February 12, 1809–April 15, 1865
HIGHEST RANK:
American President
ASTROLOGICAL SIGN:
Aquarius
NICKNAMES:
Honest Abe, the Rail-splitter, Father Abraham, the Great Emancipator
WORDS TO REMEMBER:
“Doesn’t it strike you as queer that I, who couldn’t cut the head off of a chicken, and who was sick at the sight of blood, should be cast into the middle of a great war, with blood flowing all about me?”
The election of 1860 was a strange one. To begin with, the Democrats coughed up two candidates. Divided like the rest of the country over slavery, the party of Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren—the political juggernaut that had dominated the national scene for years—simply blew apart. Senator Stephen Douglas was the natural front-runner, but he had infuriated many Southern Democrats for views that were hostile to the spread of slavery into the territories. Mostly (though not exclusively) from Dixie, these disillusioned Dems favored an aggressive, national pro-slavery platform. At their own little get-together, they nominated Vice President John Breckinridge as an alternative candidate. The Constitutional Union Party, which went out of its way to say nothing of substance on the slavery issue, threw a former senator from Tennessee named John Bell into the race, with no real chance of victory.
When Abraham Lincoln was called out to a duel by state auditor James Shields, the future president agreed to the challenge—and chose broadswords as the weapon of choice.
Taking them all on was the Republican Party, which specifically opposed the spread of slavery in its platform. The 1860 contest was immensely important for them, as it marked a genuine opportunity to put a man in the Executive Mansion. Consequently, their cleanup hitters—William Seward and Salmon Chase—came out swinging. Unfortunately for them, they were swinging too hard. Considered too radical for the Republican rank and file, neither of these very esteemed and capable politicians ended up getting on the ballot. The man who did was a typical dark horse, chosen for his moderate views and capacity to appease. His name was Abraham Lincoln, an Illinois attorney and politician known for his eloquent speeches against slavery, sinewy frontier strength, earthy humor, and ill-fitting clothes. In the election that followed, his name did not even appear on most Southern ballots, so extraordinary was the hatred for him and his party in that part of the country. But he would win forty percent of the popular vote and a clean majority in the electoral college. A gawky, self-educated depressive, he was now president of a vast republic teetering on the edge of calamity.
It soon stopped teetering and plunged right in—not in spite of Lincoln’s election, but because of it. He was an unlikely figure to bring the world’s foremost democratic civilization to its knees. Born to a poor backwoods family in 1809, he grew up in the wilds of Kentucky and Indiana. Lincoln hardly knew his mother, who died before his tenth year, and came to fear his father, whose bad luck, large family, and lack of resources compelled him to lease Abe out as a laborer for extra money. Abe loved his adoring stepmother, however, and came to love words just as much—reading them, writing them, memorizing them. Though he acquired less than a year’s worth of formal education, he discovered a fascination for the intellectual life that was totally at odds with his manual, impoverished, frontier situation. He absorbed The Life of George Washington and Aesop’s Fables and tried his own hand at prose and poetry when he was able. Determined to better himself, he became practiced at writing, a skill that was hard to come by in the forests of the Old Northwest. As a boy he was transcribing the correspondence of neighbors.
In 1830, the Lincolns moved to Illinois. A precocious young man who could entertain an audience for hours from a soapbox or a pickle barrel, Abe was desperate to get out from under his father and do something on his own. Though unusually well read for his environment, Abe’s most obvious asset was his six-foot-four-inch frame. He could wield an ax like nobody’s business, and local thugs learned to fear his ability to wrestle and to throw a devastating haymaker. To his dying day, Lincoln would remain a formidable physical specimen, despite the toll on his health that the war would take. Most have never stopped to think about it, but it bears consideration that the sixteenth president—that hallowed sage who penned the Gettysburg Address—was more able than most of his contemporaries to defend himself in a tight spot. Nevertheless, Lincoln’s gnarly frame was just a last resort and nothing more. He hated physical labor, which goes a long way toward explaining his need to escape the family and do something … different.
Lincoln became a storekeeper, a militia captain during the Black Hawk War, a surveyor, and a postmaster, among other things. Whatever he did, he exuded an attractive capacity for humor and intelligence. He made people think and laugh and connect without burdening them with the knowledge that they were doing so. In short, he was becoming a damn good politician. Elected to four consecutive terms in the state legislature, he spent much of his time studying law—intensely. He was to pass the bar and become one of Illinois’s most celebrated circuit lawyers; and it was all made possible by his own instruction. Licensed to practice from 1836, Lincoln entered a series of law partnerships that built his reputation as “Honest Abe”—a lawyer of better than average ability whose closings were always entertaining and who never lied or trucked with liars. He would eventually snag clients as big and lucrative as the Illinois Central Railroad.
