Abraham Lincoln

by Stephen B. Oates

  This also explains why Lincoln was a teetotaler. Liquor left him “flabby and undone,” he said, blurring his mind and threatening his self-control. And he dreaded and avoided anything which threatened that. In one memorable speech, he heralded some great and distant day when all passions would be subdued, when reason would triumph and “mind, all conquering mind” would rule the earth.

  It is true that Lincoln told folksy anecdotes to illustrate his points. But humor was also tremendous therapy for his depression—it was a device to “whistle down sadness,” as Judge Davis put it. Said Lincoln himself: “I laugh because I must not weep—that’s all, that’s all.” He remarked on another occasion: “I tell you the truth when I say that a funny story, if it has the element of genuine wit, has the same effect on me that I suppose a good square drink of whiskey has on an old toper; it puts new life into me.”

  An expert storyteller, Lincoln could work an audience with exquisite skill. As he related his yarns, fun danced in his eyes and grotesque expressions appeared on his face, until all his features appeared to take part in his performance. When telling a story, a friend said, mirth “seemed to diffuse itself all over him, like a spontaneous tickle.”

  On the political platform, Lincoln did like to spin tales that stressed some moral about human nature. But he also honed his humor into a potent political weapon. He was a master of ironic wit, of reducing a specious argument to its absurdity. “He can rake a sophism out of its hole better than all the trained logicians of all schools,” chuckled a young admirer. Some examples: The claim that the Mexican War was not aggressive reminded Lincoln of the farmer who said, “I ain’t greedy ’bout land, I only just wants what jines mine.” On state sovereignty: “Advocates of that theory always reminded [me] of the fellow who contended that the proper place for the big kettle was inside of the little one.” On the inconsistent politics of archrival Stephen A. Douglas: “Has it not got down as thin as the homeopathic soup that was made by boiling the shadow of a pigeon that had starved to death?” No wonder Douglas complained that “every one of his stories seems like a whack upon my back.”

  In his legal work, too, Lincoln found ample uses for his humor. As he and his colleagues walked around the little towns on the circuit, “he saw ludicrous elements in everything,” one said, “and could either narrate some story from his storehouse of jokes, else he could improvise one.” When some associates got to talking about constitutional construction, Lincoln said that “the strongest example of ‘rigid government’ and ‘close construction’ I ever knew, was that of Judge——. It was once said of him that he would hang a man for blowing his nose in the street, but that he would quash the indictment if it failed to specify which hand he blew it with!”

  In court, Lincoln could employ humor with devastating effect. An example was the indictment of a young U.S. Army officer, with Lincoln functioning as prosecuting attorney. Lincoln began, “This is an indictment against a soldier for assaulting an old man.”

  The defendant indignantly interrupted. “Sir, I am no soldier, I am an officer!”

  “I beg your pardon,” Lincoln said with a bland grin, “then gentlemen of the jury, this is an indictment against an officer, who is no soldier, for assaulting an old man.”

  In his law office, when friends and apprentices were gathered around, Lincoln often laid down his pen and treated them to “a burst of spontaneous storytelling,” which left them “with their hands on their sides, their heads thrown back, their mouths open, and the tears coursing down their cheeks, laughing as if they would die.” Some of Lincoln’s private jokes were mindless one-liners like the ones he told in public. His own absentmindedness, he said, reminded him of “the story of an old Englishman who was so absentminded that when he went to bed he put his clothes carefully into the bed and threw himself over the back of the chair.”

  In the company of his male friends, Lincoln did tell a Negro dialect joke from time to time. Offensive though these are, such jokes were commonplace among white men of Lincoln’s generation, some of whom could boast an entire repertoire. By contrast, Lincoln is known to have related only three Negro tales. An example was the one about a black preacher named Mr. Johnson and a mathematical genius known as Pompey. Here it is in Lincoln’s telling:

  “‘Now, Pompey, spose dere am tree pigeons sittin’ on a rail fence, and you fire a gun at ’em and shoot one, how many’s left?’

