Abraham Lincoln - The Portable Abraham Lincoln

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THE PORTABLE ABRAHAM LINCOLN

ABRAHAM LINCOLN was born in a log cabin in Kentucky in 1809 and was largely self-educated. As his family moved to Indiana and then Illinois, he worked as a hired hand, clerk, and surveyor until, in his twenties, he began to study law. He was elected to the Illinois House of Representatives in 1834. After marrying Mary Todd, Lincoln set up his own law practice and was elected to the U.S. Congress in 1846. As a candidate for the U.S. Senate in 1858, he debated Senator Stephen A. Douglas across the state and became a national figure. Nominated for president by the Republican Party on May 18, 1860, Lincoln was elected in November 1860 and took office in March 1861. Commander in chief of the Union forces during the Civil War, he issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. Reelected in 1864, Abraham Lincoln was shot to death by an embittered Southern actor, John Wilkes Booth, in April 1865, five days after General Lees surrender at Appomattox.

ANDREW DELBANCO, Levi Professor in the Humanities and director of American Studies at Columbia University, is the author of Melville: His World and Work and other works on American literature and culture. He has received many honors, including, in 2001, election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Introduction

There is a story that when President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, his hand was shaking. After nearly a century and a half, this detail cannot be confirmed or denied, but it has suggested to some historians that Lincoln feared he was making a mistake. General George McClellan, whose troops had stopped Robert E. Lees advance into Union territory at Antietam three months earlier, was said to be reluctant to fight on for the freedom of the slaves. Some members of Lincolns cabinet worried that creating a large free black population would be a grievous error before arrangements had been made for sending them out of the country to a colony in Africa or somewhere else suitably remote. And though Lincoln was proposing only to emancipate slaves held in states in rebellion, there was concern that emancipation would drive the loyal border states back to the Confederacy.

Throughout his political career, Lincoln had consistently maintained that I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so. In an effort to keep the South in the Union, he had reiterated those words in his first inaugural address. Still, despite the objectionsfrom his advisors and perhaps from himselfhe went ahead and on January 1, 1863, signed a document that, in the words of historian Richard Hofstadter, had all the moral grandeur of a bill of lading.

The act of emancipation has also been described as a moment of great moral couragethe climactic expression of Lincolns lifelong abhorrence of the odious institution of slavery, which can be dated at least as far back as his account of seeing slaves on a Mississippi barge strung together like so many fish on a trot line. With these words in mind, one can tell the story of emancipation as the final triumph within Lincolns heart of what Secretary of State William H. Seward called the higher law over legal compunction. But it can also be told as a story of sheer expediency. W. E. B. DuBois argued long ago that the real impetus for emancipation came from the Union generals, who wished to reduce the burden of holding and transporting captured Confederate property and to nullify the value of their labor to the rebels. It is a small step from that argument to say that Lincolns action was merely part of the Unions strategy to weaken the economic base of the enemy.

The fact is that we shall never know whyor ifLincolns hand trembled. Some say it was from fear and doubt; others say it was a symptom of his knowledge that, after a lifetime of hampered struggle, he was transforming the world with the stroke of a pen; still others suspect that it might have been the physiological result of too much handshaking on the White House receiving line. It is equally possible that his hand did not tremble at all, and that a witnesss embellishment simply became part of the Lincoln legend.

Getting right with Lincoln, as the historian David Herbert Donald put it some fifty years ago, has never been easy. Lincoln did not leave a memoir with an incidental account of his private thoughts and feelings. Between us and the man stands a larger body of myth than surrounds any other figure in American history: a mass of lore that has become an important part of Americans relatively fragile sense of possessing a common history. Lincoln has meant something different to every generation. In the 1930s, Carl Sandburgs gaunt man of the prairie gave Americans, by his example of frugality and endurance, a kind of mirror of reassurance during the Great Depression. In the 1950s, we had a cold war Lincoln, broadcast to millions in James Agees television play Mr. Lincoln, in which gentle Abe steps forward, after one provocation too many from the town bully, to teach him a lesson and then to redeem himan allegory of American patience and strength in a dangerous world. In the 1960s, when the culture wars began, Lincoln was to some the champion of civil rights, while according to others he condescended to black people, whom he never regarded as the equals of whites. Over the decades since, many versions of Lincoln have scrolled by: Lincoln the masterful political operator, Lincoln the literary genius, Lincoln the moralist, Lincoln the Christian, Lincoln the melancholic, to name just a few.

So the question remains, how close can we get to an unmediated sense of Lincolns actual being? Can one, as Edmund Wilson thought Sandburg had not, do justice to the tautness and hard distinction that we find when, disregarding legends, we attack Lincolns writings in bulk? The Portable Abraham Lincoln is meant to make possible such an encounter. In a space small enough to be toured by the interested general reader but large enough to contain Lincolns key writings, this volume aims to make the man available through his own voice and expression. The great public speeches are here, but so are a number of occasional letters and memos. The purpose of this book is to furnish the pleasure and, if I may invoke an ancient claim for the value of literature, the moral benefit of reading a great writer.

Lincoln was a writer who, as Shelby Foote once put it, wrote Americansame kind of American that Mark Twain was to write later on. His language was astringent and undecorated compared with the perfumed rhetoric, or what Lincoln himself called the bombastic parades, of his time. The strength and distinctiveness of his style, as Douglas Wilson has shown in an excellent book, Lincolns Sword: The Presidency and the Power of Words, is clear in the revisions he made of speeches first sketched or drafted by others, such as the first inaugural address, in which Seward had a hand. He was also what might be called a speakerly writera writer, that is, who understood, as the historian Perry Miller once wrote, that language as printed on the page must convey the emphasis, the hesitancies, the searchings of language as it is spoken. His friend William Herndon reported that Lincoln often read aloud in order better to absorb the meaning of what he was reading. Reading