The Life and Writings of Abraham Lincoln

by Abraham Lincoln

  Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, September 22, 1862

  Letter to Hannibal Hamlin, September 28, 1862

  Reply to an Address by Mrs. Eliza P. Gurney, September [28?], 1862

  Meditation on the Divine Will, September [30?], 1862

  Letter to General G. B. McClellan, October 13, 1862

  Telegram to General G. B. McClellan, October 24, 1862

  Telegram to General G. B. McClellan, October 27, 1862

  Order Relieving General G. B. McClellan, November 5, 1862

  From a Letter to General Carl Schurz, November 10, 1862

  From a Letter to General Carl Schurz, November 24, 1862

  From the Annual Message to Congress, December 1, 1862

  Final Emancipation Proclamation, January 1, 1863

  Letter to the Workingmen of Manchester, England, January 19, 1863

  Letter to General J. Hooker, January 26, 1863

  Letter to Henry Winter Davis, March 18, 1863

  Letter to Governor Andrew Johnson, March 26, 1863

  Proclamation for a National Fast-Day, March 30, 1863

  Telegram to General J. Hooker, June 5, 1863

  Telegram to Mrs. Lincoln, June 9, 1863

  From a Letter to Erastus Corning and Others, June 12, 1863

  Response to a Serenade, July 7, 1863

  Letter to General Grant, July 13, 1863

  Draft of Letter to General G. G. Meade, July 14, 1863

  Letter to General O. O. Howard, July 21, 1863

  From a Letter to Governor Horatio Seymour, August 7, 1863

  Letter to Mrs. Lincoln, August 8, 1863

  Opinion of the Draft, August [15?], 1863

  Letter to James H. Hackett, August 17, 1863

  Letter to James C. Conkling, August 26, 1863

  Telegram to Mrs. Hannah Armstrong, September 18, 1863

  Letter to General H. W. Halleck, September 19, 1863

  Proclamation for Thanksgiving, October 3, 1863

  Letter to James H. Hackett, November 2, 1863

  Note to Secretary E. M. Stanton, November 11, 1863

  Address at the Dedication of the Gettysburg National Cemetery, November 19, 1863

  Letter to Edward Everett, November 20, 1863

  Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction, December 8, 1863

  From the Annual Message to Congress, December 8, 1863

  Letter to General Daniel E. Sickles, February 15, 1864

  Letter to Secretary Stanton, March 1, 1864

  Letter to Governor Michael Hahn, March 13, 1864

  Draft of Letter to Secretary Stanton, March 18, 1864

  Remarks at a Sanitary Fair in Washington, March 18, 1864

  From a Reply to a Committee from the New York Workingmen’s Association, March 21, 1864

  Letter to A. G. Hodges, April 4, 1864

  Address at Sanitary Fair in Baltimore, April 18, 1864

  Telegram to Mrs. Lincoln, April 28, 1864

  Letter to General U. S. Grant, April 30, 1864

  Letter to John H. Bryant, May 30, 1864

  Reply to the Committee Notifying President Lincoln of his Renomination, June 9, 1864

  Reply to a Delegation from the National Union League, June 9, 1864

  From a Speech at a Sanitary Fair in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, June 16, 1864

  Letter to Secretary Chase, June 30, 1864

  Proclamation Concerning Reconstruction, July 8, 1864

  Letter to Horace Greeley, July 9, 1864

  Telegram to General U. S. Grant, August 17, 1864

  Address to the 164th Ohio Regiment, August 18, 1864

  Memorandum to his Cabinet, August 23, 1864

  Statement Written out for Ward Hill Lamon, September [12?], 1864

  Pardon for Roswell McIntyre, October 4, 1864

  Responses to Serenades on the Occasion of his Re-Election, November 9, 10, 1864

  Letter to Mrs. Bixby, of Boston, Mass., November 21, 1864

  From the Annual Message to Congress, December 6, 1864

  Letter to General W. T. Sherman, December 26, 1864

  Letter to General U. S. Grant, January 19, 1865

  Instructions to Secretary Seward for the Hampton Roads Conference, January 31, 1865