In 1846, he was elected to a single term in the U.S. House of Representatives, attracting some attention as a cunning opponent of the war with Mexico. But his most significant performance on the national stage came with defeat. After leaving his Whig origins behind, Lincoln became the most famous Republican in Illinois. He ran for the United States Senate in 1858 against the pugnacious, diminutive Stephen Douglas and lost. His debates with the “little giant,” however, were among the most substantive and sensational in the country, pitting two extraordinary public debaters against each other over the toughest issue of the day: the nature and fate of slavery. Douglas went to Washington; but his opponent had left a lasting impression.
Especially in the minds of his fellow Republicans, who liked him as a candidate. Not only was Lincoln persuasive and well liked, he was also easier to sell to the people than some wild-eyed abolitionist bent on the destruction of slavery everywhere immediately. He did not have the national stature of a Chase or a Seward. But he was a safe choice for a new party with a bold agenda.
The party’s choice paid off, precipitating the country’s most disastrous crisis. This rough cornstalk of a man, hailing from the rutted wilds of America’s interior, with virtually no real schooling, had become the most powerful figure in the nation and a casus belli. Now what? To begin with, Lincoln formed a cabinet that was everything he wasn’t: polished, highly educated, and confrontational. Salmon Chase became secretary of the treasury, for instance, and William Seward was made secretary of state. That Lincoln ended up controlling and ultimately winning over these men—some of whom coveted his job and thought him unworthy of it—was a measure of his inner strength and ability. But he was unable to control events with nearly as much success. When Rebel batteries fired onFort Sumter, which South Carolina claimed as Confederate property and Lincoln chose to supply and defend, it began an escalation of violence for which the new president was ill prepared. He called up 75,000 militiamen from the states to serve for ninety days. Needless to say, he would end up needing a lot more.
He would need something else, too: power. Lincoln said that his intention was to maintain the union of the states, and he meant it. The dissolution of that union presented an emergency dire enough, in his eyes, to test the limits of the constitution that governed it. He wasn’t just a wartime president; he was president of a nation that had temporarily ceased to exist in its conventional sense, leaving him a uniquely wide berth when it came to executive authority. Congress obliged by awarding him liberal war powers. James Buchanan, his predecessor, had balked at using force to coerce secessionists back to the fold for the same reason, ironically, that he hated secessionists: it was unconstitutional. It is to Lincoln’s credit that he forced a way out of that circuitous thinking.
Nevertheless, it was a terrific risk. Suspending the writ of habeas corpus, declaring martial law in the border states, and arresting writers and editors hostile to the administration hardly endeared the president to many of his fellow Americans. But one group in the North took particular issue with the president’s performance: the abolitionists. When several of his leading generals began freeing slaves in occupied territory on their own authority, he was quick to reverse their decisions. It is one of those intriguing ironies of history that the thing about Lincoln that caused the South to secede when he was elected—a direct hostility to slavery—was the same thing that he was willing to suspend in order to mend the mess that his election had created. In other words, he ended up pleasing no one: not the slaveholders whose human property, they believed, he was out to set loose, and not the abolitionists, whose agenda he seemed entirely willing to trash in the name of the Union.
Lincoln was many things, and not all of them flattering. But one of his greatest qualities was a capacity to learn and grow—fast. It became apparent to him that a war of radical dangers required radical action to win. He had always had a revulsion toward slavery, a fact that abolitionists like Frederick Douglass took pains to remind him of. And as the war crept into its second nightmarish year, proving that all bets were off, Lincoln was compelled to understand the role that his revulsion had in the fight for union. The Emancipation Proclamation was a brilliant way of blending the abolitionist agenda with a practical war measure: affecting only those slaves in Rebel states (as opposed to those slave states like Maryland and Kentucky that remained loyal to the Union), it fell under Lincoln’s jurisdiction as commander in chief. With stealth and conviction, the president had broadened the scope and purpose of the war. It would prove decisive as well as historic.
