The Not-So-Grand Review: Abraham Lincoln in the Journal of American History

Abstract

Perhaps it is accidental that the premier journal of American history has had so little to say about the premier figure in American history, Abraham Lincoln. Or perhaps it was Lincoln's misfortune that the Mississippi Valley Historical Association (mvha, the forerunner of the Organization of American Historians, or oah) was not formed until 1907 and that the Mississippi Valley Historical Review (MVHR, the forerunner of the Journal of American History, or JAH) did not begin quarterly publication until 1914, when the sun of Lincoln's historical reputation had already reached its apogee and had nowhere to go but downward. For five decades after his assassination, Lincoln's position as the second greatest American (after George Washington) had arched upward, until by 1909, the centennial of his birth, Lincoln had eclipsed even Washington as the central icon of American democracy. In just one decade, 1910–1919, seventeen new Lincoln statues were dedicated, one more than all the Lincoln statues installed in the half century after the attack in Ford's Theatre. And in that heyday of Progressivism, the most important Lincoln biography, Ida M. Tarbell's The Life of Abraham Lincoln (1900), was not only the product of one of Progressive journalism's most famous voices, but unveiled a Lincoln whom Progressives could embrace as their own. Which they did: “The Progressive platform of to-day is but an amplication … of Lincoln's,” announced Theodore Roosevelt.1