Abraham Lincoln, Public Speaker

Introduction: Literary Artist or Speaker?

INTRODUCTION Literary Artist or Speaker? Prior to 1858, if a reporter had made his way to almost any villagein the central IllinoisEighth JudicialDistrict (about 100 by 150 miles in area) and inquired about Abraham Lincoln, the reporter would have found many people eager to talk about this familiar character. They would have variously described him as a plain, perhaps even ugly, man ofthe people, a poor white Kentuckian, or an all-around westerner. They would have identified him as a storyteller, a lawyer, a talkative Whig, and an entertaining stump speaker—a good person to have on one's side in a lawsuit or to give sound advice about contracts, divorces, land titles, wills, or politics. They would have reported seeing the Springfield lawyer in the county seat or en route along country roads, attending court throughout the district—a pace that he maintained for twenty years. But no one, even the editor of the local newspaper, would have called him an orator, a political philosopher, or a writer—notHonest Abe Lincoln. And even his best friends would have laughed at the suggestion that this politician might someday be president of the United States and commander of the armies of the nation. Had the reporter asked Honest Abe for his opinion of what his friends and neighbors had said about him, he would have modestly agreed with their assessments, after telling a story or two, and confirmed that he had little desire to change or to give up his hard travels and seek an easier life. He might, however, have admitted he had a "taste" for serving, at some time, in the United States Senate. This lawyer who has become a revered figure the world over deserves to be discussed from the standpoint of how he was viewed by his neighbors and himself before his rise to greatness, when he was above all a public speaker. Sometimes admirers and scholars, forgetting how Lincoln regarded himself, elevate him to the status ofliterary figure, assign to him a secondary role as a speaker, and ignore his 1 ABRAHAM LINCOLN, PUBLIC SPEAKER context, thus providinga one-sided view of his career. Historians and critics, concentrating on the First and Second InauguralAddresses, the Gettysburg Address, selected state papers, and letters, have gone so far asto declare the assassinated president "a master of words" and "the most gifted writer among American statesmen of all times." The historian T. Harry Williams thought that among speakers of his time Lincoln was "a second-rate figure," but that as a writer, he "stands in the front rank of those few masters of language who have stirred men's emotions and moved them to action with the magic of words." Likewise, in a sweepingpronouncement, Herbert Joseph Edwardsand John Erskine Hankins asserted that "Lincoln could never deliver an extemporaneous speech that was not less than mediocre." Not stopping there, they added: "Decidedly Lincoln wasnot an orator. Hewas something else—a literary artist—and he could work only with the tool of the literary artist, his pen." They imply that they missed in Lincoln the eloquence that they found in the speeches of Daniel Webster, Stephen A. Douglas, Charles Sumner, and Edward Everett.l Such fascination with Lincoln as a stylist has come from "the misleading perspective of hindsight" and perhaps also from a slightly myth-encrusted perception. Granted, the claims about Lincoln's literary excellence have great merit; they have also served to obscure and to shift attention away from the historical Lincoln, the real man who was first a strugglingcitizen of Springfield, then a busy country lawyer, a shrewd and ambitious politician, a rugged campaigner for the young Republican party, and finally a successful wartimeleader of the Union. This adoration of the writingsof the sixteenth president as literature has served to minimize or obscure the fact that Lincoln first won attention on the platform, where he was principally concerned with persuading the common citizen. He was far too busy on the stump and in the courtroom to indulge in oratory fororatory'ssakeand had no desire to coin notable phrases to impress a reading public. He was a purposeful campaigner who argued that "this government cannot endure, permanently half-slave and half-free."2 1. Paul M. Angle, "Lincoln's Power with Words," Abraham Lincoln Association Papers (Springfield, 111.,1935), 87; Richard N. Current, The Lincoln Nobody Knows (Westport, Conn., 1958), 8;T. Harry Williams (ed.), Selected Writings and Speeches of Abraham Lincoln (Chicago, 1943), xviii-liii; Herbert Joseph Edwards...