But still a third Lincoln, as his writings show, was to emerge from the final stage of his career, a Lincoln who superadded to special moral qualities and special force of reasoning a spiritual quality which not even the great Edmund Burke had ever possessed.
Matthew Arnold said of Gladstone, whether justly or unjustly, that he failed in foresight because he failed in insight. It was precisely because Lincoln possessed so keen and sympathetic an insight into democratic strivings and hopes that, during the awful years of butchery and hatred after 1861, he rose to such a noble view of the nation’s future—to such prophetic heights. It was a spiritual insight. The first touches of the new grandeur in his thinking and writing appear in the First Inaugural, in that closing passage which represents an amalgamation of his and Seward’s thought. A half-practical, half-mystical sense of the true objects of the War—something far better than defeat of the South, far broader than emancipation—thereafter rapidly gained upon him. It was, he wrote even before Bull Run, “a struggle for maintaining in the world that form and substance of government whose leading object is to elevate the condition of men—to lift artificial weights from all shoulders; to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all; to afford all an unfettered start …” A religious feeling as to the import of the War also grew upon him. It was, he thought, a testing by God of the purposes and devotion of the American people, a punishment by God for their past errors and an opportunity given them by God to re-create their life in a nobler pattern. In his daily work Lincoln could be very hard-headed, stern and even relentless. But he had a vision, and little by little he strove to lift the people to it.
Hence the noble eloquence of his greatest utterances, and hence their semi-religious tone. The Gettysburg address has two keynotes. One is the oft-repeated phrase concerning government of the people, by the people, for the people, and the necessity of maintaining it as an object-lesson to humanity, an idea that can be traced back to the Peoria speech of 1854, where he said that he hated the popular indifference to slavery-extension “because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world.” The other keynote is his expressed hope “that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom” worthy of the sacrifice made by the heroic dead. It is this second keynote, the religious and prophetic chord, which should vibrate most strongly to later generations. That chord is touched in a different way in the letter to Mrs. Bixby. It sounds again in the noble letter that Lincoln sent to J. C. Conkling after the battle-summer of 1863, a letter that at times comes as close to poetry as prose well can. “The signs look better. The Father of Waters again goes unvexed to the sea. Thanks to the great Northwest for it.” So he begins. He goes on to thank New England, and the sunny South too, “in more colors than one.” They had helped to win the late victories. “Nor must Uncle Sam’s web-feet be forgotten. At all the watery margins they have been present. Not only on the deep sea, the broad bay, and the rapid river, but also up the narrow, muddy bayou, and wherever the ground was a little damp.…” And finally the splendid ending: “Thanks to all: for the great republic—for the principle it lives by and keeps alive—for man’s vast future—thanks to all.”
And finally, as in some ways the finest utterance of this third Lincoln, the Lincoln who was not only a great moral leader, not only a great intellectual director, but a great spiritual monitor, we have the Second Inaugural. It is not so much a state paper in the ordinary sense as a bit of religious musing upon the past and the future of the Republic; and, long after the diapason undertone of cannon which accompanied it has faded away, it still rings in the nation’s ears as a haunting and uplifting harmony:
The Almighty has His own purposes. “Woe unto the world because of offenses! for it must needs be that offenses come; but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.” If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those Divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, “The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”
With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan; to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations.
In that passage intellect, character and spiritual vision find their perfect fusion; and the writer of it distilled into a few lines of unforgettable eloquence all the sorrows, the chastened resignation and the passionate hopes of a great people emerging from such travail as nations seldom have to endure.
December, 1939
THE LIFE OF
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
THE LIFE OF
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
WHEN a man has become so famous that he is known to everyone, his identity as a person is likely to be lost. His most prominent physical features are emphasized by caricaturists until they come to stand for the man himself. A single adjective describing one phase of his personality is repeated until it takes on the value of a nickname. All the underlying subtleties and inconsistencies that go to make up the real man are forgotten or suppressed; finally he becomes as conventionalized as his memorial statue—and with no more insides to him than there is to the bronze casting.
No one in American history has suffered more from this process of oversimplification than has Abraham Lincoln. We think of him as a tall dark figure muffled in a shawl and wearing a high silk hat that is apparently never removed. We remember all the little things about his costume—the unpressed, ill-fitting clothes, the bulky umbrella, and the little black tie, always slightly askew. We know that his contemporaries considered him homely, but we are so used to seeing pictures of his face that we have come to consider it sadly beautiful. It is everywhere about us, and we must be poor indeed if we do not have Lincoln’s portrait on our persons at this very moment, for it is stamped in copper on every penny that comes from the mint.
