To his opinion-making contemporaries, Abraham Lincoln was but a politician with no settled convictions.
Wartime Washington from 1861 to 1865 was a turbulence trying to hold on to the coattails of the vast armies and wheeling movements it had set in motion. At the center of the turbulence, always in the spotlight, nothing about him concealed from the great democracy that had made him its figurehead as well as chief executive, was that assailable and by no means yet hallowed figure known to the opposition papers as the Gorilla.
His vacillations, his lack of willpower and distinctive intelligence were cited by well-placed observers as one more proof of the dangers in democracy. To the opinion-making class the most obvious thing about Abraham Lincoln was that he was a mere politician with no settled convictions. He swayed from moment to moment; he was weak; he had a deplorable tendency to wait on public opinion. Although he had always found slavery repugnant, he would not alienate the vast pro-Union majority that was not yet ready to approve emancipation. His concern for the Union dominated every moral and constitutional issue. He would not keep ahead of the masses whom he so much resembled.
What it came to in the eyes of the critics, foreign and domestic, was that he was ordinary. In England, where the governing class was impatient to recognize the Confederacy, the London Herald pointed out that Lincoln’s predecessors had all been gentlemen. “Mr. Lincoln is a vulgar, brutal boor, wholly ignorant of political science, of military affairs, of everything else which a statesman should know.” The London Standard: “Never were issues so momentous placed in so feeble a hand; never was so great a place in history filled by a figure so mean.”
At home the contempt for Lincoln (he had been nominated as a compromise candidate and was elected only because he divided the vote with three opponents) was general among New England’s intellectuals. The aristocratic abolitionist Wendell Phillips dismissed Lincoln as “the white trash of the South spawned on Illinois,” “a first-rate second-rate man … waiting to be used.” The Brahmin historian Francis Parkman complained in 1862 that Lincoln was the very type of character which democracy had given to the world, the “feeble and ungainly mouthpiece of the North.” Thirty years later Parkman was deploring Lincoln’s displacement of Washington as a hero to schoolboys.
Hawthorne, observing Lincoln in 1862 for the Atlantic Monthly, jocularly noted that “there is no describing his lengthy awkwardness, nor the uncouthness of his movement; and yet it seemed as if I had been in the habit of seeing him daily, and had shaken hands with him a thousand times in some village street; so true was he to the aspect of the pattern American, though with a certain extravagance which, possibly, I exaggerated still further by the delighted eagerness with which I took it in.”
The Atlantic did not choose to publish Hawthorne’s condescension. Emerson, also observing Lincoln in 1862, allowed that the President was “correct enough, not vulgar, as described.” Lincoln’s delight in telling stories reminded Emerson of Harvard reunions.
In Lincoln’s lifetime Whitman was the only major writer to describe him with love. Whitman identified Lincoln with himself in the worshipful fashion that became standard after Lincoln’s death. That Lincoln was a class issue says a good deal about the prejudices of American society in the East. A leading New Yorker, George Templeton Strong, noted in his diary that while he never disavowed the “lank and hard featured man,” Lincoln was “despised and rejected by a third of the community, and only tolerated by the other two-thirds.” Whitman, the professional man of the people, had complicated reasons for loving Lincoln. The uneasiness about him among America’s elite was based on the fear that this unknown, untried man, elected without administrative experience (and without a majority), might not be up to his “fearful task.”
After his death, Lincoln’s supreme competence and firmness became such an article of American faith that he was enshrined as the purest type of American. Henry James, recalling the war period in his autobiography, condemned Lincoln’s unhappy successor, Andrew Johnson, because he was common and lackluster by contrast with the “mould-smashing mask” of Abraham Lincoln. It was the underlying political despair, the doubt that the federal government could maintain itself, that centered so much understandable anxiety on Lincoln. Slavery had for 40 years divided the country: it was not until slavery died in the war, until the country under his leadership proved that “a new birth of freedom” was real, that Lincoln could be seen to be the very reverse of “vacillating.”
