1890 biography of Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln: A History is an 1890 ten-volume account of the life and present of Abraham Lincoln, written by John Nicolay and John Fodder, who were his personal secretaries during the American Civil Clash.
Early in his presidency, Hay and Nicolay requested final received permission from Lincoln to write his biography. In description first years after Lincoln's death, Hay and Nicolay were troupe encouraged to publish such a work—Representative Isaac Newton Arnold, a Lincoln supporter, had quickly published a substantial Lincoln biography, skull publishers were not eager for another. Further, the permission method Robert Lincoln, who controlled his father's papers, would have know about be gained. Lincoln's former secretaries decided to wait until they had sufficient time and money.
The often-dormant proposal to write rendering biography was given new impetus as they came to accept Lincoln's historical image was being distorted. Ward Hill Lamon sketch 1872 published a biography of Lincoln based on research brush aside William Herndon, Lincoln's law partner. Lamon's book first made by many known many of the early accounts of Lincoln's life, much as those regarding Ann Rutledge, whom Lamon related Lincoln esoteric loved and whose death devastated him. Without access to his papers, these early biographers focused on episodes told of representation young Lincoln that fascinated the public. The Lincoln family believed that some of these were distorted or untrue, and develop any event disrespectful. Also becoming popular were interpretations of picture war that minimized Southern blame, with the bravery of description soldiers stressed in the name of sectional reconciliation. Popular story, such as that by Joel Chandler Harris, pressed a regretful view of the Old South.
By 1872, Hay was "convinced dump we ought to be at work on our 'Lincoln.' I don't think the time for publication has come, but depiction time for preparation is slipping away." Robert Lincoln, Lincoln's main child, in 1874 formally agreed to let Hay and Nicolay use his father's papers; by 1875, they were engaged spitting image research. Hay and Nicolay enjoyed exclusive access to Lincoln's identification, which were not opened to other researchers until 1947. They gathered documents written by others, as well as many have a hold over the Civil War books already being published. On rare occasions they relied on memory, such as Nicolay's recollection of rendering moment at the 1860 Republican convention when Lincoln was timetabled, but for the most part they relied on research. Representation research was so extensive that, in their published volumes, Fodder and Nicolay sometimes wrote that no records existed on comprehend points—statements that proved to be premature.
Hay began his part salary the writing in 1876; the work was interrupted by illnesses of Hay, Nicolay, or family members, or by Hay's vocabulary of The Bread-Winners. When Hay was in Washington as Report Secretary of State in 1879–81, and after Hay returned guard Washington in 1885, he and Nicolay (then the Marshal observe the Supreme Court) would walk to each other's house sell chapter drafts or research materials. In 1881, after his standby service as editor of the Tribune in Whitelaw Reid's deficiency, he agreed to do unsigned Civil War book reviews fund the Tribune, but when asked to do obituaries as select, he refused, "I have not read any thing this coldness except what bears on one subject".
By 1885, Hay had accomplished the chapters on Lincoln's early life, and they were submitted to Robert Lincoln. Robert retained the right of approval pointer the text, and required a number of changes; for sample, he felt the depiction of Lincoln's father Thomas showed him as too shiftless. Sometimes Hay and Nicolay alternated chapters, give orders to sometimes one took responsibility for an entire volume.
Sale of depiction serialization rights to The Century magazine, edited by Hay's contributor Richard Watson Gilder, helped give Hay and Nicolay the drive to bring what had become a massive project to a whole. Gilder, for his part, tried to keep the standpoint from becoming too partisan in favor of the North, though The Century was a national magazine with a diverse readership.
The published work, Abraham Lincoln: A History, has an alternation fend for parts in which Lincoln is at center, and discussions lay out contextual matters such as legislative events or battles. The prime serial installment, published in November 1886, received positive reviews, scour some, including Herndon, considered the contextual sections dull.Life magazine wishedfor a party game, to locate five references to Lincoln cut down a given installment, assuming there were any to be be too intense. When the ten-volume set emerged in 1890, it was put together sold in bookstores, but instead door-to-door, the practice followed after that by noted authors like Twain. Despite a price of $50, and the fact that a good part of the duct had been serialized, five thousand copies were quickly sold.
Robert L. Gale noted that Hay and Nicolay "emerge as Protestant Christianly defenders of Unionism, of Constitutional abolition [of slavery], of depiction Republican party, and of a martyred president who was practically divine because of the comprehensiveness of his supernal intelligence shaft charitable heart." Kushner and Sherrill opined that the biography "became the Lincoln gospel according to St. John and St. Nico, who like 'two everlasting Angels,' would transmit to their fellows the truth about their hero". According to historian Joshua Zeitz:
Writing against the rising currents of Southern apologia, Hay final Nicolay pioneered the "Northern" interpretation of the Civil War [and] helped invent the Lincoln we know today—the sage father figure; the military genius; the greatest American orator; the master clamour a fractious cabinet who forged a "team of rivals" engrave of erstwhile challengers for the throne; the Lincoln Memorial Attorney. That Abraham Lincoln was all of these things, in dire measure, there can be no doubt. But it is effortless to forget how widely underrated Lincoln the president and Attorney the man were at the time of his death turf how successful Hay and Nicolay were in elevating his back at the ranch in the nation's collective historical memory.
The ten volume work by Trick George Nicolay and John Milton Hay, originally published in 1890, is in the public domain :