Lincoln-Makers

PORTRAIT FOR POSTERITY (329 pp.)--Benjamin P. Thomas--Rutgers University ($3).

Abraham Lincoln distrusted biographies and seldom read them. His son, Robert T, Lincoln, shared his distrust; he included in it the biographers of his father. He seldom gave them help and never encouragement. As a result, when Lincoln scholars recently scrambled to Washington to see the Lincolniana that had been ordered sealed until 21 years after Robert's death they found few surprises and no answers to some of the major questions abou Abraham Lincoln's life.

There is a suspicion that Robert destroyed some Lincoln papers. Portrait for Posterity, a knowing study of the major Lincoln biographers, will help many students to understand, if not to condone Robert's stubborn attitude on the subject Lincoln's first biographers were generally more interested in mythmaking and ax grinding than in fact-finding and scholarship.

Although, as Lincoln Scholar Benjamin P. Thomas wrote, "Lincoln was loved and hated, lauded and blamed, as few men have been before or since," the hero myth got off to a head start. It dominated Lincoln literature until the end of the 19th Century. Josiah Holland's Life, which appeared within a year of Lincoln's death plugged the theme that Lincoln was model youth and had made the grade through pure idealism. Its sale of more than 100,000 copies indicated to many royalty-conscious writer how the average reader liked his Lincoln served--only the palatable facts, well garnished with folklore and parsley.

Not until the Lincoln romanticists were debunked did William Herndon, Lincoln law partner and biographer (with Jessie Weik), get his due. He loved and respects Lincoln, but he insisted on telling what he believed to be the truth: about the illegitimacy of Lincoln's mother; Lincoln's religion, or lack of it; his feeling about his shrewish wife. Herndon's theory was that Mary Todd helped Lincoln to success by driving him from the house to the sanctuary of office and politics. Of course, Mary Todd disliked Herndon intensely, and didn't help when he, trying to compliment her on her physical grace, awkwardly likened her to a "serpent."

Not for Glory. Robert Lincoln himself was embittered by Herndon's now-it-can-be-told approach, and reportedly bought the whole shipment of the Herndon book in England to destroy it. Always broke, William Herndon wrote to Collaborator Weik of their book: "I hope it will be success in the money line, particular! The money line is my line & not the glory line. I need the dollars. Glory may go to thunder if I get the dimes & this you ought to know."

Another biographer hated by Robert was Ward Hill Lamon, also a Lincoln law partner and later his bodyguard. Lamon was a big, good-natured brawler, whose "office was conveniently located over a saloon, the remainder of the second floor of the building being occupied by a house of assignation."

Lamon's biography was ghostwritten; the ghost insisted that Lincoln was illegitimate. The proof was "absolutely overwhelming," he said, but at least Lincoln "never hid his face like a craven, but steadily walked straight forward. . . .Nor was he the first bastard that did the like. . . . If Tom Linkhorn* could by any possibility have got a child ... it would have been no child like this one. . . . Nancy Hanks did the world a great favor by receiving the embrace of somebody who was not Tom Lincoln." Later, as Secretary of War, Robert Lincoln blocked Lamon's appointment to the postmastership of Denver.

Robert's Blue Pencil. Biographers Nicolay & Hay made a deal with Robert: they agreed to write nothing objectionable if Robert would give them access to his documents. Hay told Robert: ". . . Read with a pencil in your hand and strike out everything to which you object. ... I will do what you suggest in final revision." One thing Robert cut out was "the story of how his father sewed up the eyes of a drove of hogs, when he found it impossible to get them aboard a flatboat by driving them in the usual manner."

Author Thomas brings his study up to date, names Ida Tarbell, Lord Charnwood and Carl Sandburg as those who have done the most successful jobs of biography. A professional Lincoln enthusiast himself, he confidently welcomes Lincolniana from any source, convinced that "as our portrait of Lincoln becomes true, it also becomes more superb."

* A backwoodsman's error. The name was originally Lincoln when the family came from England to Hingham, Mass, in the 17th Century. When the family went west, neighboring backwoodsmen sometimes called them "Linkern," and spelled it "Linkhorn."

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