Yet, ironically enough, Sandburg did not set out to write an enduring epic. When he began his project in 1923, he intended only to do a Lincoln book for teenagers. He had collected Lincoln materials since his days at Lombard College in Galesburg, Illinois. Now he read voraciously in the sources, particularly in Herndon’s Lincoln. And he retraced Lincoln’s path across Illinois, chatting with plain folk as Herndon had done, looking for the Lincoln who lived in their imaginations and memories. As he worked, Sandburg strongly identified with “Abe” and even dressed, acted, and physically resembled the figure taking shape in his mind. “Like him,” Sandburg said, “I am a son of the prairie, a poor boy who wandered over the land to find himself and his mission in life.” Both were commoners from Illinois, both champions of the underdog, both great storytellers, and “both poets withall,” as Stuart Sherman said.
As it happened, another poet had the most influence on Sandburg as a Lincoln biographer. This was Walt Whitman, who before the Civil War had actually anticipated the kind of mythic Lincoln who subsequently emerged. In the rollicking preface to Leaves of Grass, first published in 1855, Whitman’s Poet Hero was “the equable man,” simple, generous, and large, who spoke for the common people and for national union. In 1856, with uncanny foresight, Whitman asserted that “I would be much pleased to see some heroic, shrewd, fully-informed, healthy bodied, middle-aged, beard-faced American blacksmith come down from the West across the Alleghanies, and walk into the Presidency, dressed in a clean suit of working attire, and with the tan all over his face, breast, and arms.” Four years later, Republican campaign propaganda depicted the rail-splitter candidate as almost exactly such a man.
In February, 1861, Whitman saw the President-elect as he passed through New York City on his way to Washington. Lincoln’s “look and gait” captivated Whitman—“his dark-brown complexion, seam’d and wrinkled yet canny-looking face, his black, bushy head of hair, disproportionately long neck, and his hands held behind him as he stood observing the people.” Here was a hero fit for the author of Leaves of Grass. From that moment on, Whitman idolized Lincoln and insisted that only the combined genius of Plutarch, Aeschylus, and Michelangelo—“assisted by Rabelais”—could have captured Lincoln’s likeness. A true portrait, in other words, must have the dimensions and powerful symbols of myth.
“He has a face like a hoosier Michel Angelo,” Whitman wrote three years later, “so awful ugly it becomes beautiful, with its strange mouth, its deep cut, criss-cross lines, and its doughnut complexion.” Then he wrote something that was to affect Carl Sandburg enormously: “My notion is, too, that underneath his outside smutched mannerism, and stories from third-class country bar-rooms (it is his humor,) Mr. Lincoln keeps a fountain of first-class practical telling wisdom. I do not dwell on the supposed failures of his government; he has shown, I sometimes think, an almost supernatural tact in keeping the ship afloat at all, with head steady, not only not going down, and now certain not to, but with proud and resolute spirit, and flag flying in sight of the world, menacing and high as ever.” Here was the mythic “equalizer of his age and land” who inhabited Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, a poet leader who in peace “speaks in the spirit of peace,” but in war “is the most deadly force of the war.”
In Lincoln, Whitman saw the archetypical Captain who was destined to lie “fallen cold and dead.” And after Lincoln did fall, the poet poured out his grief in “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” a melodic farewell to the leader he loved, “O powerful western fallen star,” “the sweetest, wisest soul of all my days and lands.” In 1886, broken down from a stroke, this “tender mother-man” with whiskered face and luminous blue-gray eyes, smelling of soap and cologne, wearing his gray felt hat tilted straight back, gave a memorial lecture about Lincoln which he repeated almost every year until his death in 1892. It was a ritual reenactment of Lincoln’s assassination, a poet’s celebration of a “sane and sacred death” that filtered “into the nation and race” and gave “a cement to the whole People, subtler, more underlying, than anything in written Constitution, or courts or armies.”
