Carl Sandburg's Abraham Lincoln
The Prairie Years

Paige Blair
Brookwood Junior High School, Glenwood

Carl Sandburg had always been fascinated by Abraham Lincoln. Sandburg wanted to learn as much as he could about Abraham Lincoln. He talked with people who had known Lincoln or heard stories about him. Sandburg planned to write a series of three books about him, and he needed all the material he could get.

After many years of writing poetry, Carl decided to write books about Lincoln. Sandburg's publisher, Alfred Harcourt, suggested a biography about Abraham Lincoln for children. Sandburg liked that idea because he felt that there were not enough children's books that told the whole story of Abraham Lincoln. However, Sandburg began to realize that there were also very few books about Lincoln for people of any age. As one historian wrote, "It was about time that the young people of the nation should feel close, intimate contact with the flesh-and-blood Lincoln boy who suffered true pioneer hardships with his family when they moved from Kentucky to Illinois by oxcart, who lost his mother early in his youth, who knew how it felt to work himself hard—and still be able to look at the silver of the moon over the cold, bare prairie and dream searching dreams."

After more than two years, Sandburg finished Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years. Instead of the four hundred pages he had promised, he had more than eleven hundred.

Sandburg was proud of his work. Sandburg detailed Lincoln's youth in Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois. He highlighted the strength, courage, and compassion that made Lincoln great, according to one historian. But the Prairie Years did not make Lincoln a mythological hero. Unlike any other biographer before him, Sandburg also described Lincoln's stubbornness, anger, and cunning.

Carl Sandburg felt a close tie to Abraham Lincoln because of similar childhood experiences. Sandburg's and Lincoln's youths had not been easy. Their understanding of the common man was mutual. Each in his own lifetime would think of himself as a common man, a struggler from among ordinary people, according to one historian. Sandburg put it this way: "There's a certain level of human existence below which one must sometime have lived if one is to really know the ways of the masses."

In February 1926, on the one-hundred-seventeenth anniversary of Lincoln's birthday, Sandburg's work was published in two volumes. Sandburg dedicated it to his mother.

Reviewers from all over the world called Sandburg's book a classic. Sandburg, with a reputation as a labor advocate, gained favor with Republicans. After Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years was published, William Randolph Hearst offered Sandburg a job for thirty thousand dollars. The Republican Party also invited him to be the main speaker at the Lincoln Dinner of the National Republican Club in New York City.

Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years became Sandburg's first financial success. But this book was only about Lincoln until the Civil War. The next book Sandburg wrote about Lincoln was published nearly ten years later and was called Abraham Lincoln: The War Years. Sandburg did not feel as sure of this book as he did about Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years, but it was also a success. When Sandburg died in 1967, his wife Paula said of him what Stanton had said of Lincoln: "Now he belongs to the ages."— [From Ruth Franchere, Carl Sandburg: Voice of the Peoples; Harry Golden, Carl Sandburg; Jeffrey H. Hacker, Carl Sandburg; Gladys Zehnpfennig, Carl Sandburg: Poet and Patriot.]

ILLINOIS HISTORY / FEBRUARY 1998 29