The passing of Eddy, his mother, his sister, and Ann Rutledge each in their own way exposed Abraham Lincoln to death’s messy realities. Eddy’s slow, agonizing deterioration was different from Sarah’s relatively sudden, brutally sharp end in a childbirth gone badly awry or Nancy’s and Ann’s racking mortal illnesses. But all shared a common element of raw immediacy. Lincoln knew death as something that could not be entirely muted by layers of ceremony or sentiment.
But death could be separated from the fleshy messiness that is the actual end of a living being. What Lincoln experienced as a son, brother, lover, and father could be described as matters of his heart. But there were also matters of the head—of his mind and intellect. He learned of death in what he read in literature and poetry, in what he saw in the courtroom as a professional lawyer, and he learned how death was relevant (or not relevant) to his political career. These constituted the ideas of death that he encountered before the war.
Whatever ideas most Americans carried in their heads regarding death during Lincoln’s time came from the Bible, and Lincoln of course read the Bible. He could and did quote it, at length and from memory. He was “often and much moved by the stories” in the Bible, Dennis Hanks recalled. But the precise nature of Abraham Lincoln’s religious beliefs, especially prior to the Civil War, has always been a mystery. Not even his own stepmother was entirely sure what he believed. “Abe had no particular religion,” she claimed when she was interviewed after the war; he “didn’t think of that question at that time, if he ever did. He never talked about it.”1
When her husband passed away from a kidney disease in 1851, Abraham was not present. His relationship with his father was strained, dating back to their Indiana days: Thomas thought his son rude and impertinent, while Abraham was embarrassed by his father’s lack of education and wanted nothing to do with Thomas’s farming life. He rarely saw his father after he left home in 1831, although they lived in relatively close proximity, with Thomas steadily sinking into semi-impoverished elder years on a series of farms in Coles County, Illinois, about ninety miles east of Springfield.2
Abraham was not completely indifferent to Thomas’s fate. When Thomas fell ill in 1849, Lincoln visited his father. Two years later, however, he did not come when Thomas fell ill again, for the final time. There were practical reasons—Mary was also sick at the time, and the Lincolns had a new baby boy, Willie—but the long-standing strains in the relationship between Abraham and Thomas were at least partly an issue. Writing to his stepbrother, John Johnston, he expressed his opinion that a final meeting with his father would be a bad idea. “Say to him that if we could meet now, it is doubtful whether it would not be more painful than pleasant.” He followed this with the exhortation to “tell him to remember to call upon, and confide in, our great, and good, and merciful Maker; who will not turn away from him in any extremity,” for God “notes the fall of a sparrow, and numbers the hairs of our heads; and He will not forget the dying man, who puts his trust in Him.”
But Lincoln did not have much to say about what his father’s trust in the Lord might mean in terms of death’s consequences or an afterlife. This was entirely in character, for he rarely spoke of a “soul” in any meaningful sense, nor was he given to speculation about the afterlife. At the end of his letter to Johnston, he wrote of Thomas, “If it be his lot to go now, he will soon have a joyous [meeting] with many loved ones gone before.”3 It was a very rare reference to the afterlife; so rare, in fact, that one is tempted to think Lincoln was here merely reciting a well-worn Christian trope that held no deep meaning for him. Yet what held deep meaning for Abraham Lincoln and what did not is difficult to gauge in this man who was so “shut pan,” and whose spiritual beliefs were opaque even to his family and friends. Perhaps it would be best to simply observe that, judging from this one letter to his stepbrother, written while his father lay dying, Lincoln could draw on his biblical knowledge to comfort the dying—and he did not choose to do so very often.
When he pondered the deeper spiritual matters of death and dying, he tended more frequently to express himself in his preferences for literature and poetry. Five days after Eddy’s funeral, a poem appeared in the Illinois Daily Journal titled “Little Eddie.”4 It was a fairly straightforward poetic lament, of a type common to such verse of the day. It dwelt upon the theme of loss—“The angel death was hovering nigh, / And the lovely boy was called to die”—and the merciful end to a sick child’s suffering. It explained Eddy’s death in the vague terms of an often inscrutable but ultimately just and compassionate God:
Pure little bud in kindness given,
In mercy taken to bloom in heaven.
