The Battles that Made Abraham Lincoln

by Larry Tagg

  Lincoln’s opponents lampooned his odd appearance, as in this “mock biography”:

  Mr. Lincoln stands six feet twelve in his socks, which he changes once every ten days. His anatomy is composed mostly of bones, and when walking he resembles the offspring of a happy marriage between a derrick and a windmill. … His head is shaped something like a rutabaga, and his complexion is that of a Saratoga trunk. His hands and feet are plenty large enough, and in society he has the air of having too many of them. The glove-makers have not yet had time to construct gloves that will fit him. In his habits he is by no means foppish, though he brushes his hair sometimes and is said to wash. He swears fluently. A strict temperance man himself, he does not object to another man’s being pretty drunk, especially when he is about to make a bargain with him. … He can hardly be called handsome, though he is certainly much better looking since he had small-pox.

  … and this, with more meanness than mockery, which was printed in the Kentucky Statesman:

  Abraham Lincoln is a man above the medium height. He passes the six foot mark by an inch or two. He is raw-boned, shamble-gaited, bow-legged, knock-kneed, pigeon-toed, slob-sided, a shapeless skeleton in a very tough, very dirty, unwholesome skin. His hair is or rather was black and shaggy; his eyes dark and fireless like a cold grate in winter time. His lips protrude beyond the natural level of the face, but are pale and smeared with tobacco juice. His teeth are filthy.

  In the next place his voice is untutored, coarse, harsh—the voice of one who has no intellect and less moral nature. His manners are low in the extreme and when his talk is not obscene it is senseless. In a word, Lincoln, born and bred a railsplitter, is a railsplitter still.

  Lincoln’s arrival in Washington was the target of three Sut Lovingood stories in the Nashville Union&American, a newspaper that had called Lincoln a “half-witted politician.” The fictitious Sut was a rude, drunken hillbilly, who at one point offered a description of his new buddy, Abe Lincoln, whom Sut called “ole Windin’ Blades” because his arms and legs were like the long blades used for winding yarn:

  If he aint a long wun an a narrow wun, I’m durned. His mouf, his paw, an his footsez am the principil feeturs, an his strikin pint is the way them ar laigs ove hizen gets inter his body. They goes in at each aidge sorter like the prongs goes intu a pitch fork. Ove all the durned skeery looking ole cusses for a president ever I seed, he am decidedly the durndest. He looks like a yaller ladder with half the rungs knocked out.

  I kotch a ole bull frog once an druv a nail thru his lips inter a post, tied two rocks to his hine toes an stuck a darnin needil inter his tail tu let out the misture, an lef him there tu dry. I seed him two weeks arter wurds, an when I seed ole Abe I thot hit were an orful retribution cum ontu me, an that hit were the same frog, only stretched a little longer, an had tuck to waring ove close tu keep me from knowin him, an ketchin him an nailin him up agin; an natral born durn’d fool es I is, I swar I seed the same watry skeery look in the eyes, an the same sorter knots on the ‘back-bone.’ I’m feard, George, sumthin’s tu cum ove my nailin up that ar frog. I swar I am, ever since I seed ole Abe, same shape same color same feel (cold as ice) an I’m d——— ef hit aint the same smell.

