War era Study Program and did graduate work in university of pennsylvania where he focused on the history of religion. He holds a master of divinity degree. His roster of publications is so long im not going to try to read them all to you. You can go to his website to get a full accounting of not only his publications but oerjt sail ient elements of other saileint elements of hig biography. Im going to offer five books i think is pertinent. The first is called Abraham Lincoln published by william b in 1998 and the first of allen lincolns prizes. Lincolns emancipation pags proclamation end of slavery in america. Publish in 2004 brought his second lincoln prize. Lincoln and douglas the debates that define america. 2008. Some reason didnt win the lincoln prize. Faithful lightening new history of the civil war and reconstruction came out from Oxford University press in 2012 and the 5th title i will mention is is gettiesburg the last invasion published in 2013 which brought a third lincoln prize to allen, the only person who has won three. Others have won two. He is currently working on a biography of robert e. Lee and that will be one of the things well get to today. He and i will talk about his work today and about the field of civil war era studies more broadly. And i want to begin with a question relating to the opportunities for people in our field to try to reach a broader audience. Allen writes for National Newspapers and other publications and has done courses for the teaching company, the great courses company. You have reached a broader audience and id like your thought s about whether this is something we really should strive to do, why you do it, how effective you think it is, and what it yields for our field in terms of disseminating really good scholarship to a broader audience. Well, first of all, let me thank you gary for the opportunity to be here and especially to the now center, to will kirk, to everyone here who has to liz, stephanie, to everyone who has just made my visit here over the last several days such an exceedingly pleasant ones. And youve sneaked in some research. Oh, indeed. Indeed. I have been within the reach of many manu scripts, some diaries, what not, like that. Looking at what people are writing and thinking and saying in those Tumultuous Times 150 years ago. Im particularly glad to be here on this very, very significant and special day. One of the greatest days in American History. And im noticing that people are starting to look at each other like, oh, is this the fourth of july . No, no. No, its september 22nd. And we did this on purpose. Its 1555th anniversary of the preliminary emancipation pags proclamation. Writing that in 2012 in the wall street journal got some unusual responses. Got a death threat. Doesnt often happen to people writing in the wall street journal. You get other type of threats, i suppose. I succeeded in injuring someones sensibilities in writing basket emancipation pags proclamation. In a way it testifies to the fact you say it was a good thing. I did. And that upset someone . It upset someone, yes. I think it speaking it the large audien audience trying to identify ourselves, shouldnt be based on religi religion, race, any of those things, what identifies us as americans, lincoln nailed it on the gettiesburg address, it is a proposition that alternate men are created equal and the history of how we have unfolded and lived that proposition is the most important aspect of our identity. When we write about our history we do a year by year, decade by decade, sometimes referendum on that proposition. I have really been on two sides of one coin, that is, how do we explain ourselves to ourselves as americans . F that should draw in all of us, because that touches all of us and identifies all of us. So if i write for the journal of the early republic or for Civil War History or if im writing for the wall street journal or if im writing for washington post, i really regard those as being part of an overall endeavor. Its our constant reminder of ourselves, of who we are and what we are dedicated to. That involves more than academics, more than just college students. It really is something which embraces all of us. So its important, especially for historyians, to be able to speak to everybody, were speaking to our identity as americans. Not just speaking professionally. Were speaking as citizens. There is one and only one identifier of an american. That is, that you are a citizen. To be a citizen of the American Republic is if, in my book, just about the greatest privilege on earth. Were especially well positioned to reach a broader audience is because so many issues from the civil war continue to resonate, we can see echoes of them. We can see echoes of them in our daytoday life, including responses from some states to our current president , our preceding president , talking about succession. Texas, when president obama was in office. California with President Trump in office now. You dont have to look very far in current american politics and society to find echoes of the civil war era. Sometimes its even more than echoes. There was an oped in the Sacramento Bee. I think im citing this correctly. There was on oped in the Sacramento Bee yesterday, i think, in which the lead of the oped said that california is a 21st century state, which is mired in a 19th century country and, therefore, it should separate itself, which is a way of saying california is an entirely different culture from the rest of the United States. And i thought, yeah, that is exactly what they were saying in South Carolina in december of 1860. Im trying to ask people if theres really striving to emulate South Carolina in 1860. Is the that your role mod snell. Perhaps short term. I think it didnt turn out so well for South Carolina but it does come back to the