Campaign Biography Research Articles

Big Brains and the Solid South: The Role of the Press in the Election of 1880

ABSTRACT The US presidential election of 1880 provides an opportunity to examine the dynamic role of the nineteenth-century press in defining the candidates, implementing campaign tactics, and constructing an ideological battlefield for the campaign. The coverage demonstrates that the press engaged in tactics that remain staples of electoral communication strategy: constructing candidates via a campaign biography, engineering a bandwagon effect by repeatedly invoking the popularity of the candidate, disseminating qualified endorsements, calling for voter turnout, and adopting a rhetoric of victory. It was also in 1880, the research shows, that the construct of the Solid South came to the fore, denoting, in the case of the Democratic press, the political and economic reemergence of the region in the wake of Reconstruction or, in the case of the Republican press, a reactionary crystallization of Southern interests.

Preserving the White Man's Republic: Jacksonian Democracy, Race, and the Transformation of American Conservatism by Joshua A. Lynn

Reviewed by: Preserving the White Man's Republic: Jacksonian Democracy, Race, and the Transformation of American Conservatism by Joshua A. Lynn Padraig Riley Preserving the White Man's Republic: Jacksonian Democracy, Race, and the Transformation of American Conservatism. Joshua A. Lynn. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2019. ISBN: 978-0-8139-4250-6. 288 pp., cloth, $39.50. In this insightful book, Joshua Lynn analyzes the ideology of the Democratic Party from the end of the Mexican-American War to the onset of the Civil War. Lynn follows a range of men, North and South, who remained committed Democrats down to 1860, in an attempt to portray "the political thought of a party" (7). Although disputes over the governance of slavery ultimately drove Democrats into sectional discord, Lynn is more interested in the ideas and commitments that held them together and enabled the party to reunify during Reconstruction. The empowerment of white men formed the core of Democratic thought. Democrats, Lynn argues, united "Enlightenment individualism and democratic majoritarianism" with white supremacy (29). Democrats championed popular sovereignty, but they drew hard racial lines around who constituted "the people." They celebrated individual autonomy, but always considered the liberal political subject as "a raced and gendered being—abstract individualism took concrete form in the master of black and female dependents" (36). Here, Lynn's argument is a version of Stephanie McCurry's Masters of Small Worlds (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997) writ large: not only South Carolina yeomen but white men across the nation identified with slaveholders because of their shared mastery over wives, children, or slaves. At other moments, Lynn instead emphasizes herrenvolk democracy as the binding force between Democrats North and South. [End Page 237] "Northern Democrats," he argues, "showed as much solicitude as southerners for racism's leveling effects among white men" (29). To promote white freedom, Democrats gladly accommodated the oppression of enslaved people. As James Buchanan's 1856 campaign biography put it, "the peace, prosperity, and safety of twenty millions of the happiest, freest, and most advanced white men . . . should not be sacrificed—nay, not even jeopardized for the supposed interests of three millions of the African race" (3). Within their white world, however, Democrats considered themselves liberal and tolerant. They opposed nativism and welcomed immigrants, including Irish Catholics, as fellow citizens and fellow white men. They rejected temperance and abolitionism as "fanatical" movements that would use the state to constrain white men's freedom to drink and enslave. Instead, they envisioned a decentralized republic founded on popular sovereignty, where local white male majorities governed themselves and all others. Such toleration of white men's liberty and power would resolve the sectional crisis, as Stephen Douglas promised, by allowing territorial settlers to decide for themselves whether to allow slavery in their midst. The question, of course, was whether this intersectional accord of white supremacy could survive the politics of slavery. Lynn acknowledges that the Democracy took form in order to suppress debate over slavery, but he tends to downplay the extent to which slaveholders embraced antidemocratic and illiberal politics to defend their power. We hear little in this book about the three-fifths clause and little more about the defense of property rights in enslaved people. By 1860, slaveholder resistance to majoritarianism had undermined even the resolutely white supremacist democracy championed by Douglas. Lynn contends that late antebellum Democrats altered the course of American conservatism. Instead of a Burkean commitment to the organic development of political institutions through time, Democrats defended the extension of natural rights, egalitarianism, and majority rule through American space. They did so not to foment cosmopolitan revolution, however, but to conserve an exclusive republic for white men. As such, Lynn argues, they anticipated the late-twentieth-century New Right, who likewise made "individualism and democratic populism" core conservative values (178). While provocative, these claims need more work to defend. Democrats did invoke the adjective conservative to justify their opposition to abolition, but it is hard to find any substantive engagement with conservative political philosophy among Lynn's characters. A more traditional intellectual history, focused on a few key thinkers and texts, would complement Lynn's synthetic but somewhat diffuse portrait of Democratic thought...