  Draft of Message to Congress, February 5, 1865

  Second Inaugural Address, March 4, 1865

  Letter to Thurlow Weed, March 15, 1865

  Address to an Indiana Regiment, March 17, 1865

  Telegram to Secretary Stanton, March 30, 1865

  Telegram to Secretary Stanton, April 3, 1865

  Telegram to General U. S. Grant, April 7, 1865

  Last Public Address, April 11, 1865

  Lincoln’s Last Writing, April 14, 1865

  Commentary

  Reading Group Guide

  The Modern Library Editorial Board

  LINCOLN IN HIS WRITINGS

  by Allan Nevins

  “NO LONELY mountain peak of mind,” wrote Lowell of Lincoln in the “Commemoration Ode,” emphasizing Lincoln’s broad humanity of intellect and character; but a mountain peak of spirit he did represent, and as the years furnish perspective his countrymen more fully realize the fact. There was a time when Americans were too near Lincoln to comprehend his full greatness. To a traveler standing near a mountain range many eminences seem to have approximately the same altitude; it is difficult to disengage Everest from his lofty neighbors. But as the range recedes in the distance, the highest peak lifts more and more above its fellows, until it alone fills the horizon. So it has been with Lincoln. Of all the men whom Americans of 1870 or even 1890 placed near him—Douglas, Seward, Chase, Sumner, Grant—none but now seems small when measured against his fame. Or to change the simile, the Civil War era was a crowded stage on which many heroes strutted and struggled. To people of Southern blood and sympathies some of the scenes still show Robert E. Lee in the foreground. But to Americans, North and South, the drama as a whole has but one dominating figure, and all the dramatis personae are grouped about and subsidiary to the tall, gaunt form of Lincoln.

  A study of Lincoln’s writings obviously has two great elements of interest, one historical, the other biographical. To these might be added a lesser element—the purely literary interest of the latest and best of his work; but that actually belongs to the study of the man, for he never deliberately tried to be a literary artist, and wrote only to express his thought and emotions. Most men will read Lincoln either to find out what contributions he was making to his time, or to learn something about his mind, heart and personality. And of these two elements, the historical and the biographical, the latter is by far the more alluring and important.

  It is true that even in 1844, when Lincoln was on the Whig electoral ticket and stumped Illinois for Clay, or at least in 1847, when he entered Congress, he was making some small contributions to American destiny; that after 1854 these contributions became important; and that beginning in 1861 they were of transcendent value. But after all, to study the history of the slavery struggle and Civil War we must go to far ampler sources than Lincoln’s writings. Our principal reason for reading and re-reading them is to learn what Lincoln was thinking, feeling and hoping; to penetrate the lucid depths of his mind, to learn something of his wisdom and moderation, to refresh ourselves with his sensitive, lofty and sometimes half-mystical spirit.

  The greatest statesmen, unlike the greatest artists and poets, seldom burst upon the world in full-panoplied strength; the William Pitt who dazzles all contemporaries in his twenties is rare indeed. One of the fascinations of a study of Lincoln’s writings lies in the material they present for following the growth of a mind and a spirit that only slowly awoke to their full power. The process of this growth is half-explicable, half impenetrable. There is much in Lincoln’s intellectual and emotional life which will forever remain mysterious. His moody changeability, the man now all extroverted activity, genial sociability and strong self-confidence, now all melancholy, self-withdrawal and irresolution, like a la
ke first irradiated by strong sunshine and then darkened by black clouds—this is mysterious. His combination of humor and poetry, of broad jest and sensitive emotion, a combination which explains his instinctive fondness for three writers who show the same traits, Shakespeare, Burns and Tom Hood—this equally goes to the very roots of his being. The contradiction between his stern common-sense sagacity or practicality, and his bursts of mysticism and superstition (“I was always superstitious,” he wrote Joshua Speed in 1842)—this is difficult to explain. Yet from lustrum to lustrum, decade to decade, we can see him growing, and in his writings we can divine something of the secret.

