Abraham Lincoln, an interpretation in biography

Part Third. Lincoln, the Nation's Executive, 516-575

ABRAHAM LINCOLN.

introduction:

President-elect Lincoln, while on his journey to the Capital for the purpose of being installed in the highest office of the Nation, felt prompted by the locality to make certain biographic remarks in an address before the Senate of New Jersey, at Trenton, a few days preceding his inauguration. These remarks show the formative power of biography over a human career, notably over that of Lincoln, and hint suggestively, even if unconsciously, the lines upon which his life is to be constructed by the biographer. Preluding what is to follow by these words of Lincoln, we shall emphasize his salient thoughts. Let us then, first of all, hear him speak.

"May I be pardoned, if, upon this occasion, I mention that away back in my childhood, the earliest days of my being able to read, I got hold of a small book, such a one as few of the younger members have ever seen — ^Weems' Life of Washington. I remember all the accounts there given of the battle-fields and struggles for the liberties of the country, and none fixed themselves upon my imagination so deeply as the struggle here at Trenton, New Jersey. . . . You all know, for you have been boys, how these early impressions last longer than any others. I recollect thinking then, boy even though I was, that there must have been something more than common that these men struggled for. I am exceedingly anxious that that thing, that something even 7?iore than national independence, that something that held out a great promise to all the people of the world to all time to come — I am exceedingly anxious that this Union, the Constitution and the liberties of the people shall be perpetuated in accordance with the original idea for which that struggle was made, and I shall be most happy indeed if I shall be an humble instrument in the hands of the Almighty, and of this, his almost chosen People, for perpetuating the object of that great struggle."

Thus Lincoln in siglit of his mighty task, gives expression to the thoughts which well out of his heai1 in presence of the historic associations clustering around the New Jersey Capital. The chief

INTRODUCTION. 7

interest is that the speaker calls up Washington moving from the hour of his sorest trial forward to one of his greatest triumphs, and instinctively couples that time with the present. An epoch is dawning equal in magnitude to that of the Revolution, if not more colossal; very naturally Lincoln conjoins himself with Washington, and becomes aware of himself as the pilot to a new era, though with deep foreboding, as he looks out from Trenton upon the coming crisis.

Nor should we omit to note those fleeting prophetic intimations, those fitful flashes of foresight and insight into the Supreme Oixler, of which Lincoln in his high moments was capable, and which break forth through detached phrases from the hidden depths of his agitated soul. He is conscious that something is at stake "even more than national independence ", which was the purpose of the old Revolution. He glimpses the far-extending, globe-encircling significance of the contest, involving in its result "a great promise to all the people of the world to all time to come'" : surely a vast outlook, world-historical in the widest sense. And the biogra]^her must try to stretch his own soul to the vision of that promise seen by Lincoln, and to give to it some kind of utterance. Moreover Lincoln's great happiness is in feeling himself to be "an instrument in the hands of the Almighty" as well as an instrument in the hands "of this His almost chosen People", to bring about the grand coming consummation of the ages. It may be permitted to draw forth into clearer outline from the shadowy twilight in which they float, these prophetic premonitions of Lincoln. We behold him forecasting his highest function, and placing himself between the People (or Folk-Soul) on this side, and on that side the Almighty revealing Himself as the World-Spirit in the historic occurrences of Time. Thus he is truly an instrument of both these Powers, the one here below and the other there above ; a mediator we may name him between the Folk-Soul and the World-Spirit, both of which he, Abraham Lincohi, is born to harmonize, after they have produced just about the loudest and shrillest dissonance of the century, if not of all history. So he speaks, not with the strictness of a logical formula but with the glimmering outline of a far-off forecast, discoursing first of that Power more than national, in supereminent sway over all the people of the world to all time to come, then of himself as instrument of it, who is to bring it down and realize it in this his almost chosen People, also an elemental Power in the enduring world-historical act. Now it is these two Powers which will move through the life of Lincoln, and will be b}^ him interwoven, and indeed unified, making him truly the Great Man of his nation and epoch. To each of them we give its own name, that they be distinctly marked off and specially designated. In the People, from whom Liucoln springs, to whom

