar, are kept."10 And in his "symphonic finish" to The War Years, Sandburg wrote, "Out of the smoke and stench, out of the music and violent dreams

of the war, Lincoln stood perhaps taller than any other of the many

great heroes. This was in the minds of many. None threw a longer shadow than he. And to him the great hero was The People. He

could not say too often that he was merely their instrument."11 In

this and in many similar passages, the figure of Lincoln becomes

merged with that of Sandburg's favorite abstraction, The People, and the book becomes a democratic epic celebrating not an indi

vidual but a collective hero.

8. Niven, Carl Sandburg, 423.

9. Robert W. Johannsen, "Sandburg and Lincoln: The Prairie Years," in The Fron

tier, the Union, and Stephen A. Douglas (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989),

267-84.


11. Carl Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln: The War Years, 4 vols. (New York: Harcourt

Brace, 1939), 4: 387.



James Hurt 59

The oxymoronic term democratic epic foregrounds the weakness

of the interpretation of The Prairie Years and The War Years as "epic" in any interestingly complex way. It is true that they are vast and

sweeping in scale and national in spirit. The problem with an epic

reading of Sandburg, however, is with the nature of the hero. To

place The Prairie Years and The War Years in a series that begins with

the Iliad and the Odyssey and continues with the Aeneid and Par

adise Lost is to connect it with an aristocratic and individualistic tra

dition that Sandburg sharply critiques in Lincoln. The critique takes

the form of a pervasive ambivalence on the subject of Lincoln's her

oism, an ambivalence that appears in the conclusion to The War Years

quoted earlier; on the one hand, Lincoln "stood perhaps taller than

any other of the many great heroes," and on the other, to Lincoln

himself, the great hero was "The People." (Niven and Johannsen

register this ambivalence also, in Niven's identification of Sand

burg's hero as not only Lincoln but also "the nation" and Johann sen's identification of him as both Lincoln and "the human spirit.")

A reading of Sandburg's Lincoln within the epic tradition might end by placing him not in a series with Achilles, Odysseus, and

Aeneas but rather with Blake's Albion, Whitman's Walt, and Joyce's

Leopold Bloom, as antiheroic heroes, collective individualists, and

bourgeois aristocrats, in other words, within the paradoxical tra

dition of democratic epic heroes.

The Prairie Years and The War Years have also been read not as bi

ography or as an epic poem but as a mythic text of American popu lar culture. Placed not in a series that includes Herndon's, Randall's, and David Herbert Donald's biographies of Lincoln or in one that

includes the Iliad and the Odyssey, but rather, in a sequence that

includes "Rip Van Winkle," Uncle Tom's Cabin, and Gone with the

Wind, literary works, in other words, that provide or express some

of the foundational myths of our culture, myths, in these examples, of gender, race, and the South.12 The fullest reading of Sandburg's Lincoln from this point of view is perhaps found in Stephen B. Oates's

Abraham Lincoln: The Man Behind the Myths. Oates concludes his sur

vey of Sandburg's work by writing the following:

Sandburg's Lincoln has such irresistible appeal to us [because] he is "a baffling and completely inexplicable" hero who em

12. William Henry Herndon and Jesse Weik, Herndons Lincoln: The True Story of a Great Life, 3 vols. (Chicago: Belford and Clarke, 1899); James G. Randall, Lincoln

the President, 4 vols. (New York: Dodd and Mead, 1945-1955). The last volume was

completed by Richard Nelson Current. David Herbert Donald, Lincoln (New York:

Simon and Schuster, 1995).




bodies the mystical genius of our nation. He possesses what

Americans have always considered their most noble traits?

honesty, unpretentiousness, tolerance, hard work, a capacity to forgive, a compassion for the underdog, a clear-sighted vi

sion of right and wrong, a dedication to God and country, and an abiding concern for all.13

There is much that is persuasive about Oates's mythic reading of

Sandburg's book, as there is about the readings of the book as bi

ography and epic poem. Certainly Sandburg's Lincoln perpetuates a number of myths and stereotypes (and, incidentally, creates a few

of its own). But, like the biographical and epic readings, Oates's

pop-culture reading raises several questions. First, it seems remark

ably innocent on Oates's part to believe that a popular audience

would be attracted by such a Sunday School paragon as he de

scribes. He seems to have given us a Lincoln for an audience of

Tom Sawyers rather than the Huckleberry Finns that most of us

actually are. Some consultation of recent studies of the interaction

of readers with popular texts, such as Janice Rad way's Reading the

Romance, would have considerably complicated and enriched

Oates's speculations.14

A more important point, however, is not whether readers want

the sort of goody-goody Lincoln that Oates describes but rather whether this is the sort of Lincoln that Sandburg presents. And the answer must be a qualified "no." In the light of Oates's caricature

of the book, it is interesting that its early reviewers saw it not as

mythologizing but as demythologizing, a realistic portrait of a pre

viously sentimentalized man. Harry Hansen, in his review of The

Prairie Years in 1926, wrote the following:

Out of the pages of this book emerges no heroic figure, no epic character, no titan towering above puny men. This is the book

of the railsplitter, of the country storekeeper, the young law

yer, the frontier advocate, the practical backwoods politician. . .. The danger to the Lincoln legend was not from those who

tried to make him less than he was; it came from those who

were erecting him into a god of the new Augustan age of

13. Stephen B. Oates, Abraham Lincoln: The Man behind the Myths (New York: Harp er and Row, 1984), 16.

14. Janice A. Rad way, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Litera

ture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984).