  “‘Two, ob coors,’ replies Pompey after a little wool scratching.

  “‘Ya-ya-ya,’ laughs Mr. Johnson; ‘I knowed you was a fool, Pompey; dere’s none left—one’s dead, and d’udder two’s flown away.’”

  Other tales Lincoln told in private were pungent rib-ticklers, like the one about his hard-drinking chum Leonard Swett. Said Lincoln: “I attended court many years ago at Mt. Pulaski, the first county seat of Logan County, and there was the jolliest set of rollicking young Lawyers there that you ever saw together. There was Bill F[ickli]n, Bill H[erndo]n, L[eonar]d S[wet]t, and a lot more, and they mixed law and Latin, water and whiskey, with equal success. It so fell out that the whiskey seemed to be possessed of the very spirit of Jonah. At any rate, S[wet]t went out to the hog-pen, and, leaning over, began to ‘throw up Jonah.’ The hogs evidently thought it feed time, for they rushed forward and began to squabble over the voided matter.

  “‘Don’t fight (hic),’ said S[wet]t: ‘there’s enough (hic) for all.’”

  Still other Lincoln stories were downright bawdy. His fondness for smut may not have been “akin to lunacy,” as one old friend claimed. But Lincoln did like to regale his cronies with off-color jokes. One involved a youth who copulated with a female cat, another an old Virginia gentleman who stropped his razor “on a certain member of a young negro’s body.” Still another was the piece of foolery called “Bass-Ackwards” which Lincoln handed a bailiff in Springfield one day. “He said he was riding bass-ackwards on a jass-ack, through a patton-cotch, on a pair of baddle-sags, stuffed full of binger gred, when the animal steered at a scump, and the lirrup-steather broke, and throwed him in the fomer of the kence and broke his pishing-fole. He said he would not have minded it much, but he fell right in a great tow-curd; in fact, he said it give him a right smart sick of fitness—he had the molera-corbus pretty bad. He said, about bray dake he come to himself, ran home, seized up a stick of wood and split the axe to make a light, rushed into the house, and found the door sick abed, and his wife standing open. But thank goodness she is getting right hat and farty again.”

  Some of Lincoln’s best stories were those he told on himself. He liked to relate the time he was splitting rails with only a shirt and “breeches” on. A stranger passing by yelled at him, and Lincoln looked up. The stranger was aiming a gun his way. “What do you mean?” Lincoln sputtered. The stranger replied that he had promised to shoot the first man he met who was uglier than he. Lincoln peered at the stranger’s face and then declared, “If I am uglier than you, then blaze away.”

  When he finished a joke, Lincoln would wrinkle his nose, show his front teeth with a high-pitched laugh, and fall to scratching his elbows.

  4: MR. LINCOLN

  Contrary to mythology, Lincoln was anything but a common man. In point of fact, he was one of the most ambitious human beings his friends had ever seen, with an aspiration for high station in life that burned in him like a furnace. Instead of reading with an accomplished attorney, as was customary in those days, he taught himself the law entirely on his own. He was literally a self-made lawyer. Moreover, he entered the Illinois legislature at the age of twenty-five and became a leader of the state Whig party, an indefatigable party campaigner, and a regular candidate for public office.

  By the 1850s, Lincoln was one of the most sought-after attorneys in Illinois, with a reputation as a lawyer’s lawyer—a knowledgeable jurist who argued appeal cases for other attorneys. He did his most influential legal work, not in the circuit courts as mythology claims, but in the Supreme Court of Illinois, where he participated in 243 cases
and won most of them. He commanded the respect of his colleagues, all of whom called him “Mr. Lincoln” or just “Lincoln.” He typically signed letters to his friends “Yours as ever, A. Lincoln.” Even Mary referred to him as “Mr. Lincoln,” or “Father.” Nobody called him “Abe”—at least not to his face—because he loathed the nickname. It did not befit a respected professional who had struggled hard to overcome the limitations of his frontier background. In sum, Lincoln was an outstanding attorney in a flourishing, populous western state that had left its pioneer past behind, as he had.