Of course, to be truly decisive he needed to win a military conflict. A really big military conflict. But pushing a few rowdies around as a militia “captain” in his youth didn’t make him an Alexander the Great. The quintessential self-taught man, Lincoln studied up on tactics and did his best to understand the basics. But that took a while. In the meantime, he trusted in men who took advantage of his expansive nature or even thwarted his true objectives. George McClellan was a perfect example, but only the most sensational. There were plenty of others. Lincoln needed victories; but not really knowing precisely what it was that brought them about, he relied on the advice of those of mediocre ability. The Federal war machine staggered forward, honing its effectiveness at a dreadfully slow and costly rate. This was Lincoln’s burden: to maintain his intensity of purpose and never lose sight of the ultimate prize in the face of unprecedented death and destruction—a relentless harvest of lives that could conceivably be laid at his feet. “I expect to maintain this contest until successful, or till I die,” he once said. Lesser men would’ve disappeared beneath the pressure.
If he was to have constant trouble on the military front, the president handled his political battles with much more confidence and felicity. This was fortunate for him and the country, as Lincoln had serious trouble from his own cabinet members right from the beginning. One of them, Secretary of War Simon Cameron, was a political appointee whose ham-handed management made it easy for the president to sack and banish him abroad as minister to Russia. He was replaced with the eminently capable Edwin Stanton. But when it came to Secretaries Seward and Chase, Lincoln was dealing with men who—though covetous of his power—were necessary to the war effort. He was deeply irritated by them, but smart enough to appreciate their abilities. Just as bad were the Republican hotheads in Congress who hounded the administration for every error. Lincoln’s genius was to play all these self-important men off each other, manipulating their egos and maneuvering them into positions of agreement that were of use to him. Those who saw what was happening were usually too late to alter the president’s manipulations, and often merely felt more respect for him afterward. (In reference to the balance he had acquired in his cabinet between Chase and Seward, Lincoln once likened himself to a farmer riding to market on a horse whose load had been evened out by a pumpkin in each saddlebag.) It wasn’t long before enemies who originally dismissed him as a frontier yokel were singing a very different tune. This guy was not to be trifled with.
It was a lot to deal with, to be sure. And Lincoln had also to cope with an increasingly hysterical wife and the death of his son Willie in 1862. Through such nightmares, Lincoln had always expressed two reactions that were seemingly inseparable: deep melancholy and colorful humor. Having long ago honed the latter in order to dull the edge of the former, the president waded through the unending litany of wartime setbacks with both writ plainly on his face. He became the funniest and most depressed man many in Washington ever met. And, perhaps, the most sensitive. As a child he had shot a turkey and been mortified by it, becoming acutely distressed by the sight of suffering in any form. Now he was the chief player in a great national evisceration—one of the few who could possibly bring it all to an end, but who was compelled instead to keep it going toward a goal that seemed farther and farther away with every bloodletting. And yet he chased his children like a carefree youngster, told coarse frontier tales that made people blush, kept his office door open to office-seekers and quacks, and indulged a parade of inventors peddling the next war-winning weapon (one of which, a kind of grenade, became a fixture on Lincoln’s desk as a paperweight). It wasn’t the life that many would’ve preferred for a stern wartime president, but Lincoln always did things his own way, and—whenever possible—emphasized forbearance. “Let me tell you a story,” he once said to an assistant secretary of war who had come to tell Lincoln that the infamous Confederate agent Jacob Thompson was reportedly fleeing Portland, Maine. “There was an Irish soldier here last summer who wanted something to drink stronger than water, and stopped at a drug shop where he espied a soda fountain. ‘Mr. Doctor,’ said he, ‘give me, please, a glass of soda water, an’ if yez can put in a few drops of whiskey, unbeknown to anyone, I’ll be obliged.’ Now, if Jake Thompson is permitted to go through Maine ‘unbeknown to anyone,’ what’s the harm?”
He could be profound as well as endearing—Lincoln contributed to posterity some of the most outstanding speeches ever spoken in English. But not everyone was listening to what he was saying. To people who stood at the culmination of generations of racist indoctrination, Lincoln was an incredibly dangerous fool. He himself was unsure as to how the country would cope with its African freedmen and Confederate defeated, but he was forming ideas that reflected his optimism and forgiveness. The world would never see them put into action. John Wilkes Booth, a middling actor and passionately pro-Southern malefactor, wasn’t the most famous or interesting man to hate the president. But he was base enough to consider kidnapping him—a pet project Booth had been working on since 1861. Confederate defeat spurred him to up the stakes, and he decided to get rid of his target altogether. On April 14, 1865, the actor snuck up behind Lincoln during a performance of a comedy called Our American Cousin in Ford’s Theatre, and shot him in the back of the head. “Father Abraham” was dead the next morning.