  The ludicrous effect of his long limbs was magnified by Lincoln’s lifelong carelessness about clothes. “He probably had as little taste about dress and attire as anybody that ever was born: he simply wore clothes because it was needful and customary; whether they fitted or looked well was entirely above, or beneath, his comprehension,” remembered Whitney. In 1855, a high-powered lawyer described Lincoln as “an ungainly back woodsman, with coarse, ill-fitting clothing, his trousers hardly reaching his ankles.” At the time of the Douglas debates in 1858, he was still, according to a close acquaintance, “more or less careless of his personal attire, … he usually wore in his great canvass with Douglas a linen coat, generally without any vest, a hat much the worse for wear, and carried with him a faded cotton umbrella which became almost as famous in the canvass as Lincoln himself.” The linen coat itself was memorable— Edwin Stanton recalled Lincoln “wearing a dirty linen duster for a coat, on the back of which the perspiration had splotched two wide stains that, emanating from each armpit, met at the centre, and resembled a dirty map of a continent.” Carl Schurz, who met Lincoln during the debates, took away a vivid impression of his clothes: “On his head he wore a somewhat battered ‘stove-pipe’ hat… . His lank, ungainly body was clad in a rusty black dress coat with sleeves that should have been longer; but his arms appeared so long that the sleeves of a ‘store’ coat could hardly be expected to cover them all the way down to the wrists. His black trousers, too, permitted a very full view of his large feet.”

  As President-elect in 1861, his losing battles with his garments were a source of much head-shaking among those meeting him for the first time. William Russell first saw him then, “dressed in an ill-fitting, wrinkled suit of black, which put one in mind of an undertaker’s uniform at a funeral.” When Edward Dicey met Lincoln he was garbed “in a long, tight, badly fitting suit of black, creased, soiled, and puckered up at every salient point of the figure … [in] large, ill-fitting boots, gloves too long for the long bony fingers, and a fluffy hat, covered to the top with dusty, puffy crepe.” When Hawthorne met him, “He was dressed in a rusty black frock-coat and pantaloons, unbrushed, and worn so faithfully that the suit had adapted itself to the curves and angularities of his figure, and had grown to be an outer skin of the man. He had shabby slippers on his feet.” Lincoln had already come to grief over his black gloves at the New York opera, and now Mary Clemmer Ames, a Washington correspondent for the Springfield (Mass.) Republican noticed at a pre-inaugural reception, “Abraham Lincoln looks very awkward in white kid gloves and feels uncomfortable in new boots.”

  Miss Ames didn’t know the half of it. Ward Hill Lamon testified to Lincoln’s struggles with his accouterments:

  He had very defective taste in the choice of hats, the item of dress that does more than any other for the improvement of one’s personal appearance. His hat for years served the double purpose of an ornamental headgear and a kind of office or receptacle for his private papers and memoranda.

  … I think Mr. Lincoln suffered much annoyance from the tyranny of fashion in the matter of gloves. The necessity to wear gloves he regarded as an affliction, a violation of the statute against “cruelty to animals.” At about the time of his third reception [very possibly the one Ms. Ames attended] he had on a tight-fitting pair of white kids, which he had with difficulty got on. He saw approaching in the distance an old Illinois friend named Simpson, whom he welcomed with a genuine Sangamon County shake, which resulted in bursting his white-kid glove with an audible sound. Then raising his brawny hand up before him, looking at it with an indescribable expression, he said, — while the whole procession was checked, witnessing this scene, — “Well, my old friend, this is a general bustification. You and I were never intended to wear these things. If they were stronger they might do well enough to keep out the cold, but they are a failure to shake hands with between old friends like us. Stand aside, Captain, and I’ll see you shortly.”

  One of the most remarkable things about Lincoln’s inattention to his appearance was that, during his years as the highest official in the land, it never improved. The well-heeled Captain Francis Donaldson met him in 1864, and he traced the same flaws as the men who met him when he got off the train from Illinois:

  He was, apparently, the tallest man I ever saw, and so thin too and so ugly. He had a long black double breasted frock coat which hung like a wrapper on his lean frame, and it was positively the dirtiest coat I ever beheld for a man having any pretentions to gentility, much less the President of the United States of America. Before he came into the room I was rather impressed by the occasion and honor of meeting the President. But when this homely, dirty, shabby, lean, lanky man appeared I lost all sense of the dignity of the surroundings and found myself filled with amazement that this
was indeed Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States. … How can foreign nations, or indeed our own people, have respect for institutions when such a slovenly careless man is the first gentleman of the land … I never for a moment conceived him to be the uncouth, the common man I found him to be when face to face with him. I was the worst disappointed man conceivable.

