In “Patriotic Gore,” Edmund Wilson wrote, “There are moments when one is tempted to feel that the crudest thing that has happened to Lincoln since he was shot by Booth has been to fall into the hands of Carl Sandburg.” The late Mr. Sandburg was a public performer of the first rank (“Ker-oh-seen!” he crooned in one of the first TV pitches for the jet-engine—ole banjo on his knee, white hair mussed by the jet-stream), a poet of the second rank (who can ever forget that feline-footed fog?) and a biographer of awesome badness. Unfortunately, the success of his four-volume Abraham Lincoln: The War Years was total. In the course of several million clumsily arranged words, Sandburg managed to reduce one of the most interesting and subtle men in world history to a cornball Disneyland waxwork rather like…yes, Carl Sandburg himself.
The real Lincoln is elsewhere. He is to be found, for those able to read old prose, in his own writings. According to Lincoln’s law partner William Herndon: “He was the most continuous and severest thinker in America. He read but little and that for an end. Politics was his Heaven and his Hades metaphysics.” Lincoln read and reread Shakespeare; he studied Blackstone’s legal commentaries. And that was about it. Biographies bored him; he read no novels. Yet, somehow (out of continuous and severe thinking?), he became a master of our most difficult language, and the odd music to his sentences is unlike that of anyone else—with the possible exception of Walt Whitman on a clear unweepy day.
The principal source for Lincoln’s pre-presidential life is Herndon. For eighteen years they were close friends as well as colleagues; they traveled the circuit together in Illinois; they shared an office in Springfield. After Lincoln was murdered, Herndon began to collect every bit of information that he could find about his fallen friend. Unlike most obscure associates of the great, Herndon was not interested in cutting Lincoln down to valet-size; or even to cash in. In fact, Herndon generously gave to any and every biographer not only his personal recollections of Lincoln but the notes that he had compiled during his long investigation of Lincoln’s somewhat murky antecedents. Since Lincoln was said to have been illegitimate, Herndon talked to those who had known his mother, Nancy Hanks, and her husband, Thomas Lincoln. Herndon was told by an eyewitness that Thomas (viewed in the old swimming hole) dramatically lacked a number of those parts that are necessary for propagation. After studying all the evidence, Herndon decided that Thomas must have started out fully equipped and so was able to father Abraham off Nancy Hanks who was, according to Lincoln himself, illegitimate: “the daughter of a Virginia grandee.” Romantics have often suggesed that John C. Calhoun was Nancy’s father. But if Lincoln knew who his real grandfather was, he never told Herndon.
The Sandburg-Mount Rushmore Lincoln is a solemn gloomy cuss, who speaks only in iambic pentameter, a tear forever at the corner of his eye—the result, no doubt, of being followed around by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, which keeps humming “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” behind him while the future ambassador Shirley Temple Black curls up in his lap. The official Lincoln is warm, gentle, shy, modest…everything a great man is supposed to be in Sandburg-land but never is in life. As Lincoln’s secretary John Hay put it: “No great man is ever modest. It was his intellectual arrogance and unconscious assumption of superiority that men like Chase and Sumner could never forgive.”
The actual Lincoln was cold and deliberate, reflective and brilliant. In private life, he had no intimates except Herndon—and their relationship ended when he became president. In family life, Lincoln was most forbearing of Mary Todd—a highly intelligent woman who went mad; and he spoiled his sons. That was the extent of the private Lincoln. The rest was public.
Honest Abe the rail-splitter was the creation of what must have been the earliest all-out PR campaign for a politician. Lincoln was born poor; but so were a great many successful lawyers in his part of the world. By the time he was elected president, he was a well-to-do lawyer, representing the railroad interests as well as the common man. From the beginning, Lincoln knew he was going to be, somehow, great. “His ambition,” wrote Herndon, “was a little engine that knew no rest.”
Herndon has his biases. He disliked Mary Todd and he tends to exaggerate her bad temper while pushing the story of Lincoln’s love for Anne Rutledge, a highly dubious business. Usually, when Herndon repeats secondhand stories, he says that they are just that. When he speaks with firsthand knowledge, he is to be trusted.
It will come as a terrible shock to many of those who have been twice-born in the capacious bosom of Jesus to learn that Lincoln not only rejected Christianity but wrote a small book called “Infidelity” (meaning lack of faith in God). Lincoln “read his manuscript to Samuel Hill, his employer (who) said to Lincoln: ‘Lincoln, let me see your manuscript.’ Lincoln handed it to him. Hill ran it in a tin-plate stove, and so the book went up in flames. Lincoln in that production attempted to show that the Bible was false: first on the grounds of reason, and, second, because it was self-contradictory; that Jesus was not the son of God any more than any man.” Later, in the presidency, pressure was brought on Lincoln to start putting God into his speeches. At the beginning, he did so in the vague sense of the Almighty or heaven. Later, there is a good deal of God in the speeches but no mention of Jesus. At heart, Lincoln was a fatalist, a materialist of the school of Democritus and Lucretius.
