Personal traits of Abraham Lincoln

Preface

WHEN my father began collecting material to be used in his joint work with John Hay, " Abraham Lincoln : A History," he put certain things into an envelope marked " Personal Traits," meaning to make a chapter with that heading. As the work grew the items gathered under that head overflowed from one envelope into many ; and at the same time it became manifest that a chapter with such a title would be out of place. Incidents illustrating Mr. Lincoln's personal traits found their rightful place elsewhere ; and the authors argued that if the work as a whole did not reflect his character, it was labor lost.

PREFACE

The envelopes, bursting with their load, were put aside. My father meant at some future time, to make of the material thus collected, a smaller and more intimate volume. More pressing literary tasks, and failing health, interfered.

Unfortunately, first-hand knowledge, that could take those miscellaneous notes, personal jottings, private letters, and newspaper clippings, unrelated as the colors on a painter's palette, and blend them into an absolutely satisfactory portrait, is not a kind of knowledge to be inherited — even by a daughter who grew up in an atmosphere of devotion to Lincoln, and who, even in childhood was accorded the privilege of helping, in so far as she was able, with the details of the " History."

That experience, however, seems to put upon her a certain obligation to use these

PREFACE

notes, while it does not lessen her sense of the perils of the task. It is a case, indeed, where duty and something very like presumption go hand in hand.

She wishes to make acknowledgment to Mr. Robert Lincoln for his personal kindness in help and advice; and also to the authors whose painstaking research has brought to light new letters and material since " Abraham Lincoln: A History," was published.

Washington,) D. C, May 31, 1912._

Contents

PAGE

I The Man and His Nature ... 3

II Lincoln's Anecdotes and Similes . 12

II

uncoln's anecdotes and similes

JUST as white light, broken into component parts, dazzles an untrained eye with reds and yellows, to the exclusion of violets and indigo, without which the gaudier colors are only disturbing factors, popular estimate has laid too much stress on one of the least of Lincoln's qualities — his story-telling power; if indeed, it was a quality, and not the result of a quality — an effect, not a cause. That he was a royal story-teller there is no doubt, but legend and popular fancy have combined to distort the measure and the reason of his gift.

Sorrow and hardship darkened the ear- 12 liest years of his childhood, but his was a gay and happy nature by right of birth. As a boy he loved a story for the pure fun in it; and, since he was human, liked to tell one, because in those pioneer times of few amusements and almost no books, the exercise of the faculty carried with it popularity, even more than it does to-day. ^Esop's " Fables," one of the few books that fell into his hands, was a mine of wealth to such a lad, and a formative influence as well.

Grown to manhood, he faced juries by day, or appeared after nightfall before scanty groups of settlers, gathered solemn and expectant in dimly lighted log cabins to hear his views on State politics or National tariff or internal improvement. In such conditions the power of a story to rivet attention or illuminate the dismal surroundings was not to be thrown away. Later in his career he used anecdotes with telling effect to clinch an argument, or 13 good-humoredly turn away a bore. In the stress of his Presidency they became absolutely necessary to tide over the despondency of bloody, bitter days.

That he could not have told humorous tales with the frequency rumor indicates, is self-evident. Had he done so there would have been no time to carry on the war. He himself disclaimed responsibility for more than one-sixth of those attributed to him, adding modestly that he was " only a retail dealer," who remembered a good story when he heard it. In spite of which, most of the tales invented since the days of Abraham the patriarch have been laid to his door.

The proof of his skill in telling them lies in the avidity with which people listened for and talked about them, either in criticism or praise. For of course there were good unimaginative men who could not see beyond a story to the application 14 of it, and who failed entirely to grasp the reason for its telling. To these he seemed to be occupying his mind with frothy nothings while the country was in extremis

— a sort of nineteenth-century Nero, without even the dignity of Nero's music and malice.

Some went so far as to remonstrate with him for his levity. They could not see that, tortured almost beyond endurance by the responsibility and the horror of the war, he was telling stories for a purpose

— reaching out instinctively for something to turn the current of his thoughts even a moment, in order that he might get a firmer grasp again, and a saner outlook upon life.

" If it were not for this occasional vent I should die," he told a scandalized and protesting congressman. Then, seeing that his visitor, who had come on a serious errand, was really hurt, he lapsed with 15 characteristic suddenness into his patient gravity, and began discussing the matter in hand.

These quick transitions from grave to gay were a constant source of wonder to his friends. He seemed so possessed with merriment while it lasted, and put it aside so quickly. Laughter was to him a stimulant, and an aid to work. In a lecture, written years before, he defined it as the "joyous, universal evergreen of life." An old Springfield friend, hearing it ring out in the White House against the lurid background of war, called it, with sudden deep insight, " the President's life-preserver."

