“With the thoughts you’d be thinkin’
You could be another Lincoln
If you only had a brain.”—Wizard of Oz
I’ve always been particularly fond of Lincoln. Granted I grew up in the North, but the very vanilla information that I’ve garnered about him over the years has only increased my admiration. In fact, as an art project in 2nd grade, I drew a remarkable likeness of him and the teacher admired it so much that she printed my portrait of Abraham Lincoln in a special art edition of the school bulletin. (As a side note, I’ve never been able to recreate my initial success as a budding artist and perforce, can only produce a nominally decent stick figure.)
Honestly though, one of the many motives for my PRP was to read about Lincoln. Let’s pull a Ghost-of-Christmas-Past act and watch Vanya about a year ago when reading Manhunt: The Twelve Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer by James Swanson. Again this book was a “gift” so to speak. In reality my dad was cleaning house and he sent me about a half dozen books that he had already read and thought that I might like. (Coincidentally, in this package I also received His Excellency, the book on George Washington that I would later use to start my PRP.) Now I did not really care for Manhunt. The author did a good job of recreating John Wilkes Booth’s actions in the days before and after the assassination and his character analyses of the accomplices are interesting and original. But...not only did I find Swanson’s flights of fancy regarding Booth’s thoughts and the godawful length of the book frustrating but I found myself longing to read more about Lincoln while he was still alive. It was then that I discovered how little I really knew about our 16th president. All I knew about Lincoln’s life could probably summed up on one double-spaced sheet of paper and who knows if any of it was even true!
This book really got me thinking. Did I really know that much about any of the presidents? What about the ones in my own lifetime? The truth was scary and yet, I think, a testimony to the perversity of social studies pedagogy in our nation’s school system.
Anyways, now is not the time to soapbox my opinions on how history is so tragically taught to our children in school, but as a proud fan of “history” in general, I was appalled at my lack of knowledge in an area that affects me on a pretty regular basis (every four years, if you must know.) Of course, this was not the only reason I started the PRP (please read my first blog if you wish to know the rest) but since we’ve made it to Lincoln I feel that I must include these extra reasons as well. Now, maybe, you also can fathom the happiness that I felt upon delicately opening Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years and the War Years by Carl Sandburg (Harcourt, Inc: San Diego, 1939).
In choosing Carl Sandburg’s famed biography, I did quite a bit of research first. With Lincoln my frustration was due, unlike so many other presidents, to the vast amount of literature to be had on the subject. It seems like everybody and their grandmothers wanted to write their own version of Abraham Lincoln’s life story, culminating in the first ever assassination of an American President. But I wasn’t convinced. I went right to Amazon.Com and began reading review after review and realized that though Carl Sandburg’s book was rather dated and a freakin’ behemoth, it was still rated as one of the top Lincoln biographies ever. Well that was enough for me and best yet, it was at my local library!
The Lincolns originated from the Shenandoah Valley but Thomas Lincoln, Abe’s father, uprooted his wife and small daughter and moved them all to Kentucky. And that, dear folks, is where little Abraham was born. “Whatever the exact particulars, the definite event on that 12th of February, 1809, was the birth of a boy they named Abraham after his grandfather who had been killed by Indians—born in silence and pain from a wilderness mother on a bed of perhaps cornhusks and perhaps hen feathers—with perhaps a laughing child prophecy that he would ‘never come to much’” (p. 8).
In December of 1816, the whole family picked up again and moved to Indiana. Sadly, only 2 years later, Abraham’s mother, Nancy, died of the milk sickness (where the tongue apparently turned white). “So Nancy Hanks Lincoln died, 34 years old, a pioneer sacrifice, with memories of monotonous, endless everyday chores, of mystic Bible verses read over and over for their promises, of blue wistful hills and a summer when the crab-apple blossoms flamed white and she carried a boy child into the world” (p. 12). Only a year later, Thomas Lincoln remarried a widow, Sarah Bush Johnson, who would become a good and kind influence on Abraham. “His stepmother was a rich silent force in his life” (p. 16).
Growing up on a farm in the wilderness, Abraham learned to do everything needful, but he was never known as a great worker; he preferred books. In fact, he once stated “My father taught me to work but he never taught me to love it.” He was never very handsome either. In an age where the average man was 5’8”, Abraham grew to 6’4”. He was tall, gawky and his clothes never, ever fit properly, leaving his ankles and wrists perpetually exposed. On top of all this, Abraham had never any formal schooling. He went to a local school for a time, enough to learn to read, but thereafter was too busy working. In the end, he simply taught himself by books that he borrowed.
In 1828, his sister, Sarah, died in childbirth. Abraham then took a job as a flatboat operator, hauling pigs down the Mississippi River to New Orleans to be sold. When he returned home, he found that his family was getting ready to move to Illinois where he joined them as well. It was in Illinois, that he gave his very first political speech. “He had been delivering speeches to trees, stumps, rows of corn and potatoes, just practicing, by himself. But when two legislative candidates spoke at a campaign meeting in front of Renshaw’s store in Decatur, Abraham stepped up and advocated improvement of the Sangamon River for better navigation” (p. 21).
The very next year, Abe moved away from his family to the town of New Salem, Il. There he was to become a store clerk, gaining a far-reaching reputation as an honest and reliable man. Abraham also had taken to reading legal books and even performing some small legal offices for people, including deeds, wills, and other services. It was only to be expected, then, that his name be discussed as a possible candidate for the Illinois legislature.
Unfortunately though at that very moment in 1832, the Black Hawk War burst upon the scene and the local militia was called up as reinforcements for General Zachary Taylor. A group of men from New Salem banded together to form a regiment and they elected Abraham Lincoln as their captain. He and his regiment did not see much fighting but they walked long weary hours through every kind of weather. Instead of returning home after his enlistment ended, Lincoln reenlisted another two times. “In those days Lincoln had seen deep into the heart of the American volunteer soldier, why men go to war, march in mud, sleep in rain on cold ground, eat pork raw when it can’t be boiled, and kill when the killing is good” (p. 32).
In 1834, he was finally elected to the state legislature, where he proceeded to shine. “One lobbyist noted Lincoln in this legislature as ‘raw-boned, angular, features deeply furrowed, ungraceful, almost uncouth…and yet there was a magnetism and dash about the man that made him a universal favorite” (p. 44). When the legislature was not in session though, Lincoln had been hired as a surveyor for the state. He spent his time between the state legislature and when it was not in session, travelling for his surveying job. His daily existence remained much this way until 1836 when he took and passed the bar examination. Abraham Lincoln had become a lawyer.
After his successful entry into this new profession, Lincoln moved to the state capital of Springfield to become a partner in a law firm. It was here in Springfield that Lincoln met Mary Todd, whom he married on November 4, 1842. His new wife was very ambitious politically but she had to bide her time because Abraham was merely a simple country lawyer. She had her husband keep his hand in the local Whig machinery by having him travel the state electioneering for various other individuals. Through one thing and another, Abraham Lincoln’s name became quite well known among the political elite of Illinois.
As the United States declared war on Mexico, Illinois sent Abraham Lincoln as its representative to the United States Congress. Since he was a Whig and the Whigs liked to rotate representatives every term, Lincoln was only in Washington one term and then he was heading back home to Springfield. In 1849, he was offered a position of Secretary to the Territory of Oregon but he declined the position.
As the Whigs faded into the background of the political spectrum, Lincoln did not immediately jump on the Republican bandwagon. Republicanism began as a direct result of slavery in the states and was, almost from the start, a truly sectional party. However, since he had been a Whig for almost his entire political life and disliked slavery, he found himself a Republican almost without realizing it. In fact, Lincoln became so popular in the newly-created Republican Party that he even received some votes in the Republican National Presidential Convention of 1856.