fact that so often questions that we think are uniquely current and uniquely modern really have these long roots and sometimes are replicating even the rhetoric of 150 years ago and longer. Yes. Theres almost nothing new. It does seem to be that way. It seems new if you dont know anything. Thats because the fundamental questions that are posed by the american experiment really do not change either. We really are all about the business of debating that fundamental proposition, so in a sense its not a total surprise that the kind of rhetoric and a sum uggs a assumptions and kind of stances that you hear people strike today well find uncanny and sometimes unnerving echoes of those 150 or 155 years ago. For the historian what we have to do is to signal this is what the relationships are. Be careful what you wish for. Whether its the Sacramento Bee or the charleston mercury. When you write do you write specifically with more than one audience in mind . I mean, obviously your books are reviewed in the mainline scholarly journals, but do you have one or the other of those audiences more in mind or do you not even think about thats especially . I cant say that i really think about it. Sometimes im asked, well, you know, what kind of schooling did you have in writing . How do you go about the writing . And to that i i can only shrug my shoulders. I never had a writing class. I never had someone instruct me. This is how you write this. This is how you write that. I have no better explanation than to simply say i want to explain something to people. I want to communicate with people, and i look for ways to do that, and i dont really have a better explanation. You certainly read a lot of good writing. I think i did. I think i did. Thats probably the best. And im probably good at imitating. Its nothing in my mind, at least, its nothing more complicated than that and i cant make it more complicated. I wont try to make you more complicated than that. I have a question that i really want to get to, and that is did you wake up one morning and think poor Abraham Lincoln. He just hasnt gotten enough attention from writers. I think i better write a book about lincoln. What brought you youre trained as a historian and you wrote about Jonathan Edwards in your dissertation and your early work. How do you get from Jonathan Edwards and religion to Abraham Lincoln . Well, its a little unusual, but not more unusual, well, lets say a chess game. Theres a few strange moves that have to get made and processed, but not too many. I wrote my doctoral dissertation on Jonathan Edwards and the problem of determinism and free will in 18th century moral philosophy. Thats a title made for wide public consumption. Yeah. I was is that in the 19th printing now . They actually they actually did do a second edition, but, all right. The one with Matthew Mcconaughey and Jonathan Edwards is the one that really resonates. Yeah, yeah, and the one with nick nolte at lurking. When nick nolte as george whitfield, right, but i i wrote the dissertation which was then published by Wesleyan University press, and the problem with free will and determinism seem to me a real perennial philosophical american problem, maybe not the kind of thing you stay up at night reading about, but still a perennial, and i had planned to write a followup volume, kind of a, you know, Jonathan Edwards 2. 0 or free will 2. 0 and bring things bring the discussion of the problem of this philosophical problem of modern philosophy, and as i was working on this project, this was in the mid90s, i knew that Abraham Lincoln had some things to say on the subject of free will and fatalism. I had some familiarity with the lincoln corpus, and thought it would really jazz the book up, you know. Heres a book on philosophy and determinism and other sleepy subjects. To be able to interject Abraham Lincoln into that discussion would really put some fizz into it. I thought, well, wouldnt that be clever of me so i ended up writing a paper on lincoln and doctor Doug Mcdermott determinism. What he called his doctrine of necessity, because he told people frankly he was a fatalist, and he read that paper in springfield, illinois, at a meeting of the Abraham Lincoln association, and to my surprise it was well received. A book publisher got in touch with me. Would i be interested in writing a religious biography of Abraham Lincoln and i said no, because i had seen a number of writers get swallowed up in the swamp on that subject, and i thought i really dont want to do that. Publisher got back in touch sometime later. Would i do this biography, this religion biography of lincoln and i said no. Finally a friend of the publisher called me and said, look, if you dont do this book, they are going to give it to professor so and so. Someone you knew . Yeah. The hand hit the forehead, and so i i got back in touch with the editorinchief of the of this publisher, and i said to him, look, ill make a deal with you. Ill write the book that you want but let me do it as an intellectual biography of lincoln, but of all the intellectual influences on lincoln, to treat lincoln not just as a political figure but lincoln in the ideas of the 19th century. Thats how he became president and having got my hand in the cookie jar, so to speak, i just really couldnt get it out, and up lincoln book became another lincoln book became another lincoln book and so on and so forth and youve already gone down the list and, no, ive never actually gotten back to writing that free will 2. 