Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years & the War Years

If you are a student of Abraham Lincoln your education is not complete without having read Sandburg's Lincoln. Yes, it is poetic. Yes, he strays into myth making and telling. Even so, it is a masterpiece.

After searching for the quintessential Lincoln biography to read, as my introduction to studying this fascinating man, I settled on Sandberg. He was a great pleasure to spend several weeks with! Even though we know this book was completed in the 1930's it is so well written and held up by so many academics and scholars as quintessential. It is true masterpie. Many more, hundreds in fact, books have been published as biography since Sandberg but his alone provides the understanding and genesis of how Lincoln came to be Lincoln. America (2008) is searching for the next Lincoln: revered on the right and the left, revered in the center, revered on the political fringes, we need a leader, statesman, collaborator, bold leader today more then ever.

Sandburg took criticism for filling in some blanks with his imagination, but so what? His biography of Lincoln was not intended as a scholarly treatise. Think of the mystic atmosphere of a campfire at night, with an elder telling about the greatest person in a tribe's history. That is Sandburg's accomplishment, making Lincoln live again among us, at least while we are surrounded by Sandburg's mesmerizing account. No one interested in Lincoln or in the meaning of America should miss the experience of these volumes.

I read this book in 1995 and even today think of it as political and social changes unfold. The civil war and Lincoln's leadership during it impacts us in ways we take for granted. Sandburg captures these events and this man in a way which gives us the detail and facts to bring them to life. The writing is a blend of the Doris Kearns Goodwin and the William Manchester styles. Sandburg demonstrates the craft that made him poet laureate. He will dedicate pages, chapters to the social context and events of the times, and then place the players in that context to show the reasons decisions were made as they were. It should be said that this work is actually a distillation of a multi-volume work that Sandburg wrote earlier. It keeps that historical accuracy, and yet is very readable for the non-historian. As good as Sandburg is, the story is of Lincoln, and it is a story worth reading (maybe more than once). I have bought extra copies and given them out to friends. You will come to know greatness in a flawed and sometimes crude man. You will take new found reverance in the monuments and symbols we have created to him. Their is a quote in the preface that best sums this up: "There is no new thing to be said about Lincoln. Thee is no new thing to be said of the moutains, or of the sea, or of the stars. The years go their way, but the same old mountains lift their granite shoulders above the drifting clouds; the same mysterious sea beats upon the shore; the same silent stars keep holy vigil above a tired world. But to the mountains and sea and stars men turn forever in unwearied homage. And thus with Lincoln. For he was a mountain in grandeur of soul. He was a sea in deep undervoice of mystic loneliness. He was a star in steadfast purity of purpose and service. And he abides." Read this book, and you will soon find the poetry in these words too.