Abraham Lincoln
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
The Man Behind the Myths
STEPHEN B. OATES
DEDICATION
FOR MY STUDENTS
AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS,
AMHERST
EPIGRAPH
The lack of a sense of history
is the damnation of the modern world.
ROBERT PENN WARREN
Those who deny freedom to others,
deserve it not for themselves.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
CONTENTS
Dedication
Epigraph
Prelude
Part One: Myth
1: Man of the People
2: Arch Villain
3: White Chief and Honky
Part Two: Many-Mooded Man
1: Resurrecting Life
2: A Matter of Profound Wonder
3: All Conquering Mind
4: Mr. Lincoln
Part Three: Advocate of the Dream
1: The Beacon Light of Liberty
2: This Vast Moral Evil
3: My Dissatisfied Fellow Countrymen
Part Four: Warrior for the Dream
1: The Central Idea
2: Death Warrant for Slavery
3: The Man of Our Redemption
4: Necessity Knows No Law
5: The Warrior
6: Toward a New Birth of Freedom
Part Five: Final Act
1: The Theater
2: Aftermath
3: Stanton
4: Without Him
Acknowledgments
References
Searchable Terms
About the Author
Other Books By
Copyright
About the Publisher
PRELUDE
In 1984, when this book appears, Abraham Lincoln will be 175 years old. This is certain to cause an eruption of flatulent utterances about the sanctified figure and a shameless parade of scissors-and-paste Lincoln books with more pictures in them than print. Since in With Malice Toward None I immodestly undertook to write a Lincoln biography for this generation, I thought I might help commemorate his birthday by publishing a serious volume, one I have been writing in my head ever since my life of Lincoln came out. This is a biographical study, not a true biography in the grand manner, evocative and comprehensive, with a narrative sweep that carries the Lincoln story from birth to death. I have already tried that in With Malice Toward None. No, this is a more modest outing, an exploration into special moments and meanings of Lincoln’s life. Still, I hope my narrative conveys some sense of him as a living man, for I wrote it in a style that seeks to describe as well as to analyze, to feel as well as to comprehend.
The thing about Lincoln is that he keeps growing and changing. After I completed my biography and went on to a life of Martin Luther King, Jr., who understood Lincoln and carried on his vision and work, I still found myself talking about the Civil War President on the lecture circuit. In one public address in the Midwest, I found myself discussing both Lincoln and King as “Builders of the Dream”—troubled builders, I should have said, given the pain and suffering both went through. In addition, I kept contributing articles and reviews about Lincoln to various publications.
As I continued to read, write, lecture, and talk about Lincoln, I realized how much I wanted to correct or clarify some of my earlier interpretations, realized how much more I had to say. Hence this book. In it, I have probed the galaxy of Lincoln myth and countermyth, a celestial world I find fascinating. Why has he become our greatest mythical hero? And correspondingly maybe our greatest mythical demon? What do such myths tell us about Lincoln’s significance? What do they tell us about us? Moreover, how does the historical man compare with these mythic creations? What is the place of both in our literature?
Such questions are the raison d’être for Part One, which deals with the three major myths about Lincoln and against which I orchestrate the rest of the book. There I attempt an approximation of what Lincoln was like in the days he lived, taking care to discuss him in proper historical context. In specific, Part Two addresses certain themes in Lincoln’s personal life—his depression, for example, and his difficulties with affairs of the heart until after he wedded Mary. Because a person’s private and public selves are inextricably linked, I have searched Lincoln’s inner conflicts, and described how he sought to resolve them, in hopes that this might afford a deeper understanding and appreciation of the whole man.