The Emergence of Conservatism as a Political Concept in the United States before the Civil War

The Emergence of Conservatism as a Political Concept in the United States before the Civil War Adam I. P. Smith (bio) In 1848, the writer for a religious weekly noted that conservative and conservatism were now used "so frequently" that it "becomes a matter of some surprise how our predecessors managed to dispense with them so generally."1 The author might have added—though it barely needed saying—that these were terms laden with weighty, sometimes contradictory but almost always positive connotations. So self-evidently important were these political concepts that newspaper editors, ministers, and politicians all offered disquisitions on their meaning and significance, earnestly distinguishing between "true" and "false" conservatism. In the widest sense, the self-described conservatism of nineteenth-century Americans was a reflection of a political culture that placed the highest moral value on defense of the Constitution and the Union.2 US politics was hardly short of profound division, yet compared to most European states the extent of the constitutional consensus was striking. This was a "postrevolutionary" politics in the sense that the break from the British Empire and the nation-building project that followed was so culturally and politically sacrosanct that any prospect of future revolution was [End Page 231] regarded as revanchism of the most dangerous kind—as the secessionists of 1861 were to discover. This was what Nathaniel Hawthorne meant when he proclaimed in his campaign biography of Franklin Pierce that "all the greatest statesmen of America stand in the attitude of a conservative," and it was what Daniel Webster had in mind when he said in 1848 that "the whole progress of the American system, [is] marked by a peculiar conservatism."3 It was why British Chartists or revolutionary émigrés from continental Europe sometimes declared themselves conservatives; as James Fennimore Cooper put it, "here [in America], the democrat is the conservative, and thank God he has something worth preserving."4 Under a monarchy, explained an Ohio newspaper in 1858, conservatism was "the foe of popular liberty," but in a republic "where political and social movements, being accorded the largest liberty, tend to extremes," it operates as a "wholesome check, retraining excesses."5 Americans fought bitterly over the meaning of their experiment in popular sovereignty, but they shared the assumption that it was the responsibility of each generation to perpetuate the republican institutions they had inherited. And so, in this general sense, a certain sort of "peculiar" (because it was postrevolutionary) conservatism came naturally. Yet when the term conservative initially appeared in America in the 1790s, it was used in a very specific way in reports of French politics as a translation of conservatuer. Only in the mid-1830s did the term begin to be applied to American politics, and only in the 1840s did it really take hold and acquire its generally positive value-laden meaning. By the late 1850s, as the nation's institutions, and indeed its very existence, came under unprecedented threat, conservative became a language of legitimation—to claim to be a conservative was to be in favor of protecting something everyone agreed had moral value, such as the legacy of 1776, justice, or the Union. The timing and circumstances of the emergence of the language of conservatism in American politics has attracted relatively little scholarly attention. Indeed, such is the lingering influence of Hartzian assumptions about the underlying "liberalism" of American political culture that it is still quite frequently assumed that there was no "real" conservatism in antebellum America at all.6 Most of the scholarship on the [End Page 232] pre–New Deal history of conservatism takes what might be called a "genealogical" approach. That is, it aims to identify a conservative "tradition"—of people whose politics make them conservative according to some normative definition, whether or not they thought of themselves as such.7 The bulk of this scholarship concentrates, for understandable reasons, on the South, though occasionally some crusty northern Whigs of the Rufus Choate variety are also thrown in.8 At the same time, historians of antebellum politics deploy the term conservative to describe the politics of anyone who defended slavery. The implication is that the antebellum antislavery to proslavery political spectrum can...

