"Thomas Horrocks has produced a comprehensive and thoughtful survey of the surprisingly voluminous but under-appreciated collection of campaign biographies about Abraham Lincoln that appeared in 1860 and 1864. Horrocks details how these earliest Lincoln narratives came about and then carefully analyzes their impact on his evolving national reputation. This is a must-have addition for the library of any serious Lincoln student."
—Matthew Pinsker
"For the intensely private Abraham Lincoln, crafting an autobiography was nearly as painful as reading those campaign profiles written about him. As Thomas A. Horrocks demonstrates in this engaging and crisply written study, a series of political writers and editors faced uphill battle in selling the one-term congressman to a skeptical, divided nation, and then selling him again four years later to a war-weary public. Thoughtful, nuanced, yet succinct,
Lincoln’s Campaign Biographies can be read with profit by specialists as well as general readers."
—Douglas R. Egerton, author of
Year of Meteors: Stephen Douglas, Abraham Lincoln, and the Election That Brought on the Civil War
"Thomas Horrocks shines a focused beam on the biographies written to promote Lincoln’s presidential campaigns, turning them into wide-angle lenses that shed light not only on the critical elections of 1860 and 1864 but also on a wide variety of historical subjects, from the spread of print culture to the fall of the Whig Party. This is a revealing look at an important technique for making (or unmaking) presidential candidates in the nineteenth century."
—Gerald J. Prokopowicz, J.D., Ph.D., Chair, History Department, East Carolina University
“Horrocks astutely recognizes that Lincoln understood the power of the written word as well as the power of photography; and that, as a politician, Lincoln expertly used the media and understood its importance to his political successes. Thus, the printed campaign biographies, with their deliberately evocative text and images of Lincoln, are valuable sources for historical analysis. As Horrocks correctly asserts, campaign biographies are ‘a lens through which scholars can examine what party leaders, commercial firms, the American reading public, and, in some cases, candidates, thought were essential qualities of character and leadership’ and how nineteenth-century Americans ‘packaged and promoted these attributes.’”—Stacy Pratt McDermott, The Annals of Iowa
“By putting Lincoln’s adroit use of newspapers, photographs, engravings, and songs into the context of the rising interconnection among print, politics, and public opinion, Horrocks offers new insights into how the media of the time took the images of Honest Abe and the Rail Splitter and used them to introduce Lincoln to the Northern public.”—Glenn W. Lafantasie, Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society
“Lincoln's Campaign Biographies [is] an excellent book. . . . Horrocks describes presidential campaign publications such as almanacs, broadsides, newspapers published by political parties, illustrated magazines, sheet music, and songsters, which were collections of song in booklets ranging from 20 to 75 pages.”—Henry S. Cohn, The Federal Lawyer
“Horrocks expertly establishes the nexus of politics and a thriving print culture during the early decades of the nineteenth century.”—Brian Matthew Jordan, Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association
“An impressive and seminal work of meticulous scholarship, Lincoln's Campaign Biographies is a welcome and invaluable addition to community and academic library Lincoln Studies and 19th Century American Political History reference collections.”—Midwest Book Review
“Engagingly written and intelligently conceived, this brief study of Lincoln's campaign biographies throws new light on the campaigns of 1860 and 1864 and the creation of the Lincoln legend.”—Martin P. Johnson, Journal of Illinois History
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