Happier far is the angel child
With the harp and the crown of gold,
Who warbles now at the Saviour’s feet
The glories to us untold.5
For years historians wondered who wrote “Little Eddie,” speculating that the author must have been Abraham or Mary, or possibly both. It was neither. Historian Samuel P. Wheeler recently discovered that “Little Eddie” was written by a young woman from Saint Louis named Mary E. Chamberlain, who had no known connection to the Lincolns and who wrote the poem in 1849 under the pseudonym “Ethel Grey.” Someone in Springfield had read Chamberlain’s poem, which was originally titled simply “Eddie,” was perhaps struck by the connection to the Lincolns’ recent loss, and had it placed in the Journal. Possibly Abraham or Mary themselves did so, or editor Francis, or some family member or friend.6
But Lincoln did compose a poem in Eddy’s memory, a threnody—from the Greek word thrēnōidia, meaning a “wailing ode.” He showed it to his law partner William Herndon, but it has since been lost.7 More generally, Lincoln liked poets who wrote of life’s inscrutable and ultimately unknowable meaning. This was true of Lincoln’s favorite poem, “Mortality,” by William Knox, of which he was so enamored that he committed it to memory. Knox was a dour Scotsman who wrote “Mortality” sometime in the 1820s; it was an extended meditation on the fleeting quality of life and the ultimate pointlessness of posturing by even the richest, most beautiful and accomplished people—all will someday be worms’ meat. As Knox put it:
The leaves of the oak and the willow shall fade,
Be scattered around, and together be laid;
And the young and the old, and the low and the high,
Shall moulder to dust, and together shall lie.
Knox’s poem was thickly layered in imagery of death and the grave:
’Tis the wink of an eye—’tis the draught of a breath—
From the blossom of health to the paleness of death,
From the gilded saloon to the bier and the shroud:—
Oh! why should the spirit of mortal be proud?8
When Lincoln took his own turn at poetry, he found his way to similar themes. Traveling in Indiana on a political tour stumping for Whig candidates in 1844, he visited Little Pigeon Creek and his mother’s grave. The experience moved him deeply, and he composed a poem. “My Childhood-Home I See Again” was suffused with a longing for home, the transient nature of memory, and death’s gloom:
Till every sound appears a knell,
And every spot a grave.
I range the fields with pensive tread,
And pace the hollow rooms;
And feel (companions of the dead)
I’m living in the tombs.9
Like so many other nineteenth-century Americans, Lincoln linked emotion, sentiment, and death. He thought about the deeper spiritual meaning of death, its mysteries, and perhaps most poignantly—given the deaths he had witnessed visited upon innocents like his son and mother by illness or upon his sister (and stillborn nephew) by childbirth—death’s unfathomable and almost random cruelty:
O death! Thou awe-inspiring prince,
That keepst the world in fear;
Why dost thou tear more blest ones hence . . . ?10
By this point in his life, as a middle-aged adult, he had seen his share of suffering and dying within his own family, and he had arrived at a certain resignation and acceptance of death as an inevitable circumstance of living. “The death scenes of those we love, are surely painful enough,” he wrote to his close friend Joshua Speed, “but these we are prepared to, and expect to see. They happen to all, and all know they must happen. Painful as they are, they are not unlooked-for-sorrow.”11
Unlike so many others of his day, Lincoln was not given to explaining death as some benign and understandable part of God’s grand design, nor was he inclined to speculate on God’s purposes in allowing the good to die as well as the wicked. Death was to him fundamentally a mystery, and Lincoln did not venture much beyond a simple acknowledgment that dying was part of an unknowable, divine journey. God “shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will” was a favorite Shakespearean passage, taken from Hamlet, act 5, scene 2—the death-drenched closing scene, in which Horatio, taking stock of the corpses of Hamlet and the rest of the royal family lying strewn around him, cries out against death’s caprice:
And let me speak to the yet unknowing world,
How these things came about: So shall you hear
Of carnal, bloody and unnatural acts;
Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters;
Of deaths put on by cunning and forc’d cause.12
Lincoln enjoyed Shakespeare, and Macbeth was a favorite. He praised Claudius’s speech in act 3, scene 3, a scene in which Claudius writhes painfully as he contemplates the awful consequences of his brother’s murder:
O, my offence is rank it smells to heaven;
It hath the primal eldest curse upon’t,
A brother’s murder. Pray can I not,
Though inclination be as sharp as will;
My stronger guilt defeats my strong intent.13
Lincoln’s tastes ran to the darker corners of Shakespeare, plays suffused with murder, intrigue, and the consequences of greed, ambition, and the pursuit of revenge. There is a brooding sort of justice here, as death is deservedly visited upon Shakespeare’s fascinating but flawed characters, often in tragic ways. But there is little comfort or consolation: death is the means by which Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear, and others pay for their avarice and their indiscretions. Claudius prays for forgiveness but doubts it will do much good:
What if this cursed hand
Were thicker than itself with brother’s blood,
Is there not rain enough in the sweet heavens
To wash it white as snow? Whereto serves mercy
But to confront the visage of offence?
And what’s in prayer but this two-fold force,
To be forestalled ere we come to fall,
Or pardon’d being down? Then I’ll look up;
My fault is past.14
Lincoln’s predilections suggest bleak dimensions to his intellectual understanding of death. Beyond the cold comfort of retributive justice in Shakespeare—Macbeth’s murder of Duncan, for example, and the subsequent violence and murders that follow, which are in the end avenged by his own battlefield demise—death does not mean a peaceful resolution, still less going “to a better place.” The reaper’s scythe sweeps away innocence, wickedness, and pride alike.