  Nor did Lincoln’s speech redeem his appearance. “His grammar is weak,” noted George Templeton Strong. The Cincinnati Enquirer grumbled that Lincoln pronounced “words in a manner that puzzles the ear sometimes to determine whether he is speaking his own or a foreign tongue.” Lincoln had never lost his Kentucky twang, and his hillbilly mispronunciations marked him as a rube to Easterners’ ears, uneducated and provincial. He might say, for instance, that he didn’t keer fer sich idees as the secessionists espoused. Or that the unly way he would ra-ally yearn respect was when people heerd his inaugeral—then they’d git the ra-al pitcher. After meeting with Lincoln, George Templeton Strong ran back to his diary and tried to reproduce a story Lincoln told, the way he’d heard it come out of Lincoln’s mouth:

  Wa-al that reminds me of a party of Methodist parsons that was traveling in Illinois when I was a boy thar, and had a branch to cross that was pretty bad-ugly to cross, ye know, because the waters was up. And they got considerin’ and discussin’ how they should git across it, and they talked about it for two hours, and one on ‘em thought they had ought to cross one way when they got there, and another another way, and they got quarrelin’ about it, till at last an old brother put in, and he says, says he, “Brethren, this here talk ain’t no use. I never cross a river until I come to it.”

  Even this, Strong admitted, was a weak approximation, and that he despaired of capturing the story’s “intense provincialism and rusticity.” Lincoln’s accent forever cemented the poor opinion of people such as Horace Greeley, who said of the President, “Here was an heir of poverty and insignificance, obscure, untaught, buried throughout his childhood in the primitive forests, with no transcendent, dazzling abilities.” His speech appalled the well-bred General George McClellan, who, after a White House soiree, wrote to his wife that the most striking moment of the evening was when “the Magician asked the Presdt for his handkerchief—upon which [Lincoln] replied promptly, ‘You’ve got me now, I ain’t got any’!!!!”

  Lincoln’s tenor voice, too, was “high pitched and rather strident,” “shrill, piping, and unpleasant”—“far from musical.” Newspaperman Villard thought “His voice was naturally good, but he frequently raised it to an unnatural pitch.” To editor Horace White, Lincoln’s voice was “a thin tenor, or rather falsetto voice, almost as high pitched as a boatswain’s whistle.” It reminded nobody of the magnificence of Webster.

  Many were put off by his lack of social graces—he had “a homeliness of manner that was unique in itself,” in the generous phrase of his friend Alexander McClure. Though Lincoln’s good-humored affability delighted many of his visitors, it also offended many. The New York smart set saw Lincoln as an oafish social failure. Society reporter Arabella Smith of the New York Commercial Advertiser wired back her impression of the latest Republican gathering:

  I don’t believe first class people in Washington go to President Lincoln’s levees. Why, I’ve seen more intelligence in a small drawing room in New York than I could see in the reception and ante-rooms together that evening at the White House. … Between ourselves, if he were my husband and President, too, I shouldn’t like him to be so good-natured and free-and-easy in his manners. I should want him to look and act the Chief Magistrate a little more… .

  I’ll tell you what I think. The President is Abraham Lincoln, as honest and upright a man as the world ever saw. But Abraham Lincoln, in one respect, is not yet a President. His speech, his bearing, and the society he seems most at home with show him to be still Mr. Lincoln only. He has not yet appreciated, socially, the position he has been called to occupy.

