by Adam Gopnik
In describing the style that he absorbed from all that reading and writing, we always talk about “clarity” and “simplicity.” That makes some sense. Talking to a Connecticut minister on a train in 1860, Lincoln is purported to have said that “among my earliest recollections I remember how, when a mere child, I used to get irritated when anybody talked to me in a way I could not understand.” Ever since, he had struggled to put each thought “in language plain enough, as I thought, for any boy I knew to comprehend.” But every prose style is thought to be lucid by the stylist; even fancy poetic manners are thought to give the gift of clarifying metaphor. Both Dr. Johnson's “nodosities” and E. B. White's faux- naïf appeal to clarity and simplicity. (Clarity and simplicity are like naturalness and the return to the classical that occur every year in women's fashion—every mode, no matter how outlandish, appeals to them. Short skirts are liberating, and so are long, the fitted bodice emphasizes a woman's natural lines, and the flowing tunic frees her to move as she likes, naturally.)
All good styles are lucid, but each is lucid in its own way, and in a way shaped by the sounds of its time. We admire Lincoln for being so literary, but when we say that Lincoln was a great writer, it isn't his poetry we're thinking of; it's his speeches. He was a great writer whose form was talking. That was natural. The frontier–Southern fringe society in which he was growing up was, first to last, a rhetorical society, and an oratorical society. Most periods have a manner or style or form that's primary to the way the people of the time organize their feelings about the world. Stephen Greenblatt has shown us how much Elizabethan England was a theatrical society, one in which the pageantry of public life, the ambiguous rituals of religion, even the horrific public executions, flowed in some way into a shared vision of the world as stage.
The frontier America of Lincoln's youth was first of all a rhetorical society, where the ability to speak in public, at length, was central to social ambitions; giving a speech in 1838 in Illinois was the equivalent of putting on a play in 1598 in London, the thing you did into which everything else flowed. (We are, by turn—and a writer says it with sadness—essentially a society of images: a viral YouTube video, an advertising image, proliferates and sums up our desires; anyone who can't play the image game has a hard time playing any public game at all.)
The two most prominent strains of rhetoric that ran through the period and the place were the biblical and the classical; they remained so well into the years of the Civil War. Reading Edward Everett's Gettysburg address, the two- hour set speech that preceded Lincoln's and was meant to be the real event of the Gettysburg commemoration, one is startled to see how relentlessly classical it is in tone and analogy: Everett goes on and on about Marathon and the Greeks and the Persian invasions in order to “elevate” Gettysburg and the Union soldiers. Lincoln's rhetoric is, instead, deliberately biblical. (It is difficult to find a single obviously classical reference in any of his speeches.) Lincoln, in turn, had mastered the sound of the King James Bible so completely that he could recast abstract issues of constitutional law in biblical terms, making the proposition that Texas and New Hampshire should be forever bound by a single post office sound like something right out of Genesis.
But though those two—the biblical and the classical—were bedrock, it was a society full of sounds. Mark Twain, whose books give us a better sense of the background to Lincoln's language than any other—William Dean Howells did not call Twain “the Lincoln of our literature” for nothing—shows this as well as anyone. Part of the joy of reading Huck Finn is that it's an encyclopedia of the rhetorical styles in small frontier communities before the Civil War: the debased Shakespearean of the Duke and the Dauphin, the evangelical faux piety of the widow and the judge, orotund and periodic, the genuinely funny tall- tale hyperbole of pap Finn giving it to the govment—a huge range of talk, inflected by Walter Scott at one moment and by classical learning at another, the whole given the necessary gravel of folk obscenity and tall tale.
Part of Lincoln's gift as a speaker was an ability to run easily from one of these dialects to another. He could use both Petroleum Nasby and Shakespeare as references; he is said to have recast Balzac in terms of local people. We all have this gift to one degree or another—it is nearly all that's meant by social skill, and Lincoln was socially skilled; he knew how to make people like him.