While it is true, as historian Mark Schantz argues, that most antebellum Americans found death easier to bear because they constantly spoke of a “heavenly eternity of transcendent beauty [that] awaited them beyond the grave,” Lincoln was an exception in this regard. He did not articulate a clear sense of what he thought came after death. With the mix of fatalism and mystery influenced by his Calvinist background and expressed in his Shakespearean tastes and his poetry, he possessed only a powerful but inchoate belief in God’s inscrutable will and the idea that when human beings died, they did so as part of some grand, mysterious plan. “Lincoln thought that God predestined things,” a friend observed simply, and to that end, death was a function of that Almighty will, which he never pretended to fully comprehend.15
This was Lincoln the reader, the lover of books, poetry, and Shakespeare. What of Lincoln the lawyer and politician? What ideas regarding death did he absorb from his professional life?
He was self-taught as a lawyer, not at all unusual in that age of few law schools. His primary text was Sir William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, a treatise first written in 1765 that offered an exhaustive explanation of the underlying philosophy of the English legal system—and by extension, the American system, which was closely modeled on English principles. Rare was the American attorney who had not mastered the Commentaries.16
Sir William explored rather arcane avenues and aspects of death in the law. He explained, for example, the legal duties of a coroner (“if the body be not found, he cannot sit; He must also sit at the very place where the death happened”); the differences between a “civil” and a “natural” death in ancient law (the former being banishment or entry into a monastery); capital punishments for treason and other high crimes against the state; and ancient laws concerning punishments for wrongful death by negligence (“among the Athenians, whatever was the cause of a man’s death, by falling upon him, was exterminated or cast out of the dominions of the republic”).17
While the pull of his Calvinist upbringing and his literary turn took him to places of the mysterious and the inexplicable, Blackstone took Lincoln to places where death was simply an event, a problem requiring solutions or sometimes a solution to a problem. There is none of Shakespeare’s underlying awe of death’s leveling power in the Commentaries, no sense of its role in tragedy or the pathos of flawed human beings. Death might complicate marriages or the circumstances of childrearing; “since the parents, on whom this care is primarily incumbent, may be snatched away by death before they have completed their duty, the law has provided [the relation] of guardian and ward.” It could create difficulties in business relations, property rights, and commerce. It was a crime, parsed by types of murder, manslaughter, and wrongful death. It was a punishment, meted out by the state for heinous offenses.18
There is little room for the spiritual realm here: no Good Deaths or bad deaths. Death is bloodless in the pages of the Commentaries. It is all about action and reaction, rendered in spare, precise prose. The Commentaries—and by extension, the law itself—showed Lincoln that death was not only a matter of threnodies, God’s biblical inscrutability, or the tragedies of a Shakespearean soliloquy. Nor was it only the horrors of seeing his mother wretch and gag in the throes of the milk sickness or hearing his young son’s coughs echoing through the house. Death could also be a mere circumstance, an unfortunate event that created problems, but problems that usually were solvable.
What Blackstone taught him in the abstract played itself out in Lincoln’s daily life and experiences as a lawyer. In any given year, his caseload almost always included matters touching on death and its legal consequences, and when it did so, the available evidence suggests that lawyer Lincoln approached death much as the Commentaries prepared him to do.19
Death’s presence in the courtroom could be immediate and obvious. There were the various murder cases he litigated, approximately one per year during his twenty-five years at the bar.20 A murder trial put a death at the forefront of Lincoln’s consciousness, along with everyone else in the courtroom, but the attendant emotions had a different tenor than, say, a funeral or a passage in Shakespeare. Shock, dismay, anger . . . these were feelings engendered by a death that were to be suppressed in the name of finding an equitable solution to a dispute or perhaps manipulated in a jury box in the service of winning a case for a client.