James Hurt 61

American commercial expansion. Lincoln was a human being of contradictions, faults and qualities.15

"Realism" is, of course, a subjective and time-bound quality, as

anyone knows who has watched a presumably realistic film made

twenty-five years ago. The Lincoln stereotypes of 1926 against which Sandburg seemed to be rebelling were not the stereotypes of the present, which are more likely to be the ones that Sandburg himself promulgated.

The definitive treatment of Lincoln as myth, at least for the time

being, is Merrill D. Peterson's astonishingly exhaustive and per

ceptive 1994 book Lincoln in American Memory. Peterson adopts a

rather static "images of Lincoln" theoretical framework, tracing five

images through the voluminous texts, both verbal and nonverbal, in which Lincoln is memorialized: the savior of the Union, the great

emancipator, man of the people, first American, and self-made

man.16 This scheme itself might be criticized for its overly simple

conception of how audiences receive "images of Lincoln." It is as

if idealization or wish fulfillment were the only process by which

Americans perceive Lincoln. Other contemporary students of pop ular culture might see "Lincoln" not as a frozen image but as a site

of cultural negotiation, in which cultural consumers construct Lin

colns that satisfy multiply determined cultural needs. What seems

to be left out of both Oates's and Peterson's formulations is the sort

of wry, complex meditation on Lincoln that Charlie Citrine carries

out in Saul Bellow's Humboldt's Gift. Citrine reflects that Lincoln is

the exemplary American hero: "manic-depressive."17

Biography, epic, myth: All three ways of looking at Sandburg's Lincoln are partial. Each has a piece of the truth but fails to account

for some features of this odd and idiosyncratic book. I would like to end by proposing another way of describing the book, as hav

ing what the critic Northrop Frye calls an "encyclopedic form."18

Encyclopedic literary forms are characterized by their episodic, miscellaneous structures and by their panoramic, comprehensive visions of an entire culture. The principal encyclopedic text of our

own culture is the Bible, with its composite structure of separate


16. Peterson, Lincoln in American Memory. 17. Saul Bellow, Humboldt's Gift (New York: Avon, 1975).

18. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton Uni

versity Press, 1957).




books written at different times and in different forms and with

its sweeping, comprehensive vision of human life from creation to

apocalypse. In modern times, encyclopedic texts tend to be what

Frye calls "analogies of revelation," such episodic and yet vision

ary texts as James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, T.S. Eliot's Waste Land, and Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts.19

The general affiliations of Sandburg's Lincoln with encyclopedic texts are obvious in their loose, serial construction and their at

tempt to place Lincoln at the center of a vast, sweeping survey of

American democratic civilization. In pointing out a few examples of these features, I should make it clear that I am referring to the

entire six volumes of The Prairie Years and The War Years, as they were published in 1926 and 1939, and that occasionally I will refer

to them separately, because in some ways, The Prairie Years and The

War Years are separate works, organized and composed different

ly. Both are also different from the various abridgments that Sand

burg carved from them in later years. In these shorter versions,

Sandburg tamed the wildness of his original text, trimming some

of the ecstatic excesses of his American analogy of revelation. I

want to look at Sandburg on the loose, in the full wildness of his

extraordinary book.

A reading of Sandburg's Lincoln as an encyclopedic text is en

couraged by some of Sandburg's own occasional descriptions of

his work. In a letter in September 1937, to his friend and editor, Alfred Harcourt, for example, as he was preparing to turn the

manuscript of The War Years over to the publisher, Sandburg wrote:

"Sometimes I look at this damned vast manuscript and it seems

just a memorandum I made for my own use in connection with a

long adventure of reading, study and thought aimed at reaching into what actually went on in one terrific crisis?with occasional

interpolations of meditations, sometimes musical, having to do

with any and all human times."20 And as early as fifteen years be

fore, when he had just begun work on The Prairie Years, he had al

ready begun to see the book as both a miscellany and an Ameri

can secular testament: "Sometimes I think the Lincoln book," he

wrote Harcourt, "will be a sort of History and Old Testament of

the United States, a joke almanac, prayer collect, and compendi um of essential facts."21

19. Ibid.

20. Herbert Mitgang, ed., The Letters of Carl Sandburg (New York: Harcourt, Brace,

and World, 1968), 372.

21. Ibid., 221.



James Hurt 63

One of the surprises (and pleasures) of Sandburg's Lincoln is the

unexpected twists and turns it takes as it unfolds its leisurely sto

ry. Chapter 66 of The Prairie Years, for example, is an account of the

life cycle of corn, on no more pretext than that Lincoln passed a

corn field on his way to his Springfield office. We hear of the plow

ing and the planting, the sprouting and the growing of the corn, the tassling, the forming of the ears, and their slow maturation.

