Lincoln's Birthday

Today is the anniversary of the birth, in 1809, of Abraham Lincoln.  My small collection of books specifically on his life include the first edition of the one-volume edition of Carl Sandburg’s monumental six-volume biography Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years and the War Years;  Stephen B. Oates With Malice Toward None – A Life of Abraham Lincoln; the Library of America’s two-volume Abraham Lincoln: Speeches and Writings; James McPherson’s Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution; Garry Wills’s Lincoln at Gettysburg; and Jan Morris’s Lincoln: A Foreigner’s Quest.  Some of these I’ve read fully, and some in part. 

Interestingly, the only one I’ve hardly touched is perhaps the most famous of all – Sandburg’s biography.  I have a general bias toward more recent scholarship, and I’ve always been suspicious, unfairly no doubt, that Sandburg was too close in time to the actual man, and did not have the benefit of more fulsome scholarship and basic research yet to come.  But it’s on my long get-to list!

Among his many qualities was his sometimes-droll great sense of humor.  One example I enjoy, from Anthony Gross’s The Wit and Wisdom of Abraham Lincoln: 

While walking along a dusty road in Illinois in his circuit days, Lincoln was overtaken by a stranger driving to town.  “Will you have the goodness to take my overcoat to town for me?” asked Lincoln.  “With pleasure, but how will you get it again?” came the response.  Lincoln promptly replied “Oh, very readily.  I intend to remain in it.”

R Balsamo