Lincoln and His Biographers

Lincoln and His Biographers Allen Carl Guelzo (bio) Abraham Lincoln would not have thanked those who have made the pile of his biographies reach up through three floors of the Ford's Theatre education center in Washington, D.C. William Henry Herndon, Lincoln's law partner for fourteen years before his election to the presidency, believed Lincoln "had a contempt for all history and biography" in general, because "he knew how it was written; he knew the motives and conscience of the writers of history and biography" and that they were more interested in plaiting laurels and painting halos than delivering the things "Lincoln wanted to know," which were "the whole truth and nothing less." He did not expect to find it at the hands of biography writers, since, as a rule, "biographies as written are false and misleading."1 Neither was Lincoln much more encouraging to people who wanted to write biographies of him. When John Locke Scripps, the coeditor of the Chicago Tribune, begged for a brief political biography to use for his presidential campaign in 1860, Lincoln at first balked. "Why, Scripps, it is a great piece of folly to attempt to make anything out of my early life. It can all be condensed into a single sentence, and that sentence you will find Gray's Elegy: 'The short and simple annals of the poor.'" The material he supplied to Charles Lanman in 1858 for Lanman's Dictionary of Congress contained only enough to fill six lines in a half-column, admitting that he had "received a limited education" and had been nothing more than "at one time Postmaster of a small village."2 [End Page 239] But as in so many things Lincolnian, the substance is not always in agreement with the appearance. Even though he claimed his personal history amounted to nothing more than Thomas Gray's "short and simple annals," Lincoln was not incurious about his own ancestors, and when a political point was at stake, he would not hesitate to use his own career as an example. One of the great injustices of slavery, he maintained, was its absolute denial to the slave of any hope of economic betterment, whereas the Republican free-labor philosophy opened mobility to even the poorest—as instanced, very dramatically, by Lincoln himself: "When one starts poor, as most do in the race of life, free society is such that he knows he can better his condition; he knows that there is no fixed condition of labor, for his whole life. I am not ashamed to confess that twenty-five years ago I was a hired laborer, mauling rails, at work on a flat-boat—just what might happen to any poor-man's son."3 Despite his initial hesitations, he provided not only Scripps but Jesse Fell (a political booster whom Lincoln had first met in 1834) with autobiographical pieces to be used for campaign purposes. Nor was he quite as dismissive of all biography as he sometimes sounded. The teenaged Lincoln worked at pulling "fodder at 25c per day" when rain ruined a copy of David Ramsay's The Life of George Washington (1807) he had borrowed from a neighboring farmer. [End Page 240] Speaking to the New Jersey state senate thirty-five years later, Lincoln cited the influence laid on him by his youthful reading of another Washington biography, Mason Locke Weems's A History of the Life and Death, Virtues and Exploits, of General George Washington (1802).4 He loves biography; he loves it not. Unhappily, Lincoln's first biographers were exactly the penny-dreadfuls he loathed—campaign biographies, a genre almost uniquely American and dedicated to one goal, which was motivating voters, either by a pristine presentation of the candidate's virtues to the electorate or discounting negative impressions. In all, sixteen campaign biographies of Lincoln appeared during the 1860 election season, several of them based in whole or in part on the campaign biography Scripps worked up from the outline Lincoln composed for Scripps. An entirely separate biography, commissioned by the Republican publishing house of Follett, Foster & Co. and written by the then-editor of the Ohio State Journal, William Dean Howells...