Then comes the harvest, the shucking, the shelling of the corn, and

finally the fallow period of the winter: "Harvest time had come and

gone. Afterward came the months when snow blew across the

fields, and covered the stumps, and the fields were white and lone

ly."22 In the long view, the description of the corn forms part of a

metaphoric pattern in the book, but immediately, it is m?tonymie, included merely because the corn was there.

Similar interpolations are the list of jokes in Chapter 58 that

Sandburg says Lincoln "might have told"; the list in Chapter 102

of commonplace cases that Lincoln tried, with no conclusion drawn

except that "such were a few of the human causes, disputes, and

actions in which Lincoln versed himself thoroughly" and the im

mensely protracted list of White House petitioners in Chapter 35

of The War Years.23

Reviewers noticed this aggregative quality of Lincoln, by which

the book seems infinitely prolongable, merely by adding more lists, more random facts. Mark Van Doren wrote that "as Mr. Sandburg goes on he becomes drunk with data, and in true Homeric fashion

compiles long lists of things."24 Another reviewer thought that the book as "full of facts as Jack Horner's pie was full of plums."25 Milo

Milton Quaife said the same thing less tactfully: the book was "a

literary grab bag," he wrote, "a hodge podge of miscellaneous in

formation."26

The tone and the effect of the book are determined, to a large extent, by its odd combination of a mythologizing impulse and a

great proliferation of detail. We think of myths as stark, bare, and

timeless, not as embedded in the historical and the circumstantial.

But the combination is perfectly consistent with Sandburg's inten

22. Carl Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years, 2 vols. (New York: Harcourt

Brace, 1926), 1:322-24.

23. See Ibid., 1:228; Ibid., 2:67; Sandburg, War Years, 2:28-66.

24. Mark Van Doren, "Review of The Prairie Years," Nation (February 10, 1926),

149.

25. As quoted in Johannsen, "Sandburg and Lincoln," 276.

26. Quaife, "Review of The Prairie Years," 288.




tion of writing an encyclopedic work, a "History and Old Testa

ment of the United States," and perhaps we should relate Sand

burg's lists not so much to Homer and Little Jack Horner as to the

roll calls and genealogies of the Old Testament.

The other feature of Sandburg's Lincoln that is illuminated by

seeing the book in the encyclopedic tradition is its characterization

of Lincoln. As we have seen, commentators have been sharply di

vided in their readings of Sandburg's representation of Lincoln. At

one extreme is a reader such as Stephen Oates, who sees Sand

burg's Lincoln merely as a stereotype idealized beyond credibili

ty; at the other extreme is one such as Harry Hansen, who thought that Sandburg had described a real person, "a human being of con

tradictions, faults and qualities." In fact, both Oates and Hansen

are right; Sandburg's Lincoln alternates inconsistently between a

believable human being and an abstraction, not, perhaps, the Chris

tian saint of Oates's description, but something closer to a nature

god, coterminous with the natural world and frequently on the

point of dissolving back within it. The Prairie Years is especially thick with references of this sort. The boy Lincoln is compared with a growing stalk of corn:

When he was eleven years old, Abe Lincoln's young body be

gan to change. The juices and glands began to make a long, tall boy out of him. ... As he took on more length, they said

he was shooting up into the air like green corn in the summer

of a good corn-year. So he grew.27

The Illinois corn crop furnishes the central symbol for Lincoln's

development and his near identity with nature in The Prairie Years.

And not only the corn crop: At other times, Lincoln seems to be

half tree: "He grew as hickory grows, the torso lengthening and

toughening. The sap mounted, the branches spread, leaves came

with wind clamor in them."28

Such passages are less frequent in The War Years. Lincoln biog

raphers have always had trouble reconciling the Illinois and the

Washington Lincoln. Sandburg's solution is to make The Prairie

Years a comic pastoral and The War Years a tragedy. He also makes

The Prairie Years relatively mythic and The War Years relatively re

alistic. I say "relatively" because Lincoln has a double nature

throughout, oscillating between man and spirit, in line with Sand

27. Sandburg, The Prairie Years, 1:43.

28. Ibid., 1:54.



James Hurt 65

burg's double intention both to depict a real person and a real cri

sis in American history and at the same time to make of that de

piction an "analogy of revelation" of the American civil religion. That Sandburg intends his Lincoln to be this kind of a secular

scripture that would provide a spiritual inspiration for the coun

try as it faced economic collapse and impending war is clear from

the narrative of composition that unfolds in his letters. In 1935, for

example, he wrote to President Franklin Roosevelt: "Having writ

ten for ten years now on Abraham Lincoln: the War Years,' start

ing this year on the fourth and final volume, I have my eyes and

ears in two eras and can not help drawing parallels. One runs to

the effect that you are the best light of democracy that has occu

pied the White House since Lincoln."29 Readers of The Prairie Years

and The War Years, too, might read with their "eyes and ears in two

eras," not only the America of Lincoln's time but the America of

Roosevelt's as well. Read in this stereoptical way, Sandburg's Lin

coln might reveal to us the passion and the urgency that its first

readers sensed in it three quarters of a century ago.

29. Mitgang, The Letters of Carl Sandburg, 318.



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