  Frankly Lincoln enjoyed his status as a prominent Illinois lawyer and politician. And he liked money, too, and used it to measure his worth. He was fair and reasonable when it came to legal fees, but he did expect prompt remuneration for his services. “I have news from Ottawa,” he wrote an associate, “that we win our Galatin & Saline county case. As the dutch Justice said, when he married folks, ‘Now, vere ish my hundred tollars.’” And if clients refused to pay up, Lincoln sued them to get his money. By the 1850s, thanks to a combination of talent and sheer hard work, Lincoln was a man of considerable wealth. He had an annual income of $5,000 or more—the equivalent of many times that today—and large financial and real-estate investments.

  While Lincoln handled a remarkable variety of bread-and-butter cases out on the circuit, he became known in the 1850s as a railroad lawyer. And this was true to the extent that he and Herndon regularly defended the Illinois Central and other railroad companies. After all, these were years of prodigious railroad construction all over the Midwest, and this in turn created a whole new area of law and legal practice in which Lincoln was anxious to participate. Moreover, the coming of the Iron Horse marked the end of steamboating’s golden age and precipitated a titanic struggle in the Midwest between rail and water interests for commercial supremacy. And that struggle offered lucrative rewards for attorneys like Lincoln who could command a mass of technical data.

  And he harvested the rewards, collecting fees of $400 to $5,000 for precedent-setting victories in both state and federal appeals courts. Yet Lincoln never used the law for nefarious personal gain, never used it to acquire cheap land and other property as did many of his associates. No, Lincoln was as honest in real life as in the legend. Even his enemies conceded that he was incorruptible. “Resolve to be honest at all events,” he urged potential attorneys; “and if in your judgment you cannot be an honest lawyer, resolve to be honest without being a lawyer.”

  Moreover, Lincoln had broad humanitarian views, some of them in advance of his time. Even though he was a teetotaler, he was extremely tolerant of alcoholics in a day when most temperance advocates branded them as criminals who ought to be locked up. Lincoln did not view them that way. In his opinion, alcoholics were unfortunates who deserved understanding, not vilification. He noted that some of the world’s most gifted artists had succumbed to alcoholism, because they were too sensitive to cope with their insights into the human condition. When he said that, of course, church and temperance people accused Lincoln of favoring drunkenness.

  When it came to religion, Lincoln was an open-minded man who regarded the entire subject as a matter of individual conscience. Personally he believed in God and was an avid student of the Scriptures. A religious fatalist like his mother Nancy, he maintained that nothing could hinder the designs of Providence, that whatever would be would be and people could do nothing about it. Yet, because he belonged to no church and read freethinkers like Voltaire and Thomas Paine, church folk often put Lincoln down as an atheist and opposed him in his political campaigns. For example, in Springfield—his home—twenty-one of twenty-four ministers voted against him in 1860, in large part because they considered him an infidel.

  Lincoln also had a liberal mind in the matter of women’s rights. This was not a leading issue in Illinois politics, so Lincoln’s position cannot be attributed to political considerations. That position, as he publicly declared in 1836, was that women, like men, should have the right to vote so long as all paid taxes. “In this statement,” as one specialist has stressed, “Lincoln was far ahead of most of his political contemporaries, and by no means behind even the crusading feminists and abolitionists of the day.”

  He stood out on another issue, too. His was an age of obstreperous “Americanism,” a xenophobic time when native-born white Protestants campaigned and legislated against Catholics, Irish, and immigrants. Yet Lincoln had no ethnic prejudices. His law partner William Herndon, who raved against the Irish, reported that Lincoln was not at all bigoted against “the foreign element, tolerating—as I never could—even the Irish.”

  In the mid-1850s, nativism was so potent a force that it gave rise to the American or Know-Nothing party, which set out to halt immigration, suppress Catholics, and save the United States from the menace of “Popery.” Lincoln would have none of it. “Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid,” he wrote Joshua Speed. “As a nation, we began by declaring that ‘all men are created equal.’ We now practically read it ‘all men are created equal, except negroes.’ When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read ‘all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and catholics.’ When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.”