Literature as a Political Tool: Whig Efforts to Prevent the Election of Martin Van Buren

Abstract Starting with Andrew Jackson, presidential candidates in the United States used campaign biographies as useful political tools, and since 1824 no presidential election year has passed without a campaign biography. Martin Van Buren, President Jackson’s successor in the White House, became a target of a vicious campaign intended to prevent his election. His Whig opponents used a number of literary genres to slander him, including a mock campaign biography and a novel. The article focuses on the portrayal of Martin Van Buren in The Life of Martin Van Buren, allegedly written by Davy Crockett in 1835, and a novel named The Partisan Leader; A Tale of the Future, written by Nathaniel Beverley Tucker in 1836. Though being of different genres, these curious and obscure works have certain things in common - they were written under pseudonyms, their main goal was to prevent the election of Martin Van Buren and both of them failed in their goal.

Farewell, Fred Voodoo: A Letter from Haiti by Amy Wilentz (review)

Reviewed by: Farewell, Fred Voodoo: A Letter from Haiti by Amy Wilentz Adam Kaiserman Farewell, Fred Voodoo: A Letter from Haiti. By Amy Wilentz. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2013. ISBN 978-1451643978. 352 pp. $27.00 hardback, $16.00 paperback. In 1936, the writer James Agee and the photographer Walker Evans went to Alabama on assignment for Fortune magazine. The two men spent eight weeks in the Deep South in order to understand the brutal poverty experienced by white sharecroppers. After living among the destitute, the [End Page 125] pair found themselves unwilling and unable to transform the misery of their subjects into the slickly produced journalism that Fortune demanded. Instead, Agee and Evans published Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), a combination of Agee’s words and Evan’s photographs and a landmark text in the history of literary journalism. Early in the text, Agee reflects on the process of making the book: It seems to me curious, not to say obscene and thoroughly terrifying, that it could occur to an association of human beings drawn together through need and chance and for profit into a company, an organ of journalism, to pry intimately into the lives of an undefended and appallingly damaged group of human beings . . . for the purpose of parading the nakedness, disadvantage and humiliation of these lives before another group of human beings, in the name of science, of “honest journalism” (whatever that paradox may mean), of humanity, of social fearlessness, for money, and for a reputation for crusading and for unbias . . . and that these people could be capable of meditating this project without the slightest doubts of their qualification to do an “honest” piece of work, and with a conscience better than clear, and in virtual certitude of almost unanimous public approval. . . . All of this, I repeat, seems to me curious, obscene, terrifying, and unfathomably mysterious.1 Obviously uncomfortable with their assignment, Agee and Evans produced a dense, elusive work that sought to transcend the sickening clichés of magazine journalism. They hoped to offer up their subjects as they actually were in all their humanity. Amy Wilentz’s latest book, Farewell, Fred Voodoo: A Letter from Haiti, makes use of the above Agee passage as an epigraph. The book does so to raise a question, however indirectly, about Wilentz’s own relationship to Haiti. This question, which she articulates more forcefully some two hundred pages later, is simply this: “What am I doing here, what possessed me?” (203). Although Farewell, Fred Voodoo recently won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography, Wilentz’s question is not merely personal. The text is a meditation on Haiti and the relationship it has with journalists, development workers, international organizations, and the whole Western world. The story of Haiti’s fraught interactions with the wider world is a long one that predates both modern journalism and the advent of NGOs. In some ways, the story goes all the way back to Haiti’s independence in 1804. However, the earthquake of 2010 has given this story a special urgency. [End Page 126] Wilentz began writing about Haiti in 1986 when she was as a reporter for Time, sent to cover the fall of Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier and the rise of Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Covering that story took far longer than the eight weeks that Agee and Walker spent in Alabama and resulted in the publication of The Rainy Season: Haiti since Duvalier (1989). Her first book mixed travelogue with ethnography, campaign biography with political thriller. It gained the reader’s interest by immersing him or her in the dangers experienced by everyday Haitians in a time of political tumult and in the intrigues of the Haitian elite. In contrast, Farewell, Fred Voodoo is a more diffuse book. In The Rainy Season, Wilentz used The Comedians, Graham Greene’s 1966 novel about the Tontons Macoutes, as her initial guide both to understanding and to writing about the country. While Wilentz still sprinkles references to The Comedians throughout her latest effort, clearly Greene’s novel is less serviceable than it once was. Focusing on Haiti after the January 12, 2010 earthquake, Wilentz has no narrative form...

