By the time The People, Yes was published in 1936, Sandburg was a mature biographer and was well on the way toward completing his life of Lincoln. He had spent years researching, thinking, and writing about the Great Emancipator. The long Lincoln poem here, No. 57 of The People, Yes, is an overview of the president and is studded with his quotes. It shows him as a humorist, democrat, philosopher, historian, poet, man of the common man, leader of the people.

“The Long Shadow of Lincoln: A Litany” was written during the dark days of World War II. Sandburg for many years had been conscious of Lincoln’s “long shadow,” which compelled him to draw parallels between Lincoln and Roosevelt. He wrote President Roosevelt, on March 29, 1935, that he was starting the final volume of the Lincoln biography and that his eyes and ears were in two eras: “You are the best light of democracy that has occupied the White House since Lincoln. You have set in motion trends that to many are banners of dawn.” Sandburg also saw the long shadow of Lincoln cast over Roosevelt’s leadership in World War II, from 1941 to 1945.

The earliest of the five poems about Lincoln that Sandburg did not publish is dated 1914 and titled “Abraham Lincoln’s Father and Mother.” It shows Sandburg’s early thinking as a biographer. He knew that questions had been raised about the legitimacy of Lincoln’s mother, Nancy Hanks. William Herndon, Lincoln’s law partner, said Lincoln had told him that Nancy Hanks was illegitimate, the daughter of “a well-bred Virginia farmer or planter.” According to Herndon, Lincoln believed that “his power of analysis, his logic, his mental activity, his ambition” came from his unknown grandfather. That Lincoln’s mother was illegitimate is now widely accepted by scholars.

Sandburg also knew from his reading that doubt had been cast on Lincoln’s own legitimacy. Herndon thought that the questions about Lincoln’s paternity “were an outgrowth of the campaign of 1860.” However accurate that speculation might be, over the years at least seven men were alleged to have been the father of Abraham Lincoln. Six years after Sandburg wrote “Abraham Lincoln’s Father and Mother,” William E. Barton demolished all such rumors and allegations in The Paternity of Abraham Lincoln. It is now accepted as fact that Thomas Lincoln was the father of Abraham.

While Sandburg was aware of the rumors about Thomas and Nancy Hanks Lincoln, his writings about them were intended to be poetic, not factual. Later, as a biographer, he would insist on more substantial facts, though even in the biography his presentation of Lincoln, his family, and his times would remain poetic.

Two of the poems—“Lincoln” and “Mr. Lincoln and His Gloves”—appear to have a common source. In 1861, on his way to Washington for his inauguration, Lincoln appeared in New York at the Verdi opera A Masked Ball wearing black gloves instead of the more fashionable white ones. Because of the black gloves, Lincoln’s large hands, and his shambling gait, a hostile press immediately dubbed him a “gorilla” and a “baboon.”