Another section examines Lincoln’s rise to prominence in the turbulent antebellum years and his emergence as the foremost political spokesman in America for the liberating impulses of the age. Here I venture an explanation for why scholars still rank Lincoln as our best President—which would doubtless amuse him, since he preferred a seat in the national Senate to the White House. In this and in the section on the war years, I try to elucidate Lincoln’s vision of the historic meaning and mission of his young country in the progress of human liberty in the world. He fought the Civil War with that uppermost in his mind, and I attempt to discuss all his momentous war measures—particularly emancipation—in terms of his vision and core of unshakable beliefs. I’ve given special attention to Lincoln’s troubled and troubling attitudes about slavery, in part because it was the source of the conflict (as Lincoln and his associates repeatedly stressed), in part because what he did about slavery in his own view was the most important measure of his presidency. Too, my narrative seeks to capture all the passion that bondage aroused in Lincoln and his entire generation. A final section attempts to clear away some of the popular misconceptions and elaborate fantasies that surround the assassination, and to suggest the meaning of that shattering and final act. The book ends with what I hope is a fair and compassionate portrait of Mary Lincoln, surely the most misunderstood First Lady in our history. Because her whole life was bound up with Lincoln, Mary’s desolate years alone constitute a tragic coda to the Lincoln story.
On the lecture circuit and in the classroom, I have been asked all manner of provocative things about Lincoln, which attests to the powerful hold he still has on our imaginations. In this volume, I endeavor to answer some recurring questions. How, for instance, did Lincoln’s log-cabin origins affect him? How did he relate to his father and real mother? What was he like as a lawyer, a husband, a man? Was he really a country fellow who cracked jokes at the village store? On that point, can the Lincoln stories told by Carl Sandburg be believed? What in fact are we to make of Sandburg’s immensely popular biography? Was Lincoln a lifelong white supremacist, as many blacks and whites contend today? Did the Emancipation Proclamation free any blacks? Did Lincoln steal the glory of self-liberating slaves by issuing it? Was he tenderhearted when it came to reconstructing Dixie? Would reconstruction have been different had he lived? Was there a conspiracy on the part of Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton and the so-called Radical Republicans to have Lincoln assassinated—an allegation enshrined as fact in several books and a recent motion picture and periodically reported in the popular media? There is much more here about Lincoln’s public and private selves, but I have told enough: perhaps some of you are teased enough to read the book.
Inevitably, I have covered some points and used certain facts here that are also found in With Malice Toward None and in a couple of essays in my book, Our Fiery Trial. In truth, the present discussion of emancipation considerably refines and elaborates on an argument I first made in one of those essays. Given the persistent misunderstanding of that crucial event, I thought it necessary to make the argument longer and more precise. Nevertheless, in approach, emphasis, and purpose, this is an altogether different book from its predecessors. I’ve offered much new material here, new ideas and insights, all of which I
hope adds up to an original and spirited portrait.
In shaping it, I benefited enormously from a growing library of modern Lincoln studies. In fact, the last couple of decades have witnessed a veritable renaissance of Lincoln scholarship. Modern specialists have reexamined almost every aspect of his life and career, producing new treatises on his inner meanings, his humor, love of language, and ideology, his economics, law practice, work in the Illinois legislature and Congress, his rise to the presidency and his presidency itself, his relationship with his wife, with his generals and Cabinet Secretaries, with his so-called Radical Republican colleagues, with Negroes and abolitionists, even with his southern adversaries. But because much of this scholarship inhabits technical monographs and journal articles written by scholars for one another, it hasn’t reached a broad literary audience. I am addressing that audience, because I want lay readers to rediscover Lincoln as the scholars have, to take a renewed interest in his life and work, to understand what they still mean for us. And there is no better time for that than Lincoln’s 175th.
S.B.O.
Amherst, Massachusetts
August, 1983
Part One
MYTH
Myth fulfills in primitive culture an indispensable function: it expresses, enhances, and codifies belief; it safeguards and enforces morality; it vouches for the efficiency of ritual and contains practical rules for the guidance of man. Myth is thus…a hardworked active force.
