Founders' Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln

by Richard Brookhiser

  In his late twenties and thirties, Lincoln wrote poems of his own, all sad. One, “The Suicide’s Soliloquy,” was thought to have been removed from the files of the Sangamo Journal, the local newspaper that ran it, as if to spare Lincoln from being associated with such a grim topic. A scholar rediscovered it, however, in 2004. One stanza will suffice:

  Yes! I’ve resolved the deed to do,

  And this the place to do it:

  This heart I’ll rush a dagger through,

  Though I in hell should rue it!

  Lincoln failed utterly to match his words to the sentiments he wished to evoke. The rhyme of “do it” and “rue it” is like rolling barrels down a staircase.

  Probably his best touch as a poet came in “The Bear Hunt,” a long description of a wild bear being run down and killed by mounted hunters and baying dogs. As the chase reaches a clamorous pitch, Lincoln, whose sympathies are with the bear, drops in this mordant little line: “The world’s alive with fun.” Only a humorist could be that black.

  Lincoln loved poetry and turned to it all his life: as a mirror for his moods, as a salve for them, as a capsule in which to deposit them. But he stopped writing it, and seldom quoted it in his speeches. He did better: he assimilated the moods and music, and learned to call on them, when needed, in his prose.

  In January 1838 Lincoln gave a speech in which he brought together many of the things he had been learning about politics and self-expression. He also spoke of the founders—their legacy and their passing: what they had accomplished and what would become of it now that they were dead.

  His venue was the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield. Lyceums were discussion groups that met in American towns to hear edifying talks, either by locals or by traveling speakers. The highfalutin name (the original Lyceum was Aristotle’s school in ancient Athens) showed the young country’s ambition for self-improvement. Lincoln’s audience at the Young Men’s Lyceum was composed of striplings like Herndon and Matheny who were already his fans. Lincoln, on the eve of his twenty-ninth birthday, could still just claim to be one of them.

  His topic was “The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions”—a subject of obvious interest to a politician (he was in his second term in the Illinois House of Representatives). Rhetorically he was on his best behavior—perhaps too much so. His first sentence, after stating the topic, is a long rumble: “In the great journal of things happening under the sun the American people find our account running under date of the nineteenth century of the Christian era.” This was as resonant as a drum, and as empty. But as the young statesman warmed to his subject, he had some interesting things to say.

  Lincoln defined America’s political institutions as a system “conducing . . . to the ends of civil and religious liberty,” and he thanked the founders—“hardy, brave and patriotic”—for establishing it (he would come back to the founders twice more). Their handiwork, he went on, was safe from invasion. The War of 1812 had proved that point: the British, who had beaten Napoleon, had been unable to beat the United States.

  America’s institutions, however, faced a threat from within: mob violence. “Accounts of outrages committed by mobs,” said Lincoln, “form the every day news of the times”: “They have pervaded the country” and “have grown too familiar to attract anything more than an idle remark.” He dwelled on two examples—a lynching of five gamblers in Vicksburg in 1835, and the lynching of Francis McIntosh, a colored man, in St. Louis in 1836. The victims were not lambs—both the gamblers and McIntosh were killers—but their deaths were brutal and entirely illegal: the gamblers had been strung up without trial, and McIntosh had been chained to a tree and slowly burned to death.

  Here Lincoln showed his Whig partisanship. Andrew Jackson had left the White House at the end of his second term in 1837, to be succeeded by fellow Democrat Martin Van Buren. (The Whig Party had tried to beat Van Buren in the election of 1836 by running three presidential candidates, in hopes of sending a deadlocked election to the House of Representatives; their failure has dissuaded any party from trying that gambit again.) Van Buren was sleek, stout, courteous, and elegant—in short, no Andrew Jackson. But Jackson’s hellion personality was still a political lightning rod. Whigs in Lincoln’s audience would believe, without him having to argue the point, that an uncontrollable president had somehow given an impetus to lawless mobs. Both Mississippi and Missouri, where the lynchings had occurred, were Democratic states.