This laugh of Mr. Lincoln's was one secret of his power as a story-teller. His own enjoyment was so genuine, his realization of a situation so keen, that it exercised a power almost hypnotic over his hearers. Even the dullest saw the scene as he did while he was describing it, his 16 expressive face showing every emotion in turn. Then when the climax was reached he would lead the laughter with a heartiness that seemed to convulse his whole body. Yet a moment later the merriment died out of his eyes, lines of care descended again like a gray veil over his face, and sad and weary, he took up his burden.

Such moments of relaxation were literally snatched from toil. No man worked harder or had longer hours than he. It was the constant endeavor of his secretaries to compress his working day within reasonable limits — and his constant practice, in the kindness of his great heart, to break through rules he admitted ought to be kept, and to see people morning, noon, and night. Importunate visitors sometimes forced their way into his very bedroom, and neither midnight nor early dawn was free from prearranged interviews. Thus care was always with him ; he was never allowed to forget, even had his been a 2 17 nature to forget, that there was a great war raging in the land, and that he, more than any one else, was held accountable for its course and final outcome.

Those who heard him tell his stories are fast passing away. Which of the many attributed to him are of the one-sixth he really told, and which of the five-sixths he did not tell, is in some cases already impossible to determine. Some are vouched for by unimpeachable authority ; some bear internal evidence of untruth. Careful search has brought to light less than a hundred that seem likely to be genuine. Even if he told all these and as many more, the number would be a small one, to account for such a reputation.

Concerning the quality of his stories, certain facts stand out. They were always short. Lincoln's worst enemy never accused him of telling a long story. And they never lacked point. A third characteristic is that he always took his illustra- 18 tions from a life with which he was familiar. As he expressed it, he " did not care to quarry among the ancients for his figures." The life in which he grew up, the life of pioneer times, and of the small village communities which immediately followed it in the Middle West, was poor in culture and refinements of living, but strong in racy human nature. Hence overfastidious people, who liked " quarrying among the ancients," found his stories coarse. Homely, would be a truer term, for they were never coarse in spirit, even when most sordid in detail. Ethically they always pointed a clean moral. They were of the soil — strongly of the soil — but never of the charnel-house.

His story of the skunks, for example, is the tale of a man who hid behind his woodpile and saw six of these malodorous animals walking in procession to deplete his hen-house. Firing, he killed one, and when upbraided later for not exterminat- 19 ing them all, replied with feeling that he had been six weeks getting over the effects of shooting that one, and " reckoned he 'd let the others go."

Then there is the story of the louse on the man's eyebrow, supposed to have been told by Mr. Lincoln to silence a troublesome member of the Illinois legislature who questioned the constitutionality of every motion made. " Mr. Speaker," said Lincoln, with a quizzical smile, and a twinkle in his deep-set eyes, " Mr. Speaker, the objection of the Member from So-and-So reminds me of an old friend of mine," and to the merriment of his colleagues he went on to describe a grizzled frontiersman with shaggy overhanging brows, and spectacles, very like the objecting legislator. One morning, on looking out of his cabin door the old gentleman thought he saw a squirrel frisking on a tree near the house. He took down his gun and fired at it, but the squirrel paid no attention. Again and 20 again he fired, getting more mystified and more mortified at each failure. After a round dozen shots he threw down the gun, muttering that there was " something wrong with the rifle."

" Rifle 's all right," declared his son who had been watching him. " Rifle 's all right, but where 's your squirrel ? "

"Don't you see him?" thundered the old man, pointing out the exact spot.

" No, I don't," was the candid answer. Then, turning and staring into his father's face, the boy broke into a jubilant shout. " Now I see your squirrel ! You 've been firing at a louse on your eyebrow."

Certainly the moral of this could not be improved upon, however coldly one may regard the subject. And these two are the most violent examples of their class.

Then there were the stories in which subjects considered either too sacred or too profane were introduced. One described a rough frontier cabin, with children running 21 wild, and a hard- worked wife and mother, slatternly and unkempt, not overhappy perhaps, but with a woman's loyal instinct to make the best of things before a stranger. Into this setting strode an itinerant Methodist, unctious and insistent, selling Bibles as well as preaching salvation. She received him with frontier hospitality, but grew restive under questioning she deemed intrusive, and finally answered rather sharply that of course they owned a Bible. He challenged her to produce it. A search revealed nothing. The children were called to her aid, and at last one of them unearthed and held up for inspection a few tattered leaves. Protest and reproaches on the part of the visitor, but on her own stanch sticking to her colors. " She had no idea," she declared, " that they were so nearly out."

