Why I'm Writing a Book About Abraham Lincoln

Besides my fondness for spending time in libraries

I’ve been rather quiet of late. I’ll explain why in a moment. But first, thank you for being here. I hope you find it to be a comforting, enjoyable, thought-provoking and even pleasantly silly place at times. Free subscribers, you’ll still get four posts this month, and paid subscribers, you’ll get six.

Now as for why I’m getting a late start this month…

In the first week of February, ye ole COVID-19 made a return visit to engage my immune system in a pas de deux. I assume I picked it up during a very busy week of work in Nashville, project-managing a photoshoot and attending daylong meetings, but maybe it was a sexy gift imparted to me by America’s sweetheart, O’Hare International Airport. Who knows?

Anyway, I’m very alive, albeit more prone to headache and tummy trouble than I’d prefer. I also get really tired really easily, but it’s not as bad as it was the first time I had it, in late 2022.

Alright, enough about that stuff. I’m writing a book about Abraham Lincoln. Here are the details (as seen above):

ABRAHAM F***ING LINCOLN

By Sara Benincasa

Non-fiction: Biography

February 18, 2025

Journalist and comedian and author of AGORAFABULOUS! Sara Benincasa's ABRAHAM F***ING LINCOLN, about our tallest, most sanctified, deified, and sanitized president, with a focus on elements of his life often given short shrift by scholarly biographers, pitched for readers of Alexis Coe's You Never Forget Your First and Sarah Vowell's Assassination Vacation, to Maddie Caldwell at Grand Central, at auction, by Scott Mendel at Mendel Media Group (NA).

Film/TV/foreign: scott@mendelmedia.com

As a journalist, I have written about many different people for many different reasons. Lincoln poses a unique challenge, and not just because he isn’t alive to answer my questions. So towering a figure is he that one must take care to always return to writing about the man himself, not about millions of people’s millions of opinions of him. In this way, telling people the subject of my next work sometimes feels akin to announcing that I have decided to write a biography entitled JESUS FUCKING CHRIST.

As Noah Brooks wrote in the New York Times in 1898, “There can be no new Lincoln stories. The stories are all told.” He had heard and told and written and read plenty of them by that point, so I don’t blame him for assuming that well was tapped.

114 years later, Ford’s Theatre and Museum hosted a 34-foot sculpture built of 6,800 individual books about Lincoln. I wish I’d seen it back in 2012. That tower was only a portion of the books that had been published about the man since his death in 1865, and more have been published in the intervening 13 years.

So what the hell do I have to add? I had plenty of time to consider that question as I researched and wrote a 62-page book proposal, and then revised it, and then revised it again, and again, as my bookshelves groaned under the weight of so many 19th century American history books and my friends grew tired of me info-dumping random facts based on the audiobooks and articles I obsessively absorbed.

What makes a biography special is not always breaking news or digging up heretofore undiscovered primary sources. I’ve read many of the same facts stated with very different tone, style, and energy, depending on who is doing the telling. Since we’re talking Lincoln biographers: they may cover much of the same ground, but Jon Meacham is not David Herbert Donald (RIP) is not Doris Kearns Goodwin is not Michael Burlingame is not James M. McPherson (a personal fave and a dream interview) is not Eric Foner is not Carl Sandburg (RIP) is not

George Saunders

(not that George has written a biography of Lincoln, but he has written beautifully about him.)

Even the extant contemporary sources on Lincoln and his family don’t share the same opinions. Of course they don’t - they’re long dead, but they lived, and they were human, just like we are.

Elizabeth Hobbs Keckley, who survived decades of enslavement by her biological father and extended members of his cruel family, eventually purchased freedom for herself and her son, became a sought-after D.C. fashion designer and seamstress with several employees, and grew into a close friendship with Mary Todd Lincoln. In 1868, she published Behind the Scenes: Or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House. This autobiography included a frank account of Mrs. Lincoln’s behavior during the White House years. While not always adulatory, the tone of the book is certainly not identical to the stories shared by, for example, Lincoln’s personal secretaries, John G. Nicolay and John Hay, who reportedly referred to Mrs. Lincoln as “the Hell Cat” and “her Satanic majesty.”

Yet they all would have undoubtedly agreed that Mrs. Lincoln did appear at X event at Y time on Z date, in such-and-such an ensemble. It was the manner of telling that made it different.

The challenge, as I see it, is to choose what to highlight and how to discuss it. And it is with this in mind that I feel I may be able to offer a new approach. Not something that will work effectively as either doorstop or weapon (it’ll likely be under 300 pages) - but something good, and interesting, and worth your time and money.

The biography I am writing is neither a work of hagiography nor a poison pen letter. In the acknowledgements, I do hope to write a love letter to librarians, archivists, and historians. If you are a librarian, archivist, or historian, no matter your area of focus, I am grateful to you. I am grateful as an author who has experienced having her books challenged or banned, and I am grateful as a reader who loves to learn. We need you now more than ever before in my own American lifetime.

I fear that some of the best career educators at National Park Service sites have been fired or will be fired. This gives me great pain, as I know it does many of you.

But I recognize that history is not stored only in employees of any government-funded institution, but in all human beings who pass true stories down through communities.

