Memories of Lincoln and the Splintering of American Political Thought

In the thirty-five years after Abraham Lincoln's assassination, people who had known him rushed into print. Old acquaintances filled newspapers, biographies and edited collections with their recollections, some chasing fame, some pressing partisan causes, all trying to settle what Lincoln had meant. Shawn J. Parry-Giles and David Kaufer gather more than five hundred of these reminiscences, combining rhetorical analysis with corpus research to show how style, class and character shaped the way he was remembered.

Their argument is that these memories became political rhetoric in their own right. Republicans and Democrats with clashing ideas of citizenship both claimed Lincoln's hardscrabble rise as proof of their case, and the authors trace how that contest deepened a split between republicanism and democracy that persists today. A rewarding study for anyone curious about how presidents are turned into arguments.