Abraham Lincoln: pocket GIANTS E-Book

Adam I.P. Smith

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Serie: pocket GIANTS
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 125

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

The President who 'freed' the slaves and held the Union together in the face of the slaveholding South's bid to create a separate Confederacy. The teller of ribald stories, and the author of the most sublime speeches in the English language. A clever, complex, secretive man who rose from frontier obscurity to become the central figure at the moment when the United States of America came close to disintegration. Was Lincoln the 'Great Emancipator', whose wartime leadership helped free four million enslaved people? Or was he a nationalist who jumped late on the antislavery bandwagon? Was his intransigence the cause of much bloodshed? Or was he a pragmatist whose leadership minimised the destruction of the war? This concise biography situates Lincoln in his time and place. A very human figure who, after his assassination by a leading Shakespearean actor, was turned into an icon.

Leseprobe

For Rosie, Eleanor & Lucy

Acknowledgements

Thank you to Richard Carwardine, David Sim, Daniel Peart and Graham Peck, and my editor Tony Morris, all of whom read the text and made wise suggestions. I am grateful to The History Press for giving me the opportunity to write ‘my’ Lincoln in a form that was highly congenial to me.

Contents

Title

Dedication

Acknowledgements

1 ‘Who Was Abraham Lincoln?’

2 Pioneer

3 Self-Made Man

4 Harbinger of War

5 Nationalist

6 War Leader

7 Emancipator

8 Poet

9 Politician

10 Martyr

Postscript: A Note on the Lincoln Literature

Notes

Timeline

Further Reading

Copyright

1

‘Who Was Abraham Lincoln?’

His structure was loose and leathery; his body was shrunk and shrivelled; he had dark skin, dark hair, and looked woe-struck … His walk was undulatory – catching and pocketing time, weariness and pain, all up and down his person, and thus preventing them from locating.

Herndon, William & Weik, Jesse W., Herndon’s Lincoln, Wilson, Douglas L. & Davis, Rodney O. (eds) (University of Illinois Press, 2006), p. 351

Leo Tolstoy was a great teller of tales. ‘Once while travelling in the Caucuses,’ he told a reporter from the New York World in 1909, he happened to be the guest of a tribal chief, ‘who, living far away from civilized life in the mountains, had but a fragmentary and childish comprehension of the world and its history. The fingers of civilization had never reached him nor his tribe, and all life beyond his native valleys was a dark mystery.’ Gathering his sons and neighbours around him – a ‘score of wild looking riders … sons of the wilderness’ – the chief asked Tolstoy to tell them about the great men of the world. ‘I spoke at first,’ recalled Tolstoy, ‘of our Czars and their victories; then I spoke of the greatest military leaders. My talk seemed to impress them greatly. The story of Napoleon was so interesting to them that I had to tell them every detail, as, for instance, how his hands looked, how tall he was, who made his guns and pistols and the colour of his horse.’ Yet this was not enough. ‘But you have not told us a syllable about the greatest general and greatest ruler of the world,’ said the chief gravely. ‘We want to know something about him. He was a hero. He spoke with a voice of thunder; he laughed like the sunrise and his deeds were as strong as the rock and as sweet as the fragrance of roses. The angels appeared to his mother and predicted that the son whom she would conceive would become the greatest the stars had ever seen. He was so great that he even forgave the crimes of his greatest enemies and shook brotherly hands with those who had plotted against his life. His name was Lincoln and the country in which he lived is called America, which is so far away that if a youth should journey to reach it he would be an old man when he arrived. Tell us of that man.’1

What are we to make of this story? Why did it sound plausible to people who read it? First, it reminds us that Lincoln’s image has transcended the historical reality of the flesh-and-blood man. He matters to us today almost as much for what his image has come to mean as for what he achieved in his lifetime. Second, Tolstoy’s story is evidence that Lincoln – in so many ways the quintessential American figure – is also a global figure. The America Lincoln represents is universal: a place and an idea that matters to non-Americans as well. He embodies a ‘good’ America, defined in opposition to its imperialism or materialism. It was, after all, Lincoln who spoke about his struggle to defeat the Confederacy in the Civil War as the battle to ensure that ‘government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth’.2 For him, as for most other Americans in the nineteenth century – and many others around the world – it was literally true that the United States was the ‘last, best hope of earth’.3