  Sometimes Lincoln made a clumsy attempt at familiarity, as when he called Greeley “Horace” at first sight. His habit of straightaway asking tall men to “put backs,” that is, stand back-to-back with him to see who was taller—from the coal-heaver in Freedom, Pennsylvania, who was delighted; to the pompous, sober, fastidious Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, who was horrified—revealed a limited social repertoire. “Neither was Lincoln a good listener,” said William Herndon. “Putting it a little strongly, he was often not even polite. In a conversation, he was rather abrupt, and in his anxiety to say something apt or to illustrate the subject under discussion, would burst in with a story.” Carl Schurz, for one, thought little of it. He saw Lincoln as a kind of Western “noble savage,” explaining poetically, “He is an overgrown nature-child and does not understand artifices of speech and attitude.” But other high-minded leaders, such as Massachusetts Governor Andrew, never got over the feeling that Lincoln was a rowdy. Even to George Templeton Strong, who liked him, he was “a barbarian, a Scythian, a yahoo, or gorilla, in respect of outside polish.”

  What were serious men to make of a man who rarely read, and when he did, read out loud, like a schoolboy? A man who put on his stovepipe hat “country-style”—gripping it from behind his head, by the rear brim? In a reception line, Lincoln was comic. When he shook hands, he surrounded his partner’s hand and went at it with gusto, pump-handle style, up and down. A surprised New York Times reporter wrote that he had never seen anyone go through the ritual with the “abandon of President Lincoln. He goes it with both hands, and hand over hand, very much as a sailor would climb a rope.” He was “like a man pumping for life on a sinking vessel,” according to another. Lincoln was uncouth, not only in receiving guests but in meetings. He discussed weighty matters of state with a slippered foot flung up on one corner of his desk. His favorite posture, even when conferring with great leaders on the most vital concerns, was to sit and slide far down in his chair, sticking both slippers so high above his head that they could rest on his mantelpiece; his secretaries called it “sitting on his shoulders.” His official manner in these early days was unpracticed. It was sketched by William Russell, who was present when Lincoln received a diplomat:

  As he advanced through the room, he evidently controlled a desire to shake hands all round with everybody, and smiled good-humouredly till he was suddenly brought up by the staid deportment of Mr. Seward, and by the profound diplomatic bows of the Chevalier Bertinatti. Then, indeed, he suddenly jerked himself back, and stood in front of the two ministers, with his body slightly drooped forward, and his hands behind his back, his knees touching, and his feet apart. Mr. Seward formally presented the minister, whereupon the President made a prodigiously violent demonstration of his body in a bow which had almost the effect of a smack in its rapidity and abruptness, and, recovering himself, proceeded to give his utmost attention, whilst the Chevalier, with another bow, read from a paper a long address.

  The United States was an earnest nation, in an earnest era, at a time when men were most earnestly seeking a way out of a national catastrophe. The tenor of the times can be seen in its portraits, in an ocean of photographs of faces with straight mouths, with lips pressed tight, projecting solemnity, purpose, determination. In these grimmest of times, Lincoln’s most unforgivable sin for many, especially in the East, was that he told jokes. The anonymous diarist who called himself “Public Man” recorded the bias of outgoing Attorney General Edwin Stanton after a conversation in the first week after Lincoln’s arrival: “It is impossible to be more bitter and malignant than he is,” he wrote of Stanton. “Every word was a suppressed and a very-ill suppressed sneer, and it cost me something to keep my temper in talking with him even for a few moments. When he found that I had only met Mr. Lincoln once, to my recollection, he launched out into a downright tirade about him, saying that he ‘had met him at the bar, and found him a low, cunning clown.’” Lincoln similarly offended a diplomat from Holland, who complained, “His conversation consists of vulgar anecdotes at which he hims
elf laughs uproariously.” Strong added that “his laugh was the laugh of a yahoo.” The painter Francis Carpenter called his laugh “the ‘neigh’ of a wild horse on his native prairie.” Solemn congressman George Julian observed, “When he told a particularly good story, and the time came to laugh, he would sometimes throw his left foot across his right knee, and clenching his foot with both hands and bending forward, his whole frame seemed to be convulsed with the effort to give expression to his sensations.” Henry Villard described Lincoln’s storytelling manner and matter that struck so many as unpresidential: