Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 1

by Michael Burlingame

  Lincoln felt little elation upon achieving the goal that he had long sought; he confided to Joshua Speed that his election “to Congress, though I am very grateful to our friends for having done it, has not pleased me as much as I expected.”183 Such a letdown is not unusual among the compulsively ambitious, for the attainment of power satisfies only temporarily the hunger for approval rooted in a damaged sense of self-worth. Another reason for the lack of euphoria on Lincoln’s part may have been the peculiar congressional timetable stipulating that the Thirtieth Congress would not meet until December 1847. Wishing to avoid conflict with fellow Whigs, Lincoln did not try to fill the unexpired term of his friend Edward D. Baker, who in January 1847 quit his seat to participate in the Mexican War.

  Poet

  While waiting for his congressional term to begin, Lincoln indulged his poetical muse, writing verses inspired by his 1844 campaign swing through Indiana. The sight of old haunts which he had not visited for fourteen years prompted him to compose what he called “poetry, or doggerel” about his youth.184 In 1846 and 1847 he submitted to attorney Andrew Johnston a few poems, some of which Johnston published anonymously in the Quincy Whig. (Lincoln did not want his authorship revealed, for, as he told Johnston, “I have not sufficient hope of the verses attracting any favorable notice to tempt me to risk being ridiculed for having written them.”)185 Their most striking feature is morbidity, reflecting Lincoln’s obsession with death, rooted in his childhood experiences of loss.

  To attorney Johnston he sent not only his own verses but also a copy of his favorite poem, William Knox’s “Mortality.” “I would give all I am worth, and go into debt, to be able to write so fine a piece as I think that is,” he told Johnston.186 Lincoln said that Knox’s verses “sounded to him as much like true poetry as any thing that he had ever heard.”187 Gibson W. Harris heard Lincoln recite the poem often in his law office, and Lawrence Weldon observed him one night on the legal circuit sitting before the dying embers in a fireplace quoting Knox’s poem. Lincoln discovered the poem in a newspaper in 1845, shortly after his campaign trip to Indiana. The memories awakened by his return to Indiana made him susceptible to the appeal of Knox’s dirgelike quatrains:

  Oh why should the spirit of mortal be proud!

  Like a swift flying meteor—a fast flying cloud—

  A flash of lightning—a break of the wave,

  He passeth from life to his rest in the grave.

  The leaves of the Oak, and the Willow shall fade,

  Be scattered around, and together be laid.

  And the young and the old, and the low and the high,

  Shall moulder to dust, and together shall lie.

  The third stanza may have been particularly meaningful to Lincoln:

  The infant a mother attended and loved—

  The mother that infant’s affection who proved

  The husband that mother and infant who blest,

  Each—all are away to their dwellings of rest.

  This might well have brought back images of Nancy Hanks, her aunt and uncle, and his infant brother, all of whom died in Lincoln’s youth. The fourth stanza perhaps conjured up memories of Ann Rutledge and of his sister:

  The maid on whose brow, on whose cheek, on whose eye

  Shone beauty and pleasure—her triumphs are by;

  And alike from the memory of the living erased

  And the memory of mortals, who loved her and praised—

  The remaining ten stanzas continue in a similar vein but without such obvious reference to Lincoln’s life.

  Lincoln’s own 1846 poem, “My Childhood Home I See Again,” is similarly obsessed with “loved ones lost.” The first canto clearly deals with Lincoln’s own family and friends.

  My childhood-home I see again,

  And gladden with the view;

  And still as mem’ries crowd my brain,

  There’s sadness in it too.

  O memory! thou mid-way world

  ’Twixt Earth and Paradise,

  Where things decayed, and loved ones lost

  In dreamy shadows rise.

  And freed from all that’s gross or vile,

  Seem hallowed, pure, and bright,

  Like scenes in some enchanted isle,

  All bathed in liquid light.

  As distant mountains please the eye,

  When twilight chases day—

  As bugle-tones, that, passing by,

  In distance die away—

  As leaving some grand water-fall

  We ling’ring, list its roar,

  So memory will hallow all

  We’ve known, but know no more.

  Now twenty years have passed away,

  Since here I bid farewell

  To woods, and fields, and scenes of play

  And school-mates loved so well.

  Where many were, how few remain

  Of old familiar things!

  But seeing these to mind again

  The lost and absent brings.

  The friends I left that parting day—

  How changed, as time has sped!

  Young childhood grown, strong manhood grey,

  And half of all are dead.

  I hear the lone 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.188

  These verses call to mind Isaac Watts’s hymn, “The Shortness of Life, and the Goodness of God,” which Lincoln copied into his commonplace book of 1824–1826:

  Time what an em[p]ty vaper [’]tis and days how swift they are

  swift as an indian arr[ow] fly on like a shooting star

  the presant moment Just [is here] then slides away in h[as]te

  that we can never say they[’re ours] but [only say] th[ey]’re past.189

  Lincoln was fond of “The Inquiry” by Charles Mackay, which treated death and the afterlife:

  Tell me, ye winged winds

  That round my pathway roar,

  Do ye not know some spot

  Where mortals weep no more?