INTRODUCTION 9

he appeals, and for whom he acts, is working a character, an instinct, a Soul — we shall often call it the Folk-Soul. The almighty, providential Power, whom Lincoln often invokes under one name or other, who has his hand on human events, antl directs them to his end, we shall name the world-historical Spirit, or simply the World-Spirit. This last is "something more than common", "more than national", yet employing the particular nation at a given time as its upbearer and realizcr for fulfilling a given stage of the supreme end of the World's History. Moreover between these two Powers there is a certain immediate relation, as w^hen we hear it said that in a great crisis Public Opinion (the Folk-Soul) bears directly the impress of the Genius of the Age (the World- Spirit) . In such a case, however, the Folk needs a leader in word and action, voicing its dumb aspiration and bringing it to realize in deeds the decree of the supernal Power whose potency it feels and whose end it carries out. Such a leader for our Nation in its pivotal crisis was Lincoln, mediating, as we designate the relation, this particular American Folk-Soul of ours, with the universal World-Spirit, the Prime Mover in and over all History,

Another fact should be taken out of the foregoing bit of a speech and dwelt upon with due attention : Lincoln had read during his early youth in the frontier cabin of his parents the life of George

Washington by M. L. Weems, who, we learn from the title-page, was "formerly rector of Mount Vernon parish ", where was located the well-known residence of the Father of his Country. That book had gone deep into Lincoln's soul and had stayed with him through life, not only furnishing an ideal of manhood and moulding his character, but also showing him the way to reach the popular heart. For Weems was a story-teller, an anecdotist, yea a myth-maker, or at least a myth-gatherer, weaving around the name of Washington many a wonderful legend. Such for instance, was the marvelous dream of Washington's mother (with interpretation by Weems), and the hero's providential escapes from his foes, the Indians and the British, the whole being garnished with apt allusions to Scripture and even to Homer. In the same book is found the most popular of all American folk-tales, the story of the Little Hatchet with its moral climax: "Father, I can't tell a lie". This story, Weems says, was taken down from the lips of "an excellent lady ", of old the depository and transmitter of folk-lore. Deeply educative was the book for the almost schoolless boy reading in the night by the fire of a back-log; even then he was getting ready for his task, and he now recognizes the fact, as he looks rearward into his past, unavoidably connecting himself with Washington, wh(M"(nn most of his countrymen have since followed him. It is true that there is a striking dif-

INTRODUCTION. 11

ference between the high-toned, well-educated, dignified Mrginia gentleman and the awkward, self-made backwoodsman of the North-West. The one represented the Right of Revokition and succeeded ; the other represented the Wrong of Revokition and succeeded. The career of the first led primarily to separation and won it; the career of the second led primarily to union and won it. Still both sprang from the same Mrginia, though at different removes ; the one may be called the son and the other the grandson of the Old Commonwealth. The triumphant end of Washington's war was Yorktown^ the triumphant end of Lincoln's war was Appomattox, both places being in the same general locality of the same State, Mrginia.

Rector Weems thus heroizes Washington for his People and writes a unique book, though running somewhat in the Plutarchian mythologic vein and breaking out into dramatic dialogue upon tempting occasions. Such a biography is at present hardly possible, perchance not desirable, though to our forefathers it had unquestionably its message. Lincoln drew from it deep joys and deeper training of the spirit. His own life was enwreathed, particularly while he was President, in masses of fable ever sprouting afresh from the Folk-Soul, he being himself the People's own fabulist. This the biographer cannot neglect, though with it must be given the profounder significance of Lincoln's careerj truly world-historical.

Another utterance may be cited, concordant with the foregoing statement, showing to whom Lincoln's thoughts reverted as he beheld and brooded over the coming trials of his country. His fellow-citizens of Springfield assembled for a parting salutation when he set out to assume his Presidential duties, with the cloud of Civil War already darkening the Southern horizon. He bade them farewell, breathing a sigh of premonition and giving a glimpse of that great man of the past in whose presence he seemed to live during those trying days: "I now leave, not knowing when or whether ever I may return, imth a task before me greater than that which rested upon Washington^ part jfirst.

When it began to be foreshadowed about 1859- 60 that Abraham Lincohi was the coming man of the supreme national emergency, a great desire was felt to know how he got to be. Even to his friends the hues of his early life ran back into a cloud which he seemed unwilling to disperse. Two little bits of autobiography were wrung from him by the necessities of the approaching campaign. From the first we take the following extract which gives a glimpse of his early opportunities for education in the backwoods of Indiana. (Works of Lincoln, by Nicolay & Hay, I, p. 596.)

'There were some schools so-called, but no qualification was ever required of a teacher beyond reading writing and ciphering to the rule of three. If a straggler supposed to understand Latin happened to sojourn in the neighborhood, he was looked upon as a wizard. There was absolutely nothing to excite ambition for education." Still we shall see that Lincoln learned from these frontier teachers the elements and the educative instrumentalities of all culture. He thus had the chance of making further progress by means of the printed page, though "I have not been to school since. The little advance I now have upon this store of education, I have picked up from time to time under the pressure of necessity." Somewhat too disparaging is the tone of these confessions, as Lincoln contrasted himself with Seward and other college-bred men in public life. But he had opportunities for training which they had not, and which are by no means to be omitted from any complete account of his life's discipline for his mighty task.