Devotees of the Mount Rushmore school of history like to think that the truly great man is a virgin until his wedding night; and a devoted monogamist thereafter. Apparently, Lincoln was indeed “true as steel” to Mary Todd even though, according to Herndon, “I have seen women make advances and I have seen Lincoln reject or refuse them. Lincoln had terrible strong passions for women, could scarcely keep his hands off them, and yet he had honor and a strong will, and these enabled him to put out the fires of his terrible passion.” But in his youth he was seriously burned by those fires. In the pre-penicillin era syphilis was epidemic—and, usually, incurable. According to Herndon: “About the year 1835–36 Mr. Lincoln went to Beardstown and during a devilish passion had connection with a girl and caught the disease. Lincoln told me this….” Later, after a long siege, Lincoln was cured, if he was cured, by a Dr. Daniel Drake of Cincinnati.
Herndon suspected that Lincoln might have given Mary Todd syphilis. If he had, that would have explained the premature deaths of the three Lincoln children: “Poor boys, they are dead now and gone! I should like to know one thing and that is: What caused the death of these children? I have an opinion which I shall never state to anyone.” So states to everyone Herndon. The autopsy on Mary Todd showed a physical deterioration of the brain consistent with paresis. If Lincoln had given his wife syphilis and if he had, inadvertently, caused the death of his children, the fits of melancholy are now understandable—and unbearably tragic.
The public Lincoln has been as mythologized as the private Lincoln. As a congressman, he had opposed the 1846 war with Mexico—a nasty business, started by us in order to seize new territories. In a speech that was to haunt him thirteen years later, he declared, “Any people anywhere being inclined and having the power have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better….Any portion of such people that can may revolutionize and make their own so much of the territory as they inhabit.” When the South chose to follow Congressman Lincoln’s advice, President Lincoln said they could not go. When confronted with his 1848 declaration, he remarked, rather lamely, “You would hardly think much of a man who is not wiser today than he was yesterday.”
Although a small part of the country in 1860 (and all of the Mount Rushmoreites since) took it for granted that the main issue of the Civil War was the abolition of slavery, the actual issue was the preservation of the Union. Lincoln took the position that the South could not leave the Union. When the southern states said that they had every right to go, Lincoln shifted the argument to a positively mystical level: the Union was an absolute, to be preserved at all costs. As for slavery: “If slavery is not wrong, then nothing is wrong,” he said. But: “If I can save the Union without freeing any slaves, I will do that. If I can save the Union by freeing some and leaving others alone, I will do that.”
As it was, in the third year of his administration, he freed all the slaves in the states that had rebelled but he maintained slavery in the border states that had remained loyal to the Union. This did not go down very well in the world. But Lincoln knew what he was doing: First, the Union; then abolition.
Early in Lincoln’s administration he acquired land in Central America for the newly freed blacks. “Why,” he said to a black delegation, “should the people of your race be colonized, and where? Why should they leave this country? This is, perhaps, the first question for proper consideration. You and we are different races. We have between us a broader difference than exists between almost any other two races. Whether it is right or wrong I need not discuss; but this physical difference is a great disadvantage to us both, as I think. Your race suffers very greatly, many of them, by living among us, while ours suffers from your presence. In a word, we suffer on each side. If this is admitted, it affords a reason, at least, why we should be separated.” Although Lincoln was at his dialectical best, the blacks did not want to leave a country which, as slaves, they had helped to build. Lincoln had no further solution to the problem.
The real Lincoln was a superb politician. He knew when to wait; when to act. He had the gift of formulating, most memorably, ideas whose time had, precisely, on the hour, as it were, come. He could also balance opposites with exquisite justice. As the war was ending, he said, “Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with, or even before, the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes his aid against the other. It may seem strange that any man should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces; but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered—that of neither has been answered fully….”
As for himself: “I feel a presentiment that I shall not outlast the rebellion. When it is over, my work is done.” The work was done; and so was he. But for a century Lincoln’s invention, the American nation-state, flourished. Now, as things begin to fall apart, Lincoln’s avatar will have his work cut out for him, repairing that memorial we have so fecklessly damaged, the Union—or finding something better to put in its place.
The Los Angeles Times
FEBRUARY 8, 1981