Lincoln's Legacies Home Page

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Abraham Lincoln -- "Honest Abe," "the Great Emancipator," country lawyer, common man, preserver of the Union, tragic and melancholy loner. The students in the Fall 2010 History 395: Lincoln's Legacies course, taught by Jeremiah B.C. Axelrod, explored the strange and convoluted trajectory of Lincoln's identity through the last century and a half of American history, focusing not so much on the "truth" of the man as on the ways so many Americans have appropriated Lincoln's memory over the decades.

Over the course of the fall semester the class visited Oxy's Special Collections department to select and examine representations of Abraham Lincoln in texts and images in the F. Ray Risdon Lincolniana Collection, which offers an array of books, pamphlets, documents and ephemera about and related to Abraham Lincoln. Their observations, commentary, and analysis presented below, offer insight into Lincoln in American history as well as enhance the descriptive record for each work. The online catalog records for these primary resources will link to these analyses so as to offer extended descriptions of the texts for other researchers.

About this Project / Acknowledgements

Slavery & Race

In the wake of the Civil War, the ideology of reconciliation stressed the similarities between the North and South while ignoring the underlying issues that caused the conflict. The following documents were all written in the 20th Century, and qualify as retrospective evaluations of slavery and race as they pertain to President Lincoln. These documents also offer a diverse collection of perspectives about the status of African Americans during and after the Civil War. Although Lincoln’s true feelings regarding the issue of slavery and race are controversial, there is clear evidence of an evolution in Lincoln’s views of slavery and race over time. Each of the authors emphasize different stages in the evolution of Lincoln’s views in order to frame their own particular arguments about the role of race in American society. Due to this variance, all of these documents pose at least partially — and sometimes completely — conflicting accounts of Lincoln’s attitude toward African Americans.

Only one of the documents, written by white supremacist Earnest Cox, completely embodies the ideal of reconciliation. Cox does so by fixating on the evidence of Lincoln's preference for the colonization of African Americans during the first years of his presidency — a racist sentiment that undermines the legacy of emancipation and bolsters the conciliatory idea that the war was fought primarily for saving the Union. The other documents engage, and partially or completely contradict, this ideology. Another white supremacist, Neo-Confederate Giles B. Cook, argues that Lincoln's motivation for emancipation stems from his aspirations for personal glory. This sentiment undermines Lincoln’s legacy but does not fully embody the spirit of reconciliation. The other documents directly challenge reconciliation by focusing on the legacy of emancipation and expressing Lincoln’s centrality in its deliverance. In the pamphlet “The Slavery Atmosphere of Lincoln’s Youth,” Louis A. Warren argues that the anti-slavery social climate of Kentucky, and Lincoln’s personal encounters with slavery in adolescence, engendered his empathy for the plight of slaves and culminated in the Emancipation Proclamation. Finally, African American scholar Robert Moton’s pamphlet, “The Negro's Debt to Lincoln,” emphasizes Lincoln’s role as the Great Emancipator of the African-American people. While American culture was tempted by reconciliation in the decades following Reconstruction, these documents show that disparate ideologies, grounded in egalitarianism and white supremacy, challenged this dominant ideology.

Earnest Sevier Cox “Lincoln’s Negro Policy”
Sarah Henderson

Giles B. Cook et al. “Confederate Leaders and Other Citizens Request the House of Delegates to Repeal the Resolution of Respect to Abraham Lincoln, the Barbarian... ”
Joe Levell

Robert Russa Moton “The Negro’s Debt to Lincoln”
Dan Haller

Louis A. Warren “The Slavery Atmosphere of Lincoln's Youth”
Nick Schradle

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The South

The exploration texts of Jefferson Davis, Edward A. Pollard, and Francis Wilson demonstrate a large array of southern remembrance and sentiments of the Civil War and President Lincoln in the following decades. In these texts there is an increasing tone of justification of the war for the southerners as well as swaying the war in favor of the confederacy. This confidence and justification is begins with Jefferson Davis’s The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government when Davis concludes that Lincoln and the federal government were nothing more than tyrants and the confederacy was merely exercising its constitutional rights.

Similarly, former Richmond Examiner publisher, Edward A. Pollard runs on the foundation President Davis laid out and attempts to objectively re-write the history of the war from a Southern perspective. While attempting to redirect public memory of the South throughout the novel, Pollard even went as far as to say that Gettysburg was a victory for the South. Pollard also strategically omits any mention of President Lincoln’s assassination.

Finally, Francis Wilson provides a face and back-story to Lincoln’s killer, John Wilkes Booth. Leading with a Booth quote, “Our country owed all her troubles to him, and God simply made me the instrument of his punishment"[1], Wilson identifies Booth as a “Lost Cause” fanatic. Wilson believes that Booth was a spotlight-seeking assassin who thought he would become a staple in Southerners memory of the Civil War.

