The Life and Writings of Abraham Lincoln (2 page)

“N
O 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 lake 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: