Abraham Lincoln (5 page)

2: A M
ATTER OF
P
ROFOUND
W
ONDER

Had we met Lincoln in his Springfield law office during the 1850s, we would have looked on a man in his forties, dressed well enough in a plain linen suit and boots. His feet were so large—size fourteen—that he had to have his boots specially made. He weighed 180 pounds and stood six feet four inches, an extraordinary height for those days, and it was all in his legs. When he was sitting, he was no taller than an average man; but when he stood, he kept rising until he towered over his friends as though he were standing on stilts. And he loomed taller still when he put on his stovepipe hat.

Parts of him did not seem to fit. His head appeared too small for his height, and his chest was narrow and thin in contrast to his long arms and legs, his huge hands and feet. His black hair was so coarse and unruly that it “lay floating where the fingers or the wind left it,” Herndon said.

His gray eyes sparkled as he said “howdy” and shook hands with both of his. His hands were bony and rough—the hands of a man who had known hard physical toil in his youth. He had a dark leathery complexion, with a mole on his right cheek; large ears; and a scrawny neck with a conspicuous Adam's apple. His neck was too thin to fill the collar of his dress shirt, even when it was pulled tight with a black cravat.

We might have thought his face much more subtle and complex than his photographs reveal. “I have never seen a picture of him that does anything like justice to the original,” said a young journalist. “He is a much better looking man than any of the pictures represent.” A young southern woman agreed. “His face is certainly ugly, but not repulsive,” she said; “on the contrary, the good humor, generosity and intellect beaming from it, make the eye love to linger there until you almost find him good-looking.”

Had we talked at length with Lincoln, we might have thought he epitomized what a French philosopher once said: “No man is strongly marked unless he bears within his character antitheses strongly marked.” Lincoln certainly had that. He was “a many mooded man,” Herndon observed, “a man of opposites—of terrible contrasts”—now witty and outgoing, now sad, quiet, and remote. His mood changes could be startling. None of his friends and colleagues pretended to understand him. “He was, take him all in all, one of the most incomprehensible personages we have ever known,” recalled a fellow lawyer. He did seem to enjoy people and companionship, and yet he hid his inner feelings behind a wall of stone. “Lincoln's nature was secretive,” Herndon said. “He was the most reticent, secretive man I ever saw or expect to see,” added Judge David Davis. Even Mary Lincoln found him that way. Despite his deep feelings, she remarked later, “he was
not
, a demonstrative man, when he felt most deeply, he expressed, the least.”

One thing he felt “most deeply” was his log-cabin origins. The truth is that he felt embarrassed about his frontier past and never liked to talk about it. He seldom mentioned his parents either, particularly his real mother Nancy, who he feared was illegitimate. According to Herndon, Lincoln confessed that “my mother is a bastard” and admonished his partner to “keep it a secret while I live.” True, Herndon is notoriously unreliable when reporting what others told him about Lincoln. But specialists agree that he is most authentic when relating things about Lincoln he personally witnessed. So Herndon is probably right that Lincoln had painful misgivings about his mother's legitimacy. Why else would he become profoundly silent about her and her past? In an 1860 autobiography, he dismissed Nancy with a single reference that she was born in Virginia. Yet in mood and appearance he resembled sad-eyed Nancy more than he did his father.

Thomas Lincoln, for his part, was not the shiftless oaf Herndon reported. If he was illiterate, as were most pioneers of his time and place, he was also a skilled carpenter who stayed sober, paid his taxes, accumulated land, and enjoyed the respect of his neighbors in Indiana and later in Illinois. Yet the important thing is how Lincoln viewed him. Here again, Herndon's opinion of Thomas was undoubtedly Lincoln's. In the son's eyes, the father did seem an unlettered, low-born product of the frontier, and Lincoln became permanently estranged from him. At age twenty-one, he escaped his father's world—a world of mindless physical toil—and never returned. What was more, Lincoln felt considerable contempt for his father's intellectual limitations, once remarking that Thomas “never did more in the way of writing than to bunglingly sign his own name.” Lincoln did not invite his father to his wedding or take his family to visit him (Thomas never visited his son either). When his father died in a nearby Illinois county in 1851, Lincoln did not attend the funeral.

Lincoln became a literate and literary man, and he did so largely on his own. In all, he accumulated about a year of formal education in the “blab” schools of frontier Kentucky and Indiana. A gifted boy, he set about educating himself, borrowing whatever volumes he could find and reading the same one over and over. Contrary to legend, he did not study all night by the fireplace of the Lincolns' one-room cabin. Until young Lincoln got a loft, the entire family slept by the fireplace, and bedtime for hardworking farmers came early. Young Lincoln would take his book to the field and read at the end of each plow furrow while his lathered horse got its breath; and he would read again at the noon break.

In these delicious moments away from work, he would lose himself in romantic histories, in the adventures of
Robinson Crusoe
or the selected fables of
Dilworth's Spelling-Book
. He practically memorized the grammars he came across, which taught him rhetoric—that is, dramatic and oratorical effectiveness—as well as the mechanics of writing. Young Lincoln fell in love with language, with metaphors, with assonance and alliteration. His writings sparkle with such gems as “old and only,” “a thousand thanks,” and “high and beautiful terms.” He delighted in creative expression, in the literary telling of a story. Even in a letter, as the critic Edmund Wilson pointed out, Lincoln could make a sentence sing with poetic eloquence. Another cause of his melancholy, he wrote at age thirty-three, was “
the absence of all business and conversation of friends
, which might divert your mind, and give it occasional rest from that
intensity
of thought, which will some times wear the sweetest idea thread-bare and turn it to the bitterness of death.” Consider, too, the cadences and alliteration in a speech Lincoln read at the Springfield Young Men's Lyceum when he was twenty-eight. “Let reverence for the laws,” Lincoln wrote, “be taught in schools, in seminaries, and in colleges;—let it be preached from the pulpit, proclaimed in legislative halls, and enforced in courts of justice. And, in short, let it become the
political religion
of the nation; and let the old and the young, the rich and the poor, the grave and the gay, of all sexes
and tongues, and colors and conditions, sacrifice unceasingly upon its altars.”

Lincoln's mature writings, Wilson says, “do not give the impression of a folksy and jocular countryman spinning yarns at the village store.” Rather, they reveal a serious and literate Lincoln, “self-controlled” and “strong in intellect.”

In truth, Lincoln had a talent for expression that in another time and place might have led him into a distinguished career in American letters. “By nature a literary artist,” as one biographer described him, he fancied poetry and wrote verse himself. Here is a poem he composed at thirty-seven, about a visit to his boyhood home in Indiana. He hadn't seen the neighborhood in fourteen years, and nostalgia rose in him, easing his resentments for a region that held painful memories for him. Later, feeling pensive and poetic, he composed these lines:

My childhood's home I see again
,
And sadden with the view
;
And still, as memory crowds my brain
,
There's pleasure in it too
.

O Memory! thou midway world
'Twixt earth and paradise
,
Where things decayed and loved ones lost
In dreamy shadows rise
….

The friends I left that parting day
How changed, as time has sped!
Young childhood grown, strong manhood gray
,
And half of all are dead
.

I hear the loved survivors tell
How nought from death could save
,
Till every sound appears a knell
,
And every spot a grave
.

I range the fields with pensive tread
,
And pace the hollow rooms
,
And feel (companions of the dead)
I'm living in the tombs
.

In his prose as in his verse, Lincoln strove to capture eighteenth-century rhythms without eighteenth-century pomposity. His public utterances, which he always wrote out himself, took on a lean, unembellished eloquence, gleaming with apt metaphors and precise allusions. We are all familiar with the brilliance of his best state papers during the war—with the Gettysburg Address, the ringing Second Inaugural. Novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe extolled Lincoln for his literary abilities. There were passages in his state papers, she declared, that ought “to be inscribed in letters of gold.”

