Customer Reviews

The Lincoln Mailbag: America Writes to the President, 1861-1865

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This book, a sequel of sorts to Mr. Holzer's 1993 volume 'Dear Mr. Lincoln,' gathers together even more letters than Americans from all walks of life wrote to the President. Mr. Holzer is a Civil War and Lincoln expert, so he really knows his stuff. As he explains in the foreword, many of the letters he had decided for various reasons to leave out of the original volume are now included here. What makes this collection of letters so special is that many of them were never even seen by President Lincoln, and of the ones seen, many of them were never endorsed or answered. It was for that reason that Mr. Holzer originally thought such letters didn't merit being included, but then he realised the value of including them, particularly since many of them were written by African-Americans. They'd already been ignored once, and didn't deserve to be marginalised and written off again nearly 150 years later for the same reasons they'd been excluded before.

People wrote to President Lincoln because they felt that he was a man of the people and would therefore understand their hopes, dreams, worries, and fears. He didn't appear to them like some out of touch government bigwig who didn't care for the common people; due to his humble origins, they felt as though he were one of them. The subjects include the issue of equal pay for African-American soldiers, old widowed mothers wanting their sons, their sole source of support, back from the Army, a Harvard professor warning him that his oldest son Robert was doing pretty poorly at school, people writing to him about their warfare-related inventions, people (a number of them his relatives) wanting jobs in government (even local government), people who sent gifts (such as socks, scarves, gloves, hams, and flags), people requesting he appear or at least send a speech to their charity balls, congratulations on his re-election, warnings of assassination plots (such as the letter from the less-than-literate West Virginia man who hid inside of a wheat bin to eavesdrop on a conversation between some suspicious characters he worked with), and a man who wanted to start a Lincoln Club (but only on the precondition that the President rescind the Emancipation Proclamation!). Among my favorites were the letter written by Karl Marx (and signed by many of his colleagues) congratulating him on his re-election and lauding him for being such a friend of the common people and freeing the slaves, and the long threatening religious diatribe in verse (so long it was written by two different people) sent all of the way from New Zealand.

Though most people are traditionally used to studying history through the eyes of the ruling classes and the leaders of government, the people who supposedly make history, this book gives a valuable look into what life was like for ordinary American citizens during the Civil War. In many cases, the view of history provided through the eyes of the common people is even more interesting, and far more personal, than studying the exploits of a bunch of heads of state.

I had bought Harold Holzer's 1993 book "Dear Mr. President" and enjoyed it tremendously. That book dealt with the mail that ordinary and famous people from around the world sent to Abraham Lincoln during his term as U.S. President. Now, Holzer has produced a sequel book, "The Lincoln Mailbag", which contains even more letters written to Lincoln. A large number in this new volume consists of mail Lincoln never even saw, such as correspondence from black Americans. These two books by Holzer offer a fresh, new insight into the world of President Lincoln which is far more interesting than the ordinary, standard Lincoln biographies which seem to pop up every 6 months or so.