The Young Lincoln's Struggle for Distinction

Abstract

The scholarly study of Abraham has long been a cottage industry. However, until last two decades Lincoln's early life has not received attention that it deserves. To a great extent this neglect is due to perceived unreliability of William H. Herndon's post-Civil War informants, main contemporary source of information on Lincoln's early life, and Herndon's own presumed bias in use of these reminiscences. By 1970s historians seeking the real Lincoln had come to believe that, based on available documents, nothing new could be said about this great president's formative years. Many of them accepted Don E. Fehrenbacher's suggestion in his Prelude to Greatness: in 1850s (1962) that one need not look earlier than last antebellum decade for evidence of Lincoln's extraordinary capacity for growth and intrinsic qualities of leadership. Then, in 1979 with publication of George B. Forgie's Patricide in House Divided: A Psychological Interpretation of and His Age, followed almost immediately by two other psychobiographies, field received a jolt that is still sending out shock waves.' scholar Mark E. Neely, Jr., reflecting unfavorable reaction of traditional historians to a largely negative psychoanalytic treatment of Lincoln, referred to these accounts as unmitigated disasters.2