In Whitman’s writings, Sandburg found the central themes of the life he wanted to tell. He was already publishing verse that reflected Whitman’s influence and would soon be known as his heir, describing him as “the only distinguished epic poet in America.” But it was Whitman’s mythic vision of Lincoln that most captured Sandburg’s imagination, setting many of the expectations in treatment, mood, and archetype, as Justin Kaplan has pointed out, which Sandburg would try to satisfy in his biography. “In Lincoln,” Sandburg himself wrote, “the people of the United States could finally see themselves, each for himself and all together.” And he intended, Sandburg said, “to take Lincoln away from the religious bigots and the professional politicians and restore him to the common people.”
Sandburg became completely absorbed in his Lincoln enterprise, so much so that at times he “felt as if in a trance, saw automobiles as horses and wagons, and saw cities of brick and stone dissolve into lumber cottages and shanties.” What began as a teenagers’ book swelled into a massive “life and times” that took fifteen years to complete and ran to 3,765 pages in six published volumes: the two-volume Prairie Years, which appeared in 1928, and the four-volume War Years, which followed in 1939. Sandburg’s was a sprawling panorama, the literary equivalent of a Cecil B. DeMille motion-picture spectacular, with Lincoln himself alternately disappearing and reappearing in a rush of crowded scenes and events. And the Lincoln that emerges is not only a composite of the patron saint and Western hero; he is democracy’s mythic hero, a great commoner who rises to the White House from utter obscurity, an “All-American” President who personifies the American ideal that “a democracy can choose a man,” as Sandburg writes, “set him up with power and honor, and the very act does something to the man himself, raises up new gifts, modulations, controls, outlooks, wisdoms, inside the man, so that he is something else again than he was before they sifted him out and anointed him…Head of the Nation.”
Sandburg’s Lincoln captured the hearts of an entire generation of Americans, a generation that came of age in the cynical twenties, with its gang wars and brassy speakeasies, unbridled speculation and declining moral values, and that struggled through the Great Depression of the thirties, the worst crisis of American democracy since the Civil War. Small wonder that Sandburg won near universal acclaim. For poet Stephen Vincent Benét, Sandburg’s “mountain range of biography” was “a good purge for our own troubled time and for its wild-eyed fears. For here we see the thing working, clumsily, erratically, often unfairly, attacked and reviled by extremists of left and right, yet working and surviving nevertheless.” For Henry Bertram Hill of the Kansas City Star, Sandburg’s Lincoln was “an apotheosis of the American people as well as of Lincoln as the greatest exemplar of their essential worth and goodness.” For historian Henry Steele Commager, poets had always understood Lincoln best, and so it was “fitting that from the pen of a poet should come the greatest of all Lincoln biographies.” For playwright Robert E. Sherwood, it was “a monument that would live forever.”
Yet, as some critics pointed out, Sandburg’s Lincoln could not be regarded as authentic biography, as an approximation of the real-life Lincoln based on accurate detail. No, Sandburg was not after that Lincoln. He was after the mythic figure—the Man of the People who had always fascinated him the most. And proven fact and sound documentation did not impede the poet in his search. “He suggests,” as one critic said, “a bard sitting before a rude fireplace, chanting his hero tale with a poet’s repetitions and refrains.”
As The Prairie Years open, we find the future Head of the Nation born of ordinary pioneer stock on the cutting edge of the Kentucky frontier. What follows is a gripping story, a poetic story, and it abounds in fictional scenes and lyrical apocrypha. As a boy, Sandburg’s Lincoln shucks corn from early dawn till sundown and then reads books all night by the flickering fire. He kisses Green Taylor’s girl. H
e once fights William Grigsby and cries out (as did Herndon’s Lincoln), “I’m the big buck of this lick.” He lifts barefoot boys so they can leave muddy footprints on the ceiling of the Lincoln cabin. Later, as a New Salem clerk, he walks six miles to return a few cents a customer has overpaid on her bill. And, of course, he loves Ann Rutledge with an aching heart. “After the first evening in which Lincoln had sat next to her and found that bashful words tumbling from his tongue’s end really spelled themselves out into sensible talk, her face, as he went away, kept coming back. So often all else would fade out of his mind and there would be only this riddle of a pink-fair face, a mouth and eyes in a frame of light corn-silk hair. He could ask himself what it meant and search his heart for an answer and no answer would come. A trembling took his body and dark waves ran through him sometimes when she spoke so simple a thing as, ‘The corn is getting high, isn’t it?’” Which prompted Edmund Wilson to remark, “The corn is getting high indeed!”