Another told of a traveler lost during a terrific thunder-storm, blundering and floundering along in thick darkness, except 22 when vivid lightning flashes showed him trees falling around him, and the heavens apparently rent asunder. At last a flash and a crash more terrible than all the rest brought him to his knees. He was not a praying man. His petition was short and to the point. " O Lord," he gasped, " if it's all the same to you, please give us a little more light and a little less noise ! "

A third was about building a bridge across a very dangerous and rapid river. Several engineers had tried and failed, when a devout church member told the committee in charge that he had a friend who could do it. The friend was summoned. " Can you build this bridge? " they asked him. " Certainly," was the answer. " I could build a bridge to the infernal regions." The committee was not only skeptical but shocked. After the engineer had retired his friend said, " I know

so well, he is so honest and so good

a builder, that if he says he can build a 23 bridge to Hades, I suppose he can ; but, I must say," he added thoughtfully, " I have my doubts about the abutments on the infernal side."

The twentieth century will regard such matters more leniently than the nineteenth ; certainly it is hard to see, in the light of present-day liberty, how these can be classed as license.

Many of the stories attributed to Lincoln — very likely with reason, since everybody tells them — are of the class which, through sheer excellence and much repetition, has ceased to be personal or even national property, and become part of the folk-lore of the world. " Swapping horses while crossing a stream," is an example. He gave even these his own individual touch. His story of " trying the greens on Zerah," with its subtle accusation of human nature, was his much more artistic version of the usual " try it on the dog." As he told it, the scene of the story 24 was the neighborhood where he grew up. In the early spring, after a monotonous winter diet, the farmers there were very fond of the dish called " greens " — boiled dandelion tops, or other harmless wild leaves. On one occasion a large and greedy family sat down to a very moderate-sized dish of greens, and Zerah, the half-witted boy, whimpered at the unfair distribution of the dainty. Shortly afterward the whole household, including himself, became desperately sick, something poisonous having been gathered by mistake. All recovered, but the lesson was not lost. After that Zerah was invariably served first, with his full share, the others saying eagerly, " Try it on Zerah ; if he stands it, it won't hurt the rest of us."

This is almost the only one of Mr. Lincoln's stories that shows a trace of irony. His heart was too sunny, his belief in human nature too strong, to permit accusing 25 his fellow men, even in jest, of cruelty or meanness.

Another point is interesting. His stories never varied. He always told them the same way. Once established, the form remained unchanged to the last word and expression. Mr. A. J. Conant, who occupied a government office in Washington during the rebellion, has given us a hint of the way in which Mr. Lincoln made a story his own. He told the President a tale which the latter enjoyed and sometimes repeated, giving him due credit. This, by the way, is not the invariable custom of story-tellers. The story was about a man who hoped to become county judge, and hired a horse and buggy from his neighbor, a liveryman, in order to drive to the nominating convention held in a town some sixteen miles away. He asked the livery-stable keeper to give him the best and fastest horse he had, explaining that he was anxious to get there early and do a 26 little log-rolling before the meeting opened. His neighbor, being of opposing politics, had other views, and furnished him with a beast which, though starting out very well, broke down utterly. Long before he reached his destination the convention had adjourned, and of course he lost the nomination. Even with its head turned toward home the poor horse could not hurry. It was late the following afternoon before they pulled up in front of the stable. The candidate's anger had had time to cool, and feeling the uselessness of recrimination, he handed the reins over to his neighbor, only remarking : " Jones, I see you are training this horse for the New York market. I know you expect to sell him for a good price to an undertaker for a hearse-horse." In vain the owner protested. " Don't deny it," said the would-be judge. " I know it is true. I know by his gait how much time you have spent training him to go before a hearse. 27

But it is all labor lost, my friend. He will never do. He is altogether too slow. He could n't get a corpse to the cemetery in time for the resurrection ! "

The words in italics show Mr. Lincoln's interpolations. Few as they are, they disclose his quick grasp of the motives of both men, and, rendering the story plausible, make it twice as amusing.

