Word: first
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...liked to tell people that if Grant and those fellows could run their war from cracker boxes, a cracker box was good enough for him. This attic and a room on the second floor called the Lincoln Room came in time to resemble second-hand book stores. In the first two years alone Carl Sandburg went through more than a thousand source books and marked them for copyists, of whom he had two at a time working downstairs in the glassed-in porch. His pretty, white-haired wife, Paula, and three daughters helped with the files. Gutted and exhausted books...
When Sandburg gave his first two volumes a rigorous rewriting in manuscript in 1935, he scaled down four opening chapters on the background of secession into one, making a packed picture of which he suspects "there are some pages over which people will stop and wonder." It was a time of growing violence, growing paradox, growing economic change and bewilderment: "of [Northern] abolitionists hanged, shot, stabbed, mutilated, disfigured facially by vitriol, their home doorways painted with human offal ... of the 260,000 free Negroes of the South owning property valued at $25,000,000, one of them being the wealthiest...
...brown face wearing a beard for the first time (no one ever heard him seriously explain why), Lincoln arrived in Washington "like a thief in the night," with one companion, his friends having sent him on ahead to escape a mob in Baltimore. At Columbus on the way he had said in a curious, trance-like speech: "Without a name, perhaps without a reason why I should have a name, there has fallen upon me a task such as did not rest even upon the Father of his Country...
...Nicolay & Hay, Lamon, Herndon and the other biographers bearing witness among hundreds less known), and to let his own extraordinary insight play upon the record. As an incidental part of this process, he brings to life the principal political, journalistic and military figures that surrounded Old Abe from his first week in Washington to the end. His extended portrait of Charles Sumner, for example, is masterly...
...Against him across the Potomac was an army which could probably have taken Washington in the first weeks of the war, and a commander who outguessed and outfought every Union General. Sandburg on Lee: "Enfolded in the churchman and the Christian gentleman, Robert E. Lee was the ancient warrior who sprang forth and struck and cut and mangled as if to tear the guts and heart out of the enemy. . . ." The Union General George Brinton McClellan, who prudently chose to fight a war of attrition, never meeting Lee if he could help it without overwhelming superiority in manpower, caused Lincoln...