In the other bit of autobiography (Works, I, p. 639), written in the third person, for use during the campaign of 1860, he returns to the defects of his early education: "Abraham now thinks that the aggregate of all his schooling did not amount to one year. He was never in a college or academy

LINCOLN'S APPRENTICESHIP. 15

as a student, and never inside a college or academy building till since he had a law license. What he has in the way of education, he has picked up. After he was twenty-three he studied English Grammar — imperfectly of course, but so as to speak and write as he now docs. He studied and nearly mastered the six books of Euclid since he was a member of Congress," that is, after he was forty years old. Through these simple modest paragraphs pee})s out the uncjuenchablc aspiration of the man; he educates himself and graduates from a school of which he is the only man of his time who holds or can hold a diploma. Now that school with its curriculum is just what our reader, we hope, wishes to hear about in this book of ours. Still another precious autobiographic morsel concerning Lincoln we can catch up from the first pages of his Boswoll, Hcrndon. Just after the Chicago Convention of 18G0, a reporter by the name of Scripps, called upon him for some details of his life. Lincoln at first shrank from the idea, exclaiming, "Why, Scripps, it is a great piece of folly to make anything out of me or my early life. It can all be condensed into a single sentence, and that sentence you will find in Gray's Elegy,

The short and simple annals of the poor.

That's my life, and that is all that you or anyone else can make of it."

And yet the life of Lincoln before ISOO has become that part of him which the People love to hang over and ponder upon in a kind of insatiable wonder. More than any other recorded career it reveals the possibilities of the American man rising from the humblest to the highest position in the land. How did he do it? The reader clutches and caresses every little fact trying to coax out of it some brief whisper of the lurking secret. Lincoln's education certainly flowed not in the ordinary channels made by the stream of transmitted culture. Still he had an education unique of its kind and preparing him supremely for his world-historical function. Now this education of Lincoln, being quite different from what is usually included under that term and reaching considerably beyond th(! usual school-age, we shall designate specially as his Apprenticeship, which indeed covers the first thirty-three years of his life, from his birth till his marriage. And this considerable stretch of human existence has likewise its lesser turns and tides, which the biographer should not fail to trace in passing.

Lincoln the apprentice, therefore, we are to follow in the present period, tracking him as far as possible along the main lines of his spirit's early flowering. AVe arc to behold in it a time of preliminary training for his work; we can hardly leave out of view whither he is going, and under what guidance. Easy enough is it ordinarily to tell to what school, college, university this or that dis-

LINCOLN'S APPRENTICESHIP. 17

tinguished man went, what he studied and who were his teachers, in the beaten road of academic disciphne. But all this becomes just the difficult thing to speak out and even to find in the case of Lincoln, who has and even makes his own curriculum while he goes along. He creates his college course as he lives, and the biographer must create it after him from the little and few fragments which have been fished out of his youth's fountain of oblivion. His chief instruction does not take place in a building devoted to education; Lincoln's school-house is the world, more particularly his institutional environment, which he is to absorb more completely and to become acquainted with more intimately than any other man of his time. The People was his instructor, and he learned the lesson so well that he in the end became the instructor of the People.

We may say, then, that during the first period of his life Lincoln was the apprentice of the Folk- Soul, especially as the latter manifested itself in the Northwestern portion of the United States. Primarily he is of it, one with it, pulsing responsively to all its throbs; an embryo we may regard him, not yet consciously born of his institutional mother, even if lustily struggling for birth and the light of Heaven. During all these years, a full generation indeed, young Lincoln is but a germinal unit, an atom of the vast protoplasmic mass called the Multitude, from which, through the discipline of life, he is to differentiate himself and rise up to true individuality. This concentrates into one burning point the People, who thus in their Great Man can see themselves by their own light. Through such individuals a Nation, if it can produce them, need never die, being able to re-constitute and to re-make itself in the pinch of destiny

The apprentice Lincoln — so we may name him for the nonce — we are now to see in the workshop or school of the Folk-Soul, learning its ways, how it looks at things, and particularly how it deals with its own institutions. He has to get widely and well acquainted with his own around him — the hardest branch in the curriculum of life. Moreover he has not merely to commune deeply with the Folk-Soul, but he must learn to talk to it in its own dialect. Thus it understands him when he speaks to it, and it responds to him, often with a tremendous acclaim. On the other hand he understands it, probably better than any other American has ever succeeded in doing. Still all this he has to learn, and this is the theme of his Apprenticeship. Anecdote, fable, law, politics, even love are some of the elements surging through the long discipline, often chaotic in outer appearance, but inwardly attuned to one harmonious end, if our ear can be brought to catch the music.

