Lincoln's Boys: John Hay, John Nicolay, and the War for Lincoln's Image - Joshua Zeitz
Lincoln's Boys: John Hay, John Nicolay, and the War for Lincoln's Image - Joshua Zeitz
Non-Fiction
Pages: 390
In any biography of Lincoln or book on the Civil War John Hay and George Nicolay will always be mentioned, but rarely in any detail or depth. During his time in the White House they were Lincoln's shadows, his private secretaries, one of whom was with him at almost any time wherever he went. Indeed, John Hay was at his side when he died. And yet few of those books focus on Hay or Nicolay themselves, despite the fact that outside of Lincoln's immediate family they probably knew him more intimately than any other men alive.
Abraham Lincoln is one of my historical heroes, someone I can read about endlessly. There's probably no aspect of Lincoln's life that I wouldn't find interesting - and this book, for all that technically it isn't about Lincoln per se, is more than interesting. Whilst the focus is very much on Hay and Nicolay, the spirit and presence of Lincoln is everywhere in this book - as it was in Hay and Nicolay's lives. After his death they became the guardians of his memory, collecting and preserving all the Lincoln material and documents they could lay hands on, and spent almost fifteen years writing a comprehensive ten-volume biography that laid the foundations for much of the subsequent explosion of Lincoln scholarship.
The title is a little overly-dramatic - there was no 'war for Lincoln's image', then or since. But Hay and Nicolay's version of history has proved indelible, colouring the way posterity has viewed Lincoln ever since its publication. Hay and Nicolay's Lincoln was, as Zeitz puts it, the Lincoln Memorial Lincoln, the strong wise noble leader, not a god or an Immortal, but an all-too-human man who understand human nature better than almost anyone. Both men believed that the Civil War could not have been won without Lincoln, and then it was the hand of Providence that placed him in the White House when he was most needed, and I'm not sure I disagree with them.
Non-Fiction
Pages: 390
In any biography of Lincoln or book on the Civil War John Hay and George Nicolay will always be mentioned, but rarely in any detail or depth. During his time in the White House they were Lincoln's shadows, his private secretaries, one of whom was with him at almost any time wherever he went. Indeed, John Hay was at his side when he died. And yet few of those books focus on Hay or Nicolay themselves, despite the fact that outside of Lincoln's immediate family they probably knew him more intimately than any other men alive.
Abraham Lincoln is one of my historical heroes, someone I can read about endlessly. There's probably no aspect of Lincoln's life that I wouldn't find interesting - and this book, for all that technically it isn't about Lincoln per se, is more than interesting. Whilst the focus is very much on Hay and Nicolay, the spirit and presence of Lincoln is everywhere in this book - as it was in Hay and Nicolay's lives. After his death they became the guardians of his memory, collecting and preserving all the Lincoln material and documents they could lay hands on, and spent almost fifteen years writing a comprehensive ten-volume biography that laid the foundations for much of the subsequent explosion of Lincoln scholarship.
The title is a little overly-dramatic - there was no 'war for Lincoln's image', then or since. But Hay and Nicolay's version of history has proved indelible, colouring the way posterity has viewed Lincoln ever since its publication. Hay and Nicolay's Lincoln was, as Zeitz puts it, the Lincoln Memorial Lincoln, the strong wise noble leader, not a god or an Immortal, but an all-too-human man who understand human nature better than almost anyone. Both men believed that the Civil War could not have been won without Lincoln, and then it was the hand of Providence that placed him in the White House when he was most needed, and I'm not sure I disagree with them.