Lincoln the Man was published by Dodd, Mead & Co. in 1931. The book is not a conventional biography but a sustained prosecutorial brief against Abraham Lincoln — or, more precisely, against the mythologized Lincoln of Republican hagiography that Masters had grown up resisting in Democratic southern Illinois.
Masters’s Lincoln is not the Great Emancipator or the Savior of the Union but a shrewd, ambitious politician who served corporate railroad interests, who provoked a war that could have been avoided, who violated the Constitution through military arrests and the suspension of habeas corpus, and who pursued abolition not from moral conviction but from political calculation. Masters argues that Stephen Douglas’s program of popular sovereignty and peaceful accommodation would have preserved the Union without war and eventually ended slavery through natural economic evolution.
The book was received with fury by most reviewers — Lincoln was sacred in American culture, and attacking him was heresy. Masters’s arguments were dismissed as the ravings of a cranky contrarian. Some of his specific claims about Lincoln’s character and motivation have been sustained by later scholarship (Lincoln was indeed a shrewd political operator, and his racial attitudes were complex), but his larger argument — that the Civil War was unnecessary and Lincoln was primarily to blame — has found few professional historians willing to endorse it.
The book reveals more about Masters than about Lincoln: his identification with the defeated Democratic tradition of the Midwest, his hostility to Eastern establishment culture, and his deeply contrarian temperament.
Collecting Lincoln the Man
First edition (Dodd, Mead & Co., New York, 1931): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $30–$80
- Very good/very good: $10–$30