Lincoln in Private by Ronald C. White

 

Facing protesters over "Mr Lincoln's war," President Lincoln was preparing a reply when a congressman complimented him on so swiftly composing from scratch. Lincoln pointed to an open desk drawer filled with scraps of paper with his "best thoughts on the subject." He explained, "I never let one of those ideas escape me."

These private notes and reflections were a valuable resource for the president, and a more valuable exercise for working out and preserving his thoughts. Never meant for public consumption, his notes were open and revealing about his private beliefs and feelings.

Some of his notes had been destroyed when he moved from his Illinois home to Washington, D.C. But 109 were found after his death, deposited in a bank vault. Lincoln's secretaries Nicolay and Hay included some of these private notes in their ten volume history. 

Lincoln in Private by Ronald C. White explores ten of these private notes, contemplating on what we can learn from them about Lincoln. They vary from a lyrical description of encountering Niagara Falls to a mediation on Divine Will in human affairs.

Lincoln's ability to logic out arguments comes across in these notes. He was exceedingly well read, delving into newspapers and books from across the country, including pro-slavery sources. He thereby could counter arguments from the opposite political spectrum, understanding their position.

White takes readers through a thorough exegesis of each note, putting it in historic context as well as explaining its significance.

I am even more impressed by Lincoln. Considering his lack of formal education and rural roots, his depression and life challenges, his genius could not be contained, but, luckily for our country, found its proper application in at our most critical time in history.

I received a free galley from the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.

Lincoln in Private: What His Most Personal Reflections Tell Us About Our Greatest President
by Ronald C. White
Random House Publishing Group - Random House
Pub Date May 4, 2021
ISBN: 9781984855091
hardcover $28.00 (USD)

from the publisher

“A fascinating tour inside the mind—and the heart—of Abraham Lincoln . . . An important and timeless work.”—Jon Meacham, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of His Truth Is Marching On

From the New York Times bestselling author of A. Lincoln and American Ulysses, a revelatory glimpse into the intellectual journey of our sixteenth president through his private notes to himself, explored together here for the first time

A deeply private man, shut off even to those who worked closely with him, Abraham Lincoln often captured “his best thoughts,” as he called them, in short notes to himself. He would work out his personal stances on the biggest issues of the day, never expecting anyone to see these frank, unpolished pieces of writing, which he’d then keep close at hand, in desk drawers and even in his top hat. The profound importance of these notes has been overlooked, because the originals are scattered across several different archives and have never before been brought together and examined as a coherent whole.

Now, renowned Lincoln historian Ronald C. White walks readers through twelve of Lincoln’s most important private notes, showcasing our greatest president’s brilliance and empathy, but also his very human anxieties and ambitions. We look over Lincoln’s shoulder as he grapples with the problem of slavery, attempting to find convincing rebuttals to those who supported the evil institution (“As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy.”); prepares for his historic debates with Stephen Douglas; expresses his private feelings after a defeated bid for a Senate seat (“With me, the race of ambition has been a failure—a flat failure”); voices his concerns about the new Republican Party’s long-term prospects; develops an argument for national unity amidst a secession crisis that would ultimately rend the nation in two; and, for a president many have viewed as not religious, develops a sophisticated theological reflection in the midst of the Civil War (“it is quite possible that God’s purpose is something different from the purpose of either party”). Additionally, in a historic first, all 111 Lincoln notes are transcribed in the appendix, a gift to scholars and Lincoln buffs alike.

These are notes Lincoln never expected anyone to read, put into context by a writer who has spent his career studying Lincoln’s life and words. The result is a rare glimpse into the mind and soul of one of our nation’s most important figures.

American Heroes Quilts: Past and Present by Don Beld

American Heroes Quilts by Don Beld is an original quilt history book that presents traditional quilt blocks with the history of the American heroes that inspired inspired them.

'Use the patterns as a quick tour through American history," the introduction advises.

We too often have a cursory knowledge of our own history. Quilt block names such as Burgoyne Surrounded may be a mystery to quilters. I know it was to me when I first saw a beautiful two color quilt in this pattern. Beld offers a brief, accessible history for these mysterious quilt block names, including pictures. Quilts made in the block are presented, usually in several variations.

I appreciated Beld's biographies of these American heroes. He does not idolize or idealize them. My study of presidents and first ladies taught me that great things can be accomplished by people with 'feet of clay'. These people represented the beliefs of their time, some of which we later came to reject or understand as ill begotten. For example, President Andrew Jackson, a popular president who instituted and a policy of relocation and genocide of Native Americans. His winning the Battle of New Orleans was pivotal. He rescued a damsel in distress and they fell in love and married. Except her first husband never completed the divorce... The newspapers had a field day that devastated Rachel.

