Lincoln on Lincoln

Introduction

INTRODUCTION This book came about in trying to understand what Lincoln was really like. He leads in every twentieth-century poll of presidential greatness. He is perennially subjected to biographies for all ages. Yet his personality remains one of the nation's unsolved mysteries. He himself composed two biographical sketches to be used for the 1860 presidential campaign, so with these as matrix I have interwoven extracts from correspondence, speeches, interviews, and reliable reports to provide a tapestry of his life in his own words. He was not the kind of person to bare his soul in public or in private. "Even, between ourselves;' lamented Mary Todd Lincoln, "when our deep and touching sorrows, were one and the same, his expressions were few."l Yet to sensitive readers even those few expressions could open a view on the inner struggle to reconcile personal ambition and civic virtue, conscience and Constitution, ultimately the will of God and the will of the people. I take this struggle to be the source of moral force that cemented a nation divided and that sustains some of us even now. The story unfolding in his own words is in no way a conventional confessional autobiography. Absent is such a celebrated episode as Lincoln's star-crossed love for Ann Rutledge-simply because he himself never mentioned it. But concise linking notes may serve to add such details when needed for context or clarification. This is especially 1 LINCOLN ON LINCOLN so respecting the means he used to make something out of nothing and the influence of mentors as he made his way in the world. Sometimes silent on such vital matters, he nevertheless reveals means and ends between the lines as the linking notes are designed to do between excerpts. In the context of his contemporary world, Lincoln could be seen as the New Man for a New Age, a poster boy for what we now know as the industrial middle class rising from the steaming expansion of the 1840s and 1850s. Half his life was spent in Springfield, Illinois, a way station for transients moving westward and capital of the state when iron and oil discoveries energized a transport system that enabled him to rise as one of the region's leading railroad lawyers. At the same time, an expanding information technology offered new media for reaching an unprecedented reading class. This was a generation of newspaper readers. Their newspapers, much larger than our own in size if not weight, carried little news but much information for an upwardly mobile nation. Readers eagerly sought instant culture, supplied by the press in reprints of plays, entire novels, Congressional debates, along with techniques for transforming farmers to factory foremen and more. The way to wealth was paved in newsprint: almost four hundred dailies, three thousand weeklies, and, by 1860, services of the Associated Press exploiting a spreading telegraph system. By 1860 literacy rate among soldiers on both sides hovered around 80 percent. This communication revolution helps to explain Lincoln's reliance on newspapers for education and, later, reformation of a nation. Newspapers supplied his early schooling when books were scarce. As postmaster he had access to national along with regional press. As campaigner 2 Introduction he compiled a notebook of clippings to show his views on slavery. As author, he published one book, and that consisted of press reports of the debates with Stephen A. Douglas . And as President he preferred the Associated Press transcription to his own script of the Gettysburg Address. Given his symbiotic relation with the press, I have given newspaper reports and interviews equal space with his correspondence. We know that he had the chance to review and revise his speeches reported in the Congressional Globe, prototype of the Congressional Record, and that he would distribute drafts of other documents for friends to review and revise. Such drafts have added value in allowing us to see Lincoln's mind in motion as, for instance , he reworks suggestions for the first inaugural address , or works through the second inaugural address seemingly on his own. Measuring the authenticity of his words as recollected by others has been made much easier thanks to the eponymous book by Don and Virginia Fehrenbacher noted below. I have used quotation marks to distinguish recollections of others; otherwise, this is Lincoln's own story told in his own way in his own words. Extracting excerpts, of course...