An Interview With Abraham Lincoln: April 1, 1865

Grider: Mr. President, what are your hopes for the future?

Lincoln: I hope I will be able to complete my presidency by reuniting our separated people into one people and into a union stronger than before. I hope we will repair the damages done to the people and the land by this war and make it again the healthy land of liberty and opportunity for all. I hope we will welcome the freedmen and women into the fellowship of our one human family and educate and support them as they assume more and more rights and privileges of full citizenship in our one nation of free people. And I hope that brother will never again be called upon to fight his brother.

Our 16th president, himself a skilled storyteller who used yarns and hyperbole to great effect as a lawyer and politician, would have admired what Wade Hall has achieved in this slim, imaginative volume that is not quite biography but isn't exactly made up, either. In An Interview with Abraham Lincoln, Hall creates a fictional interviewer, who allows the president to tell his own story in his own words, a story that is selectively woven from his speeches, letters, and proclamations, all in the historical record.

As Hall explains in the introductory note, every statement in the book is factual except for the existence of Shelby Grider, the young ex-soldier turned journalist who "interviews" Lincoln in the White House on April 1, 1865. Through Hall's literary device we are given an account of Lincoln's life and character that sweeps movingly and concisely across his humble origins, his self-education, his family life, his beliefs and motivations, and which conveys an understanding of the enormous burden Lincoln experienced in holding the nation together during its greatest crisis. Thousands of books have been written on Abraham Lincoln, but few have conveyed the essence of the man and what he means to history as poignantly and as well as this little gem from Wade Hall. A chronology at the back of the book summarizes the key events of Lincoln's life.

Wade Hall holds degrees from Troy University, the University of Alabama, and the University of Illinois. He has taught at all three universities, as well as at the University of Florida, Kentucky Southern College, and for thirty-five years at Bellarmine University, where he chaired the English, humanities, and arts programs. He is the author of numerous articles and reviews and more than twenty books about Kentucky, Alabama, and the South. He served in the U.S. Army in the mid-fifties in several states and in Germany. He now lives in his boyhood home near Union Springs, Alabama.