Review: "A Friend of Mr. Lincoln," Stephen Harrigan

By Paul Carrier

Two years ago, Jerome Charyn’s memorable novel, I Am Abraham, gave us a first-person account of Abraham Lincoln’s life, focusing primarily on the most memorable chapter, the Civil War.

Now Stephen Harrigan has published A Friend of Mr. Lincoln, a novel that eschews the war years to focus on the young Lincoln of the 1830s and 40s, a skillful attorney and shrewd politician who was ambitious and jocular but socially inept and prone to sometimes frightening mood swings.

“To take this one brief period in his life and drill down as far as I could made a lot of sense to me as a writer,” Harrigan told the Chicago Tribune earlier this year. “I thought there was a lot there, a lot to Lincoln's character that felt a little unexplored.”

Harrigan, whose previous books include The Gates of the Alamo and Remember Ben Clayton, introduces readers to such real-life Lincoln pals from that era as Illinois pol Ned Baker and Joshua Speed, who ran a general store in Springfield, Ill., and was Lincoln’s roommate there for a time.

But the eponymous friend of the title is Cage Weatherby, a fictional poet who first meets Lincoln when they serve in the Black Hawk War of 1832, a short-lived Indian conflict in Illinois and the Michigan Territory. The two become close, with Weatherby serving as a confidant to the up-and-coming lawyer and state legislator. 

Harrigan is a fully formed character in his own right, not a one-dimensional device who exists simply to bring us closer to Lincoln. Both men’s lives unfold in equal measure, which I found inventive and entertaining. But purists among the legions of Lincoln buffs may be put off by the fact that their idol shares center stage with someone who sprang from an author’s imagination.

The future president is portrayed here as a man who’s still in the process of creating himself, a “great man in waiting” whose path to fame “was growing hard to discern” as he juggled his law practice, his political future in Illinois and his on-again-off-again relationship with the imperious and controlling Mary Todd. A teetotaler and an essentially private man trying to make his way in a public realm, Lincoln was “neither refined nor decorous and kept in his head an extensive archive of the filthiest stories and jests human beings had ever uttered.”

Lincoln quickly emerges as the natural leader of his group of friends, yet he’s plagued by self-doubt and attacks of depression so severe that he contemplates suicide at least once. We catch glimpses of the greatness that will take full form later in life, but Harrigan’s Lincoln remains a man on the make who can be ruthlessly unscrupulous, using pseudonyms to attack the character of his political enemies.

The Lincoln of these early years finds himself flummoxed by women, and takes a cautious stance on the all-important issue of slavery, to avoid damaging his political prospects. He is “too tall, too poor, too coarse” to make a fitting husband, one character muses. Lincoln visits a prostitute and comes perilously close to fighting a duel, yet he and Todd finally wed in 1842.

Despite the prominent role that Weatherby plays in the novel, Harrigan generally remains faithful to the historical record. As he told the Chicago Tribune: “I'd like the reader to have a good time reading this novel, but at the same time, have it be a credible experience.”

A Friend of Mr. Lincoln is driven by plot and, especially, character, but Harrigan’s writing is notable as well because it can be lyrical and evocative. A road in rural Illinois “seemed almost arbitrary in this featureless immensity, as if someone had tried to carve a route through the curving vault of heaven.” Todd is drawn to Lincoln by “the fact that he was awkward, that he was uncultured and half-educated, unstoppable and ungovernable, bursting like a spring out of the rocky ground of his beginnings . . . .”

Harrigan’s Lincoln is not the marble icon seated in the memorial that bears his name. Rather, he is the rough, grasping, untested, vulnerable, mistake-prone and entirely human young man who, over time, evolved into the 16th — and arguably the greatest — American president.