Hawthorne and the Gender of Jewishness: Anti‐Semitism, Aesthetics, and Sexual Politics in The Marble Faun

On Sunday, April 13 of 1856, Nathaniel Hawthorne attended banquet in London at the Mansion House, to which he was invited by David Salomons, the Lord Mayor of London. Salomons was honoring Hawthorne in his capacity as U.S. Consul in Liverpool. The United States President Franklin Pierce, of whom Hawthorne had written campaign biography, had appointed Hawthorne, one of his best friends since their days as college classmates at Bowdoin College, to this position in 1853, at the time an extremely important one given Liverpool's centrality in transatlantic trade and commerce between England and the United States. (The position no longer exists.) Hawthorne may or may not have been aware that Salomons was pioneering activist for Jewish rights in the simultaneously tolerant and deeply anti-Semitic culture of Victorian England.1 The American author's account of his dinner at the Lord Mayor's Mansion has been central to many discussions of the Hawthorne's representation of Jewish people, nakedly revealing, as it does, both his deep-seated anti-Semitism and his intense fascination with the figure of the Jewess. From the description he provides in The English Notebooks, Hawthorne and David Salomons did not exactly hit it off: He said little to Hawthorne notes, except that I must hold myself in readiness to respond to toast which he meant to give; and though I hinted that I would much rather be spared, he showed no signs of mercy (21: 480). Hawthorne also observed that his lordship tall, hard-looking, white-headed old Jew, of plain deportment, but rather hearty than otherwise in his address. Sneakily availing himself of the privacy ostensibly afforded him by his notebook, Hawthorne deemed Salomons' wife a short and ugly old Jewess (CE 21: 479). As if reenacting the movement from the scornful apprehension of the tough old Puritan dames who regard Hester Prynne with such violent contempt in the opening scenes of The Scarlet Letter to his languorously sensual descriptions of that famous, marked heroine, Hawthorne transitions from his harsh description of Salomons' wife to much more rapturous one of woman he beholds sitting nearly opposite me, across the table. His description of this woman and the description of the man at her side need to be quoted at length, and as parts of the one continuous paragraph in which they appear: She was, I suppose, dark and yet not dark, but rather seemed to be of pure white marble, yet not white; but the purest and finest complexion (without shade of color in it, yet anything but sallow or sickly) that I ever beheld. Her hair was wonderful deep, raven black, black as night, black as death; not raven black, for that has shiny gloss, and her's [sic] had not; but it was hair never to be painted, nor described - wonderful hair, Jewish hair. Her nose had beautiful outline, though I could see that it was Jewish too; and that, and all her features, were so fine that sculpture seemed despicable art beside her; and certainly my pen is good for nothing. If any likeness of her could be given, it must be by sculpture, not painting. She was slender, and youthful, but yet had stately and cold, though soft and womanly grace; and, looking at her, I saw what were the wives of the old patriarchs, in their maiden or early married days - what Rachel was, when Jacob wooed her seven years, and seven more - what Judith was; for, womanly as she looked, I doubt not she could have slain man, in good cause - what Bathsheba was; only she seemed to have no sin in her - perhaps what Eve was, though one could hardly think her weak enough to eat the apple. I never should have thought of touching her, nor desired to touch her; for, whether owing to distinctness of race, my sense that she was Jewess, or whatever else, I felt sort of repugnance, simultaneously with my perception that she was an admirable creature. But, at the right hand of this miraculous Jewess, there sat the very Jew of Jews; the distilled essence of all the Jews that have been born since Jacob's time; he was Judas Iscariot; he was the Wandering Jew; he was the worst, and at the same time, the truest type of his race, and contained within himself, I have no doubt, every old prophet and every old clothesman, that ever the tribes produced; and he must have been circumcised as much as 10 times over. …