This was true in his most famous murder trial—really, his most famous court case of any kind—the Almanac Trial of 1858. The victim in question, James Metzker of Mason County, Illinois, had died under violent circumstances, having been struck in the face with a homemade weapon called a “slungshot” during a drunken fight on the evening of August 29, 1857. Lincoln’s client, William “Duff” Armstrong, was accused of striking the deadly blow.21
Lincoln’s strategy in defending Armstrong involved steering the jury away from the grisly circumstances of the crime—having his face shattered did not kill him immediately; he rode his horse home and died there two days later—and more toward a detached, less emotional appraisal regarding what they did and did not know regarding Metzker’s demise. Since he did not die immediately, Lincoln argued, there was no way to know for certain just what had killed the man. Nor could the jury be certain that it was Armstrong who wielded the slungshot that may or may not have delivered the fatal blow; Lincoln cast doubt on the testimony of an eyewitness who claimed to have seen Armstrong commit the assault by the light of a full moon that an almanac proved was not present on the night of the fight.22
To win his case, Lincoln needed to sow doubt in the jury’s minds. To sow that doubt, he needed to move them carefully away from the certitude of fixating on Metzker’s ugly death and more toward a cool appraisal of its vague circumstances. “He Spoke Slow,” remembered a spectator, “and Carefully reviewed the whole testimony, picked it all to pieces, and Showed that the man though kiled had not received his wounds at the place or time named by the witness, but afterwards.” Lincoln did evoke an emotional response from the jury, but not toward Metzker; instead, in his summation, Lincoln movingly spoke of the dire consequences a conviction would visit upon Armstrong’s elderly mother, Hannah, an old friend from his New Salem days who had actually contacted Lincoln about taking her son’s case: “He told of his kind feelings towards the Mother of the Prisoner, a widow, That she had been kind to him when he was young, lone and without friends.” It worked; Lincoln won an acquittal for his client.23
A murder case like the Almanac Trial was the most obvious encounter between Lincoln and death in his law practice, but there were a variety of other, more subtle places in which death intruded. The miscellany of a sprawling practice could press death on Lincoln in all sorts of ways. He represented a man who sued the estate of a deceased acquaintance for a lot in Rochester, Illinois. He helped recover the balance of the sale price for a horse from the estate of a Christian County farmer. He served temporarily as a presiding judge in a case involving an insane mother who strangled her infant child. He represented a railroad trying to recover money from the estate of an agent who died only ten days after being paid to perform grading and masonry work.24
Death was incidental here, several degrees removed from the core dispute of the case; Lincoln likely was barely cognizant of the fact that a death was at the center of an estate settlement or a debt collection matter. But that was the point. Death could be muted, defanged to some extent, by a focus on procedures, on rules—on the job at hand. If he had chosen to do so, Lincoln could have dwelled on the grisly realities of Metzker’s violent death, the sadness of a child strangled by his own mother, or any of a number of other tragic stories created in his professional life by the intersection of death and the law. But in doing so, he would not have been able to effectively do his job.
That job came to increasingly preoccupy him in the immediate aftermath of Eddy’s passing. “From 1849 to 1854, both inclusive, [I] practiced law more assiduously than ever before,” he later wrote in a brief autobiographical sketch. “I was losing interest in politics, when the repeal of the Missouri Compromise aroused me again.”25 This was in 1854, a date that usually provides for Lincoln’s biographers a tidy place to identify his resumption as a politician. But his return really began with a eulogy to Henry Clay, who passed away in June 1852 at the age of sixty-five.
The eulogy was another dimension of the mourning rituals that obsessed nineteenth-century American society, part and parcel of the same general rulebook that determined the color of the plumes on Eddy’s hearse and the length of time Mary should wear her widow’s weeds. The exact definition of and rules for a eulogy, however, were a bit vague. The term itself comes from the Greek word eulogia and means “praise.” Americans in Lincoln’s day understood a eulogy to be a spoken or written tribute for a recently deceased person, normally providing a brief biography and lauding that person’s achievements and character.
Published eulogies for dead presidents and other prominent politicians were common, along with judges, clergy, and other civic leaders. Edward Everett, for example (he of the Gettysburg cemetery dedication and Philadelphia Sanitary Fair) published in 1859 a eulogy for one Thomas Dowse of Massachusetts, which he had delivered before the Massachusetts Historical Society in December of the previous year. Everett’s tribute praised Dowse for his philanthropic contributions, recounted his humble origins as the son of a “leather-dresser,” and lauded his “generous feeling toward his natural kindred, and an enlightened regard to the public.” Referencing a room that housed Dowse’s library contributions, Everett enthused, “There, appropriately arranged in convenient and tasteful cabinets at the expense of his executors, and by their liberality, wisely interpreting and carrying out the munificent intentions of the donor . . . it will remain until the end of time . . . a noble monument, more durable, more significant, than marble or brass—to his pure and honored memory.”26
Florid, a bit excessive and ornate, these were nevertheless the sort of fitting words that Americans in Lincoln’s time believed should constitute a good eulogy for a deserving person. Eulogies normally included a laudatory overview of the subject’s life, with a tendency (especially where political figures were concerned) to link those events to larger, prouder themes in the American pantheon of values. Eulogies tended to focus on the idea of a legacy, whether it be a record of public achievement, victories in battle, or some other contribution to the community. An 1830 eulogy of the late John D. Godman, a physician and professor at Columbian College in Washington, D.C., stressed Godman’s lengthy publication record as a bequeathal to the advancement of medical science. “This production will long remain a splendid monument of the genius and industry of its author, and be regarded as a model of composition for works of this description,” it read. “It should have a place upon the table of every family, and be put into the hands of all the youths of our country.”27