With his love for language, he studied Shakespeare, Byron, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, attracted especially to writings with tragic and melancholy themes. He examined the way celebrated orators turned a phrase or employed a figure of speech, looking for great truths greatly told. Though never much at impromptu oratory, he could hold an audience of fifteen thousand spellbound when reading from a written address, speaking out in a shrill, high-pitched voice of great power. On the platform, he often made a point by leaning his head to the side and leveling his finger. When he was “moved by some great & good feeling,” Herndon observed, “by some idea of Liberty or Justice or Right then he seemed an inspired man” and “those little gray eyes…were lighted up by the inward soul on fires of emotion, defending the liberty of man or proclaiming the truths of the Declaration of Independence.” On such occasions, reported a friend, “he was given to raising both arms high as if to embrace a spiritual presence.”

Yet, in conversation, this literate and poetic man still showed the ineradicable influence of his Kentucky and Indiana background. All his life he said “sot” for
sat
, “thar” for
there
, “kin” for
can
, “airth” for
earth
, “heered” for
heard
, and “one of 'em” for
one of them
. He claimed that “I han't been caught lyin' yet, and I don't mean to be.” He “pitched into” a difficult task “like a dog at root” until he had it “husked out.” He pointed at “yonder” courthouse and addressed the head of a committee as
“Mr. Cheermun.” And he “larned” about life and received an “eddication” in the best school of all—the school of adversity.

One side of Lincoln was always supremely logical and analytical. He was fascinated by the clarity of mathematics and often spoke and wrote with relentless logic and references to this or that proposition. “Their ambition,” he said of the Founding Fathers, “aspired to display before an admiring world, a practical demonstration of the truth of a proposition, which had hitherto been considered, at best no better, than problematical; namely,
the capability of a people to govern themselves
.” This too came from self-education, this time in Euclid's geometry. Law associates recalled how he used to ride the circuit with a copy of Euclid in his saddlebags along with Blackstone and
The Revised Statutes of Illinois
. More than one of them would wake up in the middle of the night and spot Lincoln, his feet sticking over the footboard of a bed, pondering Euclid in the flickering light of a candle, impervious to the snoring of his colleagues in the crowded tavern room.

Yet this same Lincoln was superstitious, believed in signs and visions, contended that dreams were auguries of approaching triumph or doom. He even insisted that fat men were ideal jurors because he thought them jolly by nature and easily swayed. He was skeptical of organized religion and never joined a church; yet he argued that an omnipotent God controlled all human destinies.

He was an intense, brooding man, plagued with chronic depression throughout his life. His friends did not know what to make of his bouts of melancholia, or “hypochondria” or the “hypo” as people called it then. In his earlier years, alienated from his parents, trying to escape their world and rise into the genteel middle class, Lincoln tended to derive his sense of worth from the acceptance and approval of others. He said as much himself in his first political platform, written in 1832. “I have no other [ambition] so great as that of being truly esteemed of my fellow men, by rendering myself worthy of their esteem.” When his fellow men rejected him at the polls, Lincoln could be devastated. Oh, he
would try to joke about political defeat. He would say, “Well, I feel just like the boy who stubbed his toe—too damned badly hurt to laugh and too damned proud to cry.” But he still felt rejected and depressed.

The “hypo” could be worse when women and affairs of the heart were involved. In his youth, Lincoln was painfully shy around girls and covered it up by acting the neighborhood clown. In New Salem and later in Springfield, young Lincoln felt inadequate as a man, fearful of female rejection, doubtful that he could please or even care for a wife. As for Ann Rutledge, there is no evidence whatever that Lincoln and she ever had a romantic attachment. There is no evidence that theirs was anything more than a platonic relationship. In these years, in fact, his closest female relationships were with married women who posed no threat to him.