BOOK REVIEW By DAVID L.WILSON

Lincoln's guilt, Lincoln's greatness

Author Strozier autographs a copy of his book for a tall admirer at Shadid's Book Mart, Springfield. Photo By Mark Raeber

Charles B. Strozier,
Lincoln's Quest for Union: Public ami Private Meanings,
New York, Basic Books, Inc., 1982, 271 pp. $17.50

ABRAHAM LINCOLN is probably our greatest American hero. His life has been examined in minute detail in thousands of books and articles. Indeed, so much has been written about Lincoln that it is difficult for a modern researcher to do more than repackage ideas that have been exposed by earlier generations of scholars.

Consequently, Charles B. Strozier, associate professor of history at Sangamon State University, has made a welcome addition to Lincoln scholarship in Lincoln's Quest for Union: Public and Private Meanings. By using psychoanalytic theory to examine Lincoln, Strozier has been able to provide fresh insights into the man's complicated and often tragic life. The author is a professional historian with formal training in the techniques of psychoanalytic theory. The mix works beautifully in this instance as here we find at work a first-class psychohistorian. Strozier demonstrates his mastery of the massive literature on Lincoln, and, in fact, turns this literature to his advantage. It is hard to imagine a book of this nature being written without incredibly detailed information available on the subject under study. Strozier, concentrating on Lincoln's life before the outbreak of the Civil War, ferrets out the extant facts with a historian's zeal for learning all about his subject, and then applies his knowledge of psychoanalytic theory to this corpus. The results are impressive. Strozier proves to be a careful scholar who does not soar too far beyond the limits of the available evidence; his observations on Lincoln's personality have solid foundations in fact.

Strozier's analysis of Lincoln's relationship with Joshua Speed is fascinating. Speed, with whom Lincoln lived for over three years and even shared the same bed, was Lincoln's most intimate friend. "The period during which Lincoln slept with Speed began and ended with unconsummated female relationships, first with Mary Owens and then with Mary Todd," writes Strozier. "Speed provided an alternative relationship that neither threatened nor provoked Lincoln. Each of the two men found solace in discussing their forebodings about sexuality. Their intimate maleness substituted for the tantalizing but frightening closeness of women" (p. 43). The author points out that such close relationships (including sharing the same bed) were not uncommon on the frontier. But, according to Strozier, "Lincoln was sensitive to issues of male closeness in a way that distinguished him from his peers" (p. 44). When Speed sold his store in Springfield, shattering this special relationship, Lincoln broke off his first courtship of Mary Todd and fell into a severe depression in January 1841. Lincoln was troubled by bouts of depression throughout his life, and Strozier suggests that, at least in this case, his depression resulted from his inability to deal with his sexuality. Indeed, the feeling persists that the author would have liked to have gone further in his analysis on this point, but did not have substantive evidence to do so.

Strozier is at his best in explaining Lincoln's often tortured relationship with his family. He was ashamed because his father Thomas Lincoln continually got into financial difficulties. Lincoln provided money, but avoided seeing his father, and could not even find the time to attend his father's funeral. This avoidance carried with it the price of enormous guilt. Although Lincoln named his fourth son after his father Strozier believes that "in this case the timing suggests a kind of expiation or atonement for the guilt that Lincoln felt for the neglect of his father" (p. 55). Even so, Lincoln proved unable to bring himself to provide a marker for his father's grave. The lack of such a memorial says much about the father and son relationship.

Lincoln's most difficult personal relationship, however, proved to be with his wife Mary Todd. "Visitors, friends, neighbors, relatives, journalists after 1860, the devoted and the spiteful, all commented on Mary's ferocious and unpredictable temper" (p. 83). This central element in Lincoln's life was a constant source of pain worsened by Mary's growing instability after the death of her second son. (The Lincolns lost three of their four children, two while Lincoln was still living.) Lincoln clearly loved his wife, at least in the early years of their marriage, but he also kept a certain distance from her. His well-known fondness for riding the legal circuit may have stemmed from a desire to maintain a separation from the tantrums of his unstable wife. Strozier, in fact, becomes so engrossed with the manifold problems of Mary that he sometimes loses sight of his main subject.

The weakest portion of this book is chapter eight, "The Group Self and the Crisis of the 1850s." In the preface, the author himself admits that this chapter is tough going because of the incorporation of highly technical psychoanalytic theory. But there is a larger problem here. Strozier writes that "Lincoln's apparent paranoia fed on and reflected a widespread, indeed rampant, paranoia throughout the land" (p. 185). Reviving the idea of "The Paranoid Style of American Politics" does little to explain the sectional conflict that eventually grew into a bloody Civil War. In fact, there was a genuine desire in the South to protect and extend the institution of slavery, and it is hard to see how it was paranoid for Lincoln and others to recognize and resist this trend of events. The Civil War is tragic to be sure, but its major cause was not a paranoid society.

Strozier has written a fine book which deserves attention. The book is beautifully designed, well illustrated, comprehensively indexed, and superbly written. I highly recommend this book to those interested in Abraham Lincoln for its fresh insights into the life of our most extraordinary American.

David L. Wilson is associate editor of The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant and adjunct assistant professor of history at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale.

October 1982 | Illinois Issues | 29