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Memories of Lincoln and the Splintering of American Political Thought by Shawn J. Parry-Giles and David S. Kaufer (review)

This book is novel because it connects fırsthand memories of Abraham Lincoln to America’s two dominant political ideologies. To begin, three points warrant mention. First, the distinction between fırsthand memories (reminiscences of those having been in the physical presence of Lincoln) and indirect memories mediated by historians, artists, and personal acquaintances is itself a conceptual advance, for insider knowledge and outsider knowledge of any historical person yield different kinds of understanding. Second, while much contemporary social science conceives ideology as a false pattern of ideas that legitimates a dominating political power, the present work is founded on a non-evaluative conception of ideology: a pattern of distinctive ideas around which ordinary people orient their beliefs, feelings, and judgments. Third, ideology is sustained by language as well as power. Opposing ideologies and their historical aspects cannot be described by the same rhetoric. Rhetoric must be the lens, therefore, through which Americans make sense of Lincoln’s life and relate it to their own. Shawn Parry-Giles and David Kaufer make these points admirably, aligning the assorted portrayals of Abraham Lincoln to the tension between the patrician ideology of George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison and the egalitarian ideology of Thomas Jefferson, George Mason, and Patrick Henry. The authors apply the term “democratic” to the egalitarian Republicans and their Democratic successors and the term “republican” to the paternalistic Federalists, Whigs, and their immediate Republican successors. Separate cultural worlds produce separate reminiscences. The reminiscences of democrats emphasize Lincoln’s frontier life and alleged poverty.