On a recent trip to the nation’s capital, my son and I visited the place where Lincoln died, a boardinghouse across the street from Ford’s Theater. It’s a museum now, as you might expect, whose exhibits testify to the immense power Lincoln’s memory exerts, regardless of political belief.

Conflicting visions of his motives and character roll off the presses year after year. In fact, the museum has built a pile of books two stories high, a brave project, given that sooner or later, the historical Babel must punch through the roof. What a fitting metaphor for the man who towered above his contemporaries in more ways than one.

Consequently, it’s fair to ask, “Why another?,” even as the echo rebounds, “Why not?” But Stephen Harrigan has made a strong case with his novel about the political formation of his hero in 1830s and 1840s Illinois. However, for better and worse, the story begins just after his assassination in 1865, as the town of Springfield mourns over the coffin that has made its sad voyage from Washington. Two friends of his—one fictional, one real—talk about setting the record straight about their late friend, a task that Harrigan seems to have zealously taken up. That too, is for better and worse.

Narrating this tale is Micajah (Cage) Weatherby, a Springfield poet and businessman, the author’s brilliant creation, a man who befriends Lincoln during the Black Hawk War of 1832. As a convinced abolitionist, freer with his passions, less concerned with how things look than how they feel, he’s a perfect foil for Lincoln, who’s always looking over his shoulder to see what the electorate thinks and binds his heart to be ruled by law.

It’s not that Lincoln the politico lacks any sense of right and wrong; on the contrary, he’s got a very highly developed one. However, it’s always subservient to his belief in order and justice, which is where he thinks honor lies, and honor means everything to him.

It’s no small task to write Lincoln’s character, but Harrigan does marvelously well, I think, partly by contrast to the young lawyer’s friends, all young men on the make. But to describe A Friend of Mr. Lincoln as a character study, even of such a momentous nature, does the book injustice.

Harrigan has re-created the period and its tensions, whether over slavery, who gets what government contract, or who’s murdered whom. Everyone must take sides, which causes both personal and political animosities. Harrigan offers court cases, romances, near riots, a duel, and, most vividly, Lincoln’s stormy courtship of Mary Todd. Cage helps his friend through terrible bouts of depression and saves his life on at least two occasions, for which, one may argue, he was poorly repaid.

I dislike prologues and retrospective first chapters. I understand why Harrigan begins his story in 1865; he wants to show how the Lincolns, chiefly Mary, have thrust Cage out of their lives when once he was intimate friend to both. But that chapter is entirely unnecessary, and the “set-the-record-straight” talk is a timeworn device for telling a story. This one needs no excuses.

More seriously, I think, is Harrigan’s apparent ax to grind. He seems determined to accent the less attractive parts of Lincoln’s character, and though I like that as an antidote to the legend, I think the author may have gotten too caught up in his cause. What’s more, he often tells you what he wants you to think, when he’s more than capable of showing it. And from time to time, these statements confused me, because the story had led me to a different conclusion entirely.

Nevertheless, I like this novel. As Lincoln himself might have said, it reminds me of a story; this one’s from the museum. When one of the president’s enemies accused him of being two-faced, he replied, “If I had another face, why would I show you this one?” That’s what Stephen Harrigan has done—show Lincoln’s different face. ( )

I loved this book. It is a look into Lincoln’s life while he was still a lawyer in Illinois, and courted Mary Todd. He accomplishes what good historical fiction does better than non-fiction. He makes people come alive. His marriage to Todd seems based more on keeping his word than love and he regretted this union from before the marriage. Bright, comedic and yet prone to depression, Lincoln is shown to have many different facets to his personality. ( )

Abraham Lincoln is one of the best-known presidents in the history of the United States so most people are familiar with the story of his life. They know about the poverty of Lincoln’s boyhood, the prodigious strength he developed as a teen, his debate skills and presidency during the Civil War, and his tragic end. The most common gap in most peoples’ Lincoln biography is the one during which he was a young lawyer and aspiring Whig politician – the 1830s and 1840s. Stephen Harrigan’s novel, A Friend of Mr. Lincoln spans precisely this period of the young Lincoln’s life.

The “friend” of Lincoln’s referenced in the book’s title is the fictional “Cage” Weatherby, an aspiring poet from Massachusetts who has made his way to Springfield, Illinois. As yet unpublished, Weatherby derives his income largely from the small boardinghouse he owns in the soon-to-be state capitol. Weatherby and Lincoln have much in common: a deep love of poetry, reaching young manhood penniless, an uneasy way with the young women of the day, and a deep desire to leave their marks on the world rather than just passing through it. As a result, the two become fast friends almost from the moment they first meet. And they will remain good friends until the day that Mary Todd marries Lincoln and decides that Weatherby can no longer be part of Lincoln’s life.

Even as a young lawyer, Lincoln was a man consumed by political ambition. Already a veteran of the Indian wars, he stood out in any crowd he was a part of, and that was just as attributable to his never ending supply of funny stories as it was to his unusually tall frame. Harrigan’s plot, though, reminds us that Lincoln and Weatherby were young men who faced, and often succumbed to, the very same temptations that all young men encounter at that point of their lives. Lincoln has as many vulgar stories to tell his male friends in private as he has stories suitable for mixed company – and he enjoys telling them maybe even more than his audience loves hearing them. Early on, Mr. Lincoln envisioned himself in Washington D.C. as a Whig congressman – a dream that finally came true for him.

The Abraham Lincoln of A Friend of Mr. Lincoln is a young man easily smitten by a pretty face and even more easily intimidated by a woman strong enough and bold enough to take the initiative in a relationship. He is also a man so prone to clinical depression that, on at least two occasions, romantic encounters left him so suicidal that Cage Weatherby and others placed him under literal suicide watches.

But it is the portion of the book that recounts Lincoln’s months spent on the Illinois legal circuit, during which he and a small team of lawyers and judges road horses from town to town trying court cases under rather primitive conditions, that is the most memorable. During this period, Cage Weatherby learns that Lincoln is very much a man of his time and place. He is willing to make whatever backdoor political deals might get him closer to Washington; he is as willing to take the cases of slave owners as he is to defend escaped slaves; and he will abandon his best friend in order to keep peace at home with his wife.

Cage Weatherby, however, is the true central character of A Friend of Mr. Lincoln, and he is a man who proves to be every bit as interesting as Lincoln during this period of Lincoln’s life. Both men are busy living their “real lives” while portraying themselves to the public as something other than what they are. Harrigan has written a coming of age novel for both men, one that fans of historical fiction will very much enjoy. ( )