Tolstoy’s Lincoln story suggests that Lincoln has been a figure in world history not just because of what he did but also because of what, or who, he seems to be. This brings us to a paradox. For all that has been written about Lincoln, he remains somehow unknowable. The facts of his life are clear enough. We have an eight-volume set of his writings and thousands of items of incoming correspondence, freely searchable on the Library of Congress website. His face is chiselled into Mount Rushmore; it is on the 1¢ coin and the $5 bill. He is famous enough to have featured in The Simpsons, in a film about vampire slayers and even in the National Enquirer (in a story claiming he was a cross-dresser). We feel we should know Lincoln; yet, like colleagues and associates in his own lifetime, in many important ways we don’t. William Herndon, who spent the best part of ten years sharing a law office with him, thought Lincoln one of the most ‘shut-mouthed men’ he had ever met when it came to his inner thoughts. In fact, apart from his combustible relationship with his wife Mary, Lincoln really only ever had one truly close friend, Joshua Speed. And even that friendship became more distant after both had married. (Speed ended up running a slave plantation in Kentucky when his old friend rose to the leadership of the new antislavery party, the Republicans.)

Tolstoy told all he knew, but his listeners wanted more. The great novelist promised to ride to the nearest town to find them a photograph. Sometime later he returned and presented the portrait of Lincoln to one of the tribesmen, whose ‘hands trembled’ as he ‘gazed for several minutes silently like one in a reverent prayer’. ‘Don’t you find,’ said the tribesman after a while, ‘judging from his picture, that his eyes are full of tears and that his lips are sad with a secret sorrow?’ Lincoln’s mournful eyes are indeed compelling. There was ‘a strong tinge of sadness in Mr Lincolns composition’, recalled a fellow lawyer. ‘He felt very strongly that there was more of discomfort than real happiness in human existence [even] under the most favorable circumstances.’4

Lincoln suffered from bouts of depression throughout his life. He once confessed that he sought company because when he was by himself he could be so overwhelmed with sadness that he ‘never dare[d] carry a knife in his pocket’.5 His melancholy was well known among those who knew him. People saw it not as an illness but as a natural way of being and one that was associated with exceptional talent. Romantic poets, after all, were the heroes of Lincoln’s age. Rather than a weakness, a thoughtful, reflective sadness could be a sign of depth and manliness. Civil War soldiers not only routinely slept cuddled up together (‘spooning’, they called it), but also sang sentimental songs with titles like ‘Weeping Sad and Lonely’ and no one questioned their manhood for doing so.

To his poet-biographer Carl Sandburg, one source of Lincoln’s fascination was his contrasting qualities. He was ‘steel and velvet … hard as rock and soft as drifting fog’. The man who broke down in tears in front of a press reporter and a senator, after hearing that the dashing young Elmer Ellsworth, his former law clerk, had been shot by a rebel sympathiser in May 1861, was also the man who refused to visit his dying father despite the desperate pleas of his stepbrother.6 There are many Lincolns – many people who claim him as their own. In Lincoln’s ‘ordinariness’ is not just a familiar humanity, but the tantalising glimpse of his vulnerability.

Ultimately, however, Abraham Lincoln qualifies as a historical ‘giant’ not because of the ways his image and the stories about him have drawn so many to him, but quite simply because he was at the centre of events that shaped the modern world. His election to the presidency of the United States in 1860 was such a provocation to the southern slave-holding states that eleven of them carried out a long-standing threat to break away from the Union, forming a separate, independent Confederacy. It was Lincoln as much as anyone who was willing to use violence in response to the break-up of the United States. Herndon remembered Lincoln, as President-Elect, vowing to ‘make one vast grave yard of the valley of the Mississippi – yes of the whole South, if I must – to maintain, preserve, and defend the Union and Constitution in all their ancient integrity’.7 Such words were cheap before the first shot had been fired; there followed a four-year civil war that, as is the case with most conflicts, cost far more in blood and treasure than anyone foresaw. At least 670,000 people had been killed by the time General Lee surrendered at Appomattox on Palm Sunday 1865. To Lincoln’s supporters these were sacrifices made on the altar of the nation.

