Abraham Lincoln

by Stephen B. Oates

  So much for the “Massa Linkun” myth. “In the final analysis,” Bennett writes, “Lincoln must be seen as the embodiment, not the transcendence, of the American tradition, which is, as we all know, a racist tradition. In his inability to rise above that tradition, Lincoln, often called ‘the noblest of all Americans,’ holds up a flawed mirror to the American soul.”

  Delete “flawed,” and there is nothing in Bennett’s remarks with which Dixon, Vardaman, or King’s ranting correspondents would disagree. That angry blacks and white segregationists should embrace the same Lincoln myth is one of the great ironies of modern race relations.

  By the 1970s and 1980s, Lincoln as honky had become the conventional wisdom among younger blacks, particularly in the academies, and among disillusioned whites too. The most impassioned debunking of the Great Emancipator came from the pen of Vincent Harding, a black historian who had marched with Martin Luther King, taught at Spelman College, and plunged into the radical black-studies movement that had burst forth on college campuses. In 1981, Harding published There Is a River to rave notices from prominent black and white Americans. The “river” in the title is a metaphor for the black struggle for freedom, a self-liberating struggle in which blacks themselves had defined their freedom, fought and died for it, from the colonial era down to 1865 (a second volume will trace the struggle to the present).

  For blacks, slave and free alike, God Himself was directing their long and continuous movement toward the Promised Land. Thus when the Civil War broke out, they saw it as the coming of Judgment Day. For them, Harding writes, “all the raucous, roaring guns of Charleston Harbor and Bull Run, of Antietam and Fort Pillow, of Shiloh and Murfreesboro and Richmond were the certain voice of God, announcing his judgment across the bloody stretches of the South, returning blood for blood to the black river.” In the North, blacks surged forward to volunteer in Union armies, because they equated the cause of the free states with the cause of freedom. In the South, the war broadened the river of struggle, intensified “the self-liberating black movement” that had long gone on, as slaves escaped to Union lines by the thousands, running “toward a new history, a new life, a new beginning…. Their God was moving and they moved with him.”

  The villain of this story, of course, is Abraham Lincoln. He had not seen the visions of black people, Harding writes, “had not yet rightly measured ‘the judgments of the Lord,’ the movements of Providence.” Like Bennett’s Lincoln, Harding’s is a dedicated white supremacist afflicted with tunnel vision. His obsession with saving the white Union “at all costs” blinds him to the spiritual and revolutionary nature of the conflict. He cares nothing for black people. For two years he will not let them serve in his armies, will not adopt an emancipation policy, lest that offend his “tender allies” in the “loyal” slave border. But the slaves could not care less. They swarm into Union lines in relentlessly increasing numbers, until Lincoln’s armies find themselves “in the midst of a surging movement of black people” who in effect are “freeing themselves from slavery.”

  But then a harried Lincoln steps in and steals all their glory. Mainly to justify the use of the South’s black “property” in his military forces, he issues an “ambiguous,” restricted Emancipation Proclamation, which from “a certain legal view” sets free no slaves at all. Alas, though, the proclamation symbolizes all that blacks have “so deeply longed to experience,” and it sends “a storm of long pent-up emotions surging through the churches and meeting halls.”

  Their rapture is understandable, Harding writes, “but like all ecstatic experiences, it carried its own enigmatic penalties.” In his view, the Emancipation Proclamation was one of the worst things that ever happened to black people in this country. For the joy with which Civil War Negroes greeted the proclamation produced the myth of Lincoln as the Great Emancipator. It was an ugly irony. “While the concrete historical realities of the time testified to the costly, daring, courageous activities of hundreds of thousands of black people breaking loose from slavery and setting themselves free, the myth gave the credit for this freedom to a white Republican president” who never saw beyond the limitations of his own race, class, and time. “Yet thanks to the mythology of blacks and whites alike, it was the independent, radical action of the black movement toward freedom which was diminished, and the coerced, ambiguous role of a white deliverer which gained pre-eminence.” For the development of black struggle and black radicalism, Harding says, the consequences of this myth were many and profound.

