Benjamin P. Thomas (1902–1956)

Someday, I’d like to see the Lincoln Memorial. I’m well aware that the civic mythology wound around Abraham Lincoln lends him a godlike aura that, surely, no living man could justify. And yet, even making due allowance for time’s apotheosizing foliage, he remains for me a beacon lighting the way toward the ideals America struggles so imperfectly to realize.

Benjamin P. Thomas’s one-volume biography of Lincoln was a bestseller, and is still considered a classic both of readability and show more scholarship. Although Thomas was a professional American academic, he took a colleague’s advice on entering into study of Lincoln: rather than burying himself in tomes and monographs, he started with a study of Lincoln’s own words.

I take this as part of the reason this biography reads so well. Lincoln was, more than any president before him, a man of the people. He knew what it meant to break your back laboring for just enough to eat. Despite his intellectual talents and political triumphs, Lincoln never lost his common touch or his gift for turning a phrase in just the right way to catch an everyday ear.

Thomas honored Lincoln’s facility with words by turning out a volume that speaks as simply as the Great Persuader himself. Thomas clearly also felt a bond with his subject, writing as he did in sympathy with the rising Civil Rights movement. In a rare authorial aside, he writes, “Douglas conceded that the Negro was entitled to certain rights and privileges. But, he asserted, in the manner of some persons of our own time, these must be determined by the white people of each state and territory…”

The sixteenth president died by the hand of an assassin at the age of 56, and his biographer died by his own hand at the age of 54. Four days after Thanksgiving in 1956, Benjamin P. Thomas received a diagnosis of terminal throat cancer. Three days later, he ended his life to spare his family a pointless ordeal. Thomas’s end was as tragic as his subject’s, and both left legacies. Abraham Lincoln breathes again in these pages, a unique and enigmatic man at a crux of history, burdened by a melancholy he could never shake, bearing a future he would never know. show less

The connection of Oneida County, where I live, to abolitionism has fascinated me. This region, now considered (unfairly) as rather unremarkable, was in the mid-19th century a hotbed of social and cultural reform. Rev. George Washington Gale, who preached at our little village church, was the nation's instigator of the Manual Labor educational movement that provided higher education for students who could not afford tuition in exchange for their labor that offset costs of education. Gale show more founded the Oneida Institute of Science and Industry, a pioneering model of the Manual Labor method that flourished; it became one of the first to admit blacks in the student body. Gale went on to Illinois where he and others from Oneida County founded Knox College. Gale also introduced the famous evangelist Charles Grandison Finney to the upstate NY region from which Finney's renown spread far and wide.

Theodore Dwight Weld became an acolyte of Finney's He was educated at the Oneida Institute under Beriah Greene who had replaced Gale. Weld took up the charge of spreading the message of the Manual Labor model across the country with the support of the Tappan brothers' "Society for Promoting Manual Labor in Literary Institutions". He traveled thousands of miles across the country extolling the merits of Manual Labor. Later, he moved on to the Lane Seminary in Cincinnati with other students of the Oneida Institute where, after a contentious fight with the seminary's trustees over promoting abolitionism, Weld and his fellow students departed Lane for the newly formed Oberlin College.

Weld became a leading light in the mid-century's abolition movement, one of the "immediatists" who lit the fires of fervent abolitionism throughout the nation. Weld was inexhaustible in orating and writing and is squarely in the pantheon of leading lights of the era's causes. While working in Washington, he became a close ally and aide to John Quincy Adams, the scourge of the "Southern Slave Power" in Congress.

For Weld, freedom for the slave was not the only desired end, that full civil and social equality of Blacks was a paramount goal. Weld, in productive collaboration with his wife, Angelina Grimke Weld, and sister-in-law Sarah Grimke recognized the importance of women's rights in a just society. Weld is also well-known for his campaigns for the temperance movement.

This out-of-print book published in 1950 provides a well-researched and thoughtful analysis of this giant of the abolitionist and social justice movement of the 19th century. show less

Well written biography. Lacking in all policy matters outside of the Civil War though. Would be nice to know more economic policies of Lincoln.

2486 Abraham Lincoln: A Biography, by Benjamin P. Thomas (read 22 Jan 1993) This is considered the best one-volume biography of Lincoln, so I read it. It was published in 1952. I found the chapters on Lincoln's early life absorbing and most enjoyable. The later life has been the subject of so much I have read recently--antebellum years and the Civil War--that it seemed well-trodden territory to me. The book presents a good appreciation of Lincoln, and I concur in its view. An excellent book.