When Ann dies, Sandburg’s Lincoln, like Herndon’s, is stricken with a lover’s grief: he wanders absently in the forest; he makes his way to the burying ground outside New Salem and lies with an arm across Ann’s grave. “In the evenings it was useless to try to talk with him,” Sandburg writes. “He sat by the fire one night as the flames licked up the cordwood and swept up the chimney to pass out into a driving storm-wind. The blowing weather woke some sort of lights in him and he went to the door and looked out into a night of fierce stumbling wind and black horizons. And he came back saying, ‘I can’t bear to think of her out there alone.’ And he clenched his hands, mumbling, ‘The rain and the storm shan’t beat on her grave.’”
Though he eventually recovers from Ann’s death, Sandburg’s Lincoln never forgets the love he felt for her.*
As he grows to maturity, Sandburg’s Lincoln is indigenously American, utterly shaped by the sprawling, unruly, pungent democracy of his day. He is simple, honest and ambitious, practical and wise. Professionally he is a homespun village lawyer and politician, always dressed in a rumpled suit and an old stovepipe hat. It is noticed among men that he has “two shifting moods,” one when he lapses into “a gravity beyond any bystander to penetrate,” the other when he recounts a “rollicking, droll story,” usually to illustrate some point about people or politics. In the company of his male friends, he can tell off-color jokes, too, and indulge in an expletive like “son-of-a-bitch.” He is a colorful and yet mystic man, a kind of prairie Socrates brimming with wilderness wit and prairie sagacity. Above all, his heart beats with the pulse of rural, working-class America, and he loves the common folk and revels in daily contact with them.
But behind his bucolic plainness is a profound and mystical spirit awaiting its call to greatness. And that call comes in the grim and terrible years that follow the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. Now Sandburg’s Lincoln is a ghost on the platform, explaining to the people that the Revolution and freedom really mean something and reminding them of forgotten oaths and wasted sacrifices. In his great debates with Stephen A. Douglas, Sandburg’s Lincoln is always one with the people, thrilling them with his “stubby, homely words.” For the folk masses, he is both “the Strange Friend and Friendly Stranger.” He is “something out of a picture book for children”—tall, bony, comical, haunted-looking, and sad. Already stories about him are spreading among the plain folk, and many sit brooding and talking about this “fabulous human figure of their own time.” By 1861, history has called him to his tragic destiny: his is “a mind, a spirit, a tongue, and a voice” for an American democracy caught in its greatest trial. As he leaves Illinois for Washington, the presidency, and the war years, voices cry out on the wind, “Goodbye, Abe.”
When he wrote The War Years, Sandburg abandoned poetical imaginings and produced a kind of symphonic documentary of the war and the man at its center. Though marred by a plethora of unauthenticated scenes and stories, the four volumes are full of the blood and stench—the sound and fury—of Civil War. And they capture all the immense tumult and confusion through which Lincoln day by day had to make his way. When we see the President, in between extensive passages on military and political developments in North and South alike, he is entirely an external Lincoln, an observed hero filtered to us through the vision and sensibilities of hundreds of witnesses who called at his White House office, from generals and politicians and office seekers to the infirm, the destitute, and the ordinary. By revealing Lincoln through the observations of others and relating him to almost everything that happened in his shell-torn land, Sandburg is trying to demonstrate that “the hopes and apprehensions of millions, their loves and hates, their exultation and despair, were reflected truthfully in the deep waters of Lincoln’s being,” as Robert Sherwood said.