0. But i cant even from the way youre talking you think there are more elements to lincoln that deserve further study. He hasnt been exhausted . Oh, i think so. I think thats entirely true. Lincoln is an extremely complicated and complex individual, and people underestimate lincoln because they think that he is just the 16th president. Hes just the civil war president. Hes just a politician. Hes just a lawyer, and that misses what people in lincolns own time knew and said about him. Lincoln, first of all, was a very reticent shutmouthed man as one of his Legal Associates said of him. Another who practiced law with him on the eighth judicial circuit for many years said that anyone who took abe lincoln for a simpleminded man would wake up with his back in a ditch, and i think that may be one. Truest things ever said about lincoln. He was a man of very meager education but extraordinary intellectual curiosity. He would delve into anything. John hey, his secretary in his diary in 1863 recorded an incident in which hey said the t, that was his short hand for the tycoon, thats what he called tycoon. The t and i had a discussion about phonology for which the t has an unsuspected interest, and you think, phonology. Okay. Lets look that up really quick before anybody noticed. Its the study of languages. Lincoln had intellectual curiosities in so many different directions. He was not a philosopher. He was not what we would call an intellectual but he had curiosities that way and he liked to pursue them. He once said towards the end. His life in an interview that he did with the journalist noah brooks. Brooks had asked him what were the most influential books in your life, and lincolns reply was very peculiar. He said butlers analogy meaning Bishop Joseph butlers analogy of religion from 1735, singularly important text for natural religion in the 18th century, and John Stuart Mill on liberty which today still functions as a major text for people thing about free speech, about libertarian political philosophy, and then he added, and i always wanted to get at president edwards on the will, and i thought yes, go, go. So that spoke to you, the third of it did, but the thing is what this suggested is heres a man who does not simply say, i read the newspaper and do the crossword puzzle and read the funnies. Hes a man who has the ability to ask some very serious questions. Its the part of lincoln we miss because were so impressed with the folksy political backslapper, shrewd political wirepuller. Thats the lincoln were most familiar with. We dont often see the lincoln that his closest friends sometimes had a peek into, and that was in some ways a very different lincoln. How do you explain lincolns facility with language . I mean, can you talk about his other attributes. Youve talked about several of them, but his ability to deal with complicated issues and render them in very brief texts, in language that can soar or make a point with an effectiveness that almost no one else who has ever been in the white house anyway has been able to match. How do you get to the second inaugural from someone with lincolns background and lincolns education . Well, one thing John Stuart Mill i dont think knows how to do that. No. One thing that certainly shaped lincoln as a communicator was having to be a lawyer and in this case a trial lawyer. He spends virtually all of his professional life as a lawyer, trying courses in county courthouses all across the middle of the state of illinois. He enjoys being in the courtroom he enjoys being in front of a jury, but he also knows that these are juries that he has to persuade, and this is in an age when juries are significant for two things that we dont often pick up today. One is is that in these Little County courthouses a jury would often be summoned from bystanders at back of the room, so you could have almost anyone sitting in the jury box, and you had to be able to communicate with them and you had to be able to do it fast because if you werent able to make yourself clear and make a clear case of things, then you were not going to be a functioning profitable lawyer for very long, so he has to learn how a to communicate directly with people, and his partner of many years, william herndon, once said that that was lincolns real passion, how to make something Crystal Clear to people. He said that lincoln would tie himself up in knots in the office. He would just sit there, concentrating, concentrating, how to get an idea into a small compass of easily understood words, and he was so effective at it that certainly one occasion theres a story about lincoln even in just his Opening Statement in a case, the judge interrupting him and saying all right, brother lincoln, thank you, now we will hear from the other side. He had made the case so clearly that he wasnt even finished his Opening Statement before it seemed like he had won it. He had that wonderful capacity to open up an idea and put it in these wonderfullly clear terms, and i think a lot of that comes out of his experience as a trial lawyer, but it comes out of the maps logical bent. Mans logical bent. He put himself to the discipline of logical expression, and it was once said by someone in their autobiography who had listened to the Lincoln Douglass debates that if you listened to Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglass for five minutes you would always take the side of stephen a. Douglass because douglass was always about passion, about shaking that huge mane of hair, about stamping his feet, but if you listened to them for half an hour, you would be taken by lincoln, because lincoln, even though he spoke in this high, reedy, somewhat nasal tone of voice, he always set things out like bait on a hook, and logically speaking once he got that hook in your mouth, all he needed to do afterwards was reel the thing in, and you were his. He would state the case in such a way that it was absolutely logically irresistible. He had that bent for logic, for lining things up right. He was not a man of passion or emotion. Herndon once said that his head ruled his heart tyranically. He was not a man of emotional appeal. He could be eloque