Introduction

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time

—T. S. ELIOT, “LITTLE GIDDING,” V,

FOUR QUARTETS (1943)

To look again with open eyes at a subject we think we know is never straightforward. All the more so when the figure has reached the mythic status of Abraham Lincoln. What more can be said about our sixteenth president that we do not already know? So much has been written, and overwritten, and written over that it seems nearly impossible to find a new nugget of truth to offer. Lincoln is an American icon, whose shadow hangs over every president as the quintessential paradigm of high-caliber leadership in a moment of great moral crisis. President Theodore Roosevelt kept a picture of him over the mantelpiece in his office, and when he was confronted by some matter of conflicting rights, he confided “that I would look up at that splendid face and try and imagine him in my place and try to figure out what he would do in the circumstances.”¹ Yet, in truth, we know less of what Lincoln actually was and stood for than what we hope he embodied. He is one of the most malleable figures in American history. Depending on how you read him, he was either maddeningly simplistic or elusively complex. His fame follows from his dogged ability to be the determined and patient tortoise to the harebrained Fire-Eaters surrounding him and from the handful of eloquently written expressions of the agony at hand. Rarely were the latter appreciated in their day nor did they have much contemporary sway, but they—along with his martyr’s death—have propelled him into a special category of American heroes.

Six Encounters with Lincoln is an invitation to rethink our presumptions about Abraham Lincoln. It is an unorthodox and provocative look at the Lincoln presidency, although it did not start out that way. The book began as a simple collection of intriguing stories about a man who himself prized storytelling. The anecdotes were good ones—mostly unknown and all unexplored, involving characters as diverse as Robert E. Lee, Chief Little Crow, Susan B. Anthony, and an old Confederate with a menacing stick in his hand named Duff Green. The backstories were even better, astonishingly so in fact, revealing Lincoln in a way that put the color-enhanced tinsel of his acclaim in a new, more garish light. Each tale describes a meeting between the sixteenth president and his constituents—plebeian or prominent—revealing his opinions and character in surprising ways. Simply to have found new Lincoln material, especially anecdotes that help us peer into dusty corners, is something to celebrate. On the most basic level, these incidents are cracking good stories, showing Lincoln in all his quirky greatness. But each tale also provides a springboard for delving into significant aspects of Lincoln’s administration that have been neglected or previously unknown. Every one of these stories causes us to ponder our preconceptions about Lincoln. The episodes are also connected by a number of common threads, so that in the end the yarn I wanted to spin has re-formed itself into a web.

First and foremost, the stories illustrate the difficulty of managing a republic and creating a presidency. In all of these situations we watch Lincoln struggle to define his administration’s priorities, while resisting the attempts of others to wrest the initiative from him. The democratic “demons” evoked in the subtitle are not just the political devils Lincoln battled in his ambitious exercise of power—though that could be said to have fully demonized America. They arise from the contradictions inherent in self-government, forming the darker side of our bright republican currency. Among the phantoms that plagued Lincoln’s administration were greed; impatience; the ignorance of the public; the need to manage a large army while subordinating it to the popular will; the structural dysfunction of the American government, guaranteed by Founding Fathers who were suspicious of any authority that might be too efficient; and constant demands from competing sectors of the population—sectors with little in common save their appetite for dominance. Every chief magistrate struggles with this reality, but Lincoln confronted it in the rawest possible context: a nation at war with itself.

Throughout his presidency Lincoln struggled with the very nature of democracy, not only its definitions and traditions but its momentum and fluidity, that irksome capacity to change swiftly like a flash flood in the mountains. He wrestled with the very people who made up so vibrant a community, grappling with their clamorous diversity, their impatience, their outspoken opinions, and above all their demands. Every leader of a republic faces a similar challenge. As President Bill Clinton so aptly put it, “[Y]ou come in with your agenda and vision, and the fact is, whether you want it or not, ultimately a lot of the legacy for Presidents is how they handle the hand they were dealt.”² We see this in high relief with Lincoln, who both responded to and helped shape a new way of looking at democratic inclusion, not necessarily because he wanted to but because he had to.

The devil in democracy is that it cannot help being itself. It provides a fierce and constant debate; a cacophony of opinions; a minefield of stubborn wills and terrible egos. Within the great truth—the supremacy of the people—there are a myriad of small truths all vying for respect and often at odds with one another. In Lincoln’s day the greatest of these was contradiction between the ideal of democracy and the prevailing views on the treatment of Indians and slavery. As the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect, voices rang out in dissent, describing a paralyzed legislative body swayed by the “infernal machinations” of Mr. Lincoln. “Congress keeps in awe the reckless and unscrupulous Administration, as, according to the pious belief of medieval times, holy water awed the devil.”³

The 1860s was an era of highly individualistic democracy, when all citizens believed they could petition the nation’s leader for rights, privileges, or direct support. At times it seemed the whole, unwieldy nation was at the President’s doorstep, selling an opinion or begging a favor. Those watching today will remember another slim lawyer from Illinois, who worked to keep true to himself and his policies in the midst of national malaise, and appreciate just how overwhelmingly personal is the job of the president and how difficult it is to address the relentless democratic demands. In the episodes presented here, we see how Lincoln must design his presidency in a hundred daily ways and as he tries to satisfy players as diverse as Julia Ward Howe and John Ross, chief of the Cherokee Nation.

