When historian Julie M. Fenster’s brother heard she was writing a book dealing, in part, with Abraham Lincoln’s role in a murder trial, he joked that she should call it “Law & Order: Future Presidents Unit.”
Fenster and her publisher, Palgrave Macmillan, didn’t go quite that far, but they took a similar tack in titling the work “The Case of Abraham Lincoln: A Story of Adultery, Murder, and the Making of a Great President.”
This, however, is a book that’s much more than a courtroom drama. It’s a beautifully nuanced portrait of Lincoln in the turning-point year of 1856 when the former Whig joined the new Republican Party, gave what many considered to be his greatest speech and suddenly found himself a national figure.
True, it was also the year in which George Anderson, a Springfield blacksmith, was murdered in his back yard. His wife and nephew, believed by many to be lovers, were put on trial for the slaying. And, at the very end of the court proceedings, Lincoln stepped in and played a key role.
Fenster tells that story well, but, what’s more important, she puts it into the context of Lincoln’s other legal work, his personal life and his tottering political career.
The high point of the book isn’t the murder or the trial. It’s when Lincoln stands up at a meeting of Illinois Republicans in Bloomington and gives the address that unites the party. It’s known as the Lost Speech because no transcript exists. But, by mining a wide array of written recollections, Fenster reconstructs its main points — and its deeply felt impact.
In an interview from her home near Syracuse, N.Y., Fenster talked about how she put the book together, with all its frustrations and delights. Here’s an edited transcript:
Q. Your book provides a fascinating, multilevel look at Lincoln’s life in 1856. How did you decide to focus on that year?
A. I really wanted to depict Lincoln just before the rest of the world discovered him. I wanted to see him as he was when he was just a member of the middle-class. And, then, of course, there was that great murder case that helped to keep the suspense of the book rolling along.
Q. He gets involved in the murder case at the very end of the book, at the very end of the case. Did you worry that, by making so much of the murder case, it would skew the book in one way or another?
A. I almost liked the fact that the murder case presented Lincoln as part of a Brueghel painting. It was a big canvas, and, for a long time, he was only one of 50 people involved in it. I liked that because the spotlight wasn’t always on him in 1856. He wasn’t always the star of the show.
Q. At various points in the book, you mention that Lincoln “probably” or “most likely” or “certainly” did something — in contrast to some other popular books about historical events, such as “Devil in the White City,” that offer suppositions as facts.
A. I really thought that it would insult the facts for me to try to embroider or improve upon them. In some cases, it was frustrating. There was never a description of the woman charged with murder that I could find. And the temptation to just sneak in a little adjective here or there was strong. But I wanted this book to be worthwhile in academic libraries. When the facts were there, they were great. I didn’t want the reader to ever have to guess what was fact and what was me.
Q. Was the Lost Speech really Lincoln’s greatest speech? Or did it just seem so good in retrospect because there wasn’t a transcript to judge it by?
A. The people who were there acted on the speech. Beforehand, you had Lincoln as a kind of sidelined politician. People who heard the speech went to the national Republican convention and had him nominated for the vice presidential slot, and he even carried enough votes to be second. Based on that speech, he really charged up the delegation.
In researching the speech, I found a great many of the people who were there had obviously remembered it, so, without having a word-for-word transcript, the major points could be brought out. When you look at what he said, it did turn the argument [by saying the North wouldn’t leave the union or permit the South to do so over slavery]. I can see where it was brilliant for the North to stop being on the defensive against Southern aggression.
Q. It’s striking that, after watching Lincoln give the speech, one lawyer said he was “the handsomest man I ever saw.”
A. And that was a lawyer who was known to be very quiet and dour, not an effusive guy. I can believe it. First of all, Abraham Lincoln could be very appealing-looking. He criticized his looks more than other people did.
Q. Lincoln, as you point out in the book, played up his ugliness for humor. But how ugly was he?
A. At this time, the activity and the travel and the excitement did bring out a bloom because people described that he never looked better than he did that summer. His color was great. He didn’t have that pallor that he sometimes did have. He seemed so vigorous and energetic.
think he thrived on the campaign that summer and probably did look great.
Q. You write that, in 1856, Lincoln was 47 years old and at “a helpless age” — watching some of his friends doing better in the world than he was and seeing younger men already crowding him. We don’t usually think of Lincoln as helpless.
A. He called himself “a flat failure” at that juncture. He was making a rhetorical point about Stephen Douglas. I don’t see where any of his peers were anointing him for greatness at the beginning of 1856. He was looking at obscurity. One wrong move with the Republican Party — if that had turned out to be a flop, I don’t know where he would have been.
Q. Did you do your work at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library before or after its new buildings were completed?
A. I did it in the brand-new building. They brought me three big thick files of reminiscences, and that’s where the Lost Speech came to life.
As I was reading all the different reminiscences, I thought, “They’re threads in the same cloth.”
Those files were heaven. It was as though I were at a cocktail party with a bunch of people who knew Lincoln, overhearing their conversations.
– – –
Excerpts from ‘The Case of Abraham Lincoln’
In “The Case of Abraham Lincoln,” Julie M. Fenster examines Lincoln in 1856, a pivotal year in his life. Here are some excerpts:
A midlife crossroads: “Lincoln was forty-seven, a helpless age, really. He was old enough to see people his own age who had attained his dream [of fame] and were living it. And old enough, moreover, to be aware of the new people on the rise, people younger than he who were either ahead of him in the ‘race of ambition,’ or crowding fast with the momentum so attractive in youth. Lincoln, too young to be an elder statesman, was perched on a plateau.”
Lincoln and vanity: “Lincoln was a man without vanity regarding his appearance — but he was not a man without vanity. He encouraged a low opinion of his looks, taking apparent delight in telling stories that brought attention to them. Brash strangers were emboldened to call him ‘ugly’; polite ones said ‘homely.’ Lincoln wasn’t anything like the ogre he made himself out to be, but it was a stance with practical benefits, as a way to warm any room to his side. Therein lay his vanity.”
Immediately after Lincoln’s “Lost Speech” in Bloomington: “‘Lincoln got disentangled from the applauding crowd at length,’ [lawyer-politician Henry] Whitney wrote, and the two of them left the building and ducked into a side street to recover from the overwhelming excitement — and to come down to earth … When he asked Whitney something along the lines of ‘How do you think I did?’ Whitney replied, ‘You know my statements about your speeches are not good authority, so I will tell you what Dubois, who is not so enthusiastic as I am, said to me as we came out of the hall. He said: “Whitney, that is the greatest speech ever made in Illinois and it puts Lincoln on the track for the Presidency.”‘”
———–
preardon@tribune.com
IN THE WEB EDITION
Read new reviews of these books at chicagotribune.com/books:
*”Inspired by Nature: The Garfield Park Conservatory and Chicago’s West Side,” by Julia S. Bachrach and Jo Ann Nathan
*”The Selected Letters of Wallace Stegner,” edited by Page Stegner
*”Heroes: From Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar to Churchill and De Gaulle,” by Paul Johnson
*Plus roundups of crime novels and our favorite books of 2007.