"The Ultraism of the Day ": Greene's Boston Post , Hawthorne, Fuller, Melville, Stowe, and Literary Journalism in Antebellum America

"The Ultraism of the Day ":Greene's Boston Post, Hawthorne, Fuller, Melville, Stowe, and Literary Journalism in Antebellum America Robert J. Scholnick (bio) "I am truly interested in this great field which opens before me and it is pleasant to be sure of a chance at half a hundred thousand readers," Margaret Fuller, the newly-appointed literary editor of the New-York Tribune, the Whig organ established by Horace Greeley in November, 1841, wrote on March 9, 1845 to her brother Eugene, a lawyer associated with a New Orleans newspaper. Eugene had written to report that he had seen a review of Fuller's recently published Woman in the Nineteenth Century during a visit to an Arkansas town. The "great field" opening before Fuller was a new form of literary journalism, one devoted at once to social critique and extended discussions of books and ideas and aimed at the widest possible readership. Recognizing the power of the daily press both to sell books and to promote the discussion of important social questions, Fuller asked Eugene to place a notice of Woman in the Nineteenth Century "in a N.O. newspaper." She then shared with him the immense pleasure she took in the reception of a book that "was sold off in a week to the booksellers and $85 handed to me as my share. Not that my object was in any wise money, but I consider this the signet of success. If one can be heard, that is enough!" However, after claiming that "respect is expressed for me personally" she had to admit that "abuse public and private is lavished upon its views."1 To help us understand the sort of "abuse" that was "lavished upon" the book's views, I reproduce below a previously unknown review of Woman in the Nineteenth Century from the Boston Post, which, as the narrator of Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Ghost of Dr. Harris" asserts, was "the leading journal of the Democratic Party, in the northern States."2 Published on February 28, 1845, the review, which most likely was written, I will show below, by the paper's influential founding editor, Charles Gordon Greene (1804-1886), articulates the [End Page 163] skepticism about the cause of women's rights held by a significant segment of the Boston community and beyond. To generalize, Democrats were far more resistant to social reforms than were the Whigs, and so the Post's treatment of Fuller may be seen as part of the pitched culture wars of the 1840s. Both Greene and Hawthorne, also a Democrat and a devoted reader of the Post, were outspoken in their skepticism about the wide variety of utopian schemes for the reform of social institutions and the perfection of human beings of the sort famously being promoted by Greeley's Tribune. In his campaign biography of Franklin Pierce, Hawthorne praised his subject for not being swept up by "the mistiness of a philanthropic theory." Further, Hawthorne asserted, "There is no instance, in all history, of the human will and intellect having perfected any great moral reform by methods which it adapted to that end."3 Differing as they did on the rights of women, abolition, and many other questions before the public, Greene and Greeley were both leaders in expanding the scope and reach of the daily newspaper to give new prominence to discussions of books and ideas. On September 24, 1845 Fuller wrote in the Tribune that "The Newspaper promises to become daily of more importance, and if the increase of size be managed with equal discretion, to draw within itself the [audience] of all other literature of the day."4 In 1831, a decade before Greeley established the Tribune, Greene had launched the Post, achieving great success in no small measure by making the daily newspaper also a daily literary paper. In addition to critical discussions of books and the arts, the Post published original poetry, comic sketches, familiar essays, and creative works in other forms. Envisioning the potential of a great urban newspaper to reach a national audience, Greene in 1843 created semi-weekly and weekly editions and established a semi-monthly California edition as well. Two years later...

Different from Himself: Hawthorne and the Masks of Masculinity

Different from Himself: Hawthorne and the Masks of Masculinity

An Oral History of Abraham Lincoln: John G. Nicolay's Interviews and Essays.