  There was a third Democratic state that had also recently witnessed mob violence, and that was Illinois. Elijah Lovejoy, a Presbyterian minister from Maine, had settled in St. Louis, where he published an abolitionist newspaper. A mob had destroyed his presses after he had condemned the lynching of McIntosh, whereupon Lovejoy had restarted his newspaper across the Mississippi River in Alton, Illinois. In November 1837 a mob there shot him to death and threw his presses into the water. Lincoln alluded to this crime in a list of the things mobs do: “burn churches, ravage and rob provision stores, throw printing presses into rivers, shoot editors . . . ” (italics added). Lincoln did not mention Lovejoy by name, but only two months after the fact and sixty miles away (the distance between Alton and Springfield), everyone in the audience would have recognized him.

  Lincoln milked these crimes for all their gruesomeness, but he argued that the worst thing about mob violence was its aftereffects. If life and property depended on “the caprice of a mob,” decent men would become “alienated” from their government. Once that happened, ambitious men would be tempted to overturn it and start afresh. This was the great threat Lincoln saw to American institutions—not Andrew Jackson and his riotous imitators, but rebels who might arise in their place.

  The spectacle of lawlessness would give such rebels their opportunity, but their incentive would be the chance of making a mark in history. Lincoln returned to the founders as a parallel. They had made their mark in history by establishing free government: “If they succeeded, they were to be immortalized.” They had succeeded, and they had their reward: “This field of glory is harvested, and the crop is already appropriated.

  “But,” Lincoln went on, “new reapers will arise, and they too will seek a field.” Would these new reapers find glory in maintaining the institutions that other men had created—even men as glorious as the founding fathers? Lincoln scoffed: “Such [ambitions] belong not to the family of the lion, or the tribe of the eagle. . . . Towering genius disdains a beaten path. It seeks regions hitherto unexplored.”

  These are almost the best lines of Lincoln’s speech. Fields, reapers, and eagles are images as plain as anything in Paine (lions are a bit exotic), though Lincoln means them seriously, not sarcastically. They reach for poetry—and Lincoln had a poetical model for the towering genius he depicted. Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage was one of Byron’s most famous poems, a long rumination on life and modern Europe, and one of its most famous passages was a portrait of Napoleon.

  But quiet to quick bosoms is a hell,

  And there hath been thy bane; there is a fire

  And motion of the soul which will not dwell

  In its own narrow being, but aspire

  Beyond the fitting medium of desire;

  And, but once kindled, quenchless evermore,

  Preys upon high adventure . . .

  Napoleon’s career was recent history—he had died in 1821—and everyone admired him for his abilities and against-all-odds boldness. But he was the archetype of the restless political adventurer; and any republican—like Byron, like Lincoln—deplored him for destroying the French republic and replacing it with his own personal empire.

  How to forestall an American Napoleon? Lincoln turned once more to the founders.

  The political institutions of the founders had been established and sustained, Lincoln argued, by passion—theirs, and ours. The founders had been passionately committed to the Revolution. Lincoln described how the struggle had galvanized them, focusing hatred on a common enemy and sinking ordinary rivalries
in a common cause. So long as the founders lived, younger Americans felt a passionate commitment to them as heroes in their midst. “A living history” of the Revolution, Lincoln said, “was to be found in every family . . . in the limbs mangled, in the scars of wounds received.”

  But now the founders were dead—dead and gone. The ties of passion that had kept America connected to the Revolution were cut. The founders had been “a fortress of strength; but what the invading foeman could never do, the silent artillery of time has done—the leveling of its walls. . . . They were a forest of giant oaks; but the all resistless hurricane has swept over them, and left only here and there a lonely trunk.” This passage, especially the phrase about time’s artillery, is the finest in the Lyceum Address, the first anticipatory flash of the light to come.

