Customer Reviews

Lincoln and the Bluegrass

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William Townsend was a Lincoln scholar/collector of the old school. He was born in 1890 and lived his whole life in Lexington, Kentucky, where he stood out as a Lincoln-lover in a pro-Confederate, Lost Cause-inclined state.

Lincoln and the Bluegrass is an expanded version of a book he first published in 1929 called Lincoln and His Wife's Hometown. It was a pioneering study of Lincoln's contact with slavery in Kentucky. The Bluegrass had always been moderate on the slavery issue, and had even produced its own home-grown abolitionist, Cassius Clay. But in the 1840s and '50s, Kentuckians became more stridently committed to the institution, a development that alarmed Lincoln. In his few trips to the state to visit his wife's family, he not only witnessed the evils of slavery first-hand but was disturbed to see the moderate South openly embracing an evil the Founding Fathers had hoped to put on the road to ultimate extinction.

Townsend's book is still highly readable, and some of its insights have yet to be fully incorporated into Lincoln scholarship.