Abraham Lincoln

Front matter

ft I Si tsV S as

LINCOLN NATIONAL LIFE FOUNDATION b iSS

The Institute of Museum and Library Services through an Indiana State Library LSTA Grant

Prefatory Note

Mr Ritchie's List of Lincolniana in the Library of Congress (1906) extends to 86 pages, and contains perhaps one thousand entries. It is obvious, therefore, that a great bulk of material has been accumulated, both for the assistance and confusion of the biographer. I do not pretend to have read, or even to have glanced over, any but a fraction of the books and pamphlets which this list represents, or to have followed Lincoln's fame through the pages of all contemporary commentators and critics, yet I have endeavoured to inform myself adequately on all the significant facts bearing upon the subjects which the present volume discusses.

The material for the Life of Lincoln is not very evenly distributed over the several periods, and there are serious gaps and deficiencies, both in material and in evidence. It is to be feared that these are now little likely to be filled. Careful inquirers appear to have repeatedly covered the ground, and later gleaners cannot now hope for much of moment. The deficiencies are most serious in relation to the character of his parents, his own early years, the love passages of his early manhood, the most intimate of his friendships, and his domestic life.

vii viii Prefatory Note

But the general outlines, and the features of his character are not in doubt. For them, we have his own words, and an admirable series of portraits extending over the last seven years of his life; besides the evidence of a large number of intelligent witnesses. The chief difficulty of the biographer lies in balancing the continually conflicting statements of previous writers. Part of this contradiction is, of course, due to the personal equation, and part to the extreme singularity of the subject of their study, but part results also from changes in the character, or at least in the outward expression, of the man himself, under the greatly altered circumstances of the last four years of his life.

Among the many lives and studies of Lincoln to which this book is under obligation, I may mention especially those of Nicolay and Hay, of Herndon and Weik, of J. T. Morse, and of Ida M. Tarbell ; but also those of F. B. Carpenter, J. G. Holland, I. N. Arnold, Noah Brooks, W. H. Lamon, Norman Hapgood, W. E. Curtis, J. H. Barrett, R. H. Browne, E. P. Oberholtzer, F. T. Hill, A. Rothschild, H. B. Stowe, C. G. Leland ; and the Reminiscences of H. C. Whitney, J. R. Gilmore, and L. E. Chittenden. I am also much indebted to J. F. Rhodes' " History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850," and to Gov. Ford's History of Illinois.

Messrs Nicolay and Hay collected the Works of Abraham Lincoln in two volumes in 1894, which, in

Prefatory Note ix

1905, were further extended to ten volumes : these, of course, furnish much of the material for my work. A selection from them, with an introduction by Mr Bryce, has been recently added to Everyman s Library. and Lincoln's speeches are thus at last accessible to the general public on this side of the Atlantic.

I may, perhaps, be allowed to note that, with all its deficiencies, this is, as far as I am aware, the first serious attempt made by an Englishman to portray on any full-sized canvas the greatest of the popular statesmen of the last century, the most notable figure among the leaders of the English-speaking democracy. I have not attempted to do more than to suggest, by way of background, the events amongst which he lived. Even an outline of the complex action of the Civil War, would only, as I think, have confused the picture of the man which I have tried to draw.

H. B. B.

Letchworth, June 30, 1907.

Contents

PAGE

Prefatory Note ...... vii

List of Illustrations ..... xiii

Chapter I Beginnings

Introductory — Origins of the Family — Early years in Kentucky — Migration to Indiana — Life at Gentryville — Begins anew in Illinois.

