Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from The Lincoln of Carl Sandburg: Some Reviews of Abraham Lincoln; The War Years Which for the Authority of Their Judgments and the Grace of Their Style, Deserve at Least the Permanence of This Pamphlet
Mary Chesnut. Mr. Sandburg gives us his own estimates of many other figures, big and little, of the period, but not of Abraham Lincoln. He indulges in no speculation as to what was going on within the heart and soul and mind of this peculiar man. If there is anything lacking in The War Years, it is the presence of two men of the prairie years, Joshua Speed and William H. Herndon, who saw more deeply into Lincoln than did any others who ever knew him. When Lincoln stepped into the White House he stepped into a great isolation which no one - not even his old friends, Browning and Lamon, nor his secretaries, Nico lay and Hay - seems to have penetrated. In the analyses of his character provided by those who observed him at closest range the word unfathomable recurs again and again.
In The Prairie Years, with fewer documents and many more myths at his disposal, Mr. Sandburg gave greater play to his own lyrical imagination. Anyone can indulge in guess work about the raw young giant who emerged from the mists of Kentucky, and Indiana, and Sangamon County, Illinois, and Mr. Sandburg's guesses were far better than most. But in The War Years he sticks to the documentary evidence, gathered from a fabulous number of sources. He indulges in one superb lyrical outburst at the conclusion of the chapter in which is described the dedication of the cem etery at Gettysburg; and, in the last volume, after John Wilkes Booth has fired the one bullet in his brass derringer pistol, Mr. Sandburg writes with the poetic passion and the somber eloquence of the great masters of tragedy.
Mr. Sandburg's method is unlike that of any biographer since Homer. He starts The War Years with the usual appreciative Foreword surveying his source material - and this Foreword provides an excellent survey of Lincolniana but he reveals the odd nature of his essential research when he says, Taking my guitar and a program of songs and readings and traveling from coast to coast a dozen times in the last twenty years, in a wide variety of audiences I havemet sons and daughters of many of the leading players in the terrific drama of the Eighteen Sixties. From these sons and daughters he obtained old letters and pictures and clip pings, and reminiscences and rumors which led him to upper shelves in remote libraries. Thus, his program of songs (like Homer's) brought him into the very spirit of the people, the same people of whom - and by whom, and for whom - was Abraham Lincoln. Quite properly, Mr. Sandburg's great work is not the story of the one man's life. It IS a folk biography. The hopes and apprehensions of millions, their loves and hates, their exultation and despair, were re?ected truthfully in the deep waters of Lincoln's being, and so they are reflected truthfully in these volumes.
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