Lincoln Unbound (8 page)

A friend of Lincoln's in New Salem recalled another brawl. Two neighbors, Henry Clark and Ben Wilcox, were embroiled in a lawsuit. Clark lost the suit but averred that nonetheless “he could whip his opponent.” Lincoln was Clark's second, and a man named John Brewer the second for Wilcox. The friend recounts, “The parties met, stripped themselves all but their breeches, went in and Mr Lincoln's principal was beautifully whipped. These combats were conducted with as much ceremony and punctiliousness as ever graced the duelling ground. After the conflict the seconds conducted their respective principals to the river washed off the blood, and assisted them to dress.”

Then came another provocation: “During this performance, the second of the party opposed to Mr Lincoln remarked—­‘Well Abe, my man has whipped yours, and I can whip you.' Now this challenge came from a man who was very small in size. Mr Lincoln agreed to fight provided he would ‘chalk out his size on Mr Lincoln's person, and every blow struck outside of that mark should be counted foul.' After this sally there was the best possible humor and all parties were as orderly as if they had been engaged in the most harmless amusement.”

By the standards of the time and place, Lincoln was practically Gandhi. In Indiana, he had supposedly acted as the mediator in a fierce dispute over ownership of a goose. An acquaintance in Illinois recalled, “When a fight was on hand Abe used to Say to me ‘Lets go and Stop it—­tell a joke—­a Story—­Say Something humorous and End the fight in a good laugh.' ” He kept his men during the Black Hawk War from killing an old Indian who had wandered into their camp. William Greene, who served with Lincoln, recalled: “Some of the men said to Mr Lincoln—­‘This is cowardly on your part Lincoln.' Lincoln remarked if any man thinks I am a coward let him test it.”

Lincoln's consideration extended to animals, in a frontier environment that would have appalled the ASPCA. After shooting a turkey from the family's cabin as a kid, Lincoln noted in the autobiographical account for Scripps, “He has never since pulled a trigger on any larger game.” As a boy he led a little personal crusade against the mistreatment of animals. Nathaniel Grigsby told Herndon: Lincoln “would write short sentences against cruelty to animals. We were in the habit of catching Turrapins—­a Kind of turtle and put fire on their back and Lincoln would Chide us—­tell us it was wrong—­would write against it.” He said that Lincoln's injunctions reached all the way down to “crawling insects.” His stepsister remembered him giving a mini-­sermon, “Contending that an ants life was to it, as sweet as ours to us.” Stories of his sometimes inconvenient, sometimes even embarrassing, kindness to animals abound.

There was the story of the hog. One day as Lincoln was crossing the prairie he saw a hog mired in the mud. Mary Owens, whom Lincoln courted, remembered him telling her that “he resolved that he would pass on without looking towards the shoat, after he had gone by, he said, the feeling was eresistable and he had to look back, and the poor thing seemed to say so wistfully—­
There now! my last hope is gone
; that he deliberately got down and relieved it from its difficulty.” “In many things,” she said, “he was sensitive almost to a fault.”

And the baby birds. Joshua Speed told Herndon of Lincoln traveling on a country road by horseback, returning to Springfield from a court about thirty miles away. When the party of lawyers stopped to water its horses, Lincoln was nowhere to be seen. John Hardin had been riding back with Lincoln. Asked where he was, Hardin replied, “Oh, when I saw him last he had caught two little birds in his hand, which the wind had blown from their nest, and he was hunting for the nest.” Speed said that Lincoln “finally found the nest, and placed the birds, to use his own words, ‘in the home provided for them by their mother.' When he came up with the party they laughed at him. Said he, earnestly, ‘I could not have slept tonight if I had not given those two little birds to their mother.' ”

And the cat. Nathaniel Grigsby remembered staying over with Lincoln in the house of William Jones after a Lincoln speech in the vicinity in 1844: “When we had gone to bed and way in the night a Cat Commenced mewing and scratching—­making a fuss generally—­Lincoln got up in the dark and Said—­Kitty—­Kitty—­Pussy—­Pussy. The cat Knew the voice & manner Kind—­went to Lincoln—­L rubbed it down—­Saw the Sparkling—­L took up the Cat—­Carried it to the door & gently rubbed it again and again Saying Kitty—­Kitty &c—­then gently put it down closed the doors.”