  Some lone and pleasant vale

  Some valley in the West,

  Where, free from toil and pain,

  The weary soul may rest?

  The loud wind dwindled to a whisper low,

  And sighed for pity as it answered, No.

  Tell me, thou mighty deep,

  Whose billows round me play,

  Knows’t thou some favored spot,

  Some island far away,

  Where weary man may find

  The bliss for which he sighs;

  Where sorrow never lives

  And friendship never dies?

  The loud waves rolling in perpetual flow

  Stopped for awhile and sighed to answer, No.

  And thou, serenest moon,

  That with such holy face

  Dost look upon the earth

  Asleep in Night’s embrace—

  Tell me, in all thy round

  Hast thou not seen some spot

  Where miserable man

  Might find a happier lot?

  Behind a cloud the moon withdrew in woe,

  And a voice sweet but sad responded, No.

  Tell me, my secret soul,

  Oh, tell me, Hope and Faith,

  Is there no resting-place

  From sorrow, sin, and death?

  Is there no happy spot

  Where mortals may be blessed,

  Where grief may find a balm

  And weariness a rest?

  Faith, Hope, and Love, best boon to mortals given,

  Waved their bright wings and whispered,

  Yes, in Heaven.190

  One of Lincoln’s favorite speeches from Shakespeare was Richard II’s lament, which John Hay heard him re
ad in Springfield and Washington:

  For heaven’s sake, let us sit upon the ground,

  And tell sad stories of the death of kings:—

  How some have been deposed, some slain in war,

  Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed;

  Some poisoned by their wives, some sleeping killed;

  All murdered:—For within the hollow crown

  That rounds the mortal temples of a king

  Keeps Death his court; and there the antic sits,

  Scoffing his state, and grinning at his pomp,—

  Allowing him a breath, a little scene

  To monarchize, be feared, and kill with looks;

  Infusing him with self and vain conceit,—

  As if this flesh, which walls about our life,

  Were brass impregnable,—and humored thus,

  Comes at the last, and with a little pin

  Bores through his castle walls and—farewell, King!

  Lincoln was fascinated by this speech. He was also fond of sad songs. As a boy in Indiana, he used to sing “John Anderson’s Lamentation,” which contained the line “In yonder cold graveyard, her body doth lie.”191 As a fledgling attorney, he was heard singing lugubrious pieces like “Mary’s Dream,” “Lord Ullin’s Daughter,” and “The Soldier’s Dream.” His favorite song was a ballad titled “Twenty Years Ago,” which he sang often in Illinois and later in the White House. The verses that most affected him were these:

  I’ve wandered to the village, Tom; I’ve sat beneath the tree

  Upon the schoolhouse play-ground, that sheltered you and me:

  But none were left to greet me, Tom, and few were left to know

  Who played with us upon the Green, some twenty years ago.

  Near by the spring, upon the elm you know I cut your name,—

  Your sweetheart’s just beneath it Tom; and you did mine the same.

  Some heartless wretch has peeled the bark,—t’was dying sure but slow,

  Just as she died whose name you cut, some twenty years ago.

  My lids have long been dry, Tom, but tears came to my eyes;

  I thought of her I loved so well, those early broken ties:

  I visited the old churchyard, and took some flowers to strew

  Upon the graves of those we loved, some twenty years ago.192

  Lincoln especially admired Oliver Wendell Holmes’s “The Last Leaf,” which also dealt with the death of loved ones. He was fondest of this stanza:

  The mossy marbles rest

  On lips that he has pressed

  In their bloom;

  And the names he loved to hear

  Have been carved for many a year

  On the tomb.

  Of these verses he said: “For pure pathos, in my judgment, there is nothing finer than those six lines in the English language!”193 When Lincoln recited that stanza, his eyes would tear up. Holmes’s lines doubtless called to Lincoln’s mind the graves of his mother, sister, and Ann Rutledge.

  In his copy of Byron’s poetry, Lincoln turned down the page containing these sorrowful verses:

  The spell is broke, the charm is flown!

  Thus is it with life’s fitful fever!

  We madly smile when we should groan;

  Delirium is our best deceiver.

  Each lucid interval of thought

  Recalls the woes of Nature’s charter,

  And he that acts as wise men ought,

  But lives, as saints have died, a martyr.194

  Lincoln also liked to quote from Thomas Moore’s “The Fire-Worshippers”:

  Oh, ever thus, from childhood’s hour,

  I’ve seen my fondest hopes decay;

  I never lov’d a tree or flow’r

  But ’t was the first to fade away.

  I never nurs’d a dear gazelle,

  To glad me with its soft black eye,

  But when it came to know me well,

  And love me, it was sure to die!195

  Lincoln’s own poetry and his literary taste indicate that his predisposition to depression was rooted in the death of loved ones in his early years.