There are the things most of us were never taught about public events, and then there are the private aspects of Lincoln’s life that have been covered by various biographers, but are not often highlighted when we discuss our received notion of Lincoln, the glowing character I call “Saint Abraham of America.” In his own time, “America” wasn’t common shorthand for this country, which is part of why I use it in referring to the ahistorical or at least sanitized man we so often meet in popular culture.

As ever, it is often in communities of descendants of those affected by State-sponsored brutality and horror that one finds the stories, documents and memories left out of mainstream narrative. These are not secrets by any means, but they are not often given the spotlight.

Let me be more specific.

At your school, when they told you about the Civil War, did you also learn about the so-called U.S.-Dakota War, which lasted five weeks? Did they tell you about the mass execution of 38 Dakota men on December 26, 1862 in Mankato, Minnesota, after “trials” that lasted mere minutes, wherein the accused were denied legally representation? They never taught us that in my schools, which were pretty good as far as schools go. It wasn’t just because I grew up far away from Minnesota, in New Jersey. As per this MPR article from 2017, turns out it never was a required part of Minnesota public education, either.

Did you know that Abraham Lincoln personally reviewed all 303 cases of men condemned to death, commuting most of the sentences but signing off on 39? One man was given a last-minute reprieve. Did you know that it remains the largest mass execution on U.S. soil in U.S. history?

How much does this affect whatever opinion you already had of him? Does it inform your understanding of the man? Does it crowd out other ideas you’ve held dear? Or does it strike you as nothing other than a story about somebody very famous and very dead?

At your school, were you told that the great document issued just six days after that mass execution, the Emancipation Proclamation, “freed all the slaves”? It did not. It freed all the enslaved persons within the states that remained in rebellion against the Union. In border slave states that had stayed loyal to the Union, slavery could legally continue as it had done for generations. The same was true for specific parts of states that had seceded but had since been returned to Union control.

Why do you suppose students are so often given the headlines but not the details? When we only get the headline and the pull quote, how long does it take before that’s the entire story? Four years? Eight years? One generation? Two?

Look how briefly I’ve addressed those two upsetting, brutal subjects up above. Do you think I gave you all the details that I have? Do you think I have all the details? Do you think I want to explain these things away, or make excuses for them? Do you think I want to throw Lincoln in the trash? Do you think I want to pop him atop a pedestal that touches the sky?

What a book allows, and a newsletter issue does not, is the space to examine context. None of this just happened out of nowhere. Abraham Lincoln did not just happen. You and I did not just happen.

Let’s look at examples more personal to the man himself.

In your U.S. History classes, did anybody mention that Abraham Lincoln went through multiple depressive episodes, including suicidal ideation, long before the Civil War, or the deaths of his sons Eddy (1846-1850) and Willie (1850-1862)? Did you know that far from being kept a secret, his suffering was widely known, and seems to have been largely regarded with understanding and compassion by his friends and associates?

On a far less serious note: did you know that he was funny? Did you know that he was a wrestling champion? Did you know that he often stored documents inside his stovepipe hat? Do you care? Should you care?

Does Abraham Lincoln still matter?

Clearly, I think he does. He changed the country through the bloodiest war we’ve yet known, and thus helped make the United States of America what it is today. To learn more, I have to look back. I can’t do that without scholars and librarians and archivists and researchers and community leaders who keep the stories alive.

That’s why I love them.

I’ll lean on a favorite Howard Zinn quote here, from a 1994 interview with Barbara Miner in Rethinking Schools magazine: “I started studying history with one view in mind: to look for answers to the issues and problems I saw in the world about me.” (The entire interview, which in fact makes mention of Abraham Lincoln, is here.)

Here’s another great one from Zinn, in You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train: “I have no right to despair. I insist on hope.”

I’d like to be more hopeful than I am. I feel despair sometimes, and maybe so do you. But I’m still going, and so are you. That’s something.

We have so much work to do.

One day, Lord willing, I hope this book finds a place on your bookshelf or at least the top of your toilet tank. I hope that it challenges some of what you thought you knew - not because you’re not smart, or not curious, but because most of us heard the same stuff about This Thing Called America (TM) in school from our overworked and underpaid teachers, who were repeating what their overworked and underpaid teachers had told them.

I promise to do my best.

Finally, I will add a very personal note. As this is the first book I’ve worked on in a decade, it is also the first one I’m writing since getting sober years ago.

This is not to say that I was drunk while I wrote Agorafabulous!, Great, D.C. Trip or Real Artists Have Day Jobs. I wasn’t, at least not when I was doing the actual writing or revising. But being an alcoholic doesn’t mean you’re drunk all the time. It does mean you’re an alcoholic all the time.

I am still an alcoholic, just not one who drinks - at least not tonight. And if that goes well, I think I’ll try not to drink tomorrow.

It feels important to me to say that if there is something you love doing - an art form, a sport, a craft, whatever it may be - and you need to take a break from it to work on, for example, not killing yourself - it’s worth taking the pause. A sacred pause can last a second - as in a deep breath before reacting to a rude driver cutting you off in traffic - or it can last ten years. Or twenty. Or thirty.

I’ll keep writing to you in SARATONIN about all sorts of things. Thank you so much for being here.

With gratitude,

Sara Benincasa

Chicago, IL

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CLASS! with Sara Benincasa and Chad the Bird - March 21 in Chicago

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