Lincoln, an acquaintance recalled, “Was fond of cats—­would take one & turn it on its back & talk to it for half an hour at a time.” At dinner once in the White House, using official flatware, Lincoln fed one of the family's cats, which was sitting on a chair next to him. Mrs. Lincoln asked a guest, “Don't you think it is shameful for Mr. Lincoln to feed tabby with a gold fork?” The president replied, “If the gold fork was good enough for ­Buchanan I think it is good enough for Tabby.”

If these were Lincoln's rejections, his affirmations were the law, reason, and personal and collective reform. In January 1838, he gave a speech at the Young Men's Lyceum of Springfield called “The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions.” In occasionally grandiloquent terms, Lincoln expounded on lawfulness as the foundation of our institutions and of liberty. Citing the fearful work of lynch mobs, he warned of “the increasing disregard for law which pervades the country; the growing disposition to substitute the wild and furious passions, in lieu of the sober judgement of Courts; and the worse than savage mobs, for the executive ministers of justice.” In cataloging recent atrocities, he mentioned those who “throw printing presses into rivers” and “shoot editors,” an unmistakable reference to the martyred abolitionist publisher Elijah Lovejoy. Mobs in Alton, Illinois, destroyed Lovejoy's presses and dumped them into the Mississippi, and then he was killed trying to defend another press from a rabble.

The answer to this threat to the “fair fabric” of our republic is enshrining the law in an exalted place in our consciousness. “Let reverence for the laws,” Lincoln counseled, “be breathed by every American mother, to the lisping babe, that prattles on her lap—­let it be taught in schools, in seminaries, and in colleges;—­let it be written in Primmers, spelling books, and in Almanacs;—­let it be preached from the pulpit, proclaimed in legislative halls, and ­enforced in courts of justice. And, in short, let it become the
political religion
of the nation.”

Lincoln mused how during the American Revolution the basest passions of the ­people were suppressed or turned against the British rather than inward. That could no longer be the case, as memories of the revolution faded and the ­people who fought it passed away. Americans would inevitably lose their emotional connection to the event. “Passion has helped us,” Lincoln concluded, “but can do so no more. It will in future be our enemy. Reason, cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason, must furnish all the materials for our future support and defence. Let those [materials] be moulded into
general intelligence, [sound] morality
and in particular,
a reverence for the constitution and laws
.”

In his 1842 temperance address, Lincoln was just as high-­flying. In it, he warned the foes of drinking against a denunciatory self-­righ­teous­ness liable to repel rather than persuade. As the great Lincoln scholar Harry Jaffa notes, it is a
temperate
temperance address. By the end, Lincoln swung around again to the American Revolution and praised it as “a solution of that long mooted problem, as to the capability of man to govern himself.” Lincoln favored self-­government both as a political system and as a personal ideal. The temperance movement brings a freedom of its own: “In
it
, we shall find stronger bondage broken; a viler slavery, manumitted; a greater tyrant deposed.”

He called temperance “a noble ally” to the cause of political freedom. Then he launched into a prose poem on freedom's hand-­in-­hand advance with temperance: “With such an aid, its march cannot fail to be on and on, till every son of earth shall drink in rich fruition, the sorrow quenching draughts of perfect liberty. Happy day, when, all appetites controled, all passions subdued, all matters subjected,
mind
, all conquering
mind
, shall live and move the monarch of the world. Glorious consummation! Hail fall of Fury! Reign of Reason, all hail!”

“His preoccupations with self-­control, order, rationality, industriousness,” Daniel Walker Howe writes, made ­Lincoln the prototypical Whig character type. The last quality—­industriousness—­wasn't merely a personal ethic with Lincoln; it was his touchstone and his gospel. Success for him was a matter of work and of will.

