Review: Lincoln the Citizen: February 12, 1809 to March 4, 1861

Lincoln the Citizen: February 12, 1809 to March 4, 1861. By Henry C. Whitney. Edited and with an introduction by Michael Burlingame. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2025. Hardcover, 277 pp. $34.00.

Reviewed by Max Longley

Lincoln the Citizen is a reprint of one of the several Lincoln books published by Henry Clay Whitney (1831-1905). Whitney also wrote Life on the Circuit with Lincoln, a memoir of his days as a young lawyer travelling around Illinois trying cases that focuses largely on his interactions with Lincoln, who also “rode circuit” in those days. Yet another Whitney book, Lincoln the President: March 4, 1861 to May 3, 1865, covers that period of the Railsplitter’s life, thus serving as a sequel to Lincoln the Citizen.

Lincoln the Citizen is based on Whitney’s personal knowledge of Lincoln and supplemented by biographical research, particularly on Lincoln’s family and early years. Prominent Lincoln scholar Michael Burlingame edited this version of Lincoln the Citizen, which could be called a director’s cut of the original 1907 edition. The 1907 version left out many passages where Whitney elaborates on his analysis of Lincoln and his forebears and contemporaries. The reinstated passages are even more vividly opinionated and suffused with even purpler prose than the original, which is saying something, because Whitney was a fan of the sort of high-flown rhetoric Lincoln himself evolved away from, Burlingame notes.

One theme that often crops up in Whitney’s descriptions of Lincoln’s frontier boyhood is a comparison between the future president and Christ. Whitney regards his old colleague as a type of secular savior who was more or less sent by God to free the United States from slavery. But while Whitney acknowledges the wickedness of enslaving black people, he was a racist himself who projected his bigotry onto Lincoln, much to Burlingame’s irritation. Harmonizing with the savior theme, Whitney describes the humble and unlikely-seeming surroundings of the future liberator, drawing on information about the Lincoln family and Whitney’s own knowledge of primitive frontier conditions in what by the time of his writing were the old pioneer days.

To be frank, Whitney’s grand rhetorical style makes this book a hard slog. Behind the stylistic challenges though, there is interesting content that some historians have used, including Whitney’s analysis. The latter is valuable because Whitney had the opportunity to observe Lincoln’s legal work firsthand, sometimes as co-counsel and sometimes as an opponent, and thus was in a unique position to make some generalizations about Lincoln’s honesty. To Whitney, Lincoln was at his best when arguing cases on general principles of justice and not having to get bogged down in the thickets of precedent as in the post-Civil-War legal world experienced by Whitney. Disdaining technicalities and side issues and getting right to the key point of his argument is how Lincoln approached the law, explains Whitney, and this illustrated the way Lincoln preferred to take up political debate, too.

Stylistically, the book has not aged well, especially when pompous passages deleted by Whitney’s own editor are reinstated. But to be clear, Whitney actually knew a good deal about Lincoln, so for many, that fact alone makes it worth reading. Of course, one can also read later historians’ studies that incorporate Whitney’s works as a source without enduring his inflated literary style.