Abraham Lincoln was many things during his lifetime–lawyer, politician, congressman, president. But detective? Not exactly.
So why did I decide to put a young Abraham Lincoln at the center of a historical mystery? When Lincoln Seeks Justice for Elijah Lovejoy begins, Lincoln is still decades away from becoming the president we all recognize. He’s a young Illinois legislator and lawyer, still building his career and deciding what kind of man he wants to become. That Lincoln fascinated me–he was so vulnerable.
We tend to look backward at famous historical figures. We know what they eventually accomplished, and it’s easy to imagine that somehow they must have known, too. Lincoln didn’t. And it tormented him.
He was largely self-taught. He had very little formal education, but an extraordinary hunger to learn. He read whatever he could get his hands on And read it again. When something interested him, he wanted to understand it. He investigated ideas, studied arguments, and worked problems through until they made sense to him.
That seemed like a wonderful quality for the central character in a mystery. But there was another reason I chose him. The Lincoln of this period wasn’t the confident figure staring out at us from monuments. He could be deeply insecure. He suffered periods of depression and struggled with doubts about himself and his future. That makes him human.
It’s much easier to identify with a young man who doesn’t know what his future holds than with the marble Lincoln sitting in the Lincon Memorial. My Lincoln can be uncertain. He can make mistakes. He can wonder whether he’s good enough. He can walk into a situation without knowing the answer and have to find it.
He had newly become a lawyer. That required him to listen carefully, examine evidence, question people’s stories, notice contradictions, and understand why people behaved as they did. Those are also pretty useful skills for someone trying to unravel a mystery.
The Illinois Lincoln inhabited was equally irresistible. The state–and the country–was wrestling with questions about slavery, abolition, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, politics, law, and how far a community could go when it believed someone’s ideas were dangerous.
Those questions form the historical world of Lincoln Seeks Justice for Elijah Lovejoy. Lincoln did not actually investigate the controversy surrounding Elijah Lovejoy, though we know he read about it and was affected by it. But I wanted the Lincoln who stepped into my fictional story to be grounded in the young man who actually lived in Illinois at the time: curious, ambitious, intelligent, sometimes insecure, always learning–and still very much a work in progress.
We know who Abraham Lincoln became. I think it’s equally fascinating to imagine the young man who hadn’t become him yet.
Current Projects
My Book: Continuing revisions of my historical mystery featuring a young Abraham Lincoln and the real people and controversies of 1830s Illinois.
Edward Bryant: Continuing preparations for future publication of stories by my friend Edward Bryant.
Thanks for walking alongside me.
The View From The Imaginarium 