In 1855, Lincoln wrote back to Isham Reavis, who had inquired about studying law with him. Lincoln told him he was away from the office too often to take him on as a student, but he offered this advice: “If you are resolutely determined to make a lawyer of yourself, the thing is more than half done already. It is but a small matter whether you read
with
any body or not. I did not read with any one. Get the books, and read and study them till, you understand them in their principal features; and that is the main thing. It is of no consequence to be in a large town while you are reading. I read at New-­Salem, which never had three hundred ­people living in it. The
books
, and your
capacity
for understanding them, are just the same in all places.” Before signing off he urged: “Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed, is more important than any other one thing.” (Reavis went on to become a judge.)

A few years later, in September 1860, he answered a young man named John Brockman, who asked him “the best mode of obtaining a thorough knowledge of the law”: “The mode is very simple, though laborious, and tedious. It is only to get the books, and read, and study them carefully. Begin with Blackstone's Commentaries, and after reading it carefully through, say twice, take up Chitty's Pleading, Greenleaf's Evidence, & Story's Equity &c. in succession. Work, work, work, is the main thing.” The emphasis on reading, though obviously necessary for the study of law, also jibed with the Whig emphasis on concerted self-­improvement.

His words of comfort in 1860 for a young man from Springfield rejected by Harvard amount to a hymn of praise to willpower: “It is a
certain
truth, that you
can
enter, and graduate in, Harvard University; and having made the attempt, you
must
succeed in it. ‘
Mus
t
' is the word. I know not how to aid you, save in the assurance of one of mature age, and much severe experience, that you
can
not fail, if you resolutely determine, that you
will
not. . . . In your temporary failure there is no evidence that you may not yet be a better scholar, and a more successful man in the great struggle of life, than many others, who have entered college more easily.”

Writing from Washington in 1848, where he was serving in Congress, Lincoln advised Herndon to get over his complaints that the elders in the party were treating the younger Whigs unfairly. Much better to concentrate on what was important: “The way for a young man to rise, is to improve himself every way he can, never suspecting that any body wishes to hinder him. Allow me to assure you, that suspicion and jealousy never did help any man in any situation. There may sometimes be ungenerous attempts to keep a young man down; and they will succeed too, if he allows his mind to be diverted from its true channel to brood over the attempted injury.” He added, “You can not fail in any laudable object, unless you allow your mind to be improperly directed.”

The point was the same, if the tone harsh and unsparing, in his letters to his stepbrother John Johnston, a pleasant sort, but not a go-­getter. In 1848, Lincoln upbraided Johnston in reply to his request for eighty dollars: “At the various times when I have helped you a little, you have said to me ‘We can get along very well now' but in a very short time I find you in the same difficulty again. Now this can only happen by some defect in your
conduct
. What that defect is I think I know. You are not
lazy
, and still you
are
an
idler
. I doubt whether since I saw you, you have done a good whole day's work, in any one day. You do not very much dislike to work; and still you do not work much, merely because it does not seem to you that you could get much for it. This habit of uselessly wasting time, is the whole difficulty; and it is vastly important to you, and still more so to your children that you should break this habit.”

He came up with an offer to entice Johnston into the cash economy. He suggested that Johnston let Lincoln's father—­who lived with him—­and his children tend to the farm, while “you go to work for the best money wages, or in discharge of any debt you owe, that you can get.” Lincoln said he would match whatever he made, dollar for dollar. “Now if you will do this,” he continued, “you will soon be out of debt, and what is better, you will have a habit that will keep you from getting in debt again.”

When Johnston said in 1851 that he wanted to sell his Illinois farm and move to Missouri, Lincoln rebuked him again: “What can you do in Missouri, better than here? Is the land any richer? Can you there, any more than here, raise corn, & wheat & oats, without work? Will any body there, any more than here, do your work for you? If you intend to go to work, there is no better place than right where you are; if you do not intend to go to work, you can get along any where. Squirming & crawling about from place to place can do no good.” He professed no unkindness, just a desire to get Johnston “to
face
the truth—­which truth is, you are destitute because you have
idled
away all your time. Your thousand pretences for not getting along better, are all non-­sense—­they deceive no body but yourself.
Go to work
is the only cure for your case.” Johnston can't have appreciated the hectoring stepbrotherly advice.