But Lincoln's stories might have been short and good and dramatically told, and forgotten in a day. Their kindliness would not have saved them, or their homely realism. Their crowning excellence lay in being always apt — told not for themselves alone, but in illustration of some point he saw and wished to make clear to others. In that sense they were not stories at all, but parables. Their teller would have been the first to disclaim any intention of preaching. He told them as simply as he did everything else in life; but mentally and spiritually he was of the line of the 28 old Hebrew poets, who had a message to deliver, and spoke it with conviction, in vivid figures of the life they knew. And just because his stories were so apt and so wonderfully told, retelling them in print after half a century is like wrenching jewels from their setting, or sea growths from ocean gardens, or anything supremely fit and right in its own place, and displaying it mutilated in utterly alien surroundings. So short were these stories, and so charged with meaning, that anecdote melts insensibly into simile. Sometimes it is hard to fix the boundary line between them. In a letter declining an invitation to a Jefferson birthday celebration in 1859, he wrote : " I remember being once much amused at seeing two partially intoxicated men engaged in a fight with their great-coats on, which fight, after a long and rather harmless contest, ended in each having fought himself out of his own coat and into that of the other. If the two leading parties 29 of this day are really identical with the two in the days of Jefferson and Adams, they have performed the same feat." Is this a story, or a simile?

Lincoln's early letter to his friend Joshua F. Speed, describing his predicament when he wanted to run for Congress and instead found himself sent to the nominating convention against his will, instructed to vote for his friend Baker, as leaving him " fixed a good deal like a fellow who is made a groomsman to a man that has cut him out and is marrying his own dear * gal,' " summed up a drama and a political situation in one sentence ; though not quite so vividly as did his retort to the friend who begged him to interfere in the campaign of 1864 when Republicans were quarreling among themselves, and seemed thereby in danger of losing the election. " I learned a great many years ago," was his answer, " that in a fight be- 30 tween husband and wife, a third party should never get between the woman's skillet and the man's ax-helve."

His mind seemed to translate every situation into dramatic form, and he became wonderfully adept in setting forth the picture he saw in a few swift words. Pages of quotation from his letters and daily conversation could be made, showing this trait. Whether it developed out of his story-telling faculty, or side by side with it, is a question more interesting than important. His answer to the New Salem election clerk that he u could make a few rabbit tracks " when that worthy inquired if he knew how to write, indicates that it was of sufficiently early origin ; and in the very last public address he made, speaking of establishing loyal governments in the southern States, he used the figure of the fowl and the egg. " Concede that the new government of Louisiana is only to what it 31 should be, as the egg Is to the fowl," he said ; " we shall sooner have the fowl by hatching the egg than by smashing it."

" A man watches his pear tree day after day, impatient for the ripening of the fruit. Let him attempt to force the process, and he may spoil both fruit and tree. But let him patiently wait, and the ripe pear at length falls into his lap," was his illustration of the folly of trying to hasten public opinion. He was speaking of the Emancipation Proclamation, as he was also when he gave that disconcerting answer to the committee of Chicago clergymen : " I do not want to issue a document that the whole world will see must necessarily be inoperative, like the Pope's bull against the comet ! "

" I asked him what was his policy," said the Prince de Joinville, telling of an interview he once had with President Lincoln. " I have none," he replied. " I pass my life in preventing the storm from 32 blowing down the tent, and I drive in the pegs as fast as they are pulled up." When emancipation became a w peg," he drove it home with great effect.

" Two dogs that get less eager to fight, the nearer they come together," and, " fitting the round man into the square hole," are similes recorded in the diary of Secretary Welles. Lincoln's half-humorous likening of himself at the beginning of his first term, when civil offices had to be filled and appointments made, regardless of whether war broke out or not, to " a man so busy renting rooms in one end of his house that he has no time to put out a fire burning in the other " ; his discouraged remark that sending men to the Army of the Potomac was like " shoveling fleas across a barn floor — half of them never got there " ; and his searching question to critics who denounced his war methods as too severe : " Would you prosecute it in future with elder-stalk squirts charged 3 S3 with rose-water ? " are among the most graphic.

In writing to military commanders he was constantly using such figures. His admonition to " hold on with a bull-dog grip and chew and choke," has in it the very spirit of dogged fight ; while his warning to General Hooker not to get his army " entangled upon the river, like an ox jumped half over a fence, and liable to be torn by dogs front and rear, without a fair chance to gore one way or kick the other," is as comprehensive as it was sound from a military point of view.

In these, as in his anecdotes, there is a noticeable absence of bitterness. After Chickamauga he did indeed speak of Rosecrans as " confused and stunned, like a duck hit on the head," but that was in the privacy of the Executive office, to one of his confidential secretaries. To the same young man he admitted that a high official, then plotting against his reelection, would probably, " like the blue-bottle fly, lay eggs in every rotten spot he can find," but in public he never admitted that this officer was at fault.

