"[L]ove the President personally"1: The Abraham Lincoln-cult in Walt Whitman's "O Captain! My Captain!" and John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln

This paper considers Walt Whitman’s poem “O Captain! My Captain!” and John Ford’s film Young Mr. Lincoln to rethink the various nuances of the Abraham Lincoln-cult in American collective memory. The mythologisation of Abraham Lincoln aligns with the history of the American Civil War and the President’s complex relationship with the legislative abolition of slavery in the country. This paper will analyse the historical complexities of these phenomena vis-à-vis the figure of Abraham Lincoln, using Whitman’s poem and Ford’s film as points of reference to explore how American democracy created the cult of Lincoln to consolidate a variant of democratic understanding shaped by a sense of contested radicality. To achieve the same, the paper will closely examine both literary and cinematic texts, while also incorporating the heterogeneity of American history that underpin the mythologisation of President Lincoln.