  For Lincoln slowly developed great inner reservoirs of strength, which enabled him to meet each new demand, each fresh crisis of his life, not merely adequately but with inspiration. The awakened opponent of slavery-expansion after the Kansas-Nebraska Bill of 1854 was clearly greater than the man of 1850; the debater against Douglas in 1858 was clearly greater than the author of the Peoria speech; and the Lincoln of the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural was greater—far greater—than the Lincoln whose silk hat Douglas held as he first took the oath of office. We can trace this development in his speeches and letters, and we can catch glimpses there of the deep springs which fed his inner reservoirs of power.

  It is impossible, in dealing with a career so eventful, and in treating a personality so full of mysterious depths, of shrouded, reticent qualities, to lay down exact categories. Neither the man nor his life can be divided into neat compartments. Both were too rich, mutable and full of mysterious lights and shadows. The promise of Lincoln’s ultimate greatness unquestionably lay in him from the beginning, and it is a significant fact that as an uncultured, uncouth country lawyer some intimates—including the woman who rather heroically became his wife—were confident that, given the proper opportunities, he would rise to eminence. But it helps to understand his growth if we attempt to fix some general divisions in his mental and moral development. And it is certainly roughly true to say that in the evolution of Lincoln as a leader, it was his greatness of character which first emerged to view; then the greatness of his intellectual faculties, his reasoning power; and finally, in combination with the two preceding, the greatness of his spiritual vision. Assuredly we can discern these three divisions in his writings.

  There was nothing precociously brilliant in Lincoln’s mind, or if there was, the circumstances of his early life were unfavorable to its expression. He went to school “by littles,” hardly a good year altogether. He loved reading; he made extracts from books with a buzzard’s quill pen dipped in brier-root ink, and omnivorously devoured even the Revised Statutes of Indiana. But his early precocity was physical—and above all moral. The young giant who tugged Denton Offut’s boatload of provisions over the New Salem dam and outwrestled the “Clary’s Grove Boys” had also gigantic traits of character.

  We see even in Lincoln’s beginnings his strong humanity, his kindliness, his simple sincerity, his strength of conviction allied with moderation of temper, and his courage. Though his early writings have the intellectual crudity of the country-store arguer and stump-speaking lawyer, these virtues glint through them. One of the turning points in his intellectual life was the result of a charitable act. He paid a Western migrant half a dollar for an old barrel not because he wanted it, “but to oblige him.” In the rubbish at the bottom he found Blackstone’s Commentaries. “The more I read the more intensely interested I became. Never in my whole life was my mind so thoroughly absorbed. I read until I devoured them.” Even the letters on the sorry Mary Owens courtship, a wild reaction to the Ann Rutledge tragedy, reveal his sensitivity of feeling. “I want in all cases to do right, and most particularly so in all cases with women.” His early political utterances are not distinguished by any special force of logic, much less felicity of expression. But they are distinguished by integrity, sense of balance, an instinct for compromise and a certain magnanimity; that is, by moral qualities. “If elected, I shall consider the whole people of Sangamon my constituents, as well those that oppose as those that support me.” “I would rather die now than, like the gentleman, change my politics, and simultaneous with the change, receive an office worth three thousand dollars a year.…” “I want you to vote for me if you will; but if not, then vote for my opponent, for he is a fine man.” Much of the powerful appeal which Henry Clay made to him lay in Clay’s capacity for strong moral fervor; some of it in Clay’s bent toward moderation and conciliation. But above all, Lincoln was always marked by a kindliness and sympathy which inspired his sociability and sweetened his humor. It was Joshua Speed who had shared his Springfield room with Lincoln when, in 1837, beginning to practice there, the rail-splitter was too poor to have a room of his own. “You know well,” he writes Speed a few years later, “that I do not feel my own sorrows much more keenly than I do yours.…”

  Yet intellectually he was growing. As he disciplined his mind by study and courtroom argument, his native sagacity was forged into a logical power as sharp and crushing as a battle ax, a power that by the middle fifties had become the most formidable weapon borne by any man in the American political arena. The process of molding and tempering this logical faculty can be followed with some distinctness from the later eighteen-forties. Even his statement of 1845 on the Texas question combines with clear moral conviction a simple but irrefutable dialectical power. A few lines of homely English, as lucid as a Euclidian demonstration, present both his characteristic mode of reasoning and his abiding belief as to the status of slavery:

  I never could see much good to come of annexation, inasmuch as they [the Texans] were already a free republican people on our own model. On the other hand, I never could very clearly see how the annexation would augment the evil of slavery. It always seemed to me that slaves would be taken there in about equal numbers, with or without annexation. And if more were taken because of annexation, still there would be just so many the fewer left where they were taken from. It is possibly true, to some extent, that, with annexation, some slaves may be sent to Texas and continued in slavery that otherwise might have been liberated. To whatever extent this may be true, I think annexation an evil. I hold it to be a paramount duty of us in the free States, due to the Union of the States, and perhaps to liberty itself (paradox though it may seem), to let the slavery of the other States alone; while, on the other hand, I hold it to be equally clear that we should never knowingly lend ourselves, directly or indirectly, to prevent that slavery from dying a natural death—to find new places for it to live in, when it can no longer exist in the old.

  This is not equal to any of a hundred passages which we could find in Lincoln’s writings from 1854 to 1861. Nevertheless, it is a glimpse of the Lincoln that was to come. And as the years pass we can find in Mr. Stern’s well-edited collection—much the amplest and best selected body of Lincoln’s writings ever brought into convenient form—more and better specimens of his argumentative power.

  If men had kept a fuller record of Lincoln’s courtroom arguments we should doubtless be able to follow better the development of this faculty of close-textured and irresistibly logical reasoning. As it is, his mind seems to show a new energy and force in the year 1854; for the political crisis precipitated by the Kansas-Nebraska Act either awakened powers previously dormant or gave him an opportunity to exhibit to the general public powers theretofore used only in the courts. Probably it did both. After Douglas came home this year to face an outraged constituency, and found the Northwest burning him in effigy while a Chicago audience howled him from the platform, he visited Springfield to make the defense that he hoped would win back the downstate voters. The speech that Lincoln delivered in reply had a logical power that astonished even his admirers. Not many days later, Douglas spoke again at Peoria in defense of the Nebraska Act. The rejoinder which at once came from Lincoln revealed still greater scope, power and vision; it was not so much a speech as a closely woven political essay, such as no man in the country could have
surpassed and few could have equaled. At last he had fully emerged intellectually. He was irrefutable in his opposition to the squatter sovereignty doctrine. “Whether slavery shall go into Nebraska, or other new Territories, is not a matter of exclusive concern to the people who may go there. The whole nation is interested that the best use shall be made of these Territories. We want them for homes of free white people.” And the logical power of the speech was matched by its complete intellectual honesty. The candor and reasonableness of the passage on slavery beginning, “If all earthly power were given me, I should not know what to do as to the existing institution,” came to reflective Americans like a cool and refreshing breeze out of the heated debates of the day.

  Thereafter Lincoln never really faltered. From the increased positiveness of the Bloomington speech in 1856—“We will say to the Southern disunionists, we won’t go out of the Union, and you SHAN’T!”—he went on to the irresistible force of the “house divided against itself” speech in Springfield the day after his nomination for the Senate in 1858; one of the political classics of the language. He was the least rhetorical of speakers, caring nothing for mere art, and everything for simplicity, directness, lucidity and honesty. These were qualities which, each seemingly commonplace in itself, his mind possessed to a degree which made it arrestingly individual and original. It was not the means which interested him, but the effect; he thought always of the minds of his auditors and readers, and desired only to reach these minds swiftly, candidly and logically. Few men understood the intelligent masses better than he, and the vocabulary and phrasing he had drawn from Shakespeare, the Bible and Blackstone were sufficient clothing for his honest thought in reaching them. For, above all, it was his thought which set him apart. He had perfected his logic until he could take a complex set of ideas, a jarring, confused array of facts, and, as shapeless globules of water are suddenly crystallized into ice, turn them into a diamond-clear pattern, which everyone saw to be Truth. People who were thinking crookedly heard him and were set thinking straight. And when he met an adversary the edge of his logic was like a living sword. The Lincoln-Douglas debates were a battle of giants, but few have ever doubted which was the greater giant. The Cooper Union speech made, as the Tribune said, the greatest impression any political leader had ever produced on his first appearance before a New York audience. Not since Burke had so trenchant a political intellect appealed to the world in such forcible English.