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Autobiographical Sketch (December 20, 1859)

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On December 20, 2009

In The Railsplitter

Ranking

#5 on the list of 150 Most Teachable Lincoln Documents

Annotated Transcript

Context.  In December 1859, Abraham Lincoln drafted his first extensive autobiographical narrative, a roughly 600-word sketch prepared at the request of an old friend and Republican newspaper editor Jesse W. Fell, who was asking on behalf of a Republican newspaper from Chester County, Pennsylvania that was preparing a series of profiles on the leading contenders for the 1860 Republican presidential nomination. The brief summary became the starting point for subsequent newspaper articles and campaign biographies and illustrates how Lincoln wanted his own story presented to voters in 1860. (By Matthew Pinsker)

“I was born Feb. 12, 1809, in Hardin County, Kentucky….” 

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HD Daily Report, December 20, 1859

The Lincoln Log, December 20, 1859

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Matthew Pinsker: Understanding Lincoln: Autobiographical Sketch (1859) from The Gilder Lehrman Institute on Vimeo.

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Other Primary Sources

Lincoln’s second attempt at autobiography, May-June, 1860

Chester County Times, “Abraham Lincoln,” February 11, 1860

How Historians Interpret

“[Jesse W. Fell] requested an autobiography of Lincoln for use among Eastern voters, who knew little or nothing about Lincoln’s life.  The brief and modest autobiography Lincoln sent on December 20 was forwarded immediately to a Pennsylvania friend of Fell’s and was widely reprinted in newspapers in that key state. It is one of the more important sources of information on Lincoln’s family history and early life.”

–Mark E. Neely, Jr., The Abraham Lincoln Encyclopedia (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company: 1980), 108.

 

“In December 1859, Lincoln made another quiet move to gain broader recognition by preparing an autobiography for campaign purposes.  Jesse W. Fell, a Bloomington politician, forwarded a request from Joseph J. Lewis, of the Chester County (Pennsylvania) Times, for biographical information he could use in preparing an article on Lincoln.  Lincoln complied with a terse sketch that reviewed his homespun beginnings, summarized his public career, and ended: “If any personal description of me is thought desirable, it may be said, I am, in height, six feet, four inches, nearly; lean in flesh, weighing on average, one hundred and eighty pounds; dark complexion, with coarse black hair, and grey eyes –no other marks or brands recollected.”  This he sent to Fell, noting, “There is not much of it, for the reason, I suppose, that there is not much of me.”  Lewis evidently found the sketch meager, for he embroidered it with remarks on Lincoln’s oratorical gifts and on his long record of support for a protective tariff, so dear to Pennsylvanians.  His article, widely copied in other Republican newspapers, was the first published biography of Lincoln.”

—David Herbert Donald, Lincoln (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 237

 

“Early in Lincoln’s senatorial campaign against Stephen A. Douglas, on June 29, 1858, Charles H. Ray of the newly consolidated Chicago Press & Tribune wrote to Lincoln: “We want an autobiography of Abraham Lincoln, the next U. S. Senator from Illinois, to be placed at our discretion, for publication if expedient. ‘A plain unvarnished tale’ is what we would desire. You are the only man who can furnish the facts. To save the imputation of having done it to us, you might give Herndon the points, and he would send them to us. We do not care for a narrative — only a record of dates, place of nativity, parentage, early occupations, trials, disadvantages &c &c — all of which will make, if we are rightly informed, a telling story.” Lincoln’s reply is lost, but it is clear from Ray’s next letter that the candidate demurred. But Ray persisted. In his next letter he wrote: “In my way of thinking, you occupy a position, present and prospectively, that need not shrink from the declaration of an origin ever so humble. If you have been the architect of your own fortunes, you may claim the most merit. The best part of the Lincoln family is not, like potatoes, under the ground. Had you not better reconsider your refusal?” (See Ray to Lincoln, July, 1858).  That Lincoln did not reconsider is evident in a letter Ray subsequently sent him in late July from upstate New York: “You will not consider it an unfavorable reflection on your antecedents, when I tell you that you are like Byron, who woke up one morning and found himself famous. In my journey here from Chicago, and now here — one of the most out-of-the-way, rural districts in the State, among a law-going and conservative people, who are further from railroads than any man can be in Illinois — I have found hundreds of anxious enquiries burning to know all about the newly raised up opponent of Douglas — his age, profession, personal appearance and qualities &c &c.” (Ray to Lincoln, July 28, 1858). Whether Lincoln actually relented and yielded to Ray’s repeated requests is not known, but Ray’s initial request — “only a record of dates, place of nativity, parentage, early occupations, trials, disadvantages &c &c” — seems an apt description of the autobiographical statements Lincoln eventually composed. What is clear is that the present document was not Lincoln’s first such attempt. That was written some six months earlier and was sent to Jesse W. Fell on Dec. 20, 1859. (See Abraham Lincoln, Autobiographical Sketch for Jesse W. Fell, December 20, 1859). While it is written in the first, rather than the third person, and is much more succinct than the present statement, it follows a similar outline, and some of its phrases are repeated here.”

