Abraham Lincoln

by Stephen B. Oates

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

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

  My childhood’s home I see again,

  And sadden with the view;

  And still, as memory crowds my brain,

  There’s pleasure in it too.

  O Memory! thou midway world

  ’Twixt earth and paradise,

  Where things decayed and loved ones lost

  In dreamy shadows rise….

  The friends I left that parting day

  How changed, as time has sped!

  Young childhood grown, strong manhood gray,

  And half of all are dead.

  I hear the loved survivors tell

  How nought from death could save,

  Till every sound appears a knell,

  And every spot a grave.

  I range the fields with pensive tread,

  And pace the hollow rooms,

  And feel (companions of the dead)

  I’m living in the tombs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  In 1836, he did become engaged to a Kentucky woman named Mary Owens, but in their notes and letters there is not a single mention of love or passion or even a kiss. In truth, Lincoln’s communications to her reveal a confused and insecure young man as far as intimacy with a woman was concerned. He was very lonely, he wrote Mary in 1837, but he had thought over his agreement to wed her and decided to let her out if she wanted. He was so poor that if they married she would have to live in unaccustomed poverty. He wanted Mary to be happy. He would be happier with her than without her, but he asked her to think it over before throwing in with him. If she liked, they could still get married. But his honest opinion was that she “better not do it,” because of the hardships this would impose on her.

  A little later he wrote her again: “I want in all cases to do right, and most particularly so, in all cases with women. I want, at this particular time, more than anything else, to do right with you.” If she wanted she could dismiss him from her thoughts, forget him. But she should not think that he wanted to cut off their “acquaintance,” because he didn’t. He would leave it up to her whether to stop or keep on seeing one another. If she felt bound to him by any promise, he now released her from all obligations—if that was what she wished. “On the other hand, I am willing, and even anxious to bind you faster, if I can be convinced that it will, in any considerable degree, add to your happiness. This, indeed, is the whole question with me. Nothing would make me more miserable than to believe you miserable—nothing more happy, than to know you were so.” But “i
f it suits you not to answer this,” then “farewell—a long life and a merry one attend you.”

  Mary Owens never replied, later remarking that Lincoln “was deficient in those little links which make up the chains of a woman’s happiness.” For three years after that, Lincoln had no romantic involvements, instead throwing himself into politics and the law. Meanwhile he found acceptance and companionship with Joshua Speed, a brooding, hefty Kentuckian who operated a general store in Springfield. When Lincoln first came there looking for a place to stay, Speed gazed at him with amazement. “I never saw so gloomy and melancholy a face in my life,” he said. Lincoln found him a warm and congenial companion: they slept together in a bed upstairs, swapped jokes, and confided in one another about their mutual troubles with women. In time, Speed became Lincoln’s “most intimate friend,” the only friend to whom he ever revealed his innermost thoughts and feelings.

  By the summer of 1840, Lincoln felt a little more sure of himself and began courting Mary Todd. They made a remarkable couple—he tall, thin, and self-conscious, she five feet two, fashionably plump, and the very creature of excitement, with radiant eyes and a turned-up nose. Lincoln had a hard-won reputation as a gifted young lawyer and a promising politician, and Mary considered him an excellent prospect for matrimony. She took a keen interest in his political work, noted how ambitious he was, found his “the most congenial mind she had ever met,” and felt a growing affection for this towering attorney who was unlike anybody she had ever known.

  But as their relationship deepened, Lincoln had gnawing doubts about his meager education and low-class background when compared to Mary’s. After all, she came from a prominent Kentucky family—her father was a well-known banker and Whig politico in Lexington. And she had attended a stylish women’s academy, where she had studied English literature and acquired a reading knowledge of French. Still, Mary fascinated him. She liked poetry and politics as much as he, and she was entirely free of snobbishness. She made it clear that she cared about him, not his family background. Encouraged, Lincoln talked with her about marriage, and in December, 1840, they became engaged.

  But Mary’s sister and brother-in-law—Elizabeth and Ninian Edwards—did not approve. Because Mary was living with them in their Springfield mansion, they felt responsible for her. And neither of them liked Lincoln. When he sat with Mary in the parlor, Elizabeth said, “he would listen and gaze on her as if drawn by some superior power. He never scarcely said a word,” because he “could not hold a lengthy conversation with a lady—was not sufficiently educated and intelligent in the female line to do so.” Yet here Mary was, wanting to marry this boorish man who came from “nowhere” and whose future was “nebulous.” Well, Elizabeth and Ninian would not stand for it. They tried to break up the engagement and halt the courtship.

  Their hostility inflamed Lincoln’s anxieties about himself. In fact, he was annihilated. Then to compound his misery, Speed sold his store—he was moving back to Kentucky—and Lincoln had to find another room alone. His most intimate friend was leaving him, a friend he loved and needed now more than ever. It shattered whatever remained of his resolve. Plunging into the worst depression of his life, he broke off his engagement with Mary—this on the “fatal first” of January, 1841—and for a week lay in his room in acute despair. “I am now, the most miserable man living,” he wrote a law associate. “If what I feel were equally distributed to the whole human family, there would not be one cheerful face on the earth.” He added: “To remain as I am is impossible; I must die or be better.”

  Speed moved to Kentucky as planned, but Lincoln visited him there, and the two friends kept up an intense and intimate correspondence about their love lives. They openly discussed their self-doubts, their fears of premature death and “nervous debility” with women. Speed went ahead and married anyway and then wrote Lincoln that their anxieties were groundless. Lincoln could barely restrain his joy. “I tell you, Speed, our forebodings, for which you and I are rather peculiar, are all the worst sort of nonsense.”