Of all those kinds and ways of speaking, though, the one that Lincoln used most often in his oratory was that of close- reasoned legal argument. Lincoln was a lawyer before he was anything else, politician or saint or commander in chief. If in the past decades we've learned a lot about Lincoln's language, the past few years have helped us see Lincoln as a legal man. Brian R. Dirck and Julie M. Fenster, among others, have given a newly sharp picture of Lincoln as traveling lawyer on the Illinois circuit.
Seen from outside, Lincoln's legal years were a preparation for his destiny; seen from inside, Lincoln's years as a lawyer were his life. Every life felt from inside is an epic; for Lincoln, seen from outside, the epic quality comes with the presidency and the war. But from inside it was the rise to the law, and to the bourgeois comfort that the law offered, that was the event of his existence. The real ascent of Lincoln is not only from log cabin to White House; it is from backwoods to the bar. Despite all that childhood reading, he had come perilously close to spending his life as a manual laborer. After he settled in New Salem, Illinois, in 1831, he flirted with becoming a blacksmith before an unsuccessful spell as a small storekeeper led him to the more mind-centered world of deputy to the county surveyor.
In those days, before the guild mentality had taken the professions by the throat, it was still possible to make yourself a lawyer rather than being made one by a professional school. Lincoln did. Between 1831 and 1836, he did the reading that you had to do to pass the bar exam—he seems to have mastered Blackstone's Commentaries, hardly a day's work—and set himself up as a practicing lawyer in Springfield, the county seat. The law then was more like real estate now, a profession you started out in early and learned from the ground up. So without “formal” training—with nothing but a lot of reading—Lincoln became a practicing lawyer before he was thirty and soon one of the most admired in his state.
In the old hagiography Lincoln the lawyer was a fiery folksy fighter against injustice; to more recent, disillusioned revisionists, he was a corporate lawyer, a “railroad” lawyer doing the work of the new industrialists. The new scholarship shows that both accounts are overdrawn. (Lincoln did do some well- paid work for the railroads, but he took on cases against their interests too.) The bulk of his legal work, which took up the bulk of his professional life, was the predictable work of a small- town lawyer with a wide practice: property disputes, petty criminal cases, family arguments over money, neighbor at war with neighbor, bankruptcies, and, oddly, libel suits in which local women defended themselves against charges of prostitution. His practice was the legal equivalent of a small- town doctor's, treating head colds, lice, scarlet fever, and a rare case or two of venereal disease.
What he learned was not faith in a constant search for justice but the habit of empathetic detachment. The “grease” is what the lawyers of his time called all the lubricants of the law— conciliation, backroom deals, plea bargaining—that allowed con flict to be minimized and trials to be avoided. When we look closely even at the height of the Civil War, Brian Dirck says, “we can see Lincoln the President trying hard to apply a lawyer's grease to the shrill machinery of war.” But Lincoln's magnanimity, which was real, began in his work as an Illinois lawyer and should not, Dirck says, be “sentimentalized as a form of kindliness…. His magnanimity was also a function of his lawyerly sense of distance from other people's motives, and his appreciation—honed by decades of witnessing nearly every imaginable form of strife in Illinois's courtrooms—of the value of reducing friction as much as possible.” The lack of vindictiveness that Lincoln displayed (his favorite expression, his secretary John Hay once explained, was “I a
m in favor of short statutes of limitations in politics”) was the daily requirement of a small- town lawyer. Lincoln believed in letting go; his magnanimity was more strategic than angelic.
