Lincoln Talks: A Biography In Anecdote

Lincoln Talks: A Biography in Anecdote

Dust jacket notes: "'Biographies, as generally written, are not only misleading but false,' Abraham Lincoln once remarked to his law partner William Herndon. Publishers simply ought to stock biographies with blanks, Lincoln suggested, to be filled in with high-sounding praise if a man happened to die. Lincoln Talks is a biography of which its subject might have approved. For it is an oral biography, told not by one man but by a thousand of Lincoln's contemporaries, who 'recorded' his words not with a tape recorder but as treasured memories of Father Abraham. For a single person to attain such an all-round view, observed Emanuel Hertz who compiled this 'biography in anecdote,' that person would have to be 'at once a Democrat and a Republican, a grateful client and a circuit judge, a humble neighbor and a Confederate general, an exasperated Cabinet member and a disgruntled office seeker, a frightened petitioner and an indignant patriot...a millionaire and a servant. For such are the reporters who have written this book.' From newspaper files, from long-forgotten magazines, from out-of-print books, government documents, and closely guarded manuscripts, Hertz gathered the stories and identified their sources. He arranged them in an order which illuminates Lincoln's career in each of its phases: youth, lawyer, politician, president, and Commander-in-Chief. Around the stove in the general store in New Salem, riding the circuit with his fellow lawyers, arguing for his clients before the informal courts of the frontier, stumping the Middle West and debating Stephen Douglas, guiding the faltering steps of the nation during the tragic years of the Civil War, Lincoln was constantly 'reminded' of a story. And the stories always threw light both on the subject at hand and on the narrator. In these anecdotes, Lincoln talks, and smiles and weeps...."