ABRAHAM LINCOLN
Abraham Lincoln
A Life
VOLUME ONE
Michael Burlingame
© 2008 The Johns Hopkins University Press
All rights reserved. Published 2008
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Abraham Lincoln : a life / Michael Burlingame.
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ISBN-13: 978-0-8018-8993-6 (hardcover: alk. paper)
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1. Lincoln, Abraham, 1809–1865. 2. Presidents—United States—Biography. I. Title
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CONTENTS
Author’s Note
1 “I Have Seen a Good Deal of the Back Side of This World”: Childhood in Kentucky (1809–1816)
2 “I Used to Be a Slave”: Boyhood and Adolescence in Indiana (1816–1830)
3 “Separated from His Father, He Studied English Grammar”: New Salem (1831–1834)
4 “A Napoleon of Astuteness and Political Finesse”: Frontier Legislator (1834–1837)
5 “We Must Fight the Devil with Fire”: Slasher-Gaff Politico in Springfield (1837–1841)
6 “It Would Just Kill Me to Marry Mary Todd”: Courtship and Marriage (1840–1842)
7 “I Have Got the Preacher by the Balls”: Pursuing a Seat in Congress (1843–1847)
8 “A Strong but Judicious Enemy to Slavery”: Congressman Lincoln (1847–1849)
9 “I Was Losing Interest in Politics and Went to the Practice of the Law with Greater Earnestness Than Ever Before”: Midlife Crisis (1849–1854)
10 “Aroused as He Had Never Been Before”: Reentering Politics (1854–1855)
11 “Unite with Us, and Help Us to Triumph”: Building the Illinois Republican Party (1855–1857)
12 “A House Divided”: Lincoln vs. Douglas (1857–1858)
13 “A David Greater than the Democratic Goliath”: The Lincoln-Douglas Debates (1858)
14 “That Presidential Grub Gnaws Deep”: Pursuing the Republican Nomination (1859–1860)
15 “The Most Available Presidential Candidate for Unadulterated Republicans”: The Chicago Convention (May 1860)
16 “I Have Been Elected Mainly on the Cry ‘Honest Old Abe’ ”: The Presidential Campaign (May–November 1860)
17 “I Will Suffer Death Before I Will Consent to Any Concession or Compromise”: President-elect in Springfield (1860–1861)
18 “What If I Appoint Cameron, Whose Very Name Stinks in the Nostrils of the People for His Corruption?”: Cabinet-Making in Springfield (1860–1861)
Notes
Index
Illustrations follow page 368
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Sixteenth president of the United States, the Great Emancipator, and an eloquent spokesman for Union, freedom, and democracy, Abraham Lincoln is one of the most studied and beloved of all Americans. This biography, the first comprehensive one to appear in two-thirds of a century, builds on a foundation of abundant fresh materials—some recently unearthed, others drawn from more traditional sources that historians have underutilized. It offers new interpretations, connecting Lincoln’s private and public lives, and incorporates the findings of countless excellent scholarly works on nineteenth-century America published since the appearance of the only comparable multi-volume biography, Carl Sandburg’s Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years (two volumes, 1926), and Abraham Lincoln: The War Years (four volumes, 1939). Unlike the ten-volume life-and-times biography of Lincoln that his White House secretaries John G. Nicolay and John Hay published in 1890, this work does not attempt to relate the history of the Civil War. The focus here remains Lincoln himself. Telling the story of Lincoln’s life in detail, this narrative aims to avoid a problem that the eminent Civil War historian Allan Nevins identified. “Heavy compression,” he warned, could leave a biography of Lincoln “pemmicanized—nutritious but flavorless.”1
The year after Carl Sandburg’s Abraham Lincoln: The War Years appeared, he penned a letter that resonates with me. In response to a critic who faulted those volumes for their analytical shallowness, use of dubious sources, lack of documentation, and many factual errors, he wrote of his amazement “that the book got born, considering that many days when completely exhausted I despaired of ever bringing it through in accordance with the original design.” By the time he finished, he said, he had spent some $11,000 on the project, “was near a physical wreck, and believed the book would only slowly and across a long future make its way to the audience for whom it was intended.”2
While I can identify with the sentiments expressed in Sandburg’s letter, my approach to Lincoln differs from his. Sandburg was a poet, I am a scholar. Our treatment of the famous letter of condolence to the Widow Bixby, written in 1864, vividly illustrates the difference between those two sensibilities. With a striking command of language, Sandburg described the document thus: “[T]hese were blood-color syllables of a sacred music.” I could never craft such a memorable sentence. As a scholar, I was more interested in a question Sandburg skipped over: Did Lincoln actually write the Bixby letter? The answer, as I have tried to show, based on stylistic grounds and on documentary evidence, is No. John Hay, Lincoln’s gifted assistant personal secretary, composed it for the president’s signature.