But it's also apparent that Lincoln loved the law because he loved the life it led to. Although as a campaign stunt he allowed the image of himself as a rail- splitter to overwhelm the reality of his role as a shrewd expensive practicing lawyer, there can't be any doubt that this boy who had always loved talking and, despite his strength, disliked manual labor was ambitious for a middle- class existence. The law got him a life; the grease got him the goods. Before Lincoln was ambitious for equality, or power, or even prestige, he was ambitious to be a professional man with a big house and a happy family. There are no more telling pictures of Lincoln than those that show him standing on the porch of his big frame house at Eighth and Jackson—bought in 1844, greatly enlarged in 1856—in Springfield. They are the least “Lincoln- like” of all the portraits, not the grave martyr of the nation but a tall man with enough money to build a big house and be proud of it. (Poor boys count their houses by the number of windows they contain; his had seventeen!) His marriage to Mary Todd, for all the erotic passion and cryptic melancholia that ran between them, was first of all a hypergamous marriage—he was marrying up, into a higher- class family than a Kentucky hardscrabble boy could ever have expected to end up in.
Lincoln was a man of a house and a marriage and a family. The Lincolns lived well—by the standards of the day, very well, and by the standards of a boy from the backwoods who, as poor boys don't, had never forgotten his poverty, it must have seemed impossibly well. Daniel Mark Epstein recently composed a loving and funny inventory of all the furniture and accessories that filled the Springfield house: globes of the world and the stars above, three- branch candlesticks and French porcelain pitchers, mirrors with curved legs in gilt frames. It was a Biedermeier idea of heaven, of the kind that was spreading throughout Europe and America at the time.
It was, as well, a place made for a family. In an age when children came increasingly in twos and threes and fours instead of eights and nines and tens, and when there was a reasonable chance that a child who survived the first uncertain years would thrive long after, the attachment of parents to children and, for the first time in a long time, of fathers to children, was very real and very important. Lincoln was away, by the account of his oldest son, Robert, too much of the time, on the circuit arguing cases or else out making speeches. But when he was home, perhaps to over-compensate, he was home; there are no more appealing images of Lincoln than those of him playing with and spoiling his children—spoiling them to the point where the Lincolns’ lax child-rearing methods became a schande among the neighbors. He carried them on his shoulders, held their hands as they danced him down the street, let them run riot in his law office. There is no surer cure for a melancholy man than the presence of small children, and it was a cure that Lincoln took whenever, and as often as, he could (a joy that did not accompany that other cure, the mercury pills that, it is now argued persuasively, he treated himself with in order to cure what he imagined was an incipient case of syphilis).
In one way, then, Lincoln learned in the law, and always kept, a sense that it is better to avoid an argument if you can. But his ambitions remained, as they had always been, fiercely political, and one of the things he found in the law was a new style of political argument.
In politics and on the stage, rhetoric and persuasion are usually essentially the same thing. Say it neatly and make them nod. But in the law, rhetoric and argument sit in constant tension. Eloquence is part of what a lawyer needs, but he also learns, both as a way of preparing for the judge and as a way of impressing the jury what is in some ways the opposite of eloquence: the close crawl across the facts of a case, the enumerating and deliberating and even pettifogging case making that keeps the law so exasperating and opaque to nonlawyers. And it was the law that Lincoln chose, and though he practiced with occasional bursts of eloquence, most of what we know about his practice suggests that he was as good at the dull procedural part as at the wound- up rug- chewing part, and probably better.
It is the addition of this kind of law talk to high talk that makes Lincoln's rhetoric special. What strikes a newcomer to Lincoln's speeches is how rare those famous cadences are; their simple resonant language—“with malice towards none; with charity for all,” the opening and concluding lines of the Gettysburg Address—is memorable in part because there isn't much of it. The majority of Lincoln's public utterances are narrowly, sometimes brilliantly lawyerly—even, on occasion, crafted to give an appearance of inevitability to oratorical conclusions that are not well supported by the chain of reasoning that precedes them. The undramatic small- print language in which Lincoln offered the Emancipation Proclamation is the most famous instance of his mastery of anti-heroic rhetoric. (Karl Marx said that it reminded him of “ordinary summonses sent by one lawyer to another.”)