The stories also remind us that Lincoln’s republic was a government of, by, and for only some of the people. It was not just the black population that was excluded, but Native Americans, women, whole categories of immigrants, and even many white males. It may have been, as Lincoln pronounced it, the “last best hope on earth”—but “hope” is the operable word here: hope of inclusion and pluralism; hope for equal rights and opportunities. It was not an ideal reached during Lincoln’s lifetime. He surely started—in important ways—the momentum toward a broader democracy, but his vision proved myopic in many instances. Democracy after all is a slippery concept. Lincoln was certainly enthusiastic about the liberty he had embraced—the liberty to reinvent himself; the liberty to move and sway with perceived opportunities; the liberty to try to grow; and even the liberty to fail and try again. That democracy and the idea of true equality were different concepts. While Indians, women, and Negroes might be equals in social niceties or as Lincoln said “in the right to eat the bread . . . which his own hand earns,” they remained unequal in political rights, social mobility, and opportunity. Lincoln moves to eliminate slavery only when it is a medium to end the war; no matter how eloquently he proclaims it to be a universal wrong. For all his promotion of a society where all men might rise, he raises no platform for better education or universal suffrage.⁴

Interestingly, these encounters also give us a sense of the difficulty Lincoln sometimes had in communicating. The eloquence of his formal writing and his delightful, whimsical humor have, to some degree, obscured the inelegance of his everyday interactions. He disliked spontaneous discussion with people who might misinterpret him. He seemed to be most comfortable when he could project his thoughts through parables or from a written script. In Six Encounters with Lincoln we observe him standing gracelessly mute at his first review of the Army; swearing precipitously at a young soldier on the White House portico; alternately pontificating or talking pidgin English to Indian chiefs; simply avoiding most interaction with women; and in a state of chronic miscommunication with Southerners. The episodes remind us of the human psyche’s contrariness; of how even the most sensitive intellect can be clumsy or obstinate or intolerant.

Lincoln is not always shown at his best in these six episodes. As the eyewitnesses make clear, in his day “Honest Abe” was not looked upon as the savior of the nation. Instead he was largely viewed as a well-meaning bumbler, a curious and earnest man, but not the leader needed in a national crisis. In each chapter of this book we have multiple protagonists who question Lincoln’s wisdom. Even many of his closest allies believed the war was won despite, rather than because of, his efforts. Today we may be tempted to dismiss this as the poor ability of lesser mortals to appreciate the greatness before them. But the blindness is perhaps ours, not theirs. Speaking of the Irish revolutionary martyr Roger Casement, Mario Vargas Llosa noted that his multifaceted personality will never be totally acknowledged: “There will always be a reluctance to accept this complexity which is the complexity of human nature. We are not perfect, and that is not tolerable in our heroes.”⁵

Americans have had the same trouble. We are willing to tolerate little personal quirks: George Washington’s false teeth, for example, or Thomas Jefferson’s philandering. We can accept the lovable foibles in Lincoln: his unruly shock of hair or strange gargoyle of a face; his unrealized ambitions in local politics; his problematic marriage; and his smutty, smirking jokes. But questioning his aspiration to lead a country in turmoil, without the barest qualifications; suggesting that he blundered through military labyrinths with all the agility of an angered buffalo, while thousands of people died; accepting that his fundamental racism accompanied his clear distaste for slavery; and acknowledging that as the consummate politician he often cheerfully compromised his principles for favor or party or expediency—these have been taboo subjects for more than a century. They are issues that need to be revisited and rethought if we are going to understand our past with a modicum of honesty.

We cannot do this if our only point of reference is a face staring up in a thousand handfuls of pocket change or down from the magisterial Lincoln Memorial. Over the years, Lincoln’s image has been polished and embellished to add luster to a political party and a set of ethical precepts that he himself did not espouse. It is a kind of mirage shimmering in the water in the road before us, promising more than is actually there. What appeared to his fellow citizens at the time was considerably more concrete, and I have at every instance tried to rely on their words, written in real time. I am less interested in the historical shadows cast by well-meaning memorialists and more interested in actions and outcomes, which are all that we can with veracity assess. For this we must rely on the Johnny-on-the-spot reporters, chroniclers of the moment, diarists, and letter writers.

