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Biographies are “founded,” historian Jill Lepore has written, “on a belief in the singularity and significance of an individual’s life and his contribution to history.” Abraham Lincoln has been the subject of more than 15,000 biographies, and even a cultural historian like me must admit: rightly so. But as Lincoln wrote in 1864, “I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me.” Scholars must reckon with such a honest, humble admission: what is the relationship between a life and its times? Some Lincoln biographers have been oddly reluctant to answer this question. In Abe, David S. Reynolds takes the legendary David Herbert Donald to task for dropping a memorable clanger in his 1995 biography. Donald claimed that Lincoln “was only indirectly connected with the economic and social transformations of the period.” Moreover, Donald also took a jaundiced perspective on the popular culture of Lincoln’s America. The “feminine,” “sentimental,” and “saccharine” cultural productions of the era had precious little impact on Lincoln’s life, his pragmatic politics, or his transcendent prose (pp. xiv-xv).1
Reynolds has not simply constructed a historiographical straw man to blow down. He likes Donald’s biography. Instead, Reynolds offers a new vantage point in his “cultural biography” of the sixteenth president, arguing that Lincoln was “immersed” in American culture and “experienced culture in all its dimensions, from high to low, sacred to profane, conservative to radical, sentimental to subversive” (p. xv). Reynolds asserts that Lincoln’s cultural influences included humbugging entertainment impresario P. T. Barnum, talented tightrope-walker Charles Blondin, and vulgar humorist David Ross Locke, as well as the literary lights of the American Renaissance. Cultural biography, Reynolds contends, “reveals not only self-making but also culture-making. Culture fashioned Lincoln; he in turn fashioned it” (p. xvii). Abe joins similarly conceived works on Walt Whitman and John Brown in Reynolds’s oeuvre. They are popular with academic and lay readers alike, and they win awards, including the Gilder Lehrman Institute’s Lincoln Prize for Abe. 2
Reynolds immerses us in Lincoln’s immersive cultural experience and argues that Lincoln was adept in “traversing a culture’s idioms” and sought to direct “the many cultural forces in America that tended toward conflict, fragmentation, and . . . chaos” with an...