I’m a retired history professor who worked until recently at Auburn University. I’m here to talk about my new book, Abraham Lincoln and the Heroic Legend.
Here’s part of the blurb: “Kenneth W. Noe’s Abraham Lincoln and the Heroic Legend boldly questions the long-accepted notion that the sixteenth president was an almost-perfect commander in chief, more intelligent than his generals. The “heroic legend” originated with Lincoln himself, who early in the war concluded that he possessed a keen strategic and tactical mind. Noe explores the genesis of this powerful idea and asks why so many have tenaciously defended it….Noe suggests that the growth and solidification of the heroic legend began with Lincoln’s assassination; it debuted in print only months afterward and was so cloaked in religious piety that for decades it could not withstand the counternarratives offered by secular contemporaries. Although the legend was debated and neglected at times, it reemerged in interwar Great Britain and gained canonical status in the 1950s Cold War era and during the Civil War Centennial of the 1960s.”
In other words, I encountered some unexpected twists and turns, including how I think Lincoln was the first person to believe he was smarter than his generals (and before Fort Sumter), how biographer John Hay helped convince us all to hate George B. McClellan, how historians ignored the heroic legend for decades, how a few influential British officers after World War I blamed the carnage of the Western Front on senior officers who taught them to emulate Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson instead of Lincoln and U. S. Grant, and how two American scholars decided that World War II proved that the dissident Brits were right about Lincoln’s genius—and convinced us all.
“Heroic legend” is a term I developed after reading folklore studies. I don’t use the word “myth” anymore when it comes to history; Lincoln really lived, and relatively recently, so “legend” is preferred. “Heroic” came from the ongoing debate about Joseph Campbell and his idea of the “hero’s journey.” Real folklorists dismiss Campbell, but his ideas became central to modern pop culture, thanks to George Lucas and Disney among others. Lincoln’s life too has become a hero’s journey to many people.
I taught Civil War history for over thirty years, so I’m open to questions about the war too. My previous books dealt with the war in Appalachia, the Battle of Perryville, why soldiers fought, and most recently the effect that weather had on the war.
So ask me anything. I’ll be here to start replying around 10AM Eastern/9 Central.
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