  Lincoln’s letter affords considerable insight into his feelings about prejudice and oppression, and his awareness of what was going on in the world. But before turning to the political Lincoln, let us summarize what we have seen of him in the prism of history. Thus far, we have seen a complex, richly human Lincoln, a self-made man who was witty and tolerant, proud of his achievements, substantially wealthy, morbidly fascinated with madness, obsessed with death, troubled with recurring bouts of melancholy, and gifted with major talent for literary expression. This is a remarkably different Lincoln from the rumpled, simple, joke-cracking commoner of mythology, or the villainous bigot of the countermyths. But there are other differences between the historical and mythical Lincoln that are even more profound, particularly in the combustible matter of slavery and Negro rights, the burning political issue of Lincoln’s day.

  Part Three

  ADVOCATE OF THE DREAM

  O my America! my new-found land.

  JOHN DONNE

  1: THE BEACON LIGHT OF LIBERTY

  In presidential polls taken by Life Magazine in 1948, the New York Times Magazine in 1962, and the Chicago Tribune Magazine in 1982, historians and political scholars ranked Lincoln as the best chief executive in American history. They were not trying to mythologize the man, for they realized that errors, vacillations, and human flaws marred his record. Their rankings indicate, however, that the icon of mythology did rise out of a powerful historical figure, a man who learned from his mistakes and made a difference. Indeed, Lincoln led the lists because he had a moral vision of where his country must go to preserve and enlarge the rights of all her people. He led the lists because he had an acute sense of history—an ability to identify himself with a historical turning point in his time and to articulate the promise that held for the liberation of oppressed humanity the world over. He led the lists because he perceived the truth of his age and embodied it in his words and deeds. He led the lists because, in his interaction with the spirit and events of his day, he made momentous moral decisions that affected the course of humankind.

  It cannot be stressed enough how much Lincoln responded to the spirit of his age. From the 1820s to the 1840s, while Lincoln was growing to manhood and learning the art and technique of politics, the Western world seethed with revolutionary ferment. In the 1820s, revolutions broke out not only in Poland, Turkey, Greece, Italy, Spain, and France, but blazed across Spain’s ramshackle South American empire as well, resulting in new republics whose capitals rang with the rhetoric of freedom and independence. The Republic of Mexico even produced laws and promulgations that abolished slavery t
hroughout the nation, including Mexico’s subprovince of Texas. In that same decade, insurrection panics rocked the Deep South, especially the South Carolina tidewater, as America’s disinherited Africans reflected the revolutionary turbulence sweeping the New World. In 1831, in an effort to liberate his people, a visionary slave preacher named Nat Turner incited the most violent slave rebellion in American history, a revolt that shook the South to its foundations and cleared the way for the Great Southern Reaction against the human-rights upheavals of the time. In the 1830s, a vociferous abolitionist movement sprang up in the free states; Great Britain eradicated slavery in the Empire; and impassioned English emancipators came to crusade in America as well. In distant Russia, Czar Nicholas I established an autonomous communal structure for Russia’s millions of serfs—the first step in their eventual emancipation two decades later. In the 1840s, while Lincoln practiced law and ran for Congress, reformist impulses again swept Europe. Every major country there had liberal parties that clamored for representative government, self-rule, civil liberties, and social and economic reform. In 1848, the year Congressman Lincoln denounced “Mr. Polk’s War” against Mexico, defended the right of revolution, and voted against slavery expansion, revolutions again blazed across Europe, flaring up first in France against the July Monarchy, then raging through Italy and central Europe. These were revolutions against monarchy, despotism, exploitation by the few, revolutions that tried to liberate individuals, classes, and nationalities alike from the shackles of the past. In sum, it was an age of revolution, a turbulent time when people throughout the Western world were searching for definitions of liberty, fighting and dying for liberty, against reactionary forces out to preserve the status quo.