The Southerner A Romance of the Real Lincoln

The Southerner: A Romance of the Real Lincoln is a 1913 novel by Thomas Dixon Jr. (1864-1946) presenting Abraham Lincoln as a Southern-born statesman whose deepest purpose was reconciliation between North and South. Dixon, whose earlier Reconstruction trilogy had vilified the Radical Republicans, builds the novel around Lincoln’s conflicts with the vengeful wing of his own party, dramatising the president as the South’s best friend destroyed by assassination on the eve of a merciful peace. The portrait suited the early twentieth-century sectional reconciliation movement and the Southern rehabilitation of Lincoln. The novel is a primary source for the Lost Cause appropriation of Lincoln’s memory in the fiftieth-anniversary years of the Civil War. Free PDF download available on BDeBooks.