Sandburg’s biography is long on elegant touches but short on research in unpublished sources. As a result, his biography compares to mine as John Constable’s full-size sketches of his 6-foot paintings of English country life compare with the finished canvasses. The subjects—people, horses, cottages, rivers, rainbows, churches, and the like—are all visible in Constable’s sketches. But they lack the color, detail, and vividness of the finished works—though both are of the same size. I hope that readers will conclude that this biography, with its fresh information, is more like Constable’s finished paintings, offering a portrait of Lincoln in higher resolution and sharper focus, with greater color, texture, and detail.
This biography relies on many sources simply unavailable to Sandburg and others, including the Lincoln Papers at the Library of Congress, which were first opened to public inspection in 1947. Access to that rich collection of 18,000 documents rendered all previous Lincoln biographies obsolete. Manuscript collections of Lincoln’s contemporaries have proven exceptionally revealing. In letters, diaries, journals, reminiscences, and other unpublished writings one can glean much new evidence about Lincoln: people would speak with him and then describe their conversations in diaries or letters; they would also comment on him and his policies and doings. Discovering such references in unpublished manuscripts
requires much panning of historical gravel; every now and then a nugget appears, and readers will find many of them throughout this book.
Newspapers are another badly neglected source of information about Lincoln. They especially illuminate his early political career, for they not only shed light on his legislative work and political campaigns; they also contain scores of anonymous and pseudonymous contributions, many apparently the handiwork of Lincoln himself. These are particularly helpful because few of his early speeches survive (shorthand reporting was unknown in the 1830s and 1840s).
Other sources of new information include the reminiscences of people who knew Lincoln. Historians tend to view such recollections with skepticism, for memories can dim with time. But the increasing respectability of oral history has changed many scholarly minds. We are fortunate to have the work of Lincoln’s law partner and biographer William H. Herndon, who gathered invaluable interview material during his research for a life of Lincoln. Herndon also corresponded with many of Lincoln’s friends, family members, colleagues, and neighbors, creating one of the first oral history collections in the country. Without it, we would have little knowledge of Lincoln’s early life. Also helpful are interviews that other early biographers, most notably John G. Nicolay and Ida M. Tarbell, conducted in the course of their own research. For decades after the president’s assassination, newspapers published recollections of Lincoln’s acquaintances. Clipping collections at various repositories as well as searchable on-line historical newspaper archives make those articles readily accessible.
In the year 2000, the Lincoln Legal Papers appeared, reproducing and indexing more than 100,000 documents and illuminating the 5,200 cases that Lincoln handled in two dozen years at the Illinois bar. Only since its appearance can we speak with any authority about Lincoln’s career as a lawyer.
Some of the new information I edited and saw into publication in the form of documentary editions of journals, diaries, letters, reminiscences and journalism, of Lincoln’s presidential secretaries. It occurred to me that someone could take all this material, combine it with the important findings made by recent historians of mid-nineteenth-century America, and write a fresh cradle-to-grave, detailed, multi-volume biography. A number of senior historians—James M. McPherson, Don E. Fehren-bacher, Richard N. Current, Kenneth M. Stampp, John Niven, Hans L. Trefousse, James A. Rawley, Robert V. Bruce, Douglas L. Wilson, Allen C. Guelzo, William C. Harris, William Hanchett, Philip Shaw Paludan, Mark E. Neely, Gabor S. Boritt, Wayne C. Temple, and Charles B. Strozier, all of whom had made considerable contributions to the Lincoln literature—might have undertaken that challenge. None of them seemed inclined to do so. David Herbert Donald, my mentor at both Princeton and Johns Hopkins in the 1960s, would have been an ideal candidate, but he chose to write a one-volume biography, which appeared in 1995. So, with some trepidation, I decided to try it myself.
Relying on traditional and new-found primary sources like manuscripts, newspapers, reminiscences, and public records, this work also makes full use of the secondary literature that has appeared in the last generation. Historians have ingeniously employed records of election results, legislative roll calls, census returns, and other quantifiable phenomena, and their work helps place Lincoln in his historical context with more precision and clarity than studies based solely on literary sources. The fruits of painstaking efforts by such quantative historians as Kenneth J. Winkle and the late William E. Gienapp thus make signal contributions to this biography.
Some of the interpretations in this biography, and some of the evidence, originally appeared in my The Inner World of Abraham Lincoln (1994). Like that volume, Abraham Lincoln: A Life offers psychological interpretations as well as fresh evidence. An early student of Lincoln’s life plausibly noted that “we can never arrive at an approximately full understanding” of his character until we have made “an extended and intensive study … of it from a psychological standpoint.”3 “I do not know,” Samuel Eliot Morison wrote to Albert J. Beveridge in the 1920s about Lincoln’s bouts of depression, “whether it has occurred to you to call the psychologists and psychiatrists into consultation, but it seems to me they would be more useful advisers than historians.”4 Use of the personality theory and the findings of clinical psychologists does indeed help to illuminate Lincoln’s depressions, as well as other patterns in his life that otherwise appear puzzling.