These three prime examples of the south’s memory of the Civil War and Lincoln, display a common theme of southern moral victory in the face of a great tyrant. This view helped many veterans and natives of the South to rationalize the war’s outcome and the post war era.

These examples can also certainly be paired with David W. Blight’s Race and Reunion, in which the author touches on the tradition of the Lost Cause and how reconciliation could stem from the Southern ideology by separating slavery from the cause of the Civil War. Blight recalls a speech given by Robert E. Lee’s grandson delivered in 1911, where he suggested, “If the South had been heeded, slavery would have been eliminated years before it was. It was the votes of the southern states which finally freed the slaves.”[2] By twisting the history and using this strange logic, Lost Cause believers could not be absolved from the responsibility of slavery but also made them true abolitionists. As Blight put it, “Protected by such mists of sentiment, the past could be anything people wished.”[3] Finally, the idea the notion created by Lost Cause members that even when Americans lose, they win. This indomitable spirit, that Margaret Mitchell infused into her character Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind (1936), and such is the basis of the enduring legend of Robert E. Lee—through noble character, he won by losing.[4]

Francis Wilson "John Wilkes Booth: Fact and Fiction of Lincoln's Assassination"
Dean DeChiaro

Edward A. Pollard "The Lost Cause: A New Southern History of the War of the Confederates"
Steve Schaffer

Jefferson Davis "The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government"
Rick Ramirez

[1] Wilson, Francis. John Wilkes Booth: Fact and Fiction of Lincoln's Assassination, 1st ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1929) pp. xv.

[2] Blight, David W. Race and Reunion, The Civil War in American Memory, (Harvard University Press, 2001) pp. 283.

[3] Ibid., pp. 283.

[4] Ibid., pp. 284.

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Visual Representations

From a young Kentucky rail-splitter to the savior of the Union, visual portrayal of Abraham Lincoln remains a national obsession for most Americans. Having lived in the era that witnessed the birth of the camera, Lincoln remains one of the most formally photographed U.S. presidents. These numerous images from his life have been the basis for increasingly diverse artistic renderings of this beloved figure.

The range of these representations, from romanticized paintings of his Gettysburg speech to George Grey Barnard's controversial Lincoln sculpture in Cincinnati, exemplifies the diversity of Lincolnian mythology. Visual representations are one way in which various individuals and groups have appropriated the life and legacy of the president in order to lend validation to their respective causes. Thus an analysis of differing depictions of Lincoln allows the viewer to identify what aspect of Lincoln the artist has chosen to emphasize, valorize, or even disparage.

Elmer Harland Daniels "Apotheosis", Nancy Hanks Lincoln Memorial
Alana Lemon

“Honest Old Abe . 30 Years Ago” Poster
Jon Ingram

Photograph of Abraham and Tad Lincoln
Peter Fúster

“Attained” Cartoon from “London Fun”
Aaron Stanton

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Memorials & Appropriation

Our study focuses on commercial appropriations of Lincoln’s name, image, and values. In keeping with this aim, we have selected several commercial advertisements dating from roughly 1900 to 1950. All these advertisements were produced by companies located in historically Union states, particularly from areas with large numbers of Midwesterners who held a strong reverence of Lincoln. It is presumed that both producer and consumer for most of the advertised products and companies viewed Lincoln positively. There is an expectation on the part of the advertiser that everyone likes Lincoln, the effect of reconciliation. A reconciliationist narrative produced a Lincoln image devoid of historical fact. These advertisements are vacuous in that they are void of any real content. They fail to acknowledge Lincoln’s controversial role in the Civil War and ending slavery. The lack of controversial content pertaining to Lincoln make these commercial representations unobjectable, effective in their ambiguity.

We found several commonalities between the various pieces in our exhibit. Almost all the appropriations depict Lincoln in his bearded Presidential years (except the writing tablet that has illustrations of Lincoln throughout his life). All the appropriations depict Lincoln in a favorable light, a light that would also cast favor upon the products being sold. We have concluded, given that these are all advertisements from newspapers and fliers, that these depictions of Lincoln were intended for mass consumption and wide distribution. While the overarching motive behind the Lincoln advertisements is to sell a product, many also suggest America’s take on Lincoln’s “values” to their audience. Some of the more prevalent values include honor, honesty, hard work, humanism and homage to American values of patriotism and freedom. These values are used to link the business practices of the company and their products to Lincoln.

J.C. Blair Company “Lincoln Axiom Tablet” and Advertisement for Lincolns Savings and Loan
Charles Bennett

Advertisement from "The Lincoln National Insurance Company" and "Lincoln on Private Property"
Molly Storer

“Lincoln Would Have Grasped This Opportunity Eagerly”Advertisement for The American Correspondence School of Law, and “Furniture Fashions—The Rugged Honesty of Lincoln” from The Peck & Hills Furniture Co.
Emma Thorne-Christy

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