Had Lincoln been of a vindictive temperament, or possessed of less self-control, this dangerous power of using words might have brought about his undoing. Had it become master of his mind, instead of its servant, it could have ridden him far, making enemies at every turn. But his kindly nature held it rigorously in check. So rigorously that when, tried beyond endurance, his pent-up feelings did break the barrier and find outlet in a stinging phrase, it was worse than any blow — as when, looking down on the sleeping Army of the Potomac, he called it, in sorrow, more than in anger, " only McClellan's body-guard."

in

IN analyzing Lincoln's influence as writer and speaker, teacher and neighbor, it must be conceded that this gift of anecdote and simile, this instinct to translate situations into dramatic form, was a tremendous help in getting his views before the public in a shape to attract and hold attention. Another gift, equally valuable, developed later — during the ten years preceding his election as President. This was his art of compressing a moral truth or a guiding principle into one short and telling sentence. All three were merely different manifestations of his dominant mental quality, his strong reasoning power. 36

" The point — the power to hurt — of all figures lies in the truthfulness of their application," he once said, and his faculty of picturesque presentation would have availed little, had it not been for the clear perception which made the figure he used the mirror of the fact itself.

His mind went unerringly to the heart of a thing. He saw essentials, and in the light of his straightforward gaze non-essentials shriveled and disappeared. Even abstract moral questions, which to others might appear nebulous and of uncertain outline, had for him definite shape. They could be examined from all sides. He made up his mind about them only after consideration, but they were never misty. He might approach them through darkness, but never through a fog.

And clear statement of what he saw was from boyhood a passion with him. " I remember how, when a mere child, I used to get irritated when anybody talked to me 37 in a way I could not understand," he told a friend. " I don't think I ever got angry at anything else in my life. But that always disturbed my temper, and has, ever since." He would puzzle far into the night over the sayings of men who came to talk with his father, lying sleepless until he believed he had caught their meaning, and then would repeat it over and over in simple words, until he was sure he had put it in language plain enough for any boy to understand.

In this bit of autobiography he has told the secret — as much of the secret as we can ever know — of his self-education. Given his keen moral perceptions, his passion for clear statement, his feeling for the beauty of words, and his sense of humor, his literary style follows as a matter of course.

Given his clear perception of the thing he wanted to do, his direct, simple processes of reasoning usually showed him a 38 way to do it. The technique might be original, but the result was effective and satisfactory. Thus, when his flatboat lay half submerged over a dam, with its nose in mid-air, he freed it from water by the simple expedient of boring a hole in its bottom. And when his military knowledge was not sufficient to get his company of Black Hawk volunteers through a gate " endwise " in terms prescribed by the manual, his common sense prompted him to dismiss it " for two minutes, when it will fall in again on the other side of the gate." Instead of running in grooves hollowed out by custom, his mind had the tonic directness of a child's. To the day of his death he kept the childlike attitude of heart; he was never too old to learn.

No process seemed too tedious or too difficult if the end was worth while.

In answer to a query received during the campaign of 1860, he wrote :

Yours of the 24th, asking " the best mode of obtaining a thorough knowledge of the law," is received. The mode is very simple, though laborious and tedious. It is only to get the books and read and study them carefully. Begin with Blackstone's " Commentaries," and after reading it carefully through, say twice, take up Chitty's " Pleadings," Greenleaf 's " Evidence," and Story's " Equity," etc., in succession. Work, work, work, is the main thing.

Yours very truly, A. Lincoln.

He saw no road to knowledge by way of " six easy lessons." Work, work, work, and the use of the faculties with which the Lord endowed him, were his means of success. It was after the end of his term in Congress that he applied himself with dogged energy to mastering the propositions of Euclid, because, as he said, he was not sure he knew what the word " demonstrate " meant. When he thought 40 he had found out, he continued the practice of the law.

In the early part of his career politics and the law went hand in hand, each helping on the other. His growing prominence in politics brought him increased law practice, while the practice of law sharpened and trained his strong reasoning powers; and both callings carried him out among people where his good fellowship and wit won him hosts of friends. The same qualities which made him agreeable to his friends made him effective with a jury. At first indeed, it was his fairness and his way of putting things, more than deep legal knowledge, which counted in the court room ; while in his political addresses he was merely talking to a larger and more informal jury, using practically the same methods, whether he spoke from the body of a wagon drawn up in the shade of trees, or the less unsteady footing of 41 the court-room floor. It was the taking, free-and-easy manner of the Middle West. Litigation was not complicated by abstruse points of law; and in politics, campaign arguments, enlivened by anecdotes, good-natured personalities, and pungent observations on questions of the day, made up the popular speech.