John C. Nicolay, who had known Lincoln in Springfield, Illinois, served as chief White House secretary from 1861 to 1865. Trained as a journalist, Nicolay had hoped to write a campaign biography of Lincoln in 1860, a desire was thwarted when an obscure young writer named William Dean Howells got the job. Years later, Nicolay fulfilled his ambition; with John Hay, spent the years from 1872 to 1890 writing a monumental ten-volume biography of Lincoln.In preparation for this task, Nicolay interviewed men who had known Lincoln both during his years in Springfield and later when became the president of the United States. When it came time to write their massive biography, however, Burlingame notes, he and Hay made sparing use of the because they had become skeptical about human memory. Nicolay and Hay also feared Robert Todd Lincoln might censor material reflected poorly on Lincoln or his wife.Nicolay had interviewed such Springfield friends as Lincoln s first two law partners, John Todd Stuart and Stephen T. Logan. At the Illinois capital in June and July 1875, talked to a number of others including Orville H. Browning, U.S. senator and Lincoln s close friend and adviser for over thirty-five years, and Ozias M. Hatch, Lincoln s political ally and Springfield neighbor. Four years later returned briefly and spoke with John W. Bunn, a young political insider from Springfield at the time Lincoln was elected president, and once again with Hatch.Browning shed new light on Lincoln s courtship and marriage, telling Nicolay Lincoln often told him that was constantly under great apprehension lest his wife should do something which would bring him into disgrace while in the White House. During their research, Nicolay and Hay also learned of Lincoln s despondency and erratic behavior following his rejection by Matilda Edwards, and they were subsequently criticized by friends for suppressing the information. Burlingame argues this open discussion of Lincoln s depression of January 1841 is perhaps the most startling new information in the Springfield interviews.Briefer and more narrowly focused than the Springfield interviews, the Washington interviews deal with the formation of Lincoln s cabinet, his relations with Congress, his behavior during the war, his humor, and his grief. In a reminiscence by Robert Todd Lincoln, for example, we learn of Lincoln s despair at General Lee's escape after the Battle of Gettysburg: I went into my father s office ... and found him in [much]distress, his head leaning upon the desk in front of him, and when raised his head there were evidences of tears upon his face. Upon my asking the cause of his distress told me had just received the information Gen. Lee had succeeded in escaping across the Potomac river. . .To supplement these interviews, Burlingame has included Nicolay s unpublished essays on Lincoln during the 1860 campaign and on Lincoln s journey from Springfield to Washington in 1861, essay s based on firsthand testimony.

Hope Springs Eternal

This study examines the narrative strategies used by Bill Clinton in his 1992 and 1996 campaign biography videos. Both videos address similar themes, utilize similar aesthetic strategies, and even repeat key rhetorical structures. In 1996, Clinton substitutes America for Hope as the key organizing symbol of his biography, thereby undermining the liberal Democratic perspective central to The Man From Hope. Instead he offers an image of America that foregrounds traditional Republican values and only makes oblique references to values typically held by Democrats. In doing so, the video biography re-presents Clinton as a moderate, in a creatively ambiguous treatment of the president that seems designed to appeal to a politically diverse America.

Hawthorne's Genealogy of Madness: "The House of Seven Gables" and Disciplinary Individualism

THE REFORMER, A RECURRENT CHARACTER IN HAWTHORNE'S FICTION, is a figure who, whatever his patent medicine, often exerts the dangerous, diabolic control of a political hubris disguised as idealism. Recent ideological criticism of Hawthorne's major novels, however, has neglected Hawthorne's own discomfort with antebellum reformparticularly in the production of subjectivities. In the Pierce campaign biography, Hawthorne qualifies the expressed liberal faith in the closed progress of history with a more strongly worded skepticism about contemporary reform movements.' Although Hawthorne does assert that slavery will be remedied by Providence in its own good time, he justifies such a disavowal of collective political action with a resigned pragmatism: there is no instance, in all human history, of the human will and intellect having perfected any great moral reform by methods which it adapted to that end.2 Hawthorne, in the Pierce biography, gives only faint endorsement to the gradual progress of liberty-one held with so timid a conviction that it needed a leap into Providential faith to have any solidity at all. What resonates more strongly in this passage than progressive pieties is an antipathy for the methods of the moral reformers, methods he would investigate most fully in The House of Seven Gables' genealogy of madness. While recent literary historians have set the works of Hawthorne