  Another psychological concern appears in a poem he composed after his 1844 visit to southwestern Indiana: fear of insanity. His schoolmate Matthew Gentry, three years older than Lincoln, had at the age of 19 gone berserk and tried to kill his parents. Thereafter he was locked up as a madman. Lincoln’s verses reveal the horror he felt as he observed Gentry:

  But here’s an object more of dread

  Than aught the grave contains—

  A human form with reason fled,

  While wretched life remains.…

  When terror spread, and neighbors ran

  Your dangerous strength to bind,

  And soon, a howling, crazy man

  Your limbs were fast confined;

  How then you strove and shrieked aloud,

  Your bones and sinews bared;

  And fiendish on the gazing crowd,

  With burning eyeballs glared—

  And begged, and swore, and wept, and prayed,

  With maniac laught[er] joined—

  How fearful were these signs displayed

  By pangs that killed thy mind!

  And when at length tho’ drear and long,

  Time soothed thy fiercer woes,

  How plaintively thy mournful song

  Upon the still night rose.

  I’ve heard it oft, as if I dreamed,

  Far distant, sweet and lone—

  The funeral dirge, it ever seemed

  Of reason dead and gone.

  To drink it’s strains, I’ve stole away,

  All stealthily and still,

  Ere yet the rising God of day

  Had streaked the Eastern hill.

  Air held his breath; trees, with the spell,

  Seemed sorrowing angels round,

  Whose swelling tears in dew-drops fell

  Upon the listening ground.

  But this is past; and nought remains,

  That raised thee o’er the brute;

  Thy piercing shrieks, and soothing strains,

  Are like, forever mute.

  Now fare thee well—more thou the cause,

  Than subject now of woe.

  All mental pangs, by time’s kind laws,

  Hast lost the power to know.

  O death! Thou awe-inspiring prince,

  That keepst the world in fear;

  Why dost thou tear more blest ones hence,

  And leave him ling’ring here?196

  Lincoln’s reaction to Gentry’s insanity suggests that he may have feared that he might lose his own mind. In the opinion of his neighbors, he had gone crazy at least twice—following the death of Ann Rutledge in 1835 and after breaking his engagement to Mary Todd in 1841. Perhaps he feared that such an attack would recur. He may also have feared that his wife was insane. She behaved irrationally, starting early in their marriage. According to William Herndon, Lincoln “held his wife partly insane for years.”197 During his presidency, he told the superintendent of the Old Capitol prison that the “caprices of Mrs. Lincoln, I am satisfied, are the result of partial insanity.”198

  Economic Issues

  As he prepared to take his seat in Congress, Lincoln wrote memoranda on the tariff issue. The most striking passage, foreshadowing his mature antislavery pronouncements, begins with a biblical quotation that he would cite frequently in the 1850s and 1860s: “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread.”199 He argued that since “most good things are produced by labour, it follows that [all] such things of right belong to those whose labour has produced them. But it has so happened in all ages of the world, that some have laboured, and others have, without labour, enjoyed a large proportion of the fruits. This is wrong, and should not continue. To [secure] to each labourer the whole product of his labour, or as nearly as possible, is a most worthy object of any good government.”200 Lincoln used this principle in 1847 to justify protective tariffs,
and he would later cite it while attacking slavery. In 1858, for example, he described the proslavery argument as “the same old serpent that says you work and I eat, you toil and I will enjoy the fruits of it.” He declared that “each individual is naturally entitled to do as he pleases with himself and the fruit of his labor.”201

  In applying this principle to the issue of protectionism, Lincoln drew a distinction between useful and useless labor. The latter included transporting goods from abroad when they could be produced as cheaply at home. Curiously, as he had done in his earlier discussions of the tariff, Lincoln continued to ignore the powerful “infant industries” rationale. Nor did he emphasize the argument made by many other Whigs, that without high tariffs, an unfavorable balance of trade would damage the United States as specie was drained overseas, leading to a credit shortage and consequent economic stagnation.

  On July 6, 1847, Lincoln made his maiden speech before a national audience. As a delegate to the Harbor and River Convention in Chicago, he had a chance to speak on federal support of internal improvements. Ten thousand people attended this convention, where delegates from the North and West remonstrated against President Polk’s veto of a river and harbor appropriations bill, an action that Westerners interpreted as a pro-Southern blow to their region’s interests. When news of the veto reached Chicago, ships there lowered flags to half-mast, and a sandbar at the harbor’s entrance was christened “Mount Polk.” Snags in rivers became known as “Polk stalks.” At the convention, a New York Democrat, David Dudley Field, spoke in favor of a strict construction of the Constitution and supported only limited river and harbor improvements. Horace Greeley wrote that Lincoln responded “briefly and happily” to Field.202 When Lincoln rose amid vigorous applause to speak, a Pennsylvanian asked a delegate who he was. “Oh,” came the reply, “that is Abe Lincoln of Springfield, the ablest and wittiest stump speaker on the Whig side in the State of Illinois.”203