  To emancipate today’s Afro-Americans from the shackles of that myth, Harding has created an alternative myth, writing in a musical style that radiates the voice of soul. Here is how his message might be summarized: Far from being the passive recipients of freedom, as white history has so long described them, our heroic, bloodstained forebears were gaining it for themselves during the Civil War. Yes, we were winning our own freedom, were forging a black radical consensus that could have liberated us from dependence on the white-man’s Union. We didn’t need Lincoln, didn’t need the racist North, didn’t need any white man. Had Lincoln not usurped our movement, misdirecting our river into waters he could control, we might have been freer, more independent, more radical and revolutionary, from then until now. Certainly this would not have been the country it became. For the sake of our liberation today, let us recapture what Lincoln took away from us in the Civil War. Let us carry on where our forefathers left off in the blood-red baptism of fire, and let us designate them, not Lincoln, as the instrument of our deliverance.

  This is a potent myth, born of deep spiritual and psychological needs in black America that command our attention. Indeed, Harding is the black counterpart of Whitman and Sandburg. In Harding’s mythic vision, Lincoln was not the poet hero of democracy. The true poet heroes were the immortal black masses who flung off their chains and seized their own freedom. A black radical and ideologue, Harding is offering today’s Negro Americans his idea of a usable past, a way to feel as one with their slave forebears. “The river of black struggle is people,” Harding writes, “but it is also the hope, the movement, the transformative power that humans create and that creates them, us, and makes them, us, new persons. So we black people are the river; the river is us. The river is in us, created by us, flowing out of us, surrounding us, recreating us and this entire nation.”

  This vividly illustrates what critic Northrop Frye said of myth—that it is “the imitation of actions near or at the conceivable limits of desire.” Yet it is a great pity, I think, that in order to build up his Civil War ancestors for the benefit of modern blacks, Harding felt obliged to tear down, not just the myth of the Great Emancipator, but the actual Lincoln of history.

  But, some will say, are blacks not as entitled to their notions of Lincoln as white America is to the Man of the People? And is the Lincoln of Harding’s River not preferable to the idea of the saintly Emancipator, which obscures the heroic role that blacks played in their own liberation?

  That may be so, but the myth of the Great Emancipator and the Man of the People does not defile the historical Lincoln. Harding’s portrait, like Bennett’s, reduces him to a racist caricature, stripping him of any complexity, any idealism, and any humanity. And this is all the more regrettable because Harding, a historian, really does believe that his glory-stealing white supremacist is the real Lincoln, and many blacks and whites are certain to take this as historical gospel.

  For the country at large, though, the scoundrelly Lincoln is in no danger of replacing Sandburg’s icon of democracy, for that Lincoln still holds first place in the pantheon of American immortals. It is Sandburg’s Lincoln who is quoted in the White House and in Congress, that Lincoln who is produced on national television, that Lincoln who is held up as the unattainable standard for anybody who undertakes a modern biography. Again, that Lincoln has such staying power because he is a larger-than-life mirror of ourselves, a god we have created in our idealized image of democratic man. As long as we believe in Ame
rica, we will have towering Father Abraham as our greatest mythical hero. And as long as he is that hero, he will remain a powerful presence to be reckoned with.

  Part Two

  MANY-MOODED MAN

  I made my song a coat

  Covered with embroideries

  Out of old mythologies

  From heel to throat;

  But the fools caught it,

  Wore it in the world’s eyes

  As though they’d wrought it.

  Song, let them take it,

  For there’s more enterprise

  In walking naked.

  WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

  1: RESURRECTING LIFE

  I suggested that the myths of Lincoln reveal a great deal about our needs and longings as a people. But the real Lincoln, the actual man of history, can also have profound significance for us. For “history,” as Michelet said, “is a reconstruction of life in its wholeness, not of the superficial aspects, but of the deeper, inner organic processes.” By the historical Lincoln I do not mean some definitive portrait that will stand forever as the way he really was. Historical biography, after all, is an interpretative art, not an exact science. In fact, the very materials we rely on to forge biography—letters, diaries, journals, interviews, recollections, and the like—were all recorded by people who filtered things through their own senses and sensibilities. Because biographical materials are themselves imprecise and interpretative, it is impossible for anyone to produce a definitive biography—a fixed and final portrait—of Lincoln or any other figure.

  As we strive for biographical truth, the best we can hope for is a careful approximation of what Lincoln was like in the days he lived. To arrive at that approximation, the Lincoln biographer must be painstaking in his pursuit of evidence—of Lincoln’s own writings and all the other records germane to his life and times. Wary and skeptical of witnesses, the Lincoln biographer plays them off against one another, testing their reliability, until he can corroborate with some degree of accuracy. Then on the basis of authenticated detail, he begins to shape his portrait of the real-life man, striving to depict Lincoln in the context of his time, not according to the needs of the present. Moreover, since biographers are people, too, it is possible to offer several authentic approximations of the historical Lincoln, each portrait depending on the biographer’s own inferences, insights, sense of importance, and conception of character.

  In my own efforts to see the man as he was, I have tried to present an accurate and coherent characterization, one that draws from a vast array of reliable contemporary evidence and from a cornucopia of modern Lincoln scholarship. Not everyone will agree with my portrait. Many would paint Lincoln with different shades and hues, would stress this or that about him more or less than I. But perhaps we can agree that an effort to see Lincoln free of the mists of legend and counterlegend, to understand the man on his own terms and in the context of his age, is a beneficial enterprise. And the portrait that emerges contrasts sharply with the lofty Man of the People and the unswerving villain and racist sketched earlier.

  2: A MATTER OF PROFOUND WONDER

  Had we met Lincoln in his Springfield law office during the 1850s, we would have looked on a man in his forties, dressed well enough in a plain linen suit and boots. His feet were so large—size fourteen—that he had to have his boots specially made. He weighed 180 pounds and stood six feet four inches, an extraordinary height for those days, and it was all in his legs. When he was sitting, he was no taller than an average man; but when he stood, he kept rising until he towered over his friends as though he were standing on stilts. And he loomed taller still when he put on his stovepipe hat.

  Parts of him did not seem to fit. His head appeared too small for his height, and his chest was narrow and thin in contrast to his long arms and legs, his huge hands and feet. His black hair was so coarse and unruly that it “lay floating where the fingers or the wind left it,” Herndon said.

  His gray eyes sparkled as he said “howdy” and shook hands with both of his. His hands were bony and rough—the hands of a man who had known hard physical toil in his youth. He had a dark leathery complexion, with a mole on his right cheek; large ears; and a scrawny neck with a conspicuous Adam’s apple. His neck was too thin to fill the collar of his dress shirt, even when it was pulled tight with a black cravat.

  We might have thought his face much more subtle and complex than his photographs reveal. “I have never seen a picture of him that does anything like justice to the original,” said a young journalist. “He is a much better looking man than any of the pictures represent.” A young southern woman agreed. “His face is certainly ugly, but not repulsive,” she said; “on the contrary, the good humor, generosity and intellect beaming from it, make the eye love to linger there until you almost find him good-looking.”

  Had we talked at length with Lincoln, we might have thought he epitomized what a French philosopher once said: “No man is strongly marked unless he bears within his character antitheses strongly marked.” Lincoln certainly had that. He was “a many mooded man,” Herndon observed, “a man of opposites—of terrible contrasts”—now witty and outgoing, now sad, quiet, and remote. His mood changes could be startling. None of his friends and colleagues pretended to understand him. “He was, take him all in all, one of the most incomprehensible personages we have ever known,” recalled a fellow lawyer. He did seem to enjoy people and companionship, and yet he hid his inner feelings behind a wall of stone. “Lincoln’s nature was secretive,” Herndon said. “He was the most reticent, secretive man I ever saw or expect to see,” added Judge David Davis. Even Mary Lincoln found him that way. Despite his deep feelings, she remarked later, “he was not, a demonstrative man, when he felt most deeply, he expressed, the least.”