  Encouraged by Speed’s success, Lincoln started seeing Mary again, meeting her in secret lest the imperious Edwardses find out. Mary’s continued affection for Lincoln helped restore some of his self-esteem. He wrote Speed again: “Are you now, in feeling as well as judgment, glad you are married as you are?” Speed replied that, yes, he was really glad. With that, Lincoln overcame his self-doubts enough to ask for Mary’s hand a second time. He was thirty-three—a late age in those days for a first marriage. Mary was twenty-three.

  Mary made it plain to her relatives that she intended to wed Lincoln whether they liked it or not, and their opposition gave way. On their wedding day, Lincoln gave her a wedding ring with the inscription “Love Is Eternal.” A few days later, he wrote an acquaintance that nothing was new “except my marrying, which to me, is a matter of profound wonder.”

  Mary helped Lincoln immensely, gave him the tender support and understanding he needed, for they developed a strong physical and emotional love for one another. Yet Mary, so maligned in the Lincoln literature, has never received the credit she deserves for helping Lincoln resolve his fears of inadequacy with women.

  Not that their marriage was a paragon of domestic bliss. The Lincolns had their spats and conflicts like any other married couple. Yet Mary was not the raging hellcat that Herndon and other detractors claimed. True, she was insecure, neurotic about money, given to headaches and outbursts of temper. Yet she was also a charming and graceful hostess, an affectionate mother to her sons, and a loyal wife who shared Lincoln’s love for politics and was fiercely proud of him.

  Those who denigrate Mary forget that Lincoln himself was hard to live with. If Mary liked a good argument now and then to clear the air, he often withdrew at the first sign of a confrontation, for he hated quarrels and tried to avoid them. He could be temperamental, introverted, and forlorn. And some of his daily habits irritated highborn Mary: he often answered the door in his stocking feet, and liked to lie in the hallway and read newspapers aloud. Yet he was proud of their sons and spoiled them as shamelessly as Mary did. Moreover, he understood her better than anyone else and could be tender to her, extremely tender. Because of all the ways he cared for her, Lincoln was everything to Mary: “lover—husband—father, all.”

  Still, their intimacy suffered in later years. After the birth of Tad in 1853, Mary contracted a serious gynecological disease which, in the judgment of one specialist, “probably ended sexual intercourse between the Lincolns.” After that, both became increasingly active outside their home, Mary in trips and shopping expeditions and Lincoln in politics. In 1858, the year Lincoln challenged Stephen A. Douglas for his seat in the United States Senate, he and Mary had separate bedrooms installed when they enlarged and remodeled their Springfield home.

  3: ALL CONQUERING MIND

  Even with marriage and a family, Lincoln remained a moody, melancholy man, given to long introspections about things like death and mortality. In truth, death was a lifelong obsession with him. His poetry, speeches, and letters are studded with allusions to it. He spoke of the transitory nature of human life, spoke of how all people of this world are destined to die in the end—all are destined to die. He saw himself as only a passing moment in a rushing river of time.

  In a real sense, Lincoln had grown up with death, and the loss of those close to him caused incalculable pain in one so deeply sensitive as he. He lost his mother Nancy when he was nine, his only sister when he was eighteen, and his sons Eddie in 1850 and Willie in 1862. The deaths of his cherished boys proved to a grieving Lincoln how ephemeral were human dreams of happiness and lasting life.

  When troubled by such thoughts, he would sink into depression again, lost in himself as he stared out the window of his law office, or looked blankly at a fireplace in some hostelry on the circuit. His friends worried about him when he got the “hypo” like that. He would become so dispirited, his eyes so full of pain, that it hurt to look at him. Then often as not he would start mut
tering the lines of his favorite poem, “Mortality,” written by the Scotsman William Knox.

  So the multitude goes, like the flower or weed,

  That withers away to let others succeed;

  So the multitude comes, even those we behold,

  To repeat every tale that has often been told.

  For we are the same things our fathers have been;

  We see the same sights our fathers have seen;

  We drink the same stream, we feel the same sun,

  And run the same course our fathers have run….

  They died—ah! they died;—we, things that are now,

  That walk on the turf that lies over their brow,

  And make in their dwellings a transient abode,

  Meet the changes they met on their pilgrimage road.

  Yea, hope and despondency, pleasure and pain,

  Are mingled together in sunshine and rain:

  And the smile and the tear, the song and the dirge,

  Still follow each other like surge upon surge.

  ’Tis the wink of an eye; ’tis the draught of a breath

  From the blossom of health to the paleness of death,

  From the gilded saloon to the bier and the shroud;

  Oh, why should the spirit of mortal be proud?

  Preoccupied with death, Lincoln was also afraid of insanity, afraid (as he phrased it) of “the pangs that kill the mind.” In his late thirties, he wrote and rewrote a poem about a boyhood friend named Matthew Gentry, who became deranged and was locked “in mental night,” condemned to a living death, spinning out of control in some inner void. Lincoln had a morbid fascination with Gentry’s condition, writing about how Gentry was more an object of dread than death itself: “A human form with reason fled, while wretched life remains.” Yes, Lincoln was fascinated with madness, troubled by it, afraid that what had happened to Matthew could also happen to him—his own reason destroyed, Lincoln spinning in mindless night without the power to know.