The more sophisticated eulogies skillfully wove a dead person’s life and achievements with what the both the eulogist and the audience believed were also their most cherished values and principles. The subtext ran something like this: the deceased embodied these values, in character and behavior, and since those values are also your values and mine, you, I, and the deceased are made whole and profit from our association. Eulogies of particularly revered national figures—Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, for example, who both died on July 4, 1826, to the wonder of the nation—were in this broad sense political documents, blurring the distinction between religious veneration and civic pride. Shrewd eulogists knew they touched on something more profound to ordinary Americans than a stump speech or editorial when they connected death, a sense of the divine, and America’s belief in its own exceptionalism. “A summons of more awful import, the Fiat of the Most high, had sped to call them, with humble faith let us say, to another and a better country,” noted one Joseph Tillinghast of Rhode Island upon the deaths of Adams and Jefferson. “It was not for them to be borne with the honours of common greatness, upon the tide of an admiring crowd. But their soaring spirits, almost without a figure it may be said, were wafted to heaven upon the acclimations of a free and mighty nation.”28
By the time he was an adult, Lincoln had heard and read his share of such sentiments; he knew and understood the ways in which public figures were memorialized. He had signed resolutions to mark the passing of deceased colleagues at the bar or in Springfield at large. He had also been both a spectator and a participant in the death and mourning of one of the most famous public men of his day, former president and then congressman John Quincy Adams. As one of Illinois’ representatives, Lincoln may have been a witness on February 21, 1848, when Adams, eighty years of age, collapsed and died of a stroke on the floor of the House congressional chamber. He was a member of the committee tasked with planning Adams’s memorial service, and he marched in the funeral procession.29
So Lincoln understood how public figures should be mourned, but at the time of Henry Clay’s death, his only other direct experiences with eulogies had been a brief address in 1842 for Benjamin Ferguson, president of Springfield’s Washington Temperance Society, and a eulogy for President Zachary Taylor when he died suddenly in office in July 1850. In Ferguson’s case, Lincoln seems to have been acting on the request of the society’s members that he deliver fitting words at one of their meetings after Ferguson—a local businessman identified in various sources only as a carpenter and a “contractor and builder”—died following a brief and unidentified illness. Lincoln’s eulogy was perfunctory: “In his intercourse with his fellow men,” Lincoln said vaguely, “he possessed that rare uprightness of character, which was evidenced by his having no disputes or bickerings of his own, while he was ever the chosen arbiter to settle those of his neighbors.”30
Lincoln’s eulogy for President Taylor was an essay rather than a speech, printed in the Daily Journal, a Chicago newspaper edited by Lincoln’s friend and political ally Charles L. Wilson. Wilson probably asked Lincoln to prepare something for his paper once news broke regarding Taylor’s death. Lincoln did not have much time; Taylor died on July 9, and Lincoln’s eulogy would appear in the July 27 edition of the Daily Journal. It subsequently bore the marks of a hastily prepared document, with some minor factual errors regarding dates and Taylor’s family history.31
Lincoln’s eulogy for Henry Clay, written two years later, was different. Clay was a personal hero to Lincoln, his “beau ideal of a statesman” and the founding father of Lincoln’s beloved Whig Party. During the week following Clay’s death on June 29, the entire nation marked his passing with ceremonies and meetings. In Springfield, prominent citizens and members of local civic organizations gathered in the downtown area, where business was suspended and at eleven o’clock, seventy-six “minute guns” marking Clay’s birth in the patriotic year of 1776 were fired. The crowd then proceeded from the Springfield Episcopal church to the representatives’ chamber in the capitol building, where, according to the Sangamon Journal, the “Honorable A. Lincoln pronounced an impressive eulogy on the character and services of the deceased.”32
Lincoln used the occasion to draw a symbolic connection between Clay’s life and that of the nation. He noted their shared 1776 birthdate and declared that “the infant nation, and the infant child began the race of life together. . . . In all that has concerned the nation the man ever sympathised; and now the nation mourns for the man.” His eulogy also contained plenty of the effusive and sometimes mawkish praise common to such circumstances; just as Lincoln knew how to properly mourn his dead son two years earlier, so too did he now understand what his audience wanted to hear. “Alas! Who can realize that Henry Clay is dead!” Lincoln declared, quoting a Democratic newspaper. “Ah, it is at times like these, that the petty distinctions of mere party disappear. We see only the great, the grand, the noble features of the departed statesman; and we do not even beg permission to bow at his feet and mingle our tears with those who have ever been his political adherents. . . . Henry Clay belonged to his country—to the world, mere party cannot claim men like him. His career has been national—his fame has filled the earth—his memory will endure to ‘the last syllable of recorded time.’”
He mingled with these showers of praise an overview of Clay’s long political career. Lincoln made clear to his listeners that he identified closely with the Great Pacificator’s underlying political ideology and moral principles and that those principles were relevant in a time of increasing sectional tensions. “As a politician or statesman, no one was so habitually careful to avoid all sectional ground,” Lincoln noted. “Whatever he did, he did for the whole country. . . . Feeling, as he did, and as the truth surely is, that the world’s best hope depended on the continued Union of these States, he was ever jealous of, and watchful for, whatever might have the slightest tendency to separate them.”