Long familiarity with his name and his appearance has made us feel that we know all about this man. His honesty, his kindness and his passion for justice have been described to us ever since we were schoolchildren. And all the things that have been said about him are true—but they are not true enough. The Lincoln we have so firmly fixed in our minds is not a person but a concept. The man himself lies deeper. His character was extraordinarily complex; his motives are not easily understood—and they have often been misinterpreted; contrary to popular belief, his rise to fame was neither accidental nor unsought for; and, more important than anything else, he was a human being like the rest of us, with all the weaknesses and faults common to mankind. It is a confirmation of his inherent greatness that despite the flaws he still seems great, and he grows more interesting on closer study.
There is only one way to understand this man as a person and as a force in history. No amount of reading biographical accounts of him will give the whole picture; no study of history or contemporary records will give as complete an understanding of his curiously complex personality as well as his own words do. We are fortunate in having a large body of his writings and speeches. Much has been lost, of course; carelessness, fire, time and deliberate destruction have taken their toll. But the material that remains is so rich that the man who emerges from Lincoln’s own record of himself can be seen whole a
nd true in an unconscious self-portrait that is sometimes most revealing when its author was most unaware of what he was saying about himself.
It is important, too, to understand the man as he actually was, for his reality as a person is fast disappearing behind the clouds of myth and fancy that have been cast around him. The Lincoln legend is not without its value as a part of American folklore but it has no place in history, except that the myth should be taken into consideration as a part of the deep impression made by Lincoln on the minds and hearts of his people.
The fact that the American people have made Abraham Lincoln into a hero and a god is not to be regretted. In their very act of deification the people have indicated what they themselves most admire in a man. A popular hero is the living embodiment of his people, with all their characteristics, good and bad. He is one of them, lifted up and made great, yet never divorced from their earthiness, rooted deep in the soil from which he sprang. That the American people have chosen this man from among all others to be their representative in world mythology is evidence of their attachment to the principles of liberty, peace and justice for which he stood. And it is remarkable, too, that they have seen through the apparent disparities in his career to the essential underlying truths. They remember him as a man of peace and good will, although they know that he was a wartime leader. They cherish the words he spoke for freedom and democracy, although they realize that he was compelled by the emergency of war to suspend many of their most dearly defended civil rights. They know that he saw beyond the temporary measures of his day to ideals of eternal importance. They remember that he and the men of his time had to fight to preserve those ideals; they remember the part he played in this struggle; they know what he did and they will not forget what he said. The words of his greatest speeches have become as much a part of our political heritage as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution itself.
Now, three-quarters of a century after his death, Lincoln’s memory, which had perhaps for a time become somewhat dimmed by long familiarity, has taken on a new meaning in a world where the things for which he fought are again being threatened. We have seen civil wars and international wars surge around us in the world at large, and the struggle which in his time was sectional for the rights of black men has extended until it has become national and international for the rights of all men regardless of the color of their skins. As a result of this mighty struggle now taking place there has been an amazing revival of interest in the details of Lincoln’s career. Plays, motion pictures, books and stories about him have attained wide popularity. His words are quoted—with varying emphasis—by all parties from right to left. He has become a guide and a prophet to an even greater extent than he was before. Through the study of his life and his words we can arrive at a better understanding of the problems of our own time. The battle for democracy and freedom to which he devoted his life has not yet been won.
His life is one of remarkable interest not only for its personal and political importance, but for its dramatic values as well; it develops through a rising curve to reach a tremendous tragic climax at the end. It has all the narrative elements, and it should be more interesting to most of us than any tale of kings and battles long ago, for it is the story of a man who rose from lowly origins to high place and yet was so human that he is still remembered in his home town as a friend and neighbor rather than as a figure in a history book.
He was born on February 12, 1809, in a log cabin near the village of Hodgenville, Kentucky. His parents came from pioneer stock. His father’s family had settled in Massachusetts in 1637, and moved ever southward and westward in successive waves of migration. In 1786, Lincoln’s own grandfather met the traditional death of the pioneer, shot down by hostile Indians while he was planting a field of corn on ground that he had cleared in the forest. Lincoln’s father, then a small child, was rescued from the marauders by an older brother who killed the kidnapper with a single shot from his long rifle.
An enormous amount of research has been devoted to establishing the facts about Lincoln’s ancestry and early life. As a result of this research, we know a good deal about Abraham Lincoln’s father, Thomas Lincoln. We know that he was a carpenter by trade and a farmer by choice, although he was successful at neither vocation. We know that he was legally married to his wife, Nancy Hanks, on June 12, 1806, by one Jesse Head, deacon in the Methodist Episcopal Church. The certificate of marriage is still in existence. Abraham Lincoln would probably have given much to see it, for all his life he was apparently afraid that he had been born a bastard, son of a mother who had herself been born out of wedlock.