  One thing he felt “most deeply” was his log-cabin origins. The truth is that he felt embarrassed about his frontier past and never liked to talk about it. He seldom mentioned his parents either, particularly his real mother Nancy, who he feared was illegitimate. According to Herndon, Lincoln confessed that “my mother is a bastard” and admonished his partner to “keep it a secret while I live.” True, Herndon is notoriously unreliable when reporting what others told him about Lincoln. But specialists agree that he is most authentic when relating things about Lincoln he personally witnessed. So Herndon is probably right that Lincoln had painful misgivings about his mother’s legitimacy. Why else would he become profoundly silent about her and her past? In an 1860 autobiography, he dismissed Nancy with a single reference that she was born in Virginia. Yet in mood and appearance he resembled sad-eyed Nancy more than he did his father.

  Thomas Lincoln, for his part, was not the shiftless oaf Herndon reported. If he was illiterate, as were most pioneers of his time and place, he was also a skilled carpenter who stayed sober, paid his taxes, accumulated land, and enjoyed the respect of his neighbors in Indiana and later in Illinois. Yet the important thing is how Lincoln viewed him. Here again, Herndon’s opinion of Thomas was undoubtedly Lincoln’s. In the son’s eyes, the father did seem an unlettered, low-born product of the frontier, and Lincoln became permanently estranged from him. At age twenty-one, he escaped his father’s world—a world of mindless physical toil—and never returned. What was more, Lincoln felt considerable contempt for his father’s intellectual limitations, once remarking that Thomas “never did more in the way of writing than to bunglingly sign his own name.” Lincoln did not invite his father to his wedding or take his family to visit him (Thomas never visited his son either). When his father died in a nearby Illinois county in 1851, Lincoln did not attend the funeral.

  Lincoln became a literate and literary man, and he did so largely on his own. In all, he accumulated about a year of formal education in the “blab” schools of frontier Kentucky and Indiana. A gifted boy, he set about educating himself, borrowing whatever volumes he could find and reading the same one over and over. Contrary to legend, he did not study all night by the fireplace of the Lincolns’ one-
room cabin. Until young Lincoln got a loft, the entire family slept by the fireplace, and bedtime for hardworking farmers came early. Young Lincoln would take his book to the field and read at the end of each plow furrow while his lathered horse got its breath; and he would read again at the noon break.

  In these delicious moments away from work, he would lose himself in romantic histories, in the adventures of Robinson Crusoe or the selected fables of Dilworth’s Spelling-Book. He practically memorized the grammars he came across, which taught him rhetoric—that is, dramatic and oratorical effectiveness—as well as the mechanics of writing. Young Lincoln fell in love with language, with metaphors, with assonance and alliteration. His writings sparkle with such gems as “old and only,” “a thousand thanks,” and “high and beautiful terms.” He delighted in creative expression, in the literary telling of a story. Even in a letter, as the critic Edmund Wilson pointed out, Lincoln could make a sentence sing with poetic eloquence. Another cause of his melancholy, he wrote at age thirty-three, was “the absence of all business and conversation of friends, which might divert your mind, and give it occasional rest from that intensity of thought, which will some times wear the sweetest idea thread-bare and turn it to the bitterness of death.” Consider, too, the cadences and alliteration in a speech Lincoln read at the Springfield Young Men’s Lyceum when he was twenty-eight. “Let reverence for the laws,” Lincoln wrote, “be taught in schools, in seminaries, and in colleges;—let it be preached from the pulpit, proclaimed in legislative halls, and enforced in courts of justice. And, in short, let it become the political religion of the nation; and let the old and the young, the rich and the poor, the grave and the gay, of all sexes and tongues, and colors and conditions, sacrifice unceasingly upon its altars.”