Examining Lincoln’s inner life involves speculation, an enterprise that professional historians usually shy away from. But as one Lincoln authority sensibly argued, “the biographer is a person who has by long and arduous concentration upon the particular subject put himself in a unique relation to it. His views ought to be more valuable than the views of other people. Of course, I don’t want him to dogmatize ever about anything he can’t prove; at the same time I do want him wherever the subject becomes obscure to give me tentatively his own views.”5 Many educated guesses, informed by over twenty years of research on Lincoln, appear in this biography. Each such guess might well begin with a phrase like “in all probability,” or “it may well be that,” or “it seems likely that.” Such warnings, if inserted into the text, would prove wearisome; readers are encouraged to provide such qualifiers silently whenever the narrative explores Lincoln’s unconscious motivation.
This caveat should not seem startling. When the practice of history started becoming professional, one of the discipline’s leading practitioners, Leopold von Ranke, announced that he sought to describe what occurred in the past “wie es eigentlich gewesen” [as it really happened]. Modern historians, more acutely aware of the problems of subjectivity than Ranke was, seek to reconstruct the past “wie es wahrscheinlich gewesen” [as it probably happened]. In 1983, the president of the Organization of American Historians observed in his inaugural address that “all historians, whether we admit it or not, work on the basis of what has been called the principle of maximum probability. The educated guess that some attribute to historical-mindedness is really a probability statement.”6
As central themes this work argues that Lincoln’s leadership proved to be the North’s secret weapon in winning the Civil War; that Lincoln was an effective leader because he achieved a level of psychological maturity unmatched in the history of American public life; and that such a high level of consciousness was acquired slowly and painfully as he overcame the economic and emotional poverty of his childhood.
Recent scholarship on race enables us to understand Lincoln’s views on that subject in context. While some of his early statements grate on modern ears, it should be borne in mind that he belonged to his era. Frontier Illinois, home to many emigrants from south of the Ohio River, was one of the most racist of the free states. Assumptions of black inferiority prevailed among whites not only there but throughout the entire country. Lincoln ultimately became far more idealistic and egalitarian on racial matters than most of his contemporaries, including the popular Democrat Stephen A. Douglas and his numerous admirers.
Lincoln was no reluctant emancipator. He delayed issuing the Emancipation Proclamation because his keen sense of duty, an emotion as strong as his profound hatred of slavery, made him hesitate to violate the oath of office he had taken, an oath that required him to uphold the Constitution. It did not authorize him to do whatever he wanted to do with regard to slavery. The need to keep the support of conservatives and moderates, who were glad to fight for the preservation of the Union but reluctant to fight for black freedom, also constrained him. When in September 1862 he did finally announce his intention to emancipate slaves in the rebellious states, he did so not for short-term political advantage but in spite of the strong possibility that it might harm Republican chances in the upcoming elections. By 1865, the preeminent black leader Frederick Douglass had ample reason to call Lincoln “emphatically the black man’s president.”7
Character is destiny, and Lincoln’s remarkable character helped make him not only a successful president but also a model which can be profitably emulated by al
l. Somehow he managed to be strong-willed without being willful, righteous without being self-righteous, and moral without being moralistic. The importance of his character was recognized during his administration. In December 1863, after Lincoln had issued a momentous proclamation dealing with amnesty and pardon for rebels, Charles Eliot Norton, a Cambridge intellectual who had once been harshly critical of the president, expressed admiration for that document and its author: “How wise and how admirably timed is his Proclamation. As a state paper its naiveté is wonderful. Lincoln will introduce a new style into state papers; he will make them sincere, and his honesty will compel even politicians to like virtue. I conceive his character to be on the whole the great net gain from the war.”8
To keep this long book from becoming even longer, I have pared down the manuscript and streamlined the notes. In the original unedited version, which is available online at the website of the Lincoln Studies Center at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois (www.knox.edu/lincolnstudies), almost every sentence is footnoted; in these printed volumes, only directly quoted material is documented. The text as well as the documentation of the online version is fuller, for much of the material left on the cutting room floor, as it were, is restored in what might be called, in the parlance of film-makers, a director’s cut. That online version will be updated as mistakes are discovered and new information comes to light.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
1
“I Have Seen a Good Deal of the Back Side
of This World”
Childhood in Kentucky
(1809–1816)
One day in the middle of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln stole time from his busy schedule to pen some wise paternal advice to a young Union captain who had been squabbling with his superiors. Quoting from Hamlet, the president wrote that a father’s admonition to his son—“Beware of entrance to a quarrel, but being in, bear it that the opposed may beware of thee”—was good counsel “and yet not the best.” Instead, Lincoln enjoined the captain: “Quarrel not at all.” The reasons Lincoln gave were practical: “No man resolved to make the most of himself, can spare time for personal contention. Still less can he afford to take all the consequences, including the vitiating of his temper, and the loss of self-control. Yield larger things to which you can show no more than equal right; and yield lesser ones, though clearly your own. Better give your path to a dog, than be bitten by him in contesting for the right. Even killing the dog would not cure the bite.”1 Born into emotional and economic poverty, Lincoln early on “resolved to make the most of himself” and did so, adhering to those precepts.
Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 1 Page 1
