Lincoln and New York

Abraham Lincoln has long been remembered as a product of Illinois by way of Kentucky and Indiana – by tradition, one of American history’s quintessential westerners. But Lincoln owed much of his national political success, not to mention his enshrinement in public memory, to his impact on the quintessentially eastern state of New York, and in turn, to New York’s profound impact on him.

This constitutes virtually unexplored intellectual territory: the full measure of the sixteenth president’s relationship with New York City has never been properly investigated. Nor have historians taken stock of – or given museum-goers and readers the opportunity to immerse themselves in – the unique political, social and commercial environment that helped to create and sustain the evolving image of Lincoln as a partisan politician, statesman, wartime commanding-chief, emancipator and, ultimately, a martyr to union and liberty. That New York’s publishers, business leaders, elected officials, writers, preachers and editors were convincingly able to introduce these successive images at the same time as parallel, wholly negative ones – those of frontier hick, jokestar, ruthless military leader and heartless tyrant – constitutes one of the mast astonishing episodes in the history of what Lincoln himself once called ‘public sentiment’. Only in New York could such robust and contradictory public relations campaigns have been launched and sustained together.

This book, which accompanies an exhibition at the New-York Historical Society, explores for the first time how America’s flourishing media and financial capital – also a centre of pro-slavery sentiment and anti-Lincoln Democratic politics – contributed to and influenced Lincoln’s political rise, his prosecution of the Civil War, his decisions on emancipation and African-American enlistment and, in the final instance, his place in history.

Harold Holzer has served since 2000 as co-chairman of the U. S. Abraham Lincoln
Bicentennial Commission, to which he was appointed by President Clinton. He is the author, co-author, or editor of thirty-four books on Lincoln and the Civil War era. Among them are The Lincoln Image, The Lincoln-Douglas Debates, Lincoln as I Knew Him, Dear Mr. Lincoln: Letters to the President, Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: The Civil War in Art, Lincoln on Democracy (co-edited with Mario Cuomo), which has been published in four languages, and Lincoln at Cooper Union, which won a 2005 Lincoln Prize.

Among his many other honors, he was presented the 2008 National Humanities Medal by President Bush. His latest books are Lincoln President-Elect: Abraham Lincoln and the Great Secession Winter 1860–1861 (2008), which won the Barondess/Lincoln Award and awards of achievement from the Lincoln Group of New York and the Illinois State Historical Society; The Lincoln Anthology (2009), a Library of America collection featuring 150 years of great writers on the subject of Abraham Lincoln; and In Lincoln’s Hand (2009), a Library of Congress book of Lincoln’s original manuscripts with commentary by distinguished Americans. Holzer, who has served as guest curator for a number of Lincoln art exhibitions, is guest historian for the 2009 show Lincoln and New York at the New-York Historical Society.