  Now that the founders had died, neither they nor our fading loyalty to them could stop the next Napoleon. What could Americans turn to instead? Lincoln’s answer was reason: “Passion has helped us but can do so no more. Reason, cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason, must furnish all . . . our future support.”

  Lincoln’s appeal to reason echoed Paine’s great title, but Lincoln’s Age of Reason, unlike Paine’s, would be focused on politics, not religion. Reason would instruct Americans to honor the law: “Let reverence for the laws be breathed by every American mother to the lisping babe that prattles on her lap.” Then American institutions would be safe from mobs, from alienation and from towering geniuses alike. Lincoln even hoped that law-abidingness would become a “political religion.” But the new faith would be founded upon, and guided by, reason.

  The Lyceum Address was printed in the Sangamo Journal, a Springfield newspaper, with a note of thanks from the Lyceum to “A. Lincoln, Esq.”

  There are problems with the Lyceum Address. There is a lot of rhetorical stuffing in it, which the eye now slides over (“lisping babe,” indeed). Lincoln’s picture of revolutionary-era America united in a glorious cause was historically false. There had been traitors, such as Benedict Arnold, and there had been thousands of loyalists engaged in violent resistance to the Revolution, both in New York and in the South. Parson Weems had followed his Life of Washington with a Life of General Francis Marion, the Swamp Fox of South Carolina, which covered the local civil war there in detail.

  Lincoln’s appeal to “cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason” was untrue to his own rhetorical efforts. If he loved reason’s coldness so much, why had he used all the arts he possessed to make his case? Reasoners don’t talk about resistless hurricanes or time’s artillery.

  A loose thread running through the address, neither cut nor tied off, was the issue of abolition. Lovejoy had been lynched for advocating it, and he and other abolitionists had deplored the lynching of McIntosh. Even the Mississippi lynchings had an abolitionist subtext: Vicksburg had turned on its gamblers in 1835 as part of a statewide alarm over a slave revolt that was supposedly being plotted by an unholy alliance of abolitionists and bandits. The fear was groundless, but the hangings that ensued were very real.

  Lincoln had no truck with abolition. In the March 1837 Protest on Slavery, he and Dan Stone had maintained that abolitionist propaganda actually made slavery worse, presumably by causing panic among masters. Lincoln hated lynchings, but he also hated stirring up public wrath. Abolitionism struck him as a radical project, the kind of thing that might follow a descent into lawlessness. America’s “towering genius,” he warned in the Lyceum Address, might be equally capable of “emancipating slaves, or enslaving freemen.” Lincoln’s fear of a Napoleon-to-be, finally, was groundless. No such figure arose. The challenges Lincoln would face over the rest of his career took very different forms.

  Yet there were Americans in the family of the lion and the tribe of the eagle, men with traces of towering genius, and though they would never found an empire, they would cross Lincoln’s path, sometimes quite intimately.

  The address was a marker of what he had learned by the end of his twenties: a try-out and a rehearsal of arguments. He had not yet figured out how to use humor in a serious setting, but he made his first essays in poetry—not jingles about suicide or bear hunts, but the true poetry of liberty, death, and humanity.

  Lincoln called on the founders. He called clumsily. He lifted Reason (shorn of anti-Christian mockery) from Paine. He invoked the founding generation as wraiths, venerable but vanished. At the tail end of the address, Lincoln even summoned George Washington: “That we remained free . . . shall be that which to learn the last trump shall awaken our WASHINGTON” (Lincoln’s caps). Washington had fought for freedom—once upon a time. He could not help us now, because he was dead, but when he should be resurrected, he would learn that we had helped ourselves.

  That was rather curt. But Lincoln would be coming back to the founders again.

  Five

  1840–1852: MATURITY

  TOWERING GENIUS, AS LINCOLN SAID, DISDAINS THE BEATEN path. In his thirties, Lincoln followed it. The beaten path led him to the mature walks of life, professional and personal.

