This query makes it exciting to learn of William E. Gienapp’s
methodology concerning Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War.
Gienapp, a professor of history at Harvard University, has
produced two complementary volumes, a short biography and an
anthology of Lincoln’s speeches and correspondence. The goal is
to search for any differences between the private and the public
man. Gienapp believes there was a differencethat Lincoln was a
man of public competence and private awkwardness. He asserts
that Lincoln’s private correspondence is not very revealing
because Lincoln made himself so pre-eminently into a public,
political person that he was hardly able to cultivate private
relationships. Gienapp therefore ignores ways in which the
private correspondence indeed illuminates the public man. The
family letters do reveal a Lincoln who struggled with intimacy.
He had a longstanding estrangement from his father and did not
even visit Thomas Lincoln on his deathbed. His letters to his
wife, Mary, were awkward and read as t