The book's chapters are organized chronologically by American history:
1776-1825: The Beginning of the Republic, including Gen. Gates and Gen. Burgoyne; Benjamin Franklin; President George and Martha Washington; Lewis and Clark; Zebulon Pike; First Lady Dolley Madison; Isaac Hull; Mary Pickersgill and Francis Scott Key; and the Marquis De Lafayette.

1826-1875 Years of Turmoil, including President Andrew Jackson; Davy Crockett; President William Henry Harrison; President John Tyler; Henry Clay; President Millard Fillmore; President James Polk; Stephen Douglas; President Lincoln and his son Tad; Barbara Frietchie; Pierre Beauregard; Gen. 'Stonewall' Jackson; and Gen. Sherman.

1876-1925 Victorian Ladies, including Gen. Custer; President Garfield; Nellie Bly; President and Mrs. Hayes; First Lady Frances Cleveland; Jacob Coxey; President Theodore Roosevelt and Edith; Gen. Dewey and Mildred Dewey; Richmond Hobson; First Lady Helen Taft; Carrie Nation; Adm Byrd; Richard Peary; and First Ladies Edith and Ellen Wilson.

1926-200 The Modern Era, including Charles Lindbergh; President Franklin Roosevelt and Eleanor; Amelia Earhart; Virginia Payne; Allen B. Dumont; President Truman; President Eisenhower; Rosa Parks; President Kennedy; President Carter; President Clinton and Hillary.

Templates for a 10" block sampler quilt are included at the end of the book.

This is a lovely book to look at with 300 color photos and 93 black and white photos. I especially enjoyed seeing the antique and vintage quilts. Quilters will enjoy the basic history lessons behind traditional quilt blocks.

I received a free book from Schiffer Publications in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

American Heroes
Don Beld
Schiffer Publications
$34.99 hard cover with slip cover
ISBN:9780764350450

FDR's "Office Wife"-- and the Many Loves of Eleanor

President Franklin Roosevelt and Eleanor were a formidible leadership team but early in Franklin's career their relationship had become a marriage of convience. Each found imtimacy in relationships and friendships outside their marriage. Missy LeHand, FDR's personal secretary was at his side 24-7, swimming with him at Warm Springs and acting as a chief of staff. Eleanor's friendship, and perhaps love affair, with newswoman Lorena Hickock helped transform her into the First Lady of the World.

The Gatekeeper: Missy LeHand, FDR, and the Untold Partnership that Defined a Presidency by Kathryn Smith is the first biography of President Roosevelt's constant companion for twenty years in the office and out, the first female 'chief of staff' who could be found with her boss at night only wearing her nightgown.

With only a high school education Missy was hired as a personal secretary before FDR contracted polio. She rose with her boss to become his 'gatekeeper' and an influential and respected advisor in the White House.

Missy dedicated her life to her boss, She accompanied FDR as he pursued therapy, going on cruises and at Warm Springs (a place Eleanor disliked). Missy served as his hostess while Eleanor was following her own interests. Missy was given rooms in the governor's mansion and the White House and was intimate with Eleanor and the Roosevelt family.

Hobnobbing with the powerful and high society, including Joe Kennedy, Missy could pull off glamour and had flirtations and love affairs. Popular magazines ran articles about her. Her love letters to Bill Bullitt offer us glimpses of the woman.

Smith's biography covers FDR's life and career showing how Missy played her part. Much of this information I had already learned from other books about FDR, but this book offers deeper information on Missy's career, her health issues and death, her family, the articles and comments written about her by others, and especially her love letters where we finally hear Missy's voice.

I was glad to see a book about Missy.  I have read quite a few books on FDR, including James Tobin's The Man He Became , A First Class Temperament by Geoffrey Ward, and Doris Kearns Goodwin's marvelous No Ordinary Time, I sped read through much of the early parts of the book.

I received a free ebook from First to Read in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

The Gatekeeper
Kathryn Smith
Touchstone
Publication Sept. 6, 2016
$28 hard cover
ISBN:9781501114960

Eleanor and Hick: The Love Affair that Shaped a First Lady by Susan Quinn shows us the personal life and independent career of Eleanor Roosevelt, and explores her friendships with women and men who enriched her life and whom she deeply loved. Lorena Hickcok (Hick) was an AP journalist covering the White House when Eleanor met her. Sharing a train car while campaigning started a relationship that helped Eleanor become a capable leader and broke Lorena's heart.

Discovering her husband's love affair with her personal secretary moved Eleanor to offer a divorce; Franklin's mother said it would ruin his political career. Eleanor never forgave Franklin and their marriage was never again emotionally or physically intimate.