This testimony is far from complete. Lincoln is largely absent as a voice, because his own writings are sparse, uneven, and largely dull. Even with nine volumes of closely spaced transcripts, the cache is disappointing for those who want to feel the spirit of the man. Most of his writings are limited in subject matter (political scheming and business of the day), and exhibit jumbled thought patterns and syntax. God knows you do not read most of them for the prose. They are filled with countless small acts of accidental violence to the English language. They lack the tone, style, verse, and veracity of Lincoln at his best. Only later in his career did he learn to express himself in sharp, succinct prose, the fineness and brevity of which had the power to dazzle. Much of the earlier writing is so self-contradictory or measured against political advantage that it is difficult to know what he stood for outside of his enormous ambition for elected office. It is a paper-thin personality that emerges, the flimsiest of characters, without the satisfying girth of a well-formed man. It is too bad that Lincoln did not record more of his thoughts and observations, because it really would be interesting to know, for example, what he thought of the women’s movement burgeoning around him. Because on so many issues Lincoln does not share his thoughts, it is open season for those who wish to interpret him.

What we know—or think we do—about Lincoln, and what gives him fascination, all comes from other people. We see him secondhand, through the eyes of friends or enemies and secretaries, who presume to speak for him or of him from authority. Some of those wrote as he lived; some knew him well and respected and liked him. But far more wrote after his tragic assassination, when vice turned to virtue and his legacy seemed unique to all. His famous words were often placed in his mouth by others, for their own purposes. It is the chroniclers who supply the wry, entertaining, and astute oral pyrotechnics that we have come to associate with Lincoln. Some of what they tell us about the man is verifiable, but far more is sullied by the mystic chords of memory.

I have been intrigued by many points of view, but persuaded only by those of people who knew Lincoln and wrote in real time. The six narratives in this book are based on firsthand accounts—no tainted memoirs or heroic post-assassination recollections. I discovered these sources while doing research on topics other than Lincoln—on Clara Barton’s relation with the women’s rights activist Frances Dana Gage, for example, or why the Cherokee fought for the Confederacy. The fact that the documents were in unexpected places and far-flung locations is perhaps why they have escaped the notice of generations of Civil War scholars. In several of the stories, the new information is so striking that it might be worthy of its own monograph. One could explore all of the themes here at length: our loss of Lincoln through mythology; the way he tackled the conundrum of American democracy; and the troubling way that his endearing quirkiness has obscured questions about whether his governance was effective. However, the goal of this particular work is to present the six chapters as an interlinked series of episodes.

The strength of the eyewitnesses is that they knew and worked with Lincoln, and wrote as they were living through the nightmare of civil war. Listening to their voices helps us avoid projecting our perfect knowledge of what did happen—both triumph and tragedy—on our assessment of the war’s outcome. They force us to ask what are apparently unmentionable questions: whether the war could have been ended sooner or less bloodily or with better consequences under a different president. “Whatever sacrifices his vacillations may have cost the people, those vacillations will now be forgiven,” noted one astute observer on the night Lincoln died. Predicting the onslaught of praise-laden works that would appear for the next century and a half, he added: “The murderer’s bullet opens to him immortality.”⁶

It did not take long for the petrification of immortality to set in. By the 1880s Lincoln’s halo was so brightly polished that the orator Robert G. Ingersoll could lament that “[h]undreds of people are now engaged in smoothing out the lines in Lincoln’s face—forcing all features to the common mold—so that he may be known, not as he really was, but according to their poor standard, as he should have been.” As the literary scholar Stephen Greenblatt has noted, we want to cling to vivid symbols, the memorable images that have captured our collective imagination. This is why it is so difficult to even suggest that Abraham Lincoln might have been something less than the mythologers have told us. But to fetishize Lincoln is only to demean him by pretending that he was something that he was not. It should be enough to praise his personal achievement in rising from a humble backwoods beginning to make a mark in the world and to celebrate his quest for greater knowledge and higher understanding. The pride of being something more than you were expected to be is part and parcel of the American dream. What he had already achieved by 1858 was notable enough.⁷

The historian Douglas L. Wilson has written about Lincoln’s pathway between two worlds as a young man.⁸ He undoubtedly took this journey, consciously and unconsciously—blazing not only a trail for himself, but for generations of aspiring Americans. But one of the troubling aspects of Lincoln is that throughout his career he is less a man of principle than of political expediency. Early on he shuns his idol Henry Clay for the presidency when it appears that his party may falter with Clay’s candidacy. In 1836 he denounces the disenfranchisement of tax paying (or mocks it as a possibility). In any case, he never makes a move to alleviate this democratic paradox. By comparison, in his years as president, he had to open up new roads, shaking off long-held prejudices as he created innovative ways of progressing. I see him throughout his presidency, probing the darkness—extending his long fingers into the unknown—for his situation was perilous and his role unprecedented. Reaching into the void he would have had nothing to turn to, neither his lawyerlike instinct for precedent nor the smooth bonhomie of his familiar political machine. At times he did have limited support from long-standing friends, but suspicion often filled the air. His presidency was forged not only by quiet thought and weighty consultation, but also by the constant pressure to respond to the demands of the day. We watch him react or at times overreact to those who sought him out, men—struck by his awkwardness and shrewdness—who made up the chain of experience that ultimately gave him insight.

Lincoln’s trajectory from farm boy to president has been likened to the parable of the mustard seed (Mark 4:26–32), in which large things grew from small beginnings. Well-meaning scholars have tried to rationalize his self-contradictory statements into a kind of Lincolnian unified field theory, by saying he “grew” over time or was “big enough to change” as he thoughtfully honed his policies. Yet growing on the job is just another way of saying that he was always playing catch-up—he was behind, not before the curve. Learning on the job is always laudable and might have been fine if the times had been less perilous. It would have been acceptable in a Martin Van Buren or William Henry Harrison presidency and perhaps that is what Lincoln envisioned—a job of patronage, posturing, and party politics. But with a close reading of the political trends of the time, it simply looks like he was expedient, finding the most popular path and following it. This does not make him a moral compass for the nation, especially at a time of war when the consequences were greater and every stumbling step could and did lead to a corpse. In war, the price for “growing” was death.

We err in assuming the war had to take the course it did and that Lincoln’s heroism lay in the tenacity to see the nation through the labyrinth of terror. Lincoln himself takes this line in his Second Inaugural Address, writing as if the war, the loss, the devastating calamity had nothing to do with him—“and the war came”—it all took place in the passive tense.⁹ But we cannot say for certain how someone else might have galvanized, rather than divided, the nation, or quickened the end of the war. There is no apparent alternative, although that is not particularly important given the unlikely examples of great war-leaders such as Winston Churchill or Harry S. Truman. Who might have had a better touch cannot be retrospectively predicted. What we do know is that at many junctures the war might have been managed differently. Many serious options for change in policy, personnel, and partisan appeal were presented to Lincoln—options he chose not to take. By his own admission, he lurched and stumbled through much of the crisis, learning on the job. What we do know for certain are the catastrophic consequences of the outcome. But what we like about him is that he tried so very hard to do his best. What we must question is whether in doing his best, he did the best for the country.

Abraham Lincoln’s lasting legacy is the ability to inspire us to be better selves and to do better for our country. We should not underestimate the power of this but nor should we confuse this inspiration with a call to imitate his style of governing. There is much that Lincoln deserves credit for. First and foremost is cementing the concept of majority rule—the disappointed and disgruntled should not simply take their ball and go home, but stay and tough it out, make their case, fight and persuade their way back to power. The emancipation question is more problematic, but certainly he deserves praise for political courage. He hewed a line that made the difficult possible and won at least noisy acquiescence from opponents. It was not a purely humanitarian gesture, however, as Lincoln’s response to Horace Greeley’s open letter, published in the New York Tribune on August 20, 1862, makes clear. As a speechwriter Lincoln’s hand became ever surer, but his words—which have so much resonance today—fell flat when they were uttered. The initial response to the Gettysburg Address was decidedly muted. Lincoln was not a crusader. His saving grace is that he upheld a system that allowed for change even when he was not its champion.

When you look through a peephole into the past, you hope for a clear view, but more often than not what you get is a kaleidoscope vision. Little pieces, multifaceted and multicolored, that fit together to make a knowable pattern—not completely knowable because we are looking from afar—yet recognizable and describable. It is not a seamless, unified, or perfectly delineated vision. Looking through the peephole, we have to strain to see clearly and to gain as wide a view as possible. The six episodes presented here offer a changing pattern of images. Some shapes and colors appear in every frame, yet each one is different. The challenge is to adjust our view—to rethink—so as to make sense of them all. As we swivel our kaleidoscope, the Lincoln whom we find at the end may not be the Lincoln whom we wanted to find at the beginning. When we are aware of greatness we want to hear about it over and over again, but greatness does not mean perfection. It is the quirky note in the symphony, the brilliantly odd step in the ballet, the misplaced word in the awe-inspiring sentence that keeps our heroes human, interesting, and bright. Abraham Lincoln is like this, in that his very fallibility punctuates his moments of greatness.

In 1876 Frederick Douglass, speaking at a ceremony to dedicate the Freedmen’s Monument in Washington, D.C., declared that there was nothing new to say about Abraham Lincoln. “His personal traits and public acts are better known to the American people than those of any other man of his age.”¹⁰ Yet thousands of books later, we still have important insights to relate. And America’s yearning to know its sixteenth president seems not to have abated.