Michael Lind has a new book about Abraham Lincoln, What Lincoln Believed, which he says is being kept out of the Lincoln Museum bookstore in Springfield (see below). On a quick skim through, it seems like a very Lindian book–I’d agree with some of it, disagree with some of it, and find it all interesting. I know and like Richard Norton Smith. I wonder what his side of this is?

Richard Norton Smith, the Republican director of the new Lincoln presidential library and museum in Springfield, Illinois, has pressured the director of the museum bookstore into canceling my signing of What Lincoln Believed at the bookstore, scheduled for four days from today (June 7, 2005). According to Amy Miller, the bookstore manager who had previously invited me to sign books there, not only will the Lincoln library bookstore not allow to sign books, but it also will not stock my book at all, thanks to Smith’s intervention.
This follows James McPherson’s denunciation in The Nation of my book for not whitewashing Lincoln’s less-than-contemporary views of race (McPherson previously had denounced the historians Lerone Bennett and William Harris, in the New York Times Book Review and The Nation, respectively, for the same reason). It now appears that Smith, like McPherson, is determined to spike my book?which, ironically, is a largely favorable appraisal of Lincoln–because like many historians I do not follow the new (and unsubstantiated) view that Lincoln became a modern color-blind liberal shortly before his death.