Richard N. Current

• 1. Introduction

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  Richard Nelson Current spent the first half of his career writing about Thaddeus Stevens, Daniel Webster, John C. Calhoun, and even the history of the typewriter. Abraham Lincoln was not his destination. He arrived there by accident, when a colleague died. That accident would earn him the title "the Dean of Lincoln Scholars" and occupy the remaining decades of his hundred-year life.

  Born on the 5th of October, 1912, in Colorado City, Colorado, Current died on the 26th of October, 2012, in Boston, Massachusetts. He made it to age 100. What drove a man to spend a century in archives, to pick fights with novelists in the pages of literary journals, to lecture on every continent including Antarctica? The answer turns out to be two phrases he used to describe Lincoln: "perpetual timeliness" and "eternal relevance".

• 2. An Accidental Lincoln Scholar

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  James G. Randall had spent years on a four-volume biography of Abraham Lincoln, finishing three volumes before he died in 1953. Current, then his colleague at the University of Illinois, was asked to complete the work. He wrote at least half of the fourth volume, titled Lincoln the President: Midstream to the Last Full Measure, published in 1955.

  The book won the Bancroft Prize from Columbia University, one of the most prestigious awards in American historical writing. That prize set the course for everything that followed. Current went on to write seven more books about Lincoln, building a body of work that spanned decades and attracted admirers, students, and at least one prominent literary enemy.

  Before the Lincoln detour, Current had trained at Oberlin College, earning his B.A. in 1934, then moved to The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University for an M.A. in 1935, and finally to the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he completed his PhD in 1940 under William B. Hesseltine. His dissertation on Thaddeus Stevens, published as Old Thad Stevens: A Story of Ambition, showed a historian drawn to political ambition and its costs.

• 3. The Lincoln Nobody Knows

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  Current's 1958 book The Lincoln Nobody Knows took aim at the comfortable myths that had grown up around the sixteenth president. At its core was a question about contradiction: how did a man raised in the backwoods of Kentucky and Indiana, in communities where racist and white supremacist views were common, become someone capable of growth on the scale Lincoln demonstrated?

  "The most remarkable thing about him was his tremendous power for growth," Current wrote. "He grew in sympathy, in the breadth of his humaneness, as he grew in other aspects of the mind and spirit." He argued that Lincoln succeeded in breaking through what he called the "narrow bounds" of his early environment.

  Current also wrote about the distorting effect of Lincoln's assassination. "The awful fact of the assassination falls between us and the man," he observed. "It is like a garish, bloodstained glass, in which all perspectives are distorted." That image of a bloodstained lens became one of the more memorable formulations in Lincoln scholarship: a warning that martyrdom warps historical judgment.

  His 1963 book Lincoln and the First Shot pushed further, arguing that Lincoln had a more sophisticated command of law, economics, and military tactics than earlier historians had credited. Current also used that book to address the claim that members of Lincoln's cabinet knew about the assassination conspiracy, a theory he worked to dismantle with archival evidence.

• 4. A Feud with Gore Vidal

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  Gore Vidal published his novel Lincoln in 1984. Current did not approve. He opened a public feud in the pages of The New York Review of Books, accusing Vidal of willfully distorting the historical record and misrepresenting Lincoln's views.

  Current reached for a specific example of what he considered Vidal's carelessness: the novelist had spelled "jewelry" and "practice" in the British way, which Current cited as evidence of "utter ignorance" of the linguistic differences between British and American English. He summed up his broader verdict in plain terms. "He is wrong on big as well as little matters," Current wrote. "Vidal simply doesn't know what he's talking about."

  Vidal shot back in kind. He argued that he used the agreed-upon American speech of the era and that, as a novelist, he was obliged to render events through a character's consciousness rather than through footnotes. He accused Current of never having read the book in full, of fault-finding, and of failing to distinguish between a novel and a biography. He described Current as "getting all tangled up in misread or misunderstood trivia."

  Vidal's sharpest counterpoint concerned Lincoln's views on colonization. He maintained that his portrayal of Lincoln as wanting to resettle freed slaves in Liberia came from a biography of Lincoln written by Current himself. That claim, if accurate, turned the dispute from a fight about Vidal's research into an argument about intellectual consistency. The feud ran on.

• 5. A Traveling Life in Teaching

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  Current taught at a long list of American institutions: Rutgers University, Hamilton College, Northern Michigan University, Lawrence University, Mills College, Salisbury State University, the University of Illinois, the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The breadth suggests a scholar willing to move, unwilling to settle into a single institutional home.

  His reach went well past the United States. He lectured in Chile, Japan, India, and Antarctica, a roster of destinations that says something about the international appetite for American Civil War history in the postwar decades. In 1959, he was named a Fulbright Professor in Munich, Germany. In 1962, he held the Harold Vyvyan Harmsworth Professorship of American History at Oxford University.

  He served as president of the Southern Historical Association in 1975, a notable appointment for a scholar whose work often pushed back against Lost Cause romanticism of the Confederacy. He published over 250 articles across his career. His papers eventually came to rest in the Rare Book Room of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, the institution where he spent a significant portion of his teaching life.

• 6. Late Work and Final Years

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  His first wife, Rose Bonar, died in 1983 after 45 years of marriage. The following year, 1984, Current married Marcia Ewing. Together they co-wrote a biography of the dancer Loie Fuller, published in 1997 under the title Loie Fuller, Goddess of Light.

  In 2000, the Abraham Lincoln Association gave him the Logan Hay Medal, and the Lincoln Forum created the Richard Nelson Current Award of Achievement in his name. That same year he received the Lincoln Prize for lifetime achievement. Three years later, in 2003, he published his final book: a collection of essays and stories by the Norwegian author Knut Hamsun, covering the years 1885 to 1949, with Current serving as translator.

  The translation project is easy to overlook beside the Lincoln shelf, but it points to a scholar whose curiosity ran wider than a single subject. Current died on the 26th of October, 2012, in Boston, and was buried in Greensboro, North Carolina. The date of his death fell just three weeks after his hundredth birthday, on the exact anniversary of his birth month.