Abraham Lincoln in his Times Chapter 20 Politics, Race, and the Culture Wars Part 2

Abraham Lincoln in his Times Chapter 20 Politics, Race, and the Culture Wars Part 2

The author of Abraham Africanus I , Alexander del Mar, was a New York–based financial journalist and historian who fiercely opposed the Civil War and Lincoln’s policies. After the war, del Mar was slated to be the secretary of the treasury under the Democrat Horatio Seymour, who campaigned against Ulysses S. Grant under the motto: “This is a White Man’s Country; Let White Men Rule.” 25 A similar view informs  Abraham Africanus I.  For two decades,  readers had gobbled up pulp fiction about the “mysteries” of American cities, which sensationalized debauchery and wickedness behind the closed doors of the rich and famous.  Abraham Africanus I  offered, in the words of its subtitle,  Mysteries of the White House . The fifty-seven-page pamphlet, which sold for fifteen cents, blended common elements of the mysteries genre—hidden corruption, substance abuse, demonic conspiracies—and pointed them at Lincoln. The novella has Lincoln, here called Bram, drinking liquor by his fireplace when, in an alcoholi…