He lived long enough to see the surrender of Lee, which had become the purpose of all that he endured and worked for. In essence, Lincoln was the Civil War: his election had sparked it, his reelection had decided it, and his death marked its close. Fortunately for us, he showed as great a capacity for metamorphosis as the nation he gave his life to save.
MISCHIEF
Lincoln had an overdeveloped sense of humor that became one of his hallmarks. In 1829 he and some fellow jokesters targeted the Grigsby family, into which Lincoln’s sister Sarah had married before her death in childbirth. When a double wedding was thrown for two of Reuben Grigsby’s sons, Abe—who was not invited—devoted his efforts to wreaking havoc with the wedding night festivities. He had a conspirator lead the grooms that night to the wrong brides, creating a flurry of embarrassment. Lincoln, who always blamed the Grigsbys for his sister’s death, immortalized the silly little escapade in “The Chronicles of Reuben,” a lyrical bit of satire that people in southern Indiana were still reciting long after its author had moved to Illinois and greater glory.
LITERARY LICENSE
During the early 1840s, Lincoln and his soon-to-be bride, Mary Todd, weren’t exactly hitting it off. Jealousies had gotten the better of both of them and the relationship was truly in trouble. But as David Herbert Donald recounts in Lincoln, fate intervened in the form of … economics. When the State Bank of Illinois failed, Lincoln and other Whigs took it as an opportunity to attack the Democratic leadership of the state. For his part, Abe wrote a series of scathing letters to the editor of a local paper against the state auditor James Shields using the pseudonym “Rebecca.” Though Abe’s jabs were more than enough, Mary Todd and a friend took up Lincoln’s lead and joined the fun, contributing their own letter to the series under the same alias. Shields finally reached his limit of tolerance and pressed the newspaper editor to divulge the identity of “Rebecca.” Abe did the gentlemanly thing and owned up to it all, sparing any mention whatsoever of his female co-conspirators. But the excitable object of his published barbs was demanding satisfaction. On September 22, 1842, Lincoln and Shields met on the field of honor—in Missouri, as dueling was quite illegal in Illinois. Abe, as the challenged party, had his choice of weapons. Taking his height and strength into consideration, he chose broadswords. (Yikes!) “If it had been necessary,” said Lincoln, “I could have split him from the crown of his head to the end of his backbone.”
Fortunately, it didn’t come to that. The duelists’ seconds got the two to agree that the whole mixup had been a symptom of political passion, and everyone ended up shaking hands. The affair may not have given Abe an opportunity to show off his filleting skills, but it did do something just as significant (and a lot less bloody): Impressed by Lincoln’s chivalry in protecting her identity, Mary Todd came around and the troubled lovebirds were back on track. They would be married by the end of the year.
Facing Facts
Lincoln wasn’t exactly a dashing young figure. His fellow Republicans had their concerns during the 1860 election campaign that voters might be less than smitten by photographs of the wiry lawyer from Illinois. They ended up getting a solution from the unlikeliest of sources. Her name was Grace Bedell, she was eleven years old, and she lived in Westfield, New York. Grace wrote a letter to the Republican candidate suggesting that he grow a beard: “You would look a great deal better for your face is so thin.” Though Lincoln joked about the matter at first, he was soon sporting whiskers and would never return to the smooth-shaven look. Thanks to Ms. Bedell, Abraham Lincoln would be the first American president to wear a beard.
WHAT A GUY
When Lincoln assumed office as president, he seemed a little overwhelmed. After all, he had never had a position of supreme executive authority before, and he had trouble delineating the boundaries. One of the most conspicuous examples involved office seekers. Patronage was the bane of nineteenth-century White House life, as everyone wanted a job or a posting or a commission from the new big cheese. But Lincoln, far from turning most of them away, insisted on letting them have their say—in person. From early in the morning until well past sundown, the president’s office was open to all comers, who often lined up outside his door and wound all the way downstairs. Few were rewarded with what they came for, but nearly everyone got a frontier tale to ease their rejection—Lincoln was usually the most amused by his own stories and jokes, shamelessly slapping his knee and bending over in laughter. When he returned to Washington after delivering his Gettysburg Address in 1863, the president became ill and was diagnosed with a minor form of smallpox. “Now I have something I can give everybody,” he quipped.