These were Lincoln’s values as much as Clay’s. At the conclusion, Lincoln offered an extended examination of Clay’s antislavery ideas, particularly his embrace of gradual emancipation and colonization—ideas Lincoln also shared. “Cast into life where slavery was already widely spread and deeply seated, he did not perceive, as I think no wise man has perceived, how [slavery] could be at once eradicated, without producing a greater evil, even to the cause of human liberty itself,” Lincoln declared. Clay’s “feeling and his judgment, therefore, ever led him to oppose both extremes of opinion on the subject.”
The Clay eulogy also marks the emergence of what would thereafter become a hallmark of Lincoln’s own antislavery efforts: his constant invocation and reverence for the Declaration of Independence as a rebuke of proslavery extremists. After briefly disparaging abolition extremists who “would shiver into fragments the Union of these States . . . rather than slavery should continue a single hour,” Lincoln then declared, “I would also, if I could, array [Clay’s] name, opinions, and influence against the opposite extreme—against a few, but an increasing number of men, who, for the sake of perpetuating slavery, are beginning to assail and to ridicule the white-man’s charter of freedom—the declaration that ‘all men are created free and equal.’”33
The Clay eulogy was as much a description of the living Abraham Lincoln as it was of the dead Henry Clay. Lincoln here expressed his own nationalist and antislavery principles, rooted those principles in the Declaration of Independence, and fastened all of it to the bier of one of the greatest American politicians of his day. It was, in short, Lincoln the politician making professional use of a death.
This was not a crass or cynical exercise. Lincoln genuinely believed in both what he was saying and his fundamental accord with Henry Clay’s legacy. But had Lincoln in 1852, at this point an obscure former one-term congressman and state legislator, expressed in a speech his perspective on slavery and the principles of the Declaration of Independence, he would have garnered less attention than by expressing those views at a time of national mourning for a dead American hero. He surely knew this.
Still, there were limits to how he might use death and mourning to benefit himself politically. He did not make politicized eulogies a habit; the Clay eulogy was in fact the last eulogy he would ever compose. “I am not accustomed to the use of language of eulogy,” he said many years later; it was quite true.34
Nor did he care much for sentimentalizing death in the political arena. On one occasion, he mocked Stephen Douglas’s use of a typical Good Death narrative to advance Douglas’s own political interests and that of the Little Giant’s pet project, popular sovereignty. In an 1858 speech in Bloomington, Illinois (just before their famous series of debates began), Douglas had described a deathbed scene in which Clay gave his blessings to popular sovereignty. When he made such use of Lincoln’s “beau ideal of a statesmen,” it struck a nerve. “Last evening, in a sort of weeping tone, he described to us a death bed scene,” Lincoln said of Douglas during a speech a few days later. “He had been called to the side of Mr. Clay, in his last moments, in order that the genius of ‘popular sovereignty’ might duly descend from the dying man and settle upon him, the living and most worthy successor. He could do no less than promise that he would devote the remainder of his life to ‘popular sovereignty’; and then the great statesman departs in peace.” Sneering at Douglas’s pretensions in quoting the Whig Clay in service of a Democratic Party policy (“the Judge has evidently promised himself that tears shall be drawn down the cheeks of all old Whigs, as large as half grown apples”), Lincoln belittled the idea that Douglas and his allies were wrecking the Compromise of 1850 in the name of principles Clay supposedly bequeathed to Americans the way a dying parent imparted advice to children. “It would be amusing, if it were not disgusting, to see how quick these compromise-breakers administer on the political effects of their dead adversaries, trumping up claims never before heard of, and dividing the assets among themselves,” Lincoln declared. “If I should be found dead tomorrow morning, nothing but my insignificance could prevent a speech being made on my authority, before the end of next week.”35
Later in 1858, during a speech in Lewistown, Illinois, he grew impassioned about Douglas’s habitual parsing of the Declaration of Independence to exclude Americans who were not white. Speaking with “great earnestness” according to an onlooker, Lincoln told his audience:
If you have been taught doctrines conflicting with the great landmarks of the Declaration of Independence . . . if you have been inclined to believe that all men are not created equal in those inalienable rights enumerated by our chart of liberty, let me entreat you to come back. . . . You may do anything with me you choose, if you will but heed these sacred principles. You may not only defeat me for the Senate, but you may take me and put me to death. . . . But do not destroy that immortal emblem of Humanity—the Declaration of American Independence.36
On the eve of the Civil War, Lincoln spoke in similar terms, this time while standing on the steps of Independence Hall in Philadelphia. After referencing the Founders’ legacy in the building behind him, he identified as the nation’s “great principle” the idea that “in due time the weights should be lifted from the shoulders of all men, and that all should have an equal chance.” Warming to the subject, and admitting that the times and the location had filled him with deep emotion, he declared, “If it can’t be saved upon that principle, it will be truly awful. But, if this country cannot be saved without giving up that principle—I was about to say I would rather be assassinated on this spot than to surrender it.”37
Few people aroused Lincoln’s ire more than Stephen Douglas, and few subjects caused him to wax more eloquently than the Declaration and the Revolutionary generation, so perhaps it is not surprising that these things sometimes drew him to the hyperemotional subject of death. But they were exceptions to the rule. Normally he did not speak in terms of martyrdom or dying for a higher political cause, and he avoided the sort of rhetoric that might have led him to reference death in this way.