FOR the great majority of those who are not Americans, the story of the New World is symbolized, if it is not summed up, in three illustrious names — Columbus, Washington, and Lincoln. It is true that other figures are visible, but rather as shadows, than as historical persons. And of these three, all but the last are now so heavily cloaked in legend that their faces are hardly to be recognized. Even that of Abraham Lincoln, as plain and full of character as any man's, has been already changed, and in a sense, transfigured. To many who have " fastened their eyes upon him," as to those at Antioch who looked upon the first Christian martyr, his face has become " as it had been the face of an angel." The extraordinary part he played in the drama of his nation's life, and especially in the act of Emancipation, read in the light of his humble birth and of his tragic death, has made Lincoln something more than a great public character. He has become a national possession, and as such the outlines of his story have inevitably been drawn by the hand of national sentiment. Like Columbus and Washington, he too has become, for the general, a symbol and type of his people.

But while America may seek and find in this nationalized portrait, the face of one whom she delights to call " the first American," and while those of us who are not Americans, may also see in that face, as in perhaps no other, an indication of the meaning and purpose of the Republic in the middle of the nineteenth century, yet it is time the world should be able to look at him from a point of view more human and universal. " He was a man, take him for all in all : " and a man whose character and story contributes something original to our common stock of manhood.

We cannot then allow America to monopolise Abraham Lincoln. Indeed, it would be absurd, if it were possible, to suppose that the most typical citizen of the most cosmopolitan of States, had any other country than the world.

From another point of view, the English have a claim upon him prior even to the American ; for if in tracing back his path to its starting place, we pause at his first home in Kentucky, we must there take up the quest again, till we find ourselves among the Lincolns on this side of the sea in some farmstead of East Anglia.

In spirit, as by origin, he is of that household of liberty which sojourned for so many centuries in this England of ours ; his republicanism comes of the stock of that of our Pirns and Hampdens, it is of the same spirit as are the songs of his favourite Burns ; while, in spite of all that is original and unexpected in him, yet essentially, in temper and sentiment, he is unmistakably a Briton. The best of his papers and addresses have become an inalienable part of that English literature which is the common possession of a people who share too intimately both in blood and aspiration — the greatest of all bonds — to be sundered by anything that is less vital than they. And in his own person he presents one of the most striking examples of our ultimate identity of purpose. During his presidency, the relations between the two countries were severely strained by the incidence of a war which proved disastrous to one of the principal branches of English industry. But it was at this period, when thousands of the men of Lancashire were thrown out of employment, and with their wives and children to the number of half a million were cast upon charity by the blockading of the cotton ports, that our northern artizans proclaimed their faith in Lincoln, and their recognition of the fact that it was their battle he was fighting across the sea.

During those dark days the portrait of John Bright, the English tribune of the people, was one of the two that adorned the business room of the American President. He knew, and the true leaders of the English working-men knew, that the cause of the peoples is one ; that in preserving and renewing the life of the American republic, in breaking for ever the power of slavery within it, he was, as he so often repeated, upholding the cause of freedom for the whole world, and nobly saving " the last, best hope of earth."

In the largest sense of the phrase, a sense in which it has been applicable to very few, Abraham Lincoln was a " man of the people."

Few have ever lived more continuously in the eye of day. His life seems to have always been peculiarly open to inspection and a sort of publicity. Yet he never became common-place. He remains among the always unexpected persons whose thoughts and actions are the reverse of trite or obvious.

And thus, while the volumes which have been written about him already form " a literature," we, their readers, remain unsatisfied. The man himself baffles us. Before his portrait we still stand curious. No one is able to explain this man so that we can say to ourselves with flattering satisfaction, " Yes, we understand him very well," and so pass by. We read what has been written in explanation, and we know that neither we nor the writers really understand. So we come back to every word and instance of the man himself.

Some may ascribe this to the failure of his biographers ; but it is really an evidence of their honesty, and is far better than a delusive success. Abraham Lincoln must remain, for all but the very few who are by nature of his spiritual kindred, an unsolved enigma. We can trace his history through almost all its details ; we can question scores of witnesses who were in close relation to him ; we can analyse the writings and actions in which he expressed himself. But at the end, we confess we are not satisfied with the explanations we have to offer. Like any other greatest man, he eludes our categories.

