James Garfield Randall

Background

James Garfield Randall was born on June 4, 1881 in Indianapolis, Indiana, the son of Horace Randall, a businessman, and Ellen Amanda Kregelo Randall.

Education

He attended Indianapolis public schools and received the B. A. degree from Butler College in 1903. The following year he earned the M. A. degree in history from the University of Chicago, and he received his doctorate from that institution in 1911.

Career

Randall was slow in gaining recognition as a historian. He held a number of temporary appointments as a graduate student; the first permanent position he could secure was at Roanoke College in 1912.

Neither appointment as Harrison postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania in 1916 nor service as historian of the United States Shipping Board during World War I opened avenues to professional advancement, and after the armistice the best job Randall could find was at a small school, Richmond College.

Finally, in 1920, he was invited to the University of Illinois as assistant professor. He remained at that institution until his retirement, becoming associate professor in 1924 and professor in 1930. At Urbana, he found the time, the library resources, and the emotional tranquillity that permitted him to push ahead with his scholarly work. He discovered stimulating colleagues and enjoyed working closely with the graduate students who flocked to his seminar.

In 1926 he published his first book, Constitutional Problems Under Lincoln, which promptly became a standard work. Although Randall taught courses in constitutional history, Southern history, and historical methodology, he increasingly specialized in the study of the Civil War years.

At the urging of Allan Nevins he prepared a large general history, The Civil War and Reconstruction (1937), which served as a text for a generation of college students. Before beginning this work he had begun to think of writing a life of Abraham Lincoln, and his commitment to the subject was confirmed after Allen Johnson commissioned him to prepare the long sketch of Lincoln for the Dictionary of American Biography.

In 1945 the first two volumes of Randall's magisterial Lincoln the President appeared; a third volume was published in 1952. The final volume, of which Randall had written about half before illness compelled him to lay it aside, was completed by Richard Nelson Current and was issued in 1955. Randall also wrote numerous articles on the Lincoln presidency, the best of which he collected in Lincoln the Liberal Statesman (1947). Randall's main contribution to historiography was the stimulus he gave to scholarly interest in Lincoln and the Civil War. Most books in these fields had been written by journalists, ministers, military history buffs, and other amateurs; professional historians tended to consider these topics less suitable for scholarly investigation than, for example, the founding of the colonies or the westward movement.

Randall helped change this view by insisting upon the most rigorous standards of scholarship, both for himself and for the twenty-six students who completed doctoral dissertations under his direction. He examined unused manuscript collections; he discarded myths, including the legend of Lincoln's love for Ann Rutledge; and he stressed political, constitutional, and diplomatic developments, rather than the conventional military history of the Civil War. Randall's portrait of Lincoln is complex.

Lincoln the President received both the Bancroft Prize and the Loubat Prize for distinguished work in American history, and Randall was elected president of the Illinois State Historical Society, the Mississippi Valley Historical Association, and the American Historical Association. He was not able to read his presidential address on "historianship" before the last of these associations, for by December 1952 he was weakened by leukemia, from which he died in Urbana, Illinois, two months later.

Achievements

• Along with Avery Craven, Randall came to be identified as one of the principal "revisionist" historians who questioned the inevitability of the Civil War.

Works

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  • Constitutional Problems Under Lincoln (Classic Reprint)

    (Excerpt from Constitutional Problems Under Lincoln It is...)

  • Constitutional Problems Under Lincoln (Classic Reprint)

    (Excerpt from Constitutional Problems Under Lincoln It i...)

  • Has the Lincoln Theme Been Exhausted? (Classic Reprint)

    (Excerpt from Has the Lincoln Theme Been Exhausted? Some...)

  • Has the Lincoln Theme Been Exhausted? (Classic Reprint)

    (Excerpt from Has the Lincoln Theme Been Exhausted? Some ...)

  • The Confiscation Of Property During The Civil War (1913)

    (This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of th...)

  • Mr. Lincoln (Classic Reprint)

    (Excerpt from Mr. Lincoln I am happy to acknowledge my co...)

  • The Civil War and Reconstruction

Politics

Randall's belief that the war should have been avoided was not, as in the case of some other revisionists, the consequence of disillusionment with Wilsonian idealism, for Wilson always remained one of his heroes.

Nor was it a reflection of isolationist sentiment during the years before World War II, for he strongly favored American intervention against Nazi Germany. Rather, it was the result of Randall's temperamental aversion to any deterministic interpretation of history - particularly the economic interpretation popularized by Charles A. Beard - and it reflected his ingrained distrust of public figures who assumed rigid ideological positions. Although a few critics, mostly from New England, attacked Randall's work because of his alleged indifference to the moral issue of slavery, historians as a whole warmly welcomed it, as did the general public.

Views

While he greatly admired the president's humor, homely wisdom, and pragmatic spirit, he was often sharply critical of Lincoln's actions and policies. He felt that Lincoln was inexperienced and poorly informed in the secession crisis but he rejected the theory that the president deliberately provoked war at Fort Sumter. He praised Lincoln's rhetoric and grudgingly appreciated his political skill, but he regretted his failure to lead the Congress and deplored his interference with the military plans of General George B. McClellan. Randall depicted Lincoln as being at war with the Radicals in his own party, and he bitterly lamented the failure of Congress to accept the president's generous program of Reconstruction.

Connections

In 1911 he married his childhood sweetheart, Edith Laura Abbott, who died in 1913. They had no children. From his second wife, Ruth Elaine Painter Randall, whom he married in 1917, he received affection, encouragement, and unwavering loyalty.

Father:

Horace Randall

A businessman

Mother:

Ellen Amanda Kregelo Randall

Spouse:

Ruth Elaine Painter Randall

Spouse:

Edith Laura Abbott