Looking for Lincoln

In honor of the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln's birth, an extensively researched, lavishly illustrated consideration of the myths, memories, and questions that gathered around our most belovedand our most enigmaticpresident in the years between his assassination and the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial in 1922. A sequel to the enormously successfulLincoln: An Illustrated Biography,Looking for Lincolnpicks up where the previous book left off, examining how our sixteenth president's legend came into being. Availing themselves of a vast collection of both published and never-before-seen materials, the authorsthe fourth and fifth generations of a family of Lincoln scholarsbring into focus the posthumous portrait of Lincoln that took hold in the American imagination, becoming synonymous with the nation's very understanding of itself. Told through the voices of those who knew the manNortherners and Southerners, blacks and whites, neighbors and family members, adversaries and colleaguesand through stories carefully selected from long-forgotten newspapers, magazines, and family scrapbooks,Looking for Lincolncharts the dramatic epilogue to Lincoln's extraordinary life when, in a process fraught with jealousy, greed, and the struggle for power, the scope of his historical significance was taking shape. In vibrant and immediate detail, the authors chart the years when Americans struggled to understand their loss and rebuild their country. Here is a chronicle of the immediate aftermath of the assassination; the private memories of those closest to the slain president; the difficult period between 1876 and 1908, when a tired nation turned its back on the former slaves and betrayed Lincoln's teachings; and the early years of the twentieth century when Lincoln's popularity soared as African Americans fought to reclaim the ideals he espoused. Looking for Lincolnwill deeply enhance our understanding of the statesman and his legacy, at a moment when the timeless example of his leadership is more crucial than ever.

Foreword
David Herbert Donald
The Kunhardt family occupies a unique place in the field of Lincoln studies. For five generations members of this talented family have been writing, editing, designing, and publishing books on aspectsof Abraham Lincoln’s career that are as beautiful as they are sound.

The tradition began with Frederick Hill Meserve (1865-1962), whose father had fought in the Union Army. Looking for pictures to illustrate his father’s wartime recollections, Frederick, then a businessman in New York City, began haunting secondhand bookstores and auctions, buying up old prints and glass negatives discarded by wartime photographers. At that time nobody else seemed much interested in them, so he had little competition. In 1902, visiting a warehouse in New Jersey, he stumbled upon a pile of fifteen thousand glass negatives from Mathew Brady’s studio that were about to be destroyed as trash. He bought the whole lot, including, as he discovered, seven photographs of President Lincoln. In 1911, in the first attempt to catalogue and arrange the pictures of Lincoln in chronological order, he publishedThe Photographs of Abraham Lincoln, which became a bible for collectors and scholars, especially because he issued supplements from time to time as new photographs turned up. Generously he shared his treasures with other Civil War experts. It is hard to find a book on Lincoln that does not acknowledge the author’s indebtedness to Mr. Meserve’s collection (now known as the Meserve-Kunhardt Collection).

When Mr. Meserve died, his daughter, Dorothy Meserve Kunhardt, took on the management of the collection. Though occupied with writing and publishing nearly a score of delightful books for children, she somehow found time to expand its holdings, adding thousands of Civil War photographs, books, clippings, and newspapers.
In 1958 she acquired the large collection of Lincoln relics owned by Mary Edwards Brown, Mary Lincoln’s great-niece, which included Lincoln family scrapbooks and dozens of daguerreotypes of the Lincolns’ friends and neighbors in Springfield. Drawing on the Meserve Lincoln Collection, she also published the handsome Time-Life bookMathew Brady and His World.

Eventually her son, Philip Kunhardt, Jr., a genial, soft-spoken man who had previously been managing editor atLifemagazine, became guardian of the collection. Like his mother and his grandfather, he willingly allowed other Lincoln scholars to use it. He also continued the family tradition by writing, with his mother,Twenty Days, a superb account, lavishly illustrated, of Lincoln’s assassination, andA New Birth of Freedom, a fine re-creation of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.

He moved on in 1992 to his major historical effort,Lincoln,a full-length pictorial biography (which accompanied an excellent television series of the same name). To help in this ambitious project, he enlisted his sons, Philip and Peter. The Kunhardts’Lincolnis a magnificent book, widely acclaimed and generally recognized as the definitive pictorial record of Abraham Lincoln’s life.

After the death of their father in 2006, Philip and Peter Kunhardt continued the family tradition, and they recruited a member of the fifth generation, Peter’s son, Peter Kunhardt, Jr., to join their literary team. The result of their collaboration is the present book,Looking for Lincoln.


A casual reader who glances atLooking for Lincoln, perhaps in a bookstore, may be surprised to find that it begins in 1865, with a moving account of the assassination of the president, followed by an elaborately illustrated narrative of the capture, trial, and execution of the Lincoln conspirators. At this point in a conventional biography the reader might expect a historical flashback to Lincoln’s early days and upbringing. Instead t

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Excerpted from Looking for Lincoln: The Making of an American Icon by Peter W. Kunhardt, Philip B. Kunhardt, Peter W. Kunhardt
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.