For all that, the inexplicable man himself with his boldly-cut characteristics, standing out clear and dominant against the background of events, is singularly satisfying. If we cannot explain him, neither can we really misunderstand him. He is always himself, and his humanity is so large that he appeals to us all. Not indeed, as a mere Sundayschool hero, or as a conventional " example to the young " — they little understand him who would thus tell his story — but as a man of like passions with us all, a man more responsive than others to some, at least, of the claims and possibilities of life, more burdened than others by destiny.

In these pages I have tried to bring the reader to a position from which he may see this tall figure in what has seemed to me to be its most striking and characteristic aspect. His own public and private utterances, the more important of which are now accessible to all, read with the history of the time will supplement this volume with much significant material which could not be included in it. But here, I trust, the reader may find the man, Abraham Lincoln, whom to know was to love.

It was in 1637 — the year of Hampden's refusal to pay ship-money — that three brothers of the name of Lincoln sailed from Bristol to settle in the colony of Massachusetts. A century and a half later, while the colonists, under the leadership of a Virginian soldier, were still engaged in declaring their independence of the Mother-country, one of the descendants of these brothers crossed the mountains that separated Virginia from the rich Indian lands to the westward. The Lincolns, then, may fairly be described as among the foremost of American pioneers.

During that interval of a century and a half, Abraham Lincoln's ancestors — all belonging to the independent working-class, as distinguished from mere wage-earners — had sojourned first in one colony and then in another, slowly but steadily moving South and West. In Pennsylvania they had prospered, and one of them, at least, was associated with the Quakers of that State. In some brief autobiographical notes Lincoln remarks that his ancestors, when they left Berks County, Pennsylvania, and removed into Virginia, were Quakers. The allusion has significance, not merely because it is the only reference to any religious body in these notes, but because it suggests an interesting spiritual affiliation to which we shall refer again later.

John Lincoln's " Quakerism " — it is not clear that he was actually a member of the Society of Friends — did not prevent one of his sons from serving in the Revolutionary War ; nor, in spite of the traditions of Penn's friendship with the Red-men, could it save another from death at the hands of the Indians.

This Abraham Lincoln, the elder, sold his Virginian farm, and about 1781, took the Wilderness-trail for Kentucky. He was one of the first 20,000 of those who crossed the Cumberland Ridge, attracted by the fertility of a country whose Indian name of " the dark and bloody land " so well suggests the years of its conquest and settlement under Boone and other leaders as adventurous as he.1

Abraham Lincoln took with him a wife and three sons when he crossed the mountains, and all shared together for some seven years in the hardships of that

1 One of these pushed on beyond the borders of Kentucky into the country of the Illinois, "the land of full-grown men," and with almost incredible daring and determination captured it from its British rulers to become in future years the home of one of the greatest of American statesmen.

wild life. Then, as they were at work on their clearing outside the friendly shelter of Hughes Station, they were surprised by Indians, the father being killed and the others only narrowly escaping.

Old Abraham Lincoln may have been a prosperous settler, but in the nature of things he could leave but little property behind him, beyond certain wide tracts of uncleared land, a couple of horses, a few head of cattle, some tools, guns, and the simplest of household necessaries. And these passed, by the prevailing law of Virginia, to his eldest son, Mordecai.

His widow removed further westward into what is now the centre of the State, and here her youngest son, Tom, early inured to labour, and without any of the advantages of education, became in due time a country carpenter. Round - faced and compact in build, with grey eyes, a prominent nose, and coarse black hair, he grew to be a favourite among his neighbours, for his kindly good-nature, companionableness, and honesty. He seems to have been endowed with some of the best qualities of the pioneer, and to have possessed an obstinacy of purpose, a slow, sturdy determination, and personal rectitude, which have been too easily forgotten. He was probably of a lethargic temperament ; there is a tradition that he was at times subject to fits of depression, and that at rare intervals, and under extreme provocation, he exhibited a certain violence of unrestrained passion. His choice of two noble women as his successive partners in life, indicates some corresponding quality of character.1 But he belonged to a class which could not thrive in the