  As his legal practice grew, he traveled the roads, dusty or muddy by turns, of central Illinois, arguing cases in county courthouses. In politics he clambered up the ladder of ambition until he was sent to Washington as a congressman. He made money, labored for his party, and attacked a president (of the other party) and a war (begun by the other party).

  Along the way he sank into despair, married, and started a family.

  He had some further encounters with George Washington, but they were muffled by official piety or partisanship. The beaten path can be a busy and distracting place.

  Despite Lincoln’s fears of real mobs and possible Napoleons, Illinois politics followed ordinary democratic paths, both intricate and boisterous. A few of the incidents in which Lincoln figured stood out for their local color.

  In December 1840 Illinois Democrats tried to adjourn the legislature, which would cause a law offering relief to the Illinois state bank to lapse. Local Democrats opposed the state bank for the same reasons Andrew Jackson had fought the Second Bank of the United States—they claimed it favored businessmen and the rich, not the common man. Lincoln and his fellow Whigs argued that the state bank offered credit to all and wanted to protect it by keeping the legislature in session. To block a motion to adjourn, most Whigs absented themselves, depriving the legislature of a quorum; only Lincoln and a few others stayed behind to keep an eye on things. But the Whig watchdogs miscounted: Lincoln and friends plus the Democrats were just enough to make a quorum after all. When the Whigs saw their error, they tried to leave the statehouse, but the Democrats barred the door. So Lincoln and his friends jumped out of a second-story window. Democratic newspapers joked about raising the building another story.

  Two years later Lincoln was involved in a more serious spat, though still a grotesque one. By 1842 the Illinois state bank was so weakened that the state refused to accept its currency in payment of debts, a policy announced by the state auditor, James Shields, who was a Democrat. Lincoln believed that the Democrats, who had attacked the bank for years, were reaping the fruit of their own demagogy, and he decided to make fun of Shields in a pseudonymous letter to the Sangamo Journal.

  Lincoln’s letter appeared in August. His persona was Aunt Becca, a chatty old countrywoman; her message was that Shields was imperious and high-handed. There was one funny line in the piece, describing Shields (who must have been a bit of a dandy) at a party: “Dear girls,” he says to the assembled ladies, “it is not my fault that I am so handsome and so interesting.”

  Shields was not amused, and he challenged Lincoln to a duel. The deaths in duels of Alexander Hamilton in 1804 and of naval hero Stephen Decatur in 1820 had thrown the practice into disrepute—somewhat. But Shields and Lincoln took the matter seriously. As the challenged party, Lincoln got to pick the weapons; he chose cavalry broadswords, to take advantage of his long arms (Shields was of average size). In September the parties and their seconds met on an island in
the Mississippi, opposite Alton, where the affair was finally resolved short of combat, Lincoln declaring that Aunt Becca’s letter had been written “wholly for political effect,” and not to impugn Shields’s character.

  Lincoln learned from these encounters to make better vote counts, and not to push opponents too hard.

  Such maneuvers and mind-games were the inside story of politics, absorbing to politicians and journalists, if to no one else. But there was also the outside story of politics: the public appeals that politicians and parties made to establish their claim to rule.

  Lincoln’s party made one of the most effective appeals in American political history in the presidential election of 1840. After Jackson destroyed the Second Bank of the United States, the economy had collapsed on the head of his successor, Martin Van Buren. The Whigs were determined to ride through the ruins to victory—their first ever, if they succeeded. Their candidate in 1840 was William Henry Harrison, a hero of the War of 1812 who had also held a few political offices, though none of them recently. He seemed dignified and reasonably famous without being controversial.

  Early in the campaign, a Democratic newspaper attacked Harrison as a nobody: if he were given a pension, he would “sit the remainder of his days in his log cabin.” The Whigs immediately realized that this jibe, aimed at Harrison’s obscurity, came off as disdain for his humble station in life—which also happened to be the station of the vast majority of voters. The Whigs embraced the insult, parading log cabins at Harrison rallies and marketing canes, handkerchiefs, soapboxes, joke books, and whiskey bottles decorated with log cabins.