Lincoln Mailbag!

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Wow, reader Dan G. didn’t take to Elizabeth Pryor Brown’s book, of which I spoke positively:

First chapter berates Lincoln for a disorderly approach to the military — fair enough, I suppose — without acknowledging the more defensible reasons for this, such as a desire to establish the facts on the ground independent of the possibly self-serving officers in the chair of command.  To hear her, the military should be spared any outside audit or opportunity for whistleblowing. And she doesn’t even mention his ultimate success. Her second chapter pooh-poohs his coarse humor and sometimes rustic rhetoric as though the prissy rareified manners of a Boston drawing room were innately superior and not, as they would have been in real life, a barrier to communicating with and leading the broad mass of the people.

It’s not just me:

https://www.civilwarmonitor.com/blog/pryor-six-encounters-with-lincoln-2017

He goes on to describe the book as:

a biography of Sam written by Diane

which is a funny idea.