1 See H. M. Jenkin's, " The Mother of Lincoln " {Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, for July 1900).

Southern States, the class of free labourers and artizans. In the North he would doubtless have become, if not as prosperous as other men of equal skill and rectitude — for he seems to have had less than the average of ambition — yet free at least from actual poverty or dependence upon others. No man in his condition of life need, at that time, have remained really poor in the North. But in the South it was different. Slavery and independent labour could not prosper side by side ; and as the gentry of Virginia brought their " property" into Kentucky, the descendants of the first hardy settlers either rose upon the new flood into affluence, were swept on before it further West, or, if they remained, sank into insignificance and social ostracism as " crackers " or " poor white trash."

During Thomas Lincoln's youth a great change came over the new land. He had been born in 1778, a year after his more successful contemporary, Henry Clay, whose name is so intimately associated with all the fortunes of Kentucky. Clay came over the mountains twenty years later, when the population of Kentucky already numbered nearly 200,000, onefifth of whom were slaves. Almost immediately, he became prosperous as an eloquent lawyer in courts whose principal business was the settlement of conflicting land claims. In those twenty years, Kentucky had passed out of the hands of the pioneers. Other men with other manners were taking the places of the old frontier leaders with their coon-skin caps, their tasselled shirts, their moccasins and fringed leggings ; their long rifles, powder-horns and axes ; their bold, free manners, their rough honesty and justice, and their vices of cruelty and dissipation. The trickster and land-speculator had followed so fast upon their heels, that they had often been unable to retain for themselves the very lands they had won and cleared at so much peril. With these came also the lawyer and the judge, the surveyor, and the landed gentry.

Much of the old social system disappeared with the passing of the frontiersman. But even when buffalo and Red-skin had become little more than legends, when the women of Kentucky were ceasing to treasure Indian scalps among their trophies, and the towns of Lexington and Louisville were centres of social and even literary interest, whisky-drinking and boisterous merriment still ruled at all festivities, and personal prowess was the surest path to popularity.

A little before midsummer, 1806, this noisy mirthmaking seems to have found full scope at the wedding of Thomas Lincoln and his first-cousin, Nancy Hanks. The rude fare and roaring fun associated by tradition with this occasion, even if they could be transferred to this cold type and paper by the pen of a Rabelais, might only obscure the two figures whom we see but dimly in its midst — the young carpenter and his bride. From this distance she looks pathetically out of place at that noisy wedding feast, given by the well-to-do guardian of this, the youngest member of a large and impoverished family of orphans.

A mystery has always hung over the name and story of Nancy Hanks.1 There is, however, clear documentary evidence that Nancy was the youngest child of Joseph Hanks of Nelson County, Kentucky, whose wife was " Nanny " Shipley, daughter of Robert Shipley of Amelia County, Virginia, probably

1 See Appendix A.

i o Beginnings

a Quaker, and the sister of Mary, wife of Abraham Lincoln the elder. There were three other sisters, Lucy, who married Richard Berry ; Sarah, married to Robert Mitchell ; and Elizabeth, who became Mrs Thomas Sparrow. These all removed into Kentucky, and the Hankses, Berrys, and Sparrows all play their part in the earlier chapters of Lincoln's life. Joseph Hanks, Nancy's father, who died when she was nine years old bequeathing to her " one heifer yearling called Peidy," may have had some Welsh blood in his veins.1 He left eight children, and the widow being poor, Nancy was brought up by her aunt Lucy, Mrs Richard Berry, at whose house, near Beechland, her wedding subsequently took place.

