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156 four NatuRe’s NobleMaN Abraham Lincoln and the Improvement of America at some moment during the mid- to late 1850s, Abraham Lincoln sat down to compose one of his least remembered and least appreciated speeches. The exact location of the chair, desk, or table where he reposed his lanky frame is unknown. Perhaps it was in his house, a two-story wooden structure on the northeast corner of Eighth and Jackson Streets in Springfield, Illinois. A domestic Parthenon recently renovated in the Greek Revival style, its parlor contained a small desk where he sometimes wrote. Or perhaps he prepared the speech in his law office, on the second floor of a commercial building that faced Fifth Street and a public square from which rose the columns and dome of the Illinois state capitol. Although the office was so cluttered and filthy that seeds once sprouted in the residue on its floor, it provided him with a convenient place at which to work.1 No matter where Lincoln sat, his arrangement of words on a page repeated the same process that had made the architecture and landscape around him. Whether he and his fellow citizens used paper and ink or stone, brick, and wood, they believed that their creations fulfilled nature’s potential and thereby improved the world. Poised above the blank sheet, Lincoln focused his mind on his theme: mankind and nature, or more precisely, the nature and destiny of man. It was a subject of profound importance to him and his contemporaries. Virtually every discipline or practice—science, law, geography, history, politics, economics, and others—in some way addressed it. The books that William Herndon, Lincoln ’s law partner, placed on the shelves of their office conveyed the range of NatuRe's NobleMaN 157 thought devoted to it. As Lincoln’s eyes moved down the pages of John Stuart Mill’s Principles of Political Economy (1848), for example, he read that labor redirected natural processes to human ends. By guiding the muscular action of cattle or channeling the flow of water and wind, people turned the wheels of economic production. As Mill stated, labor “in the physical world is always and solely employed in putting physical objects in motion; the properties of matter, the laws of nature, do the rest.” Whether making production more efficient or distributing wealth more justly, society’s goal should be “improvement.”2 Books alone did not speak to the importance of the human place on Earth and its prospects for betterment; so, too, did the environment that Lincoln observed and experienced every day. In Illinois and across the nation, people were transforming the raw materials of nature into finished forms at once useful , valuable, even beautiful: a gridded, rectilinear landscape of farmsteads, city blocks, and public squares; houses, churches, commercial buildings, factories , and government halls; sidewalks, planked streets, canals, railroads, and bridges; horses, wagons, locomotives, steamboats, and farm implements; sacks of grain, stacks of lumber, piles of brick and coal, bundles of wool, reams of paper, shelves of books; and much, much more.3 First as a laborer and later as a lawyer, Lincoln had built and benefited from this endlessly dynamic and productive landscape. Now it inspired some of the words that flowed from his pen. “All creation is a mine, and every man, a miner,” he began. “The whole earth, and all within it, upon it, and round about it, including himself, in his physical , moral, and intellectual nature, and his susceptibilities, are the infinitely varied ‘leads’ from which, man, from the first, was to dig out his destiny.” Lincoln drew on the story of Genesis to explain his point. Man had come into the world without skill and with little means, almost like a child: “In the beginning, the mine was unopened, and the miner stood naked, and knowledgeless, upon it.” Yet man’s discovery of his primal condition—his nakedness—prompted his first great invention: clothing, specifically a “fig-leaf-apron.” Such inventiveness distinguished man from the other animals. Fish, birds, beavers, ants, honeybees, and other “beasts” and “creeping things” gathered food and even built houses for themselves. But only man had the capacity to advance his skills and transform natural substances into instruments of progress: “Man is not the only animal who labors; but he is the only one who improves his workmanship.”4 A summary of major “discoveries” and “inventions” followed: spinning and weaving, iron and iron tools, wheeled carriages and watercraft, food production and draft animals...

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