Here, however, we shall just hint what the future is fully to reveal. This A]ij:)rcnticeship is not the finality of the man, but is only the means,

LINCOLN'S APPRENTICESHIP. 19

the road leading him forward to his supreme vocation. As he himself declared, he is "the instrument" in the hands of the Almighty and of the People to fulfil the grand behest of the Ages. Still he has to have preparation and a good deal of it. This Apprenticeship is, accordingly, but a part or stage of the total Lincoln. Nevertheless it has its own process and its own law governing its somewhat diversified and scattered occurrences. These are what we shall have to study, seeking to put them into some kind of inner relation and order, which brings to light their psychical movement, and thus reveals the soul itself in its unfolding. This Apprenticeship, we may say in advance, will show Lincoln in three stages or chapters of his si)irit's evolution towards its supreme end: first, his youth with its schooling at home under the paternal roof, then his going forth and experiencing the world in a time of drifting, finally his getting established in State, Community and Family, or his becoming institutionalized. With this last phase his Apprenticeship is rounded out to fullness, and the Apprentice passes on to the next great sweep of his life's occurrences driving forward towards his goal.

CHAPTER FIRST. Xtncoln'0 !3outb

The boundary of Lincoln's youthful period we may draw through the year when he becomes of age, and quits parental guidance for the direct experience of the world. He reaches a new individuality, being now his own master; a kind of second birth it is, bringing him into another, yet independent life. From babyhood to manhood we conceive Lincoln's youth to range, dropping upon his path many an important lesson which he will never forget. In his tenth year the tenderest tie of his young existence was snapped in twain by the death of his mother, which stamped or helped to stamp upon his soft heart and even upon his face lines of an undying sorrow.

Accordingly Lincoln, till ho was twenty-one years old, remained at home, and received the domestic training of his father's family. It was a shifting unsettled household, yet had an inner life over which the two women, the mother and the step-mother, successively presided, giving to it in the humblest siu'roundings a real nobility of character and depth of feeling. This training of the home through his two mothers developed and purified Lincoln's emotional life, so that his native human sympathy was always one of his mightiest powers. To be sure he; was originally gifted with a great re- (20)

Chapter First— Lixcolws Youth. 21

sponsivc heart, which nevertheless might have been dwarfed or pei'vcrted had it not been mifolded and ennobled by the maternal instinct moulding the child-soul in the home.

Abraham Lincoln was born February 12th, 1809, three miles from the little town of Hodgensville, in a locality which was then included in Hardin County, Kentucky, but which now belongs to La Rue County. His parents were named Thomas and Nancy Lincoln, whose social position was that of the poor class of Southerners. The son declared in a brief sketch of himself (in 1859) that "my parents were both born in Virginia, of undistinguished families — second families perhaps I should say." Wherein we feel the unspoken contrast with the first families of Virginia, so famous, to which his people did not belong.

We have already seen how Lincoln shrank from his own biography in his response to reporter Scripps just after his nomination for the Presidency. Of course he could not and did not appreciate the import of his own life up to 1860, when he made the before cited statements about himself. And he was then seemingly correct in his judgment. The succeeding five years are to bring out the man and to set him down in the very focus of the World's History, which will throw a search-light into eveiy little nook of his previous humble existence. Those last years of his were the realization of what lay in him, and revealed him ec^ual to the mightiest crisis of the age. So mankind must find out how he came to be what he was, and will persist in prying into every dark corner of his earlier days to see if it can not discover the clew of his genesis. That inquisitive reporter of 18G0 was but the brief prelude of a long line of biographers running down into the present and shooting out many a bud for the future.

A word may be inserted here upon the scope of the present work, which does not attempt to add new details of Lincoln's life, but to order and interpret old facts, those already well-knowm and collected by numerous investigators. Nor is there intended a critique of the extensive Lincoln literature, though such a work would be timely, if done by the right hand in the right way. Within all the outer occurrences of his life we seek to see and to utter the spiritual or psychical evolution of Lincoln unfolding in and through the institutions of his land, which he not only maintained but also transformed, thereby putting them in line with the movement of the World's Histor3^

It is well known that Lincoln often reflected upon, yea, brooded over the mystery of his origin and destiny. He seemed unable to account for himself from his parentage, and refused to give any detailed report of his early life. Still the chief facts of it have been hunted up and garnered in print by diligent incjuirers. Along the track of his youthful days he left a luminous record in the memories of living men with whom he was associated, and who have been sought out in their obscure haunts like hidden treasures, that they might yield a few nuggets of golden information concerning Abraham Lincoln. Likewise his remote kindred have been exhumed, if not from their graves, at least from old buried records, in order that the line of his descent may be traced, perchance to discover the secret of his genius. For the deep necessity of the time is to see the great man and the great event evolving out of their germ, this present century of ours being truly the century of Evolution.

