When Lincoln Met Emerson

In the history of the United States, the convergence of statecraft with the world of letters remains particularly notable in the case of Abraham Lincoln. In the world of letters, this distinction has to do with the fact that Lincoln’s written English—with its distinct blending of the elegantly lyrical and the pungently vernacular; the rhetoric of the courtroom and the rhetoric of the pulpit; the slap of short, simple sentences and the extended caresses of syntactically parallel units, so often parceled into groups of three—is simply more sonorous, memorable, and meaningful than the written English of not only his presidential successors or their professional speech writers but most people who write in English. But my aim here is not to pile on praises and appraisals of Lincoln’s literary artfulness. Many commentators have already done important work in this area, among them Douglas L. Wilson, whose 2006 book, Lincoln’s Sword: The Presidency and the Power of Words won the Lincoln Prize.¹ Instead, my aim is to meditate on the convergence of statecraft with the world of letters, and especially on one aspect of Lincoln’s awareness of that world, from another angle, that of his meeting with Ralph Waldo Emerson in Washington, D.C., on Saturday, February 1, and Sunday, February 2, 1862. By looking closely at this particular meeting and its implications, we can deepen our understanding of Lincoln’s familiarity with, and assimilation of, features of Emerson’s thinking in public circulation at that moment.

Emerson had been invited to lecture at the Smithsonian Institution, where he delivered an address titled “American Civilization” on January 31, only a few hundred yards from the site of wartime hospitals standing between the Smithsonian and the Capitol. Focusing on slavery and the war, while calling for immediate emancipation, it spoke to the “existing administration” with “the utmost candor”: “The end of all political struggle is to establish morality as the basis of all legislation. . . . Morality is the object of government.” Emerson’s biographers disagree about whether Lincoln heard the Sage of Concord the night before they met.² Lincoln’s biographers make almost no mention of either the lecture or the meetings.³ Newspaper coverage of the lecture included nothing about the president’s going to hear it.⁴ Whether or not Lincoln attended the lecture, the best pictures we have of their meetings come from Emerson’s journal, which he started keeping the first month of the new year in a copybook, on the cover of which he wrote in ink “1862” above the word “WAR.”⁵

The pictures that emerge from Emerson’s journal give us richly textured glimpses of the president, whose weekend included mulling over the conviction and sentence of Nathaniel P. Gordon, hanged in New York three weeks later for slave-trading and the first person in the United States to be executed for this crime. It also included skipping church to read Charles Sumner’s speech on the Trent affair, the international aftermath of which continued in the form of communications with Lord Lyons, British minister in Washington, and messages on the same topic from France and Spain, all of which were mentioned or discussed with William Seward, Emerson’s guide for the day, in Emerson’s presence.⁶

The pictures from the journal contain precious candid shots of Lincoln as well: Seward telling Emerson that Lincoln had told him not to tell Emerson a “smutty” story, although the secretary of state apparently ignored the president’s instructions and delivered an anecdote involving the punch line, “I can’t say I have carnal knowledge of him,” an anecdote the reserved Emerson described as an “extraordinary exordium”; Lincoln overseeing the Sabbath barbering of his sons, which the father called “whiskeying their hair” as he watched Tad and Willie, noted by Emerson as “his two little sons,—boys of 7 & 8 years perhaps,” though in reality Tad was almost nine at the time and Willie, who would die eighteen days later, eleven; Lincoln listening to the Episcopalian Seward tell him about the Reverend Smith Pyne’s sermon, which the lapsed Unitarian Emerson...