Transcript: Sandburg and Lincoln

NARRATOR: in 1922 Sandburg began writing what he called ‘a short profile’ of Abraham Lincoln, intended for children...

It grew into one of the longest biographies ever written in the English language. The six volumes Sandburg would write about Abraham Lincoln would occupy much of the next twenty years of his life, synthesizing his love for history with his progressive vision for America.

LILIAN SANDBURG: Carl became interested in Lincoln as a boy. He spoke to old soldiers in the war and they told him a great deal about the war and also about their admiration, you know, for Lincoln and all that.

RODNEY DAVIS: Well, living in Galesburg, when he did, he would have simply been unable to escape the ghost of Lincoln. The Civil War was only over 13 years when he was born. There were Civil War veterans everywhere in town. But there was something also in Sandburg’s upbringing, I think, that made him feel a kinship to Lincoln. Both of them had worked hard in their youth and finally had become people of thought instead of people of muscle, if you will.

LILIAN SANDBURG: He liked to work out in the open, an orange crate the typewriter on top and there he was back in the old barn hitting away and getting that wonderful book going there.

HELGA SANDBURG CRILE: When he finished The Prairie Years, which was the first two volumes, and which were very natural and evocative and everything, then he started on The War Years because he couldn’t stop, and he was fascinated with this man.

[SANDBURG on The Ed Sullivan Show: The name of Abraham Lincoln has gone around the world, more books written about him than any other figure in history except Jesus Christ. His repeated public quotation from the Declaration of Independence in 1776, ‘all men are created equal’, has gone worldwide and he is known and loved as a world spokesman for democracy and freedom.

PENELOPE NIVEN: His Lincoln biography, in many ways, was his best known work and the six volumes written over two decades of time found their way into so many American households.

ROBIN METZ: The folk style of research, where the anecdote and the memory, it just fits entirely with the way in which he was gathering materials for poems.

SANDBURG at Gettysburg on See It Now: He was asked one time, an old timer from Sangamon County, Illinois, said, "Well, Mr. Lincoln, just how does it feel to be President?" And he said, "Well, I’m like the man that was rode out of town on a rail." He said that if it wasn’t for the honor of it he would of just as soon walked.

ROBIN METZ: It was a method that fell into disrepute until once again, all of a sudden, we’re saying, "Oral histories really matter."

SEAN WILENTZ: Well, Sandburg’s Lincoln was the major statement about the life and times of Abraham Lincoln, no question about it. There are other books about the Civil War. There were plenty of other books about Lincoln. But in the popular mind, Sandburg was it.

PENELOPE NIVEN: He made a deliberate choice to move from poetry into biography. I think he transformed modern biography in the process of doing that.

SEAN WILENTZ: In many ways he remains a tremendous influence over people’s image of Lincoln. I mean, the Lincoln image in the American mind, as a great historian once put it, is always changing, is always there.

SANDBURG on Wisdom Series: All because he is a titanic character with mystery attaching to him, all the mystery that attaches to the word ‘democracy’ and that other phrase ‘the American dream.’ It’s there in him more than in any other one man.

PENELOPE NIVEN: I think that Sandburg’s vision of Lincoln in The Prairie Years and The War Years had a profound effect on how we view Lincoln, how we came to know Lincoln.

SANDBURG on "Storm over the Supreme Court": It was the Dred Scott decision and as much as anything else it helped make the Civil War inevitable.

RODNEY DAVIS: There’s was a tendency, to try to put the Civil War behind us, to try to stitch the sections together, to try to bring about a re melding of North and South, and one very successful way of doing that, one certainly indefensible way of doing that, was to put the black man in second place or in last place, to make secondary the fact that slavery might have been an important cause of the Civil War.

SEAN WILENTZ: Sandburg, in the latter sections of The War Years, identified the fundamental causes of the Civil War as being the attempt to preserve the Union against secession, which was anarchy and treason, and a fight over slavery.

SANDBURG at Gettysburg: It was fought because there was an institution, in the South they referred to it as ‘The Institution’ or our ‘Domestic Institution,’ meaning slavery.

SEAN WILENTZ: I think that that is exactly right. That is exactly what the Civil War was about. There are two or three paragraphs towards the end of that volume, of the final volume of The War Years where it’s all there.

That Sandburg’s very different Lincoln is the one we take as being so familiar is, in fact, a mark of Sandburg’s iconoclasm, not his complacency, not his sentimentality and of his great success.