So it belongs in the present biographic theme to follow carefully the youthful steps of Lincoln in his first period of Apprenticeship to the Folk- Soul, and to keep meantime in view the task for which he is under training, possibly with an occasional glimpse of the Power which has set him such a task and is constraining him to such an Apprenticeship.

I. Ancestral

It is stated that the American ancestral chain of Lincoln starts about 1G38 with the coming of Samuel Lincoln to Hingham, Massachusetts, from Norwich, England, some eighteen years after the landing of the Pilgrims. At this date the mothercountry was getting into deeper and deeper trouble with her king, and many of her sons, foreseeing the civil conflict, were looking towards America as a refuge from oppression and as a bulwark for the maintenance of their political and religious liberty. What directly caused the emigration of Samuel Lincoln is not known; but we may feel a throb of the movement of the time in the prohibition of 1637, in which the Puritans were forbidden by the government to leave Englantl, so great was their flight to the New World. Still they continued to escape to the promised land in the West regardless of the prohibition.

If the first American progenitor of Abraham Lincoln was a fugitive from his native country for the sake of greater hberty (a matter probable but not verifietl), we find a later ancestor separating from his New England home and settling in Pennsylvania, Berks County, probably for a similar reason. We read that these early Lincolns were Quakers, and there seems to have been a second hegira to the paradise of William Penn and Quakerdom. It is well known that the Puritans did not tolerate any heresy (except their own), and that they pei'secuted the heretical Quakers, who, as men of peace, naturally took to flight. Still a branch of the Lincoln family remained in Massachusetts, and one of its eminent members met there our historic Abraham Lincoln in 1848, over two hundred years after the landing of their supposedly connnon ancestor.

The next step in this ancestral march of descent and of migration was taken from Pennsylvania to Virginia, to which State a John Lincoln moved aboirt 1750 and settled in Rockingham County. Here the Revolutionary War overtook the family; one of the sons of John Lincoln, Lsaac by name, enlisted, and was a lieutenant in a Mrginia regiment at the surrender of Yorktown. Four other sons are known by name, but they seem to have held themselves aloof from the great issue of the age, probably in accord with their Quaker faith. Moreover, their look was turned westward, they were by nature pioneers, and had to take another flight from civilization to the woods. The quiet idyllic life of the solitary Quaker settlement on the remote border of their advancing race seems to have been their ideal. At any rate the family in its manifold offshoots throughout the Southern and Western States, never furnished any public men of note, with the one colossal exception, though the Massachusetts branch produced a number of distinguished citizens.

Still this dip of the family into Virginia's institutional life was an important event of its histor3^ The migratory stream at that time was turning southward, as it later bent back northward when the slavery question began to make itself felt. In the middle of the eighteenth century, Mrginia was altogether the largest, richest, and most influential of the American Commonwealths. Its population then was nearly as great as that of New York and Massachusetts combined; the chief seaport on the Atlantic coast was Norfolk, though Charleston might dispute the claim. Boston and New York lagged to the rear. Also in Virginia at that time were the statesmen of the rising nation, the moulders of its institutions. How that Commonwealth ever brought forth so many and such excellent public-men is still a problem which no historian of Virginia has yet solved or even fully presented. And this suggests her limitation; she seems unable to write the history she herself has made; her practical gift has far surpassed her reflective. Very different is New England, which has the moral, self-examining, critical spirit rather than the institutional, and has produced a wonderful stream of preachers, writers and talkers — an output by no means to be neglected, even if its character be somewhat provincial.

Here it must not fail to be noted that Mrginia then was the; main center from which rayed out the new States of the Union. She had or claimed the vast territory lying to the North-west, to the West directly, and in part to the South-west, till the Mississippi. Thus she was in area by far the largest of the Old Thirte(>n. Truly she possessed not only the domain but the ability to be the Statebuilder for the future. This was in fact just her supreme function, deeply in accord with her institutional character. Really she was the only one of the old Commonwealths that had such a transcendent gift in good working order, as is shown by the Constitution of the United States, which was substantially her product. Still the other Commonwealths participated in her excellence, and recognized her position. So it comes that the stream of migration already mentioned flowed from the north into Virginia and then passed on to the young States after a baptism, short or long, in her spirit. Thus she radiated new States towards all points of the Western land of promise.