Reading With Lincoln

Preface

ix Preface As I am constituted I don’t love to read generally, and as I do not love to read I feel no interest in what is thus read. I don’t, & can’t, remember such reading. When I have a particular case in hand I have that motive, and feel an interest in the case—feel an interest in ferreting out the questions to the bottom—love to dig up the question by the roots and hold it up and dry it before the fires of the mind. —Abraham Lincoln, quoted by William H. Herndon, in “Analysis of the Character of Abraham Lincoln” To a professor of the liberal arts, as I have been for several decades, Abraham Lincoln’s splendid self-education presents an occasion for humility. What I have long tried to accomplish with my students—better reading, better thinking, and better writing—he managed by himself, without formal schooling, and became one of the supreme communicators and leaders in United States history. My label for the public Lincoln is “political artist.” That is, he used his reading to help him speak and write with greater authority; and this verbal authority allowed him to reach the American people and to lead them through the national crisis of the Civil War. This study intends, by considering closely those books that Lincoln is known to have “assimilated to his being” (in William H. Herndon’s phrase), to explore what their contents and styles contributed to Lincoln’s “liberal arts education” and thereby to his political artistry. From boyhood on, Lincoln’s habit of reading concentrated a naturally powerful mind; and reading provided models of voice and diction to one who had inborn talent as a storyteller and a near-flawless memory and therefore needed only the stimulus of literary greatness, and emulative practice, to emerge as a great writer himself. When a youth, Lincoln read avidly whatever print came his way. But, as his words in the epigraph indicate, as an adult %UD\)URQWPDWWHULQGG $0 x preface Lincoln always read deeply rather than broadly; for a purpose rather than as a cultural habit. “General reading,” he admits, “broadens the mind” and makes it “universal.” But only specifically motivated reading “makes a precise deep clear mind”—a mind that may come to understand itself and the world outside. From the Bible and Shakespeare to the rude dialect humor of mid-nineteenth-century literary comedians: whenever Lincoln was moved by literature or needed its language for work, he committed his reading to memory and kept it ready for his own use, public or personal. Reading with Lincoln owes its origin to a sabbatical leave granted by my institution, Illinois Wesleyan University, during which I completed the annotated bibliography “What Abraham Lincoln Read” (published in the Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association, 2007) and began the book; for its completion, I am indebted to the encouragement of friends in the community of Lincoln scholars, especially Michael Burlingame and Douglas L. Wilson, both of whom kindly read drafts of chapters and urged me to persevere with a subject they thought important to Lincoln studies. I thank as well Robert S. Eckley, Guy Fraker, and Jerry Stone, each of whom read and helped me improve subchapters on Lincoln’s study of the law and political economy. Finally, Sylvia Frank Rodrigue, executive editor of Southern Illinois University Press, has assisted me greatly in revising and polishing the manuscript into its final form. %UD\)URQWPDWWHULQGG $0 ...