Through his words as well as his actions – for his elegant, unpretentious prose makes him one of the world’s greatest political speechwriters – Lincoln is imagined as having ‘re-founded’ the American nation. If George Washington brought what he called the ‘great experiment’ of the new republic into being, it was Lincoln who defined it and secured its future – and thus laid the foundations for the United States’ twentieth-century dominance. Lincoln’s nationalism has worn well historically because he offered a liberal, antislavery vision of the nation that seems modern. He may appear a slightly comical figure in modern popular culture, with his absurdly tall hat and an arrangement of facial hair that has never since been fashionable, yet he is also a relevant one, for with only a little imagination, Lincoln’s political sensibility appears not so distant from our own. Today, he is claimed by liberals as well as by conservatives, and held up by virtually all as a yardstick against whom the pygmy politicians of the present are measured.

Lincoln’s perceived relevance – his place in the historical imagination of generations of people in the United States and beyond – also owes much to his role in the abolition of slavery. More than 4 million people of African ancestry were emancipated during or immediately after the American Civil War, although their future legal status in the United States remained unclear at the time of Lincoln’s death. The Confederacy had claimed its place alongside the multiple other nationalities emerging in the mid-nineteenth century despite, or even because of, its assertion that a particular race of human beings could be bought and sold like property. This coerced human property was the basis of the South’s economy. How might industrial capitalism have developed differently had the South won? We will never know, but the potential weight of the question indicates why northern victory seemed at the time, and ever since, to have mattered so much. If Lincoln does not necessarily deserve as much credit as he has sometimes received for the abolition of slavery, he certainly played the principal role in binding emancipation into a compelling narrative of the meaning of the war. To a remarkable extent, the dominant interpretation of the Civil War is Lincoln’s. It was he who wanted people to see Union victory as a triumph of modernity (though southern slaveholders were nothing if not modern in their own way – operating as fully fledged capitalists in a global market). It was Lincoln, too, who, above all, wanted people to associate the United States with freedom and to see that its use of force was for the universal benefit of mankind. When we talk about Lincoln, we are reckoning with both the historical man and his legacy.

The Civil War is not just the formative story of American nationhood, nor did it matter only as the most dramatic chapter in the story of emancipation and economic development. It was also a central event in the nineteenth century. It disrupted world trade and polarised politics as far afield as Brazil and Britain. At stake in the conflict seemed to be all the issues that were coursing through the world at this moment of heightened global inter-connectedness: what was a nation? Could democracy replace older forms of authority? What, in practice, did ‘freedom’ mean? Abraham Lincoln was at the centre of it all.

The United States mattered to Europeans in the nineteenth century as a promise (or, to some, a threat) of the possibility of popular government. Many of the leading political thinkers of the time understood the great question of the age as being about the struggle for democratic nationhood – that is, states defined by and responsive to ‘the people’ rather than barons, kings, or emperors. In this dichotomous world, Lincoln came to represent democracy more perfectly than any other figure, not just because of what he said or did, but because of who he was. Narratives of Lincoln’s life were published regularly in Europe as well as America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and at their core was the story of his rise from humble origins to the highest office in the land – from the ‘plough to the presidency’, as one British biographer put it.8

What put the seal on the Lincoln legend was his assassination, on Good Friday, 14 April 1865. The President had been in unusually good spirits that day, telling some of his Cabinet members about a dream that he believed augured good fortune. The war was over. General Lee, the Confederate commander, had surrendered and his bedraggled, hungry men appeared only too willing to disband and trek back to their homes. That evening, Lincoln and his wife Mary rode by carriage from the White House to Ford’s Theatre for a performance of a popular British comedy. The Lincolns were late, missing the first few minutes of the play. The action on stage stopped as they appeared in a box to take their seats and the band struck up ‘Hail to the Chief’. Waiting for Lincoln that night was a well-known actor and Confederate sympathiser, John Wilkes Booth. This was Wilkes’ moment on the world stage, with himself as the hero of a melodrama of revenge and catharsis. ‘Sic Semper Tyranis’ (‘Thus, always to tyrants’) some in the audience remembered Booth shouting as he jumped to the stage after shooting the President in the back of the head. Lincoln did not die at once, but he never regained consciousness. He was carried across the road to the ground-floor bedroom of a boarding house, where his life slipped away the following morning.