In the “tornado years” of civil war, Sandburg’s Lincoln is both the hero and the instrument of the people. He is the umpire of an embattled Union, patiently sticking to the cherished middle way. When it comes to emancipation, he always follows the pulse of the people: with a genius for timing, he issues his proclamation only when that is what they want. Now “a piece of historic drama” has been played, and across the world, among the masses of people who create folk gods out of slender fact, there runs the story of “the Strong Man who arose in his might and delivered an edict, spoke a few words fitly chosen, and thereupon the shackles and chains fell from the arms and ankles of men, women, and children born to be chattels for toil and bondage.”
As the war rages on, Lincoln’s “skilled referee hand” guides the ship of state through cross winds of passion and cross plays of hate. Throughout he has the folk masses behind him. He is still their Friendly Stranger in a storm of death and destruction. Even during his lowest ebb in 1864, he remains the people’s President: he retains their love and loyalty even as Republican leaders raise a howl against his renomination and reelection. And he wins in 1864 because the wisdom of the people prevails.
Moreover, in the last long year of the war, Sandburg’s Lincoln does battle with the so-called radicals of the party—vindictive cynics like Charles Sumner and old Thad Stevens, who in Sandburg’s view want to exterminate the South’s ruling class and convert Dixie into “a vast graveyard of slaughtered whites, with Negro State governments established and upheld by Northern white bayonets.” But a mild and moderate Lincoln refuses to go along with them. He is now in his grandest hour, this Lincoln of The War Years, as he plans to reconstruct the South with tender magnanimity. He is the only man in the entire country who can peaceably reunite the sections. But, as in a Greek tragedy, Lincoln is murdered before he can bind up the nation’s wounds and heal the antagonisms of his divided countrymen. In North and South, common people weep aloud, realizing the painful truth of the old folk adage that a tree is measured best when it is down.
“To a deep river,” writes Sandburg, “to a far country, to a by-and-by whence no man returns, had gone the child of Nancy Hanks and Tom Lincoln, the wilderness boy who found far lights and tall rainbows to live by, whose name even before he died had become a legend inwoven with men’s struggle for freedom the world over.” There was the story of how Count Leo Tolstoy, traveling into the Caucasus of czarist Russia, encountered tribesmen demanding to know about Lincoln, the “greatest general and greatest ruler of the world.” Says Sandburg: “To Tolstoy the incident proved that in far places over the earth the name of Lincoln was worshipped and the personality of Lincoln had become a world folk legend.”
Sandburg ended his narrative with Lincoln’s funeral in Springfield. But others have added an epilogue implied by Sandburg’s story. Without Father Abraham, the epilogue goes, the nation foundered in the harsh years of reconstruction, as an all-too-mortal President succumbed to “vengeful radicals” on Capitol Hill. Alas, how much better reconstruction would have been had Father Abraham only lived. How much more easily a divided nation would have set aside the war years and come together again in a spirit of mutual respect and harmony. There would never have been an impeachment trial, never a radical r
econstruction, never an army of occupation, never a Ku Klux Klan, never all those racial troubles to haunt later generations, if only Father Abraham had not died that terrible day in 1865.
And so Lincoln comes to us in the mists of mythology. Still, I have no quarrel with this Lincoln, so long as we make a careful distinction between myth and history. Myth, after all, is not an untrue story to be avoided like some dread disease. On the contrary, myth carries a special truth of its own—a truth, however, that is different from historical truth, from what actually happened. In the case of Lincoln, the myth is what Americans wish the man had been, not necessarily the way he was in real life. That is why Sandburg’s Lincoln has such irresistible appeal to us. He is a “baffling and completely inexplicable” hero who embodies the mystical genius of our nation. He possesses what Americans have always considered their most noble traits—honesty, unpretentiousness, tolerance, hard work, a capacity to forgive, a compassion for the underdog, a clear-sighted vision of right and wrong, a dedication to God and country, and an abiding concern for all. As I have said elsewhere, no real-life person has ever risen to such mythic proportions, to epitomize all that we have longed to be since 1776. No real-life person can ever rise to such proportions. So we have invented a Lincoln who fulfills our deepest needs as a people—a Father Abraham who in the stormy present still provides an example and shows us the way. The Lincoln of mythology carries the torch of the American dream, a dream of noble idealism, of self-sacrifice and common humanity, of liberty and equality for all.
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