This was particularly noteworthy in his reaction to what was arguably the most politically important martyrdom of his time. On the eve of the Civil War, as Lincoln ascended to a position of respect and importance in the new antislavery Republican Party, there appeared on the American public stage someone who came to personify the idea of dying for a cause, and he did so in a way that was guaranteed to stir the deepest sorts of emotional reactions from his fellow Americans, North and South: “Hanging from the beam, / slowly swaying,” Herman Melville later wrote in a poem about John Brown, describing him as “the meteor of the war.”38
John Brown at times seemed almost steeped in violence and death. A flinty man with a hard countenance who harbored few reservations about enlisting lethal tactics in the name of ending slavery, Brown often quoted Hebrews 9:22 (“without the shedding of blood there is no remission of sin”) and other Old Testament passages that linked justice to both inflicting and suffering death. He admired Nat Turner—the slave preacher who led a rebellion in 1831 that resulted in the deaths of over fifty white Virginians and a large number of African Americans—and Toussaint Louverture, the leader of Haiti’s bloody slave rebellion in the 1790s. More moderate antislavery Americans were reluctant to openly praise either the Turner or Haiti rebellions, even if they secretly were sympathetic: the body counts were too high. But Brown was unperturbed.39
He was also willing to act on his convictions. In 1856, Brown and his sons hacked five proslavery settlers to death with swords along the banks of Pottawatomie Creek in Kansas. Three years later, he led a small band of followers in a sunrise raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia, with the avowed purpose of inciting a bloody slave uprising. “We have reached a point,” he told fellow abolitionist William Phillips, “where nothing but war can settle the question.”40
The entire Harpers Ferry affair was badly botched; the first person to die was an African American railroad employee, caught a fusillade of bullets loosed by Brown’s trigger-happy men at a train passing through town. Eventually the raiders barricaded themselves in a small engine house near the arsenal, surrounded by angry townspeople and members of the Virginia militia. Under the command of U.S. Army colonel Robert E. Lee—home on leave in nearby Alexandria—the militiamen rushed the building in a melee of gunfire that killed two of Brown’s sons and eight other members of his little band. Brown was wounded from several sword thrusts by an onrushing militia officer, though none of the wounds were fatal. He was taken into custody and ensconced in a Virginia jail.41
Some people wondered if Brown had a death wish. When offered the chance to surrender, he shouted from inside the building, “No, I prefer to die here!” Following his arrest, he was resigned to his fate. When the governor of Virginia in an interview with Brown urged him to “think upon eternity,” Brown calmly replied, “Governor, I have, from all appearances, not more than fifteen or twenty years the start of you in the journey to that eternity of which you kindly warn me; and whether my tenure here shall be fifteen months, or fifteen days, or fifteen hours, I am equally prepared to go.”42
Tried for treason in proslavery Virginia, Brown’s execution was a foregone conclusion, and he seemed to relish the idea of his impending martyrdom.43 During the trial, he answered questions and gave statements with an almost eerie serenity. “If it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice,” he told the court in his final speech after the verdict of guilty was pronounced, “and mingle my blood further with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments, I say, let it be done.” The jury took only forty-five minutes to find him guilty, and the judge pronounced a sentence of death forthwith. He was hanged a month later.44
Abolitionists knew good propaganda value when they saw it, and images of Brown’s righteous martyrdom suffused abolitionist literature. Ralph Waldo Emerson, who had met Brown before the raid, likened him to Christianity’s most revered figures: “That new saint, than whom none purer or more brave was ever led by love of men into conflict and death—the new saint awaiting his martyrdom, and who, if he shall suffer, will make the gallows glorious like the cross.”45 Even those who had little use for Brown or his tactics prior to his execution now discovered a nobility in the man heretofore unnoticed. As antislavery minister Henry Ward Beecher rather indelicately put it, “Let no man pray that Brown be spared. Let Virginia make him a martyr. . . . His soul was noble, his work miserable. But a cord and a gibbet would redeem all that.” Others agreed. “By the gallows you have triumphed,” read a resolution adopted by citizens meeting in Natick, Massachusetts, to express their support for Brown two weeks before his execution, “Virginia will hang your body, but she will not hang John Brown. . . . Had you not done as you have, you would have died a living death for treason against God, as he spoke to you in the depths of your own soul.”46
But for more moderate antislavery Americans like Lincoln, Brown’s martyrdom posed a dilemma. If they agreed with Brown’s purpose of ending slavery, most disagreed with his violent tactics. Members of the Republican Party felt compelled to tread carefully, given that their Democratic opponents and many proslavery Southern whites were convinced the Harpers Ferry raid was a clandestinely sanctioned Republican operation.