Nancy herself would seem to have been at the time of their marriage a woman of twenty-three, of great charm, with dark hair and dark vivacious eyes, whose conversation was brightened by frequent sallies of fun. She had besides, according to her son, a strong memory, acute judgment and cool, heroic temper, and a nature highly intellectual. She seems to have been too sensitive a creature for the hard life of a pioneer ; and the vein of humour may well have been associated, as her health failed, with a nervous and melancholy temperament.

It will be noted that she was Thomas Lincoln's first cousin, both their mothers being Shipleys. This double intermarriage with members of a well-known Quaker family again recalls the affiliation to which I have already referred.

The pair settled at first in Elizabethtown, where

1 See H. M. Jenkins, op. cit., and Historical Collections relating to Gwynedd.

.

Thomas Lincoln was a carpenter ; but he soon afterwards resolved to eke out his earnings by the clearing of a farm. It was not a successful venture ; and his family can have derived little benefit of any kind from his removal out of the friendly village to the somewhat desolate region, a dozen miles away, which he had selected. It was there, in his cabin, three miles from Hodgensville, that, on February 12th 1809,1 his second child, Abraham, was born.

As far as we can tell, little Abe's inheritance was of that " honest poverty " that need not hang its head. The comparative prosperity of his grandfather in the years before he crossed the mountains, and before the long-protracted war which had ruined so many a Virginian family, was so far forgotten that it was not even a legend to the child. His parents were poor among a poor people. But doubtless he was well content in his home by Nolin Creek, playing in and out of his father's workshop, and taking part in his mother's butter-making and spinning.

When he was four years old the family crossed the ridge to the northward to another farm in a more fertile situation. But it lay so low between the hills that it was subject to disastrous flooding by the freshets after heavy rains. Here, during the next three years, he began to make himself useful to his father in a hundred ways about both farm and workshop. And under his mother's guidance, and with the very irregular and limited assistance of certain itinerant teachers, he subsequently learnt to read and write. In this respect he soon outstripped his father, who, if he could sign his name, yet always found his

1 The birthday also of Charles Darwin.

hammer much handier than his pen. Indeed, although Thomas Lincoln assigned much of his own poverty to lack of education, and upon that score had a strong theoretical belief in its value, he was, in practice, sceptical about anything beyond the obviously useful rules of arithmetic. Booklearning seemed to tend perilously to waste of time upon mere stories, with consequent restlessness and general dissipation of energy. The boy was quickwitted, and soon had gained knowledge enough — according to his father's standards — while he was too likely a lad and too willing, to be spared from the always pressing tasks of a struggling farmer.

Thomas Lincoln did not prosper at Knob Creek ; and when, after a spring planting of his three fields, a torrent from the hills, unheralded by any rain in the valley, swept away, not only his seed, but the very soil in which it was sown, he seems to have despaired of his second farm. Nor was the peril from flood the only one that overhung him ; the title to his land does not appear to have been secure, and in the autumn of 1 8 1 6, he relinquished his clearing and left Kentucky forever.

Henry Clay in the meanwhile, had risen to be a great political leader. The eloquent Kentucky lawyer had become speaker of the lower House of Congress, and was the idol of the younger Republicans. They styled him already the " Statesman of the West." During Thomas Lincoln's forlorn struggle at Knob Creek, Clay's fiery eloquence had carried his countrymen into the second war with Great Britain. His popularity caused him to be chosen as one of the four Commissioners sent to Europe to negotiate the ensuing peace, a peace which his proud, impetuous spirit was the last to accept. There is no figure of the time more fascinating than that of this gallant " Harry of the West," whose personal influence over his contemporaries can scarcely be exaggerated, and who remained to the end of his life — with the possible exception of Jackson — the greatest political power in the Western States, and above all, in the life of Abraham Lincoln.

The Lincolns' migration across the Ohio river into the Indiana timber was a more serious undertaking than that to Knob Creek, and hardly more fortunate in its issue. For a part of the 80 or 90 miles they traversed, the travellers had to cut their waggon-way through the forest ; and from this time on, for many years, the boy was never long without an axe in his hand. Arrived at their destination, the new farm had to be cleared and fenced, and the new house built, all entailing heavy and determined toil.

