Abraham Lincoln is generally ranked as one of the greatest Presidents in American history, among Washington, Jefferson (??), Theodore Roosevelt, and some would include FDR and Reagan in this small camp (I would not). This essay attempts to get behind the stereo-typical Lincoln, to offer insights into who he was and why his star still shines brightly.
Revisiting Abraham Lincoln
Historians today consistently rank the 16th President of the United States among the top presidents in U.S. history. Why is this? Because Abraham Lincoln’s story is quintessentially American. He is the embodiment of Americanism. Estimates are that from 750 to 800 books on the subject of Abraham Lincoln are currently in circulation in libraries, bookstores, or on line. His personality, his leadership and his humanity continues to resonate with us a century and a half after his untimely death. Most importantly, Lincoln presided over the bloodiest conflict America ever experienced, living long enough to see the Union preserved. This is his single greatest legacy to the history of America.
The commonly known Lincoln is a tall, lanky man with a full beard and stove pipe hat. The pictures we have of Lincoln show him carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders, which he unquestionably did with an unhappy marriage and a civil war that would kill 620,000 Americans. An equivalent count among today’s domestic population would be approximately 1.5 million dead, military and civilian combined.
Abraham Lincoln was born in western Kentucky. While not all historians agree with this, legend has it his mother was the illegitimate daughter of a wealthy Virginia planter’s maid who was quickly sent to Kentucky when her delicate condition became known. His father, Thomas Lincoln, was described by contemporaries as a rover, a drifter, floating about from one place to another. In 1805 Hardin County, Kentucky paid Thomas Lincoln six cents an hour to catch and whip recalcitrant slaves, but because Kentucky was a border state with slaves, thereby driving down wages for white labor, Thomas Lincoln moved his family next door to the relative wild lands of Indiana.
Northerners in mid-nineteenth century America were opposed to slavery for economic reasons, with morality having little weight among them except for the abolitionists. Up north the urban areas were rapidly industrializing and in rural areas the kind of crops grown around the Mason-Dixon line and further north were not conducive to slave labor. In short, slavery was not an economic benefit to northerners like it was down south. The north was not opposed to the institution of slavery, rather, they simply did not want slavery to spread beyond the geographical borders agreed up by the Founding Fathers in the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which excluded slavery in territories north of the Ohio River.
Lincoln and his father experienced problems throughout Lincoln’s life. Thomas Lincoln had no use for learning, with Abraham always borrowing books to read and re-read them even while working in the field. Farmers who hired Lincoln as a lad complained he was "awfully lazy." Lincoln later agreed, saying, "My father taught me to work, but he never taught me to love it." When Thomas Lincoln died in 1851 his son was not by his side even though Abraham Lincoln had financially supported his father for the final few decades of Thomas Lincoln’s life.
Lincoln’s redemption in his early life came in his fixation with books. One teacher remembered Lincoln studying the best of three different ways to express an idea. Lincoln particularly liked practicing debate and speech-making, even by talking it through himself. He read Shakespeare and the Bible and Aesop’s Fables and Robinson Crusoe and poetry over and over again. From reading stories, he came to love telling stories and making people laugh, although he was generally seen as extremely moody and introspective. Lincoln was a physically strong man, a teetotaler, and a failed farmer, merchant, river raft tradesman, and postmaster. He fell in love with a local young lady Anne Rutledge, who broke his heart by dying at a very young age. It was said Lincoln never really recovered from Rutledge’s death, almost committing suicide while despairing of his loss.
In his early twenties Lincoln took a river raft trip down to New Orleans where he was a first-hand witness to the scourge of chattel slavery (outright ownership of slaves). Lincoln always considered slavery evil, although, again, he believed the South was entitled to retain the institution as long as the Missouri Compromise of 1820’s stipulation that all territories and states north of Missouri would remain free states, stayed in place. Lincoln understood Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence words of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," to apply to all Americans regardless of skin color. Yet Lincoln was undoubtedly a product of his time. He favored colonization for slaves, shipping them off to Cuba, Central America, or Liberia in Africa. He held the common racial prejudices of his day as far as the "co-mingling of the races" was concerned.
It was said that Lincoln did not belong to any church and he typically avoided any religious discussions. He once told a good friend that his religious code was like that of an old man he once heard speak at a church meeting who said, "When I do good, I feel good. When I do bad, I feel bad. And that is my religion." A popular story is told about Lincoln’s partner in a store dying due to excessive drinking. Lincoln worked for ten years to pay off all the debts of that failed business rather than walk away from his obligations.
Now living in Springfield and working as a circuit-riding lawyer, a young lady from a slave owner’s family in Kentucky came to town. Her name was Mary Todd. Her sister once said of Mary Todd, "she loved glitter, show, pomp, and power. She was the most ambitious woman I ever knew." Lincoln could not have found a more different life partner. They were opposites in every way: in training, background, temperament, tastes, and mental outlook. Later on in life Mary Todd stated that she had been courted both by Lincoln’s famous rival Stephen Douglas and Lincoln at the same time, choosing Lincoln in part because Douglas liked his liquor too much, and because she saw something in Lincoln that promised great accomplishments in the years ahead.
When the wedding day arrived, Lincoln failed to appear at the altar, unable to go with the marriage. Two years later, under considerable pressure from Mary, Lincoln agreed to finally tie the knot. On the day of his marriage the son of one of his friends innocently asked him where he was going. Lincoln reportedly answered, "To hell, I suppose."
In the early years of his marriage Lincoln’s lack of refinement frustrated his wife. It was said he had no table manners, didn’t hold his fork correctly, and usually just tilted the serving plate to slide a pork chop onto his plate. He loved to read lying down and he never stood up when ladies entered the room. He lived in another world, often saying nothing, expressionless, non-responsive to his young boys who crawled all over him. Loving them very much, he never disciplined his children in any way. He and Mary lost three of his four boys before they reached adulthood, the only survivor was Robert Todd, the oldest, who eventually placed his mother in an asylum for a time in her later years, which she never forgave him for. Mary was famous for her sharp tongue in town, always heard barking at Lincoln. The neighbors thought Lincoln liked riding around the state on his lawyer duties to get away from his wife.
When he was elected to Congress he angered voters by voting against President James Polk’s decision to invade Mexico, calling it a land grab. In the age of manifest destiny, where America was ready and willing to take any land from any power unable to prevent it from happening, Lincoln was in a small minority. He was technically a veteran, having served as a Captain in the Indiana militia during the Black Hawk War in the Midwest, although he never saw hostile action for the brief time he served.
Lincoln made his mark in a series of seven debates with Stephen Douglas for the U.S. Senate seat from Illinois. He vehemently opposed the Kansas-Nebraska Act supported by Douglas which basically said the territories themselves should vote on whether to permit the extension of the slavery; technically referred to as "popular sovereignty." In passing that Act and the Fugitive Slave Act four years earlier, the Missouri Compromise of 1820 would be nullified forever, which Lincoln viewed as one step away from civil war. He was proven to be right within a decade. Lincoln lost that Senate battle, but he found greatness a few years later as President.
Lincoln was a surprise winner in the 1860 Republican Convention in Chicago, over expected winner William Seward of New York. Seward would become Lincoln’s Secretary of State later that year. A glance at the results of the 1860 elections shows that Lincoln won less than 40% of the popular vote, but with four national candidates running, including Stephen Douglas who split the Democratic Party into North and South factions, Lincoln became President, causing South Carolina to secede from the union, followed by ten other southern states.
Somehow, Abraham Lincoln rose to meet the challenges of his office at the most critical period in U.S. history. A self-taught military strategist who was forced to learn as the war progressed because he was unable to find a competent military leader, Lincoln also successfully thwarted political plotting and intrigue among various members of his own cabinet, details of which is highlighted brilliantly in Doris Kearns Goodwin’s TEAM OF RIVALS. He hired and fired Army General George McClellan twice, before McClellan became his Democratic rival for president in 1864. One time in the field, McClellan, feeling micro-managed by Lincoln, sarcastically sent the president a telegram telling him he had just found two cows and he needed instructions. Lincoln immediately wired back to McClellan, "milk ‘em, George." At home Lincoln’s wife continued making his life miserable, running up thousands of dollars in bills for her clothes and White House furnishings, the national press having a field day as it all unfolded. On a separate subject, history does not give Lincoln credit enough for his leadership with the Transcontinental Railroad in the early 1860s, and his support of selling off federal lands to set up land grant colleges all over America, a legacy that endures today.
Further, Lincoln's receiving Frederick Douglass in the White House to hear Douglass' grievances against the disparity in pay between white and black soldiers of equal rank, and certain Confederate troops taking no quarter with black northern soldiers, preceded Theodore Roosevelt's famous invitation to Booker T. Washington to dine at the White House by four decades.
While many remember Lincoln’s greatness in the shadow of his martyrdom, the profound simplicity of his words to the nation at Gettysburg and in his Second Inaugural Address are some of his greatest gifts to American history. At Gettysburg Lincoln only spoke for a few minutes, his words brief, simple, and to the point. Yet, as the primary speaker at the event, Massachusetts’ statesman Edward Everett later said to the president, Lincoln was able to get to the heart of the matter in those brief moments better than Everett did in two hours. At Gettysburg Lincoln spoke of a "new nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal . ." echoing one of his favorite heroes Jefferson. He said the world would little note nor long remember what was said at Gettysburg, but in that humbleness that spoke of the essence of Lincoln, he was sorely mistaken. He concluded his remarks by asking the nation to resolve, "that these honored dead shall not have died in vain--that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom--and that government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from the earth."
I want to close today by citing the latter portion of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, where he is speaking of his vision of post-civil war America. These are his words: "With malice towards none, with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see that right, let us strive to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and orphan--to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and a lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations."
We revere Abraham Lincoln because like all great presidents he rose to the demands of the presidency at the most critical period in our country’s history. He rightfully was criticized for suspending writs of habeas corpus and ignoring the Supreme Court’s ruling against this action. And those today who cling to the 'righteousness of the Lost Cause' dismiss Lincoln as a bloody tyrant. But as was the case with Andrew Jackson and his ignoring the Court’s ruling siding with American Indians claims of violation of U.S. treaties, the power of the presidency won out, for better or worse.