BRONISLAW MALINOWSKI
1: MAN OF THE PEOPLE
In 1858, against a backdrop of heightening sectional tensions over slavery, Abraham Lincoln stood in the Great Hall of the Illinois House of Representatives, warning his countrymen that a house divided against itself could not stand. Across Illinois that year, in a series of forensic duels with Stephen A. Douglas, this tall and melancholy man addressed himself boldly to the difficult problems of his day: to the haunting moral contradiction of slavery in a nation based on the Declaration of Independence…to the combustible issue of Negro social and political rights…to the meaning and historic mission of America’s experiment in popular government. This same man went on to the presidency, charged with the awesome task of saving the Union—and its experiment in popular government—in the holocaust of civil war. In the end, after enduring four unendurable years, he himself became a casualty of that conflict, gunned down by John Wilkes Booth just when the war was won and popular government preserved for humankind the world over.
The man who died that dark and dismal day had flaws as well as strengths, made mistakes and suffered reversals just as surely as he enjoyed his remarkable achievements. But in the days that followed his assassination, the man became obscured in an outpouring of flowery orations and tear-filled eulogies. As the seasons passed, Lincoln went on to legend and martyrdom, inflated by the myth makers into a godly Emancipator who personified America’s ideal Everyman.
Before proceeding, I had best try to define myth as I am using it here. Above all, I do not mean some preposterous story. Nor do I mean a story that is uncontaminated by life. Myth, as I am using the term, is a grandiose projection of a people’s experience. As X. J. Kennedy has put it, “Myths tell us of the exploits of the gods—their battles, the ways in which they live, love, and perhaps suffer—all on a scale of magnificence larger than our life. We envy their freedom and power; they enact our wishes and dreams.” In other words, the grandiose dimensions and symbol-building power of the myths we create reveal our deepest longings as a people. And this is especially true of the myths we Americans have fashioned about the powerful figure who presided over the Civil War, our greatest trial as a nation. Our extravagant projections of Lincoln in myth suggest a great deal about the spiritual and psychological needs of our culture ever since.
As historian David Donald has noted, two traditions of Lincoln mythology developed after the war. The first began on “Black Easter,” April 16, 1865, when ministers across the North portrayed the slain President as an American Christ who died to expiate the sins of his guilty land. For them, it was no coincidence that he had fallen on Good Friday. Did not the times of his shooting and death—just after ten in the evening and just after seven-twenty the next morning—make on the clock an outline of the crucifix? “Oh, friends,” cried the Reverend C. B. Crane from the pulpit of Broadway Tabernacle, “it was meet that the martyrdom should occur on Good Friday. It is no blasphemy against the Son of God and the Saviour of men that we declare the fitness of the slaying of the second Father of our Republic on the anniversary of the day on which He was slain. Jesus Christ died for the world, Abraham Lincoln died for his country.”
Blacks, too, viewed Lincoln with uninhibited reverence. “We mourn for the loss of our great and good President,” a Negro soldier wrote his fiancée. “Humanity has lost a firm advocate, our race its Patron Saint, and the good of all the world a fitting object to emulate…. The name Abraham Lincoln will ever be cherished in our hearts, and none will more delight to lisp his name in reverence than the future generations of our people.” In truth, black Americans came to regard Lincoln as a perfect, personal emancipator and kept pictures of him pasted on the walls above their mantelpieces. “To the deeply emotional and religious slave,” as one man explained, “Lincoln was an earthly incarnation of the Saviour of mankind.”
And so one body of writings depicted him in the ensuing decades. Typical of this school was Josiah Gilbert Holland’s The Life of Abraham Lincoln, which appeared in 1866 and sold more than 100,000 copies. Holland’s Lincoln is a model youth and an impeccable Christian gentleman. When war clouds gather in 1866, he supposedly tells an Illinois associate: “I know there is a God and that he hates injustice and slavery. I see the storm coming, and I know that His hand is in it. If he has a place for and work for me—and I think he has—I believe I am ready. I am nothing, but truth is everything. I know I am right, because I know that liberty is right, for Christ teaches it and Christ is God.” For Holland and other writers, ministers, and orators of this tradition, Lincoln was a martyr-saint, as pure and perfect a spirit as the Almighty ever created. He was “savior of the republic, emancipator of a race, true Christian, true man.”