This mother, Nancy Hanks, is a vague and shadowy figure who left no tangible record behind her. She was probably not able even to write her own name, for the few legal documents she signed bear only that shakily drawn cross that is the mark of an illiterate. We do not even know what she looked like, except that she was probably small and dark. After her son became famous, old settlers who had known her tried to remember as much as they could about this woman who had died obscurely many years before. They succeeded only in further confusing our knowledge of her, because they disagreed with one another on almost every point. The woman they described was a protean creature who ranged all the way from a Madonna-like mother to a slut whose casual infidelities would cast doubt on the paternity of her son. She herself was so unimportant that even the few people who knew her at all could not agree as to what sort of person she had been. And she was not only poor and obscure—she was a woman, a pioneer woman who could leave to posterity only one kind of record to indicate that she had lived, breathed consciousness of the world around her, been a part of her generation and her race. Her life work, the sum of her accomplishments, the living memorial of all her qualities, were her children. Whoever and whatever she was, Nancy Hanks Lincoln made her mark upon the world in this one record of her life. Reasoning backward from the kind of son she bore, she must have been a remarkable woman. Certainly her husband shows no trace of greatness in his character. The heritage he gave to his son was the heritage of weakness, of indecision, of slowness and of unceasing inner struggle.
The father, Thomas, a man and a property owner, is as clear to us as the mother is vague. He left a written trail through the records of the counties in which he lived. We can trace his career as a militiaman in 1795; we know to a penny certain sums that were paid to him for his work; we can follow the intricate legal transfers of properties that he bought, sold or abandoned. He lived until 1851. Many people remembered the father clearly when the son became so celebrated that investigators were trying to find every scrap of interest about his ancestry and the facts of his career. There is nothing unknown about Thomas Lincoln. He was the result that might be expected of his environment, no more and no less. He was uneducated, and inclined to look down upon book learning as useless in the hard battle for existence that had been his life. He worked as hard as he had to—and no harder. He never made much money, but he never starved. He got by in everything and he was content to eat, sleep and remain alive. He had the slow deliberate ways and movements that were to be characteristic of his son. He had dark hair and complexion, and so did his son. Otherwise there was not much in common between them, and the little we know regarding their personal relationship indicates that Lincoln had not too much affection for his father, and no more than a formal respect for him.
Thomas Lincoln took his bride, Nancy Hanks, to Elizabethtown. There their first child was born, a daughter whom they named Sarah. Shortly before their second child was due, they moved to a three-hundred-acre farm which Thomas had bought for two hundred dollars. This place was noted for its fine water supply, and was called Sinking Spring farm. In a cabin near this spring, Abraham was born in mid-winter in surroundings that were typical of the pioneer country, crude and primitive to our eyes, but not unrepresentative of the living conditions under which thousands of others dwelled in that new country.
The family stayed on this farm for three year
s. The land title proved to be defective, and Thomas Lincoln suddenly withdrew from his holding to take his family to another farm of only thirty acres ten miles away. This was known as the Knob Creek place, and its physical features were among the earliest memories of Abraham Lincoln. Here he played as a little shirt-tail boy; here he first came to knowledge of a wider world. He remembered the bright waters of the creek that ran through the farm. He remembered some of his first playmates, and he never forgot the names of the teachers whose ABC schools were his first encounter with education.
THE INDIANA YEARS
Title trouble again drove his father onward. He sold his rights to the Knob Creek farm and invested the money in portable merchandise—whisky. Then he built a raft, loaded his whisky and tools on it and went on alone to Indiana in search of new land. He returned for his family, and with them he started out in the late fall of 1816 for the spot he had picked in the forest wilderness to begin his life anew.
Winter was beginning when they arrived there. Thomas Lincoln built a half-faced shelter—a simple structure open on one side to face an outdoor fire that was supposed to heat the interior. Life in Indiana was even more primitive than it had been in Kentucky. Neighbors were few, and the country was in its virgin state, covered by endless forests that had to be cleared by hand labor. Winter came upon them. Somehow they managed to live through it, but the snow must often have drifted into the open-sided cabin. They got food from the forest, shooting the wild animals that were there in great numbers. Water was to be had by melting the snow. Like most wilderness creatures they probably spent much of their time sleeping, for in sleep one could forget the cold and the endless boredom of life under such conditions.
The Life and Writings of Abraham Lincoln Page 3