The home was indeed the poorest Nancy Lincoln had ever called her own ; a " half-faced camp " open on one side to the weather save for a curtain of skins. But she had had a long training in the painful practice of poverty, and this thin-breasted, stooping woman, who could handle a gun at need, was not one to complain. Their circumstances slowly improved, and after the first winter the family moved into a cabin, in whose loft the boy slept upon a mattress of leaves. Doubtless the wilder life with its forest episodes and adventures was more than ever to his mind, as long as food was plentiful. But, though there was game of all sorts about them, bear and venison, and wild turkey, there were too many busy days when the table boasted only its dull staple dish of potatoes or Indian corn. Perhaps, even worse to the boy than the occasional scarcity of food was the continual excess of labour. He was old for his years and very strong ; and as we have seen, his father was too poor and too hard pressed by necessity to excuse his sturdy son. There was scant time to spare for books on Little Pigeon Creek, though his mother was eager enough for him to learn. But she, poor woman, probably weakened by incipient consumption, seems to have succumbed to one of those malignant, malarial fevers which were then rife in that part of the country.

With final injunctions that they should worship God and be good to one another, she left her forlorn little family and her own hard lot in the autumn of 1818.

For about a year they struggled on together as best they might, the father, son, and elder sister Nancy, and an easy-going nondescript cousin about twenty years of age, one Dennis Hanks. Then Thomas Lincoln made his way back over the difficult tracks through the forest to Elizabethtown, where a girl he had formerly loved had now become a widow in comparatively comfortable circumstances. Her he married in December 1 8 1 9, and brought back with her three children and her household gear to his Indiana cabin. The new mother, though of a different type, was a fit successor to the old ; a handsome, sprightly woman of thrift, character and a large heart. Under her decisive influence the conditions of life in that desolate household were improved as far as poverty and the back-woods permitted, and lost henceforward much of their aspect of sordidness.

Beginnings t

The hard life of the pioneer brings him continually face to face with death. Before they left Kentucky, the Lincolns had already buried an infant son, over whose fate the mother seems to have brooded long. The mysterious fever, to which she herself fell a victim, devastated the whole district, and the carpenter had to make many a rough coffin besides that for his dead wife.

Hers had been a bald and lonely burying; no preacher was there to represent the communion of mourners in every age, or to offer words of comfort. There were, indeed, few ministers among the frontiersmen, and it was months before one could be found to conduct a service over her grave. These bare facts of his early life show how, at ten years old, the lad had begun to study the book of Tragedy with its vivid pictures. He appears to have inherited an imaginative temperament from his mother — at seven years he seemed already " considerin' and old like " to the neighbours — and this tendency must have been nourished at the cost of other sides of his character by such events as I have narrated. His constitution was, moreover, saturated with the malaria of that low-lying riverside locality, which further disposed him to a morbid intensity of feeling. Surrounded by the fever-haunted forest, and by all the mysteries of death and the Unknown, made ever more mysterious by the ignorance and superstition of the forest-folk, it is little wonder that Lincoln's childhood appears to have been coloured by melancholy and dark abstraction. He must already have been often withdrawn from the outer world into that of his own sad and secret thoughts.

But while his melancholy was probably, in this early period, so strong and dominant a mood as to be almost an obsession, we must not conceive of him as a boy wholly isolated from others and absorbed either in his own thoughts or in the woes of a retentive imagination. In a healthy nature, the sheer reaction from such moods is very strong, reaction of abandonment to that reckless, harmless, irresponsible mirth which in later years his familiars knew so well. The wholesome influence of his new mother, who, as he once said, did more than any one to make a man of him, must henceforward have been of the greatest help in steadying and balancing his character, while his own quick interest in life and events grew continually with the unfolding of his powers.