The Life and Writings of Abraham Lincoln (3 page)

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.

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

W
HEN 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 and 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.