Lincoln and His World: The Early Years, Birth to Illinois Legislature AND Lincoln and His World: Prairie Politician, 1834-1842
By Richard Lawrence Miller
(January 2009 Civil War News)

Preface, acknowledgements, notes, bibliography, index, 443 pp., 673 pp., 2006, 2008. Stackpole Books, 5067 Ritter Rd., Mechanicsburg, PA 17055, Vol. 1 $32.95, Vol. 2, $44.95.

Reviewer: Dr. Allen C. Guelzo
Dr. Allen C. Guelzo is the Henry R. Luce Professor of the Civil War Era and director of Civil War Era Studies at Gettysburg College.

Review:
Richard Miller is a new face among the tribe of Lincoln biographers. Very new, since these two volumes (the beginnings of a projected multi-volume biography of Lincoln) constitute his first major venture into writing about Abraham Lincoln.

A former National Public Radio producer and free-lance editorial consultant, Miller’s previous published works include books on the Cold War (which he dismissed as an illusion promoted by right-wing hawks), on drug policy (in which he railed against “the combined vision of utopia held forth by Nancy Reagan, Ronald Reagan, George Bush, William Bennett, Daryl Gates, and thousands of other drug warriors”), the Holocaust, and Midwestern politics (including a biography of Harry Truman).

In other words, Miller has a certain track record for flamboyant edginess. Nevertheless, for coming so late to Lincoln, Miller has done a formidable amount of reading in the Lincoln literature, as well as fine-combing the Illinois newspapers for previously unknown material on the political atmosphere of Lincoln’s early career as a state legislator.

What prevents Miller’s two volumes, which only take Lincoln from 1809 to 1842, from emerging as landmarks for the Lincoln bicentennial is that, despite his accumulation of data, sources and readings, Miller seems to have very little idea of what to do with it all.

His expressed goal is to “lift layer after layer of gauze applied by legend, stripping bare the raw reality of Lincoln’s world” and offering readers “a vicarious experience” of moving around in that world.

But in fact, what Miller does, for the most part, is to leave the layers of legend undisturbed and apply thick coats of minuscule detail over them, like an overwash of fine-grained sludge. Where there are “legends” to deal with, Miller actually offers little more than tepid, take-your-pick opinions.

Consider the famous tale of Lincoln’s early romance with Ann Rutledge: Miller is content merely to say that “The nature of Lincoln’s involvement with Ann Rutledge – friendship versus romance – is disputed.” Well, yes, but as the Harry Truman-like sign on my desk says: What is your recommendation?

That’s the judgment every worthwhile historian is called upon to make. Miller would “like to believe romance existed, although the two villagers surely didn’t date in a twenty-first century manner” – so, of course, their relationship followed a course which modern readers would have a hard time recognizing. So much for vicarious experience.

Miller’s weakness for allowing the trees to swallow up the forest is at its worst in the presumption of his running title – “Lincoln and His World.” Despite the suggestion that this is a biography which will set Lincoln up in “his world,” we learn in these two volumes almost nothing about that “world” – nothing, for instance, which reminds us that at the time of Lincoln’s birth, Thomas Jefferson was still president of the United States, George III was still king of England, and the first great American industrial complex at Waltham, Mass., had yet to be built.

Most puzzling of all, Miller makes no effort at explaining the Whig party (for which Lincoln was a loyal spear-carrier for over 20 years). How one can fail to give some account of what motivated this longest and firmest of Lincoln’s political allegiances is beyond me; describing Lincoln’s “world” without the Whigs and their link to the triumph of market capitalism in the 19th century is like explaining Karl Marx without communism. But since one of the three dedications at the very beginning of these books is to the ‘memory’ of John Brown, perhaps the invisibility of the Whigs and Lincoln’s Whiggism is not an oversight after all.

Instead, the “world” Miller seems to have in view is the infinitely narrower “world” of Knob Creek, Spencer County, New Salem, Vandalia and Springfield. And that’s it.

While Miller follows Lincoln around those tiny “worlds” in loving detail, it is the detail we might expect from someone trying to record an entire life on videotape. Plenty of information, but no means for sorting it out. Births happen, elections happen, legislatures happen, Lincoln happens, but without a word about why they happened or why anyone but an obsessive Lincolnite should care.

I think it has to be said, too, that despite Miller’s vast deployment of detail about Lincoln’s life up till his 33rd year, that detail is almost entirely based on already-published sources (apart from his troll through the Illinois newspapers), starting with Rodney Davis and Douglas Wilson’s Herndon’s Informants (1998). The only archive Miller seems to have invested any long-term sitzfleisch in is the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield.

Reading through these two volumes will, at least for hard-core Lincolnites, be something like revisiting the old friends and familiar stories, only in more detail than is customary.

The uninitiated, however, will lose patience as they wander through the unending thickets and mazes of Lincoln’s first pair of pants, the etiquette of bear-killing and Samuel Musick’s bridge. In this, Miller’s Lincoln bears an eerie resemblance to what the New York Times said about his Truman biography in 1985, that Miller heaps up “rather more detail than the general reader may find absorbing or care to absorb,” to the point where “many passages of this long book can be skipped with benefit.”

No matter how much of the what Miller can rake together, it is really the why which brings us back to Lincoln, and at the end of his two thick volumes, we are no nearer to that in Miller’s Lincoln and His World than when we began.