Sheer nonsense! thundered William H. Herndon, Lincoln’s nervous, besotted law partner, when he read Holland’s book. This prettified character was not the Lincoln he had known in Illinois. That Lincoln had never belonged to a church. He was “an infidel,” a prairie lawyer who told stories that made the pious wince. Determined to correct Holland’s portrait, Herndon set out “to write the life of Lincoln as I saw him—honestly—truthfully—co[u]rageously—fearlessly cut whom it may.” He jotted down his own impressions and interviewed old settlers in Indiana and Illinois who remembered Lincoln. They spun yarns about “Old Abe” that made Herndon’s eyes hang out on his shirt front. Their Lincoln was an Illinois Paul Bunyan who could hoist a whiskey barrel overhead, a prairie Davy Crockett who roared that he was “the big buck of the lick.” No historian, Herndon embraced such tales as zealously as he did actual fact. As a consequence, Herndon’s Lincoln: The True Story of a Great Life, which came out in 1889, brimmed with gossip, hearsay, and legend, all mixed in with Herndon’s own authentic observations of Lincoln in their law office, in Springfield’s muddy streets, in courthouses and on the platform.
In sharp contrast to Holland’s Christian gentleman, Herndon’s Lincoln is a Western folk hero, funny, ambitious, irreverent, and sorrowful by turns. He is born in a “stagnant, putrid pool,” the son of a shiftless poor white and “the illegitimate daughter” of a prominent Virginia planter. Though he rises above his impoverished origins, Herndon’s Lincoln still has the stamp of the frontier on him: he plays practical jokes and performs legendary feats of strength. Still, he fears that he is illegitimate, too, and that and other woes often make him depressed. In New Salem, Herndon’s Lincoln has the only love affair of his life. This is the Ann Rutledge story, a chimerical story which Herndon popularized and which subsequent biographies shamelessly repeated. In He
rndon’s telling, Lincoln falls deeply in love with Ann and almost goes mad when she dies. As she lies in her grave, he moans miserably, “My heart is buried there.” If his heart is buried there, then he cannot possibly love Mary Todd. Herndon certainly bears her no love; in fact, he detests the woman; she is “the female wildcat of the age.” What follows about Lincoln and Mary is mostly malicious gossip. In Springfield, Herndon’s Lincoln does promise to wed Mary, only to plummet into despair. How can he marry this nasty little woman? Still, his sense of honor torments him. He has given his word. Sacrificing domestic happiness, Herndon’s Lincoln goes ahead with the marriage, and Mary, a “tigress,” “soured,” “insolent,” “haughty,” and “gross,” devotes herself to making Lincoln miserable. For him, life with Mary is “worse punishment…than burning by the stake.” He finds escape in law and politics, and through adversity rises to “the topmost rung of the ladder.” No haloed saint, Herndon’s Lincoln in sum is a product of the great Western prairies, a religious skeptic, open, candid, energetic, trusting, and brave.
Herndon had promised that his Lincoln would “cause a squirm,” and he was right. From across American Christendom came a fierce and unrelenting cry, “Atheist! Atheist! Herndon’s an atheist!” With that, Herndon’s partisans took on those of the Holland school in what David Donald has termed “a religious war.” And so the two mythical conceptions—one portraying Lincoln as a frontier hero, the other as a martyr-saint—battled one another into the twentieth century.
By 1909, the centennial year of Lincoln’s birth, the two traditions had begun to blend into “a composite American ideal,” as Donald has said. But it remained for Carl Sandburg, in his epochal Abraham Lincoln, to combine the saint and folklore Lincoln and capture the mythic figure more vividly and consistently than any other folk biographer. In truth, Sandburg’s became the most popular Lincoln work ever written, as a procession of plays, motion pictures, novels, children’s books, school texts, and television shows purveyed Sandburg’s Lincoln to a vast American public, until that Lincoln became for most Americans the real historical figure.