cover image Six Encounters with Lincoln: A President Confronts Democracy and Its Demons

Six Encounters with Lincoln: A President Confronts Democracy and Its Demons

Elizabeth Brown Pryor. Viking, $30 (496p) ISBN 978-0-670-02590-9

The late historian and diplomat Pryor (Reading the Man) left behind a manuscript that will cinch her legacy as a creative scholar. She uses six little-known interactions between American citizens and President Lincoln—either individually or in groups—as a means to parse the president’s thoughts on important political issues. What makes the encounters particularly fascinating is that the participants recorded them at the time, so they remain uncolored by the sentimentality of post-assassination remembrance. Pryor is intrigued by the ways in which the encounters demonstrate how Lincoln “both responded to and helped shape a new way of looking at democratic inclusion, not necessarily because he wanted to but because he had to.” An uncomfortable meeting between U.S. Army officers and their new commander-in-chief in March 1861 serves as an exploration of Lincoln’s abilities as a military leader. The recounting of a nearly botched flag-raising during the christening of a new Marine bandstand launches a meditation on what Lincoln’s storytelling abilities meant for his presidency. Meetings with the Cherokee leader John Ross and the writer Harriet Beecher Stowe show the president profoundly uncomfortable around people who weren’t white men. Pryor’s impressive final book will be of great appeal to legions of Lincoln aficionados. Illus. Agent: Deborah Grosvenor, Grosvenor Literary. (Feb.)