Book review: “Lincoln the Citizen: February 12, 1809 to March 4, 1861” by Henry C. Whitney, edited and with an introduction by Michael Burlingame

Abraham Lincoln’s friend and courtroom colleague Henry Clay Whitney remembered him as a man with an agile and restless mind, as “a versatile genius, whether as a man or boy. His mind was constantly on the go; he hopped about from one thing to another, never adhering to one thing long.”

Whitney was a hero-worshipper but one who, in many cases, could write with a critical eye about the object of his esteem. For instance, he writes that, physically, the man who campaigned as the Rail Splitter was strong but also odd-looking:

At the age of seventeen, he was six and a third feet high [6’4”]. His feet and hands were unusually large and his legs and arms disproportionately long. His head was small and phrenologically defective; his body very diminutive for one of his height.  His walk was awkward, his gestures still more so.  His skin was of a dirty yellowish brown and shriveled and baggy, even that age.

Whitney was a young lawyer who rode the circuit with Abraham Lincoln in central Illinois in the middle of the 1850s. Four decades later, he wrote a biography of his friend in two volumes, one focusing on his life up to his election to the White House and the second dealing with his time in office.  The second was based almost entirely on secondary sources and is of little value today.

The first, though, was a mix of information, some pieced together from historical documents or published books, some based on the recollections of those who had known Lincoln and his family, and some from Whitney’s own experience and frequent conversations with the future chief executive.

 

“The Complete Version”

Newly republished by the University of Illinois Press, it is called Lincoln the Citizen: February 12, 1809 to March 4, 1861: The Complete Version. Although written by Whitney in 1892, it wasn’t published until 1907, two years after his death, and even then in a truncated version. Michael Burlingame, a major Lincoln biographer who edited and introduces the new edition, estimates that “The Complete Version” restores about one-sixth of Whitney’s words cut out by the book’s initial publisher.

Whitney was not a professional historian, and he didn’t have access to the voluminous Lincoln-related research that a present-day historian can call up on a computer screen. In addition, he indulged at times in wishful thinking, such as believing that his own racist beliefs about Blacks were shared by the president.

As Burlingame points out, Whitney’s book is marred at many points by inaccuracies, misunderstandings and wrong-headedness. For instance, on the first page of the first chapter about Lincoln’s lineage, the editor offers a footnote saying, “Much of what follows is inaccurate.”  Later, as a footnote to a story Whitney tells about a political gathering that drew only one person, he writes, “This story is untrue; no such failed meeting was called.”

 

“Intimate, realistic and convincing”

Nonetheless, Burlingame writes that, of the books written by the president’s friends, only two are, as one historian put it, “intimate, realistic and convincing.”  Those are the widely heralded Herndon’s Lincoln by his law partner William Herndon and the much lesser-known Lincoln the Citizen by Whitney.

Indeed, Burlingame asserts that much of what Whitney relates about Lincoln’s early life in Kentucky, Indiana and Illinois and about his relatives “as well as Lincoln’s legal career and political activity between 1854 and 1861, constitutes high-grade ore for the historian’s smelter as well as an intimate portrait of the sixteenth president.”

In other words, Whitney’s book isn’t a beautiful jeweled work of historical art, such as The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank or Ulysses S. Grant’s Memoirs, but, instead, “high-grade ore” that a historian can alloy with other materials to create a better understanding of Lincoln. A historian will take what Whitney writes and compare it with everything else that is known about the president and be able to determine what is real gold and what is dross.

So, for a Lincoln researcher, Whitney’s book is filled with treasure.  Less so, for the general reader.

 

Striking insights into the man who was Lincoln

Lincoln the Citizen is not a biography that the general reader will find captivating.  For one thing, Whitney writes in a somewhat pompous style.  And then there are all those inaccuracies. Burlingame provides extensive notes that indicate many places where Whitney is wrong. However, there are many other places where the reader has to guess whether Whitney knows what he’s talking about.

Nonetheless, if the reader is willing to spend the time, energy and discernment, there are striking insights in the book into the man who was Lincoln.

When I read Lincoln the Citizen, I skimmed many passages, such as those dealing with politics or the president’s lineage, figuring that those subjects were covered thoroughly during his lifetime by newspapers and later by the memoirs of those who worked with him politically and by generations of Lincoln researchers.

I slowed down and read closely, however, those pages in which Whitney wrote about the human being he had known, such as his description of Lincoln’s quick and agile intelligence and his unusual physical appearance.

Whitney often writes about Lincoln as a storyteller and, in his artless way, brings the reader into the group of lawyers on the circuit where the future president is holding court:

Imagine a loose-jointed, carelessly attired, homely man, with a vacant, mischievous look and mien, awkwardly halting along in the suburbs of the little prairie village, in the midst of a crowd of wild, western lawyers, he towering over the rest, taking in the whole landscape, with an apparent vacuity of stare, but with deep penetration and occult vision. Something would remind him of “the feller in Indiana” or the “man down in Florida” and all would crane their necks to hear the story. At its conclusion, the whole crowd would explode with laughter—Lincoln himself more emphatically than the rest.

 

“As weird-looking as himself”

In the aftermath of Lincoln’s assassination at the end of the Civil War, he became a national saint, and the tendency, at least outside the South, was to attribute to him every possible virtue.

One such virtue was his humility, and one can read Whitney’s description of Lincoln’s way of traveling the circuit as an expression of his humbleness. However, I think Whitney is making a point about his idiosyncrasy.

One would naturally suppose that the leading lawyer of the circuit, in a pursuit which occupied nearly half his time, would make himself comfortable, but he did not. His horse was as rawboned and weird-looking as himself, and his buggy, an open one, as rude as either; his attire was that of an ordinary farmer or stock-raiser, and he might very easily have been taken for one or the other, while the sum total of his baggage consisted of a very attenuated carpetbag, an old weather-beaten umbrella, and a short blue cloak reaching to his hips—a style while was prevalent during the Mexican War.

 

“One of the most interesting men”

As a final example, I’d offer this description by Whitney of Lincoln as a person. It is an excerpt can be seen as a depiction of his friend as a kind of secular saint, but I think it’s rooted more in reality than in misty remembrance:

Aside from all politics, Lincoln was one of the most interesting men I ever saw; he had no envy, malice, or spite—no ill-feeling of any kind toward anybody; he was deferential but not obsequious; he made no sarcastic remarks and made no one a butt for an ill-natured joke. He employed no social tyranny to one in his power; he had no angularity except physically; was not inquisitive about the affairs of others; was disinterested and magnanimous, not supercilious or discourteous; was generous and forgiving to a fault.

This description seems to ring true, in part, because Whitney says Lincoln was only one of the most interesting men he’s come across. Also, because Whitney’s biography offers here and there exceptions to this description, such as a sarcastic remark that Lincoln made about a neighbor as a teenager.

In addition, I’m someone who has read dozens of books about Lincoln, and the Lincoln in these two sentences seems to be the Lincoln that other contemporaries have hinted at and that historians and biographers have glimpsed.

Yet, I’ve never seen two sentences sum up the sixteenth president in such a clear, succinct way as Whitney does here. So, thanks to Whitney for writing Lincoln the Citizen, and thanks to Burlingame for resurrecting it.

 

Patrick T. Reardon

6.12.25

 

This review originally appeared at Third Coast Review on 6.16.25.