That was what it was meant to sound like. The rhetorical disjunction between the windup and the pitch was part of the performance. Lincoln believed in narrow legalism because he believed that legalism wasn't narrow. The attempt is made, frequently, to explain away these dull, odd, disjointed phrases, but the habit of legal argument—with its tedium and its hairsplitting and even its dubious distinctions and special pleading—is part of Lincoln's rhetoric too.
Lincoln's sense of legal argument as the foundation of liberal eloquence worked itself out over time, but it was at the center of his mind from the beginning. In his first important public speech, the Address Before the Young Men's Lyceum, in Springfield in 1838, Lincoln declared a radical insistence on “reason” to be the only acceptable form of public discourse, the cure for the prevalence and epidemic of violence in American life.
Lincoln was arguing for something, but above all he was arguing against something, and that was the code of honor that insisted that a higher law lay outside mere procedural obedience. It is hard now to grasp the cultural authority that the code of passionate honor—with its elaborate rituals of feuds and duels—held in the period, and the primacy that it seemed to give to the South. Not merely the political edge but the poetic priority seemed to lie with the feudal and honorable South against the commercial and mouthy North. (It was a cultural advantage that persisted right up through, and perhaps beyond, the Atlanta premiere of Gone with the Wind.)
It was the toleration, even the admiration, that this extralegal code inspired, with its violent consequences for public life, that the young Lincoln set out, ambitiously, to end. He begins by asking, presciently what threat one might expect to see to American “political institutions,” the republican rules passed on by the Founders. Only one thing, he says, has that potential, and it has “pervaded the country,” springing up “among the pleasure hunting masters of Southern slaves, and the order loving citizens of the land of steady habits.” That thing is uncontrolled violence, set off by mass emotion and intended to end debate. Reviewing recent “horror- striking” scenes of lynch law and mob violence— gamblers hanged, Negroes murdered, “a mulatto man, by the name of McIntosh, … seized in the street, dragged to the suburbs of the city, chained to a tree, and actually burned to death; and all within a single hour from the time he had been a freeman…. Such are the effects of mob law”—Lincoln insisted that salvation for America lay only in extreme proceduralism, in obeying laws as though they were religious diktats:
Let every American, every lover of liberty, every well wisher to his posterity, swear by the blood of the Revolution, never to violate in the least particular, the laws of the country; and never to tolerate their violation by others…. Let reverence for the laws, be breathed by every American mother, to the lisping babe, that prattles on her lap—let it be taught in schools, in seminaries, and in colleges;—let it be written in Primmers, spelling books, and in Almanacs…. And, in short, let it become the political religion of the nation.
The emphasis, like the passion, is in the
original.
Many familiar Lincolnian ironies are in embryo here: the passionate assertion of the dispassionate case for legalism—“never to violate in the least particular,” a tall order for a frontier people— and absolutist morality and authoritarian legalism seen not as conflicting but as complementary. The end of the law is to reconcile different interests and let them live together without undue fanaticism—and everyone should have a fanatic attachment to that end.
Lincoln then goes on to make a subtle argument for the new political principle. Emotion does play a role in political life; ideas of sacred honor and moral ideals not yet embodied in law do count, or, rather, they did count once—they were part of the invention of the country, not part of its perpetuation: “Passion has helped us; but can do so no more. It will in future be our enemy. Reason, cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason, must furnish all the materials for our future support and defence.”
Most students of the Lyceum speech see it as apprentice work, interesting chiefly because it suggests the possibility of a kind of democratic dictator, a giver of rules, as a not entirely displeasing possibility to the young Lincoln. But there is more to the speech than that; the originality lies in the radicalism of its case for reason. Lincoln's argument was simple but original: the curse of American life was violence; its cure was law. Although Lincoln was a Southerner, nothing could be more remote from the Southern cult of honor or idea of noble vengeance. Cold calculation, the dispassionate parsing of the people of the Northern land of steady habits, was the path to the future.