Lincoln was not a revolutionary but a supreme nationalist. The Union had to be preserved at any cost. Since democracy in America was a revolutionary fact in the nineteenth-century world—Whitman always referred to Europe as “feudal”—there were too many powerful interests at home and abroad opposed to what Lincoln the campaigner joined as “free soil, free labor, free men,” for Lincoln the war President not to recognize that he was upholding more than a national cause. “Thanks to all: for the great republic—for the principle it lives by and keeps alive—for man’s vast future—thanks to all.” If it was difficult in the century of American superpower for an Edmund Wilson to share Lincoln’s fear for his threatened nation, it was still difficult to understand Lincoln’s reluctance to press emancipation when he honestly believed in the promise of equality in the Declaration of Independence. And how to reconcile the “suffering” and “Christ-like” Lincoln with the driving and even authoritarian President who suspended habeas corpus and violated individual rights granted by the Constitution? Although steel was not manufactured in great quantity until near the end of the war, Lincoln was capable of saying, “My mind is like a piece of steel—very hard to scratch anything on it, and almost impossible after you get it there to rub it out.”
It was Lincoln’s peculiar honesty—the total reliance on his innermost promptings that one associates with genius, least of all with politicians captive to public relations—that still makes him unfathomable and endlessly interesting. None of the contemporary literary folk who could have analyzed Lincoln’s writings as a subject worthy of themselves ever did so. Henry Adams’s feisty elder brother, Charles Francis Adams, Jr., was the first to lead black troops through captured Richmond, and may have had enough experience of war to know what went into the Second Inaugural Address. From the field he wrote to his father, the American minister in London, who was not an admirer of the President.
“What do you think of the inaugural? That rail-splitting lawyer is one of the wonders of the day. Once at Gettysburg and now again on a greater occasion he has shown a capacity for rising to the demands of the hour which we should not expect from orators or men of the schools. This inaugural strikes me in its grand simplicity and directness as being for all time the historical keynote of the war; in it a people seemed to speak in the sublimely simple utterance of ruder times. What will Europe think of this utterance of the rude ruler, of whom they have nourished so lofty a contempt? Not a prince or a minister in all Europe could have risen to such an equality with the occasion.”
It was Lincoln’s poised, patient, and unswervable spirit of command, triumphing finally over the bloodiest American factionalism, that made him important to Whitman. Lincoln was the greatest possible example to the “failed” poet whose life was a perpetual crisis.
Whitman’s “reports from the front,” as he liked to call them, show a strong sense of fact. Lincoln’s prominent “ugliness” and sallow complexion startled most observers. Whitman came up with “I think well of the President. He has a face like a Hoosier Michael Angelo, so awful ugly it becomes beautiful, with its strange mouth, its deep cut, crisscross lines, and its doughnut complexion.” In his notebooks of the war period, Specimen Days, Whitman gives us an endearing glimpse of the president on horseback, returning from the Soldiers Home where he slept on hot summer nights.
“Mr. Lincoln … is dressed in plain black, somewhat rusty and dusty, wears a black stiff hat, and looks about as ordinary in attire, etc. as the commonest man. A lieutenant, with yellow stripes, rides at his left, and following behind, two by two, come the cavalry men in their yellow-striped jackets.… The sabres and accoutrements clank, and the entirely unornamental cortege as it trots toward Lafayette Square arouses no sensation, only some curious stranger stops and gazes.”
And they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden. But the Lord God called to the man, and said to him, “Where are you?” And he said, “I heard the sound of thee in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself.” He said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?” The man said, “The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me fruit of the tree, and I ate.” Then the Lord God said to the woman, “What is this that you have done?” The woman said, “The serpent beguiled me, and I ate.” The Lord God said to the serpent,
“Because you have done this,
cursed are you above all cattle,
and above all wild animals;
upon your belly you shall go,
and dust you shall eat
all the days of your life.
I will put enmity between you and the woman,
and between your seed and her seed;
he shall bruise your head,
and you shall bruise his heel.”
To the woman he said,
“I will greatly multiply your pain in childbearing;
in pain you shall bring forth children,
yet your desire shall be for your husband,
and he shall rule over you.”
And to Adam he said,
“Because you have listened to the voice of your wife,
and have eaten of the tree
of which I commanded you,
‘You shall not eat of it,’
cursed is the ground because of you;
in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life;
thorns and thistles it shall bring forth to you;
and you shall eat the plants of the field.
In the sweat of your face
you shall eat bread
till you return to the ground,
for out of it you were taken;
you are dust,
and to dust you shall return.”
Genesis 3:8–19