Hawthorne's Politics in The House of the Seven Gables

Reasonably enough, discussions of Hawthorne's politics in his most political romance1 have focussed on the economic relations between Pyncheons and Maules, and on Holgrave's social ideas. But the roles played by Ned Higgins, evidently a child of working-class parents,2 the young carpenter, Matthew Maule, and the Negro figures, Jim Crow and Scipio, deserve more careful consideration than they have received. It is clear that in dealing with the problem of property Hawthorne drew upon the ideas of Locke, Proudhon and Fourier.3 What is not so clear is the relationship between Hawthorne's explicit comments on slavery - in his 1852 campaign biography of the anti-Abolitionist Franklin Pierce, as well as in his Atlantic Monthly article of 1862, "Chiefly About War Matters" - and the depiction in The House of the Seven Cables of "aristocrats," blacks, and poor whites. I think that a careful analysis of all these matters may lead to a more satisfactory definition of Hawthorne's politics than that of Russell Kirk, who considers Hawthorne an outstanding conserva- tive,'1 or that of F. O. Matthiessen, who interestingly but cryptically refers to a "peculiar kind of social understanding" which "made Hawthorne hold to both the contrasting terms of [the] paradox of being at once a democrat and a conservative."5

Melville and the Negro: From Typee to "Benito Cereno"

Jf NASMUCH AS MELVILLE PUBLISHED most of his best work in the years between the Mexican and Civil Wars-the years during which the interconnected problems of westward expansion and slavery reached crisis stage-it might seem, as Sidney Kaplan thinks, surprising that from Typee in I846 to the Battle-Pieces of i866 there is scarcely an important item in the Melville canon that does not contain Negro characters or touch in some way the question of bondage and revolt.' Yet the frequency and importance of the Negro's role in Melville's work is, in fact, surprising in view of the absence of black men from the work of his contemporaries. Though Negroes figure prominently in such abolitionist efforts as Uncle Tom's Cabin, they seldom appear in the nonpropagandistic writings of Melville's literary peers. Emerson, Thoreau, and Whittier, for example, may have spoken and editorialized against the evils of slavery and the wickedness of Daniel Webster and Judge Shaw, but Negroes as individuals have no place in their poetry. Negroes do, of course, figure in Whitman's work, but Leaves of Grass was published four years after Moby-Dick, and Whitman was not widely known until still later. Mention of Negroes and slavery is also conspicuously absent from the stories and novels of Melville's close friend and correspondent Nathaniel Hawthorne (though he discusses the slavery issue in his campaign biography of Franklin Pierce, whose administration was pro-slavery). Furthermore, Melville's correspondence makes no reference to the slavery issue. Even the letters to his father-in-law and confidant, Judge Lemuel Shaw, contain no mention of either Negroes or slavery, though Shaw was at the time embroiled in the fugitive slave cases

The President as a National Symbol - *W. Burlie Brown: The People's Choice: The Presidential Image in the Campaign Biography (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1960. Pp. 178. $4.00.)

The President as a National Symbol - *W. Burlie Brown: The People's Choice: The Presidential Image in the Campaign Biography (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1960. Pp. 178. $4.00.)

The People's Choice: The Presidential Image in the Campaign Biography

The People's Choice: The Presidential Image in the Campaign Biography

The People's Choice: The Presidential Image in the Campaign Biography

The People's Choice: The Presidential Image in the Campaign Biography