Eleanor became involved with a series of friendships that offered her the love and companionship she needed. The deep love expressed in her letters to Lorena Hickcock, as well as to male friends Joe Lash and her doctor David Gurewitsch, show her deep capacity to love. If any of these relationships included sexual intimacy is uncertain and unknowable but Eleanor's letters to Hick express longing for physical contact and expressions of love.

Eleanor had a history of close relationships to women from her time away at school when she idolized a teacher, to her close friendships with lesbian couples. Eleanor also may have had problems with intimacy and closeness. Her involvement in causes and political work and role as First Lady meant Hick hardly ever had Eleanor all to herself. They took trips together, vacationed together, and spent special holidays together. But it was never enough for Hick.

Eleanor had a great heart and felt deeply, and fought courageously, for the underdog, the powerless, the marginal; she championed equality for all. This book also shows how Hick's reporting and WPA work brought to attention the grinding poverty and dangerous workplaces, the starvation and health crisis across the country during the Depression. Hick was also a competent leader for Democratic Women.

This book shows how these strong women, so disimilar in background and class, impacted FDR's policies and improved the lives of Americans.

I recieved a free ebook through First to Read in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Eleanor and Hick: The Love Affair that Shaped a First Lady
Susan Quinn
$30 hardcover
Publication Date: Sept 16, 2016
ISBN: 9781594205408

Portrait Of The President As A Young Man

Education: Any experience that has a formative effect on the way one thinks, feels, or acts may be considered educational. From Wikipedia

I have studied John Quincy Adams backwards: from reading books about his parents, to his wife's biography, to his later career as a senator, to this book of his early life and career. It is not logical, but I am so glad it happened this way.


The Remarkable Life of John Quincy Adams by Phyllis Lee Levin was made available to me through NetGalley; the book will be published in January 2015. I was familiar with the events and people. This book fleshed out the details but more importantly offered another view of John Quincy: a youth who suffered home sickness and depression while enduring long separations from his family; a teenager in the throes of first love; a young adult conflicted over career expectations; a man of passionate love but tied to parental expectations; a sentimental father whose wife miscarried five times and was devastated by the loss of an only daughter and suicide of a son. This is not the John Quincy that too many consider him to be: a dour, ram-rod straight, cold fish of a man.

The photographs of John Quincy as a state elder embattled with Congress show a bald man with piercing unflinching eyes that are quite unsettling, communicating all the battles and disappointments of a lifetime. He looks straight at you, hands clenched, his beloved books beside him.

John Quincy Adams - copy of 1843 Philip Haas DaguerreotypePublic Domain

Southworth & Hawes - The Metropolitan Museum of Art

But in his youth he was a different sort, tending to fatness and in personality like his father, but with his mother's dark eyes and good looks. Around the time of his marriage to Louisa Catherine Johnson he was enough of a heart throb that she was sincerely attached. in Copley's portrait he is looking straight at us, but a smile plays at the corner of his mouth. He is a man ready to start life in earnest, in love and about to become the minister to St. Petersburgh, Russia.

John Quincy in 1796 by Copley

John Quincy is rated among the most intelligent of our presidents. As a child he accompanied his father to Europe where he was exposed to other cultures and hobnobbed with the movers and shakers of his time. He enjoyed opera and theater. Formal education consisted of tutors, various universities, and self-education through reading and study. At age fourteen he became a translator for the minister to St. Petersburg. Later in life his hobby horse was the study of weights and measures and the need for standardization, and he wrote a definitive paper on the subject. He wrote poetry and enjoyed playing the flute. He was a little weak in Latin. But we will forgive him that lapse.

Abigail wrote that her son was passionate and emotional. Years in the diplomatic core required complete control and repression of personal feelings. He asked his wife Louisa to use faith and philosophy to conquer the depressions and sorrows that afflicted her. It worked for him. But the extroverted, sensitive and romantic Louisa's frail physical health and tentative self-esteem buckled again and again. Her memoirs written late in life make John Quincy out as cold and dismissive. His own letters and diary speak volumes about his inner emotional life, and he was anything but cold. The lovers often misunderstood each other, but their love never faltered.

I already had an admiration for John Quincy's resolute and independent mind that kept The Constitution as it's lodestar and his parent's example as his role mode. Levin's book opened up John Quincy's humanity.

How many public servants today are willing to give up financial security, family, health, and even the good opinion of our colleagues to"duty" and our country? Our Founding Fathers like George Washington, John Adams, and John Quincy Adams had that kind of commitment.



Phyllis Lee Levin
St, Martin's Press
Publication: January 6, 2015
$35.00
ISBN: 9781137279620