Abraham Lincoln’s Library
Richard Carwardine describes the new library dedicated to Abraham Lincoln.
In November last year a stark neglect was righted, with the opening of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library in Springfield, state capital of Illinois. Much less brilliant stars in the American political firmament, including most of the twentieth-century occupants of the White House since Franklin Roosevelt, are memorialised in presidential libraries funded by the federal government. Yet the president who exerts an unequalled hold on the nation’s imagination – a figure exceeded as the subject of historical study by Christ alone – has had to wait until now for such a tribute. After Richard Nixon’s resignation in 1974 his successor remarked in self-deprecation that he was ‘a Ford and not a Lincoln’. But students of Gerald Ford’s presidency have been blessed with a Rolls-Royce library compared with the archival arrangements previously available for the study of the 16th president.
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