But Lincoln could no more stay away from politics than a starving man from food. “The political letters of Lincoln early in 1858 showed more and more a rare skill in the management of men” (p. 137). He began to hone his political platform by officially speaking out against the institution of slavery. It is generally accepted that Lincoln’s “House Divided” Speech (where he said that no house can stand against itself, referencing slavery) caught the public interest and got his name out to a more national audience.
The “House Divided” speech, though, was just an appetizer. Lincoln really reached a higher level of national popularity and recognition from a brilliant plan that his team formulated to promulgate his name. The 1858 Senate race was to be contested between Abraham Lincoln, Republican lawyer and backcountry farm boy, and Stephen A. Douglas, political wunderkind and Democratic urbanite. Stephen Douglas had known Lincoln for years (they both practiced law in Springfield) and both held each other in high regard. However, Douglas had been actively engaged in politics for decades before Lincoln was ever elected to any position. For example, Douglas, also known as the “Little Giant,” had penned the controversial Kansas-Nebraska Act when he chaired the Senate committee on Territories.
The daring plan to get their man elected to the Senate essentially had Lincoln ask Douglas if he would be willing to hold a number of debates throughout the state. Douglas agreed and over several weeks, went head-to-head with Abraham Lincoln on the issues of that day. Lincoln was clever though. He used everything that Douglas said against him, without it appearing that way. Slavery was the most hotly contested issue between them and Lincoln used it to trap Douglas into saying that slavery should be ended. This tiny statement by Douglas would severely hurt his chances of being nominated the presidential candidate by the Democratic Party in 1860.
In the end, Lincoln failed to be elected to the US Senate and instead Douglas went on to Washington. However, people took notice of the lanky, intelligent lawyer from Illinois who had beat Douglas in the popular vote but lost with the electors. What no one could have imagined would be the effect of the printed word in these men’s futures. The Lincoln men put together a little booklet of all the debates and through this medium, Lincoln’s name shone across the nation as an up-and-coming political star.
“Lincoln was 51 years old. With each year since he had become a grown man, his name and ways, and stories about him, had been spreading among the plain people and their children. So tall and so bony, with so peculiar a slouch and so easy a saunter, so sad and so haunted-looking, so quizzical and comic, as if hiding a lantern that lighted and went out and then he lighted it again—he was the Strange Friend and the Friendly Stranger. Like something out of a picture book for children—he was. His form of slumping arches and his face of gaunt sockets were a shape a Great Artist had scrawled from careless clay.
“He looked like an original plan for an extra-long horse or a lean tawny buffalo, that a Changer had suddenly whisked into a man-shape. Or he met the eye as a clumsy, mystical giant that had walked out of a Chinese or Russian fairy story, or a bogy who had stumbled out of an ancient Saxon myth with a handkerchief full of presents he wanted to divide among all the children in the world.
“He didn’t wear clothes. Rather, clothes hung upon him as if on a rack to dry, or on a loose ladder up a windswept chimney. His clothes, to keep the chill or the sun off, seemed to whisper ‘He put us on when he was thinking about something else.’
“He dressed any which way at times, in broadcloth, a silk hat, a silk choker, and a flaming red silk handkerchief, so that one court clerk said Lincoln was ‘fashionably dressed, as neatly attired as any lawyer at court, except Ward Lamon.’ Or again, people said Lincoln looked like a huge skeleton with skin over the bones, and clothes covering the skin.
“There could have been times when children and dreamers looked at Abraham Lincoln and lazily drew their eyelids half shut and let their hearts roam about him—and they half-believed him to be a tall horse chestnut tree or a rangy horse or a big wagon or a log barn full of new-mown hay—something else or more than a man, a lawyer, a Republican candidate with principles, a prominent citizen—something spreading, elusive, and mysterious—the Strange Friend and Friendly Stranger” (p. 146-47).
To be continued…
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