Many Republicans subsequently tried to draw a careful distinction between Brown’s tactics (wrong) and his principles (right). His death provided a degree of cover for this distinction. He had died nobly and well, making praise of his principles easier and suggesting at the same time that however misguided his tactics, he had paid an appropriately high price for his failings.47
As Brown’s trial proceeded during the latter part of October and into early November 1859, Lincoln coincidentally found himself in Kansas, where Brown had first made a name for himself with the Pottawatomie murders. Lincoln was touring the territory just after its citizens had adopted a Free-Soil constitution, so the various controversies that had roiled “Bleeding Kansas” regarding slavery over the last few years were uppermost on everyone’s minds, and with Brown’s trial receiving great national publicity, Lincoln felt compelled to say a few words on the matter. During a speech in Elwood, Kansas, he stated that he “believed the attack of Brown [on Harpers Ferry was] wrong for two reasons. It was a violation of law and it was, as all such attacks must be, futile as far as any effect it might have on the extinction of a great evil.” He then occupied ground familiar among other members of the Republican Party, praising Brown for having “shown great courage, [and] rare unselfishness” but reiterating that “no man, North or South, can approve of violence or crime.”48
He returned to the subject a few days later in Leavenworth, by which point Brown was dead. “Old John Brown has just been executed for treason against a state. We cannot object, even though he agreed with us in thinking slavery wrong,” Lincoln declared. This time he did not speak at all to the man’s character, noting only that Brown’s antislavery convictions “cannot excuse violence, bloodshed, and treason. It could avail him nothing that he might think himself right.” In a second speech, Lincoln reiterated his disapproval, noting that while he did “sympathize” with Brown’s “hatred of slavery,” he had no use at all for the Harpers Ferry raid and stated his belief that “the old man [was] insane.”49
By 1860, even the faintest allusion to Brown’s martyrdom as a courageous act, or to any private sympathies with his antislavery principles, had vanished from Lincoln’s public statements. In February, he delivered an important speech at Cooper’s Union in New York City. By this point, a congressional investigation led by prominent Democrats (including future Confederate president Jefferson Davis) had tried hard to establish a direct link between the Republican Party and Brown’s raid. Lincoln expressed indignation at the very idea. “Harper’s Ferry! John Brown!!” he exclaimed. “John Brown was no Republican; and [Democrats] have failed to implicate a single Republican in his Harper’s Ferry enterprise. . . . Persisting in a charge which one does not know to be true, is simply malicious slander.” He proceeded to heap scorn on the raid, again voicing no admiration or approval of its leader’s motives. “John Brown’s effort was peculiar,” Lincoln pointed out. “It was not a slave insurrection. It was an attempt by white men to get up a revolt among slaves, in which the slaves refused to participate. In fact, it was so absurd that the slaves, with all their ignorance, saw plainly enough it could not succeed. That affair, in its philosophy, corresponds with the many attempts, related in history, at the assassination of kings and emperors. An enthusiast broods over the oppression of a people till he fancies himself commissioned by Heaven to liberate them. He ventures the attempt, which ends in little else than his own execution.”50
Lincoln made a sound political decision in distancing himself from Brown’s martyrdom. Any talk of Brown’s “triumph at the gallows” or the like would have placed him in the company of the more radical antislavery elements he earnestly wished to avoid as he began laying plans to capture the Republican nomination for the presidency in 1860. Radicals found Brown’s death redemptive, while more moderate antislavery Americans found his death politically useful, providing a way to express sympathy for the man without being tarred by his violent tactics.
Lincoln avoided talk of the former and did precious little of the latter; Brown the martyr was far too controversial. For Lincoln, death in the political realm, as with so much else involving this politically astute man, was a careful calculation. By 1860, he was a seasoned politician, unlikely to get carried away with his own emotions as he delivered a speech or expressed an opinion. He knew how to use a death when it suited his purposes, as in the Clay eulogy, and how to carefully avoid the highly emotional content of a political martyrdom, as with John Brown.
More generally, Lincoln’s ideas about death were dualistic and somewhat contradictory. His taste in poetry, literature, and Shakespeare, along with his biblical fatalism, gave him an appreciation of death’s mystery and unknowability, an appreciation that was emotive and deeply attached to the gut-wrenching suffering he had witnessed in the deaths of his loved ones since an early age. But his legal training and political instincts taught him that death was also a thing that could be rationally analyzed, defined, and manipulated in a more detached manner. He would carry both sets of ideas with him into the White House.