BoHisotokry Review
Review by Jonathan Herbert
‘Old Abe’
by John Cribb
July, 1861- The Sunday morning of the
battle started off warm and muggy. A
battalion of congressmen, senators,
journalists, and ladies rode out of the city
toward Manassas to watch the fi ghting.
They took along picnic baskets, bottles of
wine, and opera glasses. Abraham put on
a good suit and went with Mary to the New
York Avenue Presbyterian Church to hear Dr.
Phineas Gurley preach. It was hard to sit still
in the pew. The rumble of distant cannons
fi lled the spaces between the words of the
sermon. What am I supposed to pray for? He
wondered. That we kill more of them than they
kill of us?
“Old Abe,” by John Cribb, is a profound
novel about the fi nal fi ve years of Abraham
Lincoln’s life, years that some would consider
the most cataclysmic years of America’s
history. Cribb, a New York Times bestselling
author, spent more than a dozen years
researching and writing this novel that comes
at an appropriate time when Americans are
more divided than ever before. This novel
reminds us of our great history and portrays
the president who embodies our fi nest ideals.
This is a shining example of how historical
fi ction brings Lincoln to life as a true hero who
saved the country and set millions of enslaved
Americans free.
The author fi rst found his voice for Old Abe,
after reading many books about Lincoln,
including several hundred pages of The
Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, and
then drafting a couple hundred pages of
manuscript.
“I wanted the voice to have somewhat of an
old-fashioned feel since this is a nineteenth
century story,” he said, “but I didn’t want it to
16 GASPARILLA MAGAZINE • January/February • 2021
be a stiff read. That was a challenge.”
Cribb said he spent a great deal of time
reading not just Lincoln’s writings, but the
writings of people who knew him and had
fi rst-hand interactions with him, and the
writings of characters who appear in Old Abe
– such as the collected letters of Mary Todd
Lincoln.
“I tried to build their words and voices
into the dialogue,” he said. “Reading all that
material helped me fi nd and shape the overall
voice for the book.”
Cribb said he has been writing about history
for several years, so that helped.
“Old Abe is my fi rst novel, so fi nding the
voice for it really did take a few months of
drafting and rewriting,” he said. “And, as I
say, it took a lot of reading about Lincoln, as
well as visiting the places where he lived and
worked – from Kentucky and Indiana to Illinois
and D.C. – before I felt like I knew him well
enough to settle on a voice for the book.”
After so many books about Abraham
Lincoln’s life, what inspired this work?
“Lincoln has been a hero from history for me
for a long time – since childhood – but writing
a novel about him did not occur until 2006,”
Cribb said. “My original intention was to start
him off as a young man and follow him all the
way to the end of his life, but that proved too
unwieldy, so I zeroed in on the last fi ve years
of his life.”
What makes this work of historical fi ction so
important for our politically divided country?
“One way Old Abe speaks to our divided
times is that Lincoln was, in many ways, all
about unity,” he said. “He was all about our
Union and saving that Union. In his fi rst
inaugural address, his message was, ‘We