—Editors of the Abraham Lincoln Papers at the Library of Congress, Note 1, Autobiographical Notes, May-June 1860, http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?ammem/mal:@field(DOCID+@lit(d0321400))

“Abraham Lincoln wrote this ‘little sketch’ of his first fifty years just five months before his nomination to the presidency. He composed it as a research tool for a newspaper feature designed to introduce the still largely unknown western politician to the East. ‘There is not much of it,’ Lincoln apologized in a cover letter, ‘for the reason, I suppose, that there is not much of me.’ Predictably, it was sumptuously embellished when adapted by the Chester County (Pennsylvania) Times on February 11, 1860, even though Lincoln wanted something ‘modest’ that did not ‘go beyond the materials.’ The article was widely reprinted in other pro-Republican organs. But it is the original Lincoln text that remains a principle source of our knowledge about the guardedly private public figure his own law partner complained was ‘the most shut-mouthed man I knew.’ In truth, the sketch rarely travels beyond perfunctory facts toward the realm of insight, and it ends with the vaguest of personal descriptions of the face that would soon become the most recognizable in America. Although he authored more than a million words altogether, Lincoln would produce nothing further about himself except for a slightly longer account of his early days written in 1860 as the basis of a campaign biography. Even though democracy could claim no more convincing validation than his own rise, Lincoln the writer hardly ever illuminated Lincoln the man. Where Lincoln is concerned, history comes no closer to autobiography than this.”

—Mario M. Cuomo and Harold Holzer, Lincoln on Democracy, (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), xlix

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Springfield, Dec: 20. 1859

My dear Sir: 

Herewith is a little sketch, as you requested– There is not much of it, for the reason, I suppose, that there is not much of me– If anything is made out of it, I wish it to be modest, and not to go beyond the materials– If it were thought necessary to incorporate any thing from any of my speeches, I suppose there would be no objection– Of course it must not appear to have been written by myself– Yours very truly

A. Lincoln

[ Enclosure:] 
I was born Feb. 12, 1809, in Hardin County, Kentucky. My parents were both born in Virginia, of undistinguished families — second families, perhaps I should say– My Mother, who died in my ninthtenth year, was of a family of the name of Hanks, some of whom now reside in Adams, and others in Macon counties, Illinois– My paternal grandfather, Abraham Lincoln, emigrated from Rockingham County, Virginia, to Kentucky, about 1781 or 2, when, a year or two later, he was killed by indians, not in battle, but by stealth, when he was laboring to open a farm in the forest– His ancestors, who were quakers, went to Virginia from Berks County, Pennsylvania– An effort to identify them with the New-England family of the same name ended in nothing more definite, than a similarity of Christian names in both families, such as Enoch, Levi, Mordecai, Solomon, Abraham, and the like–

My father, at the death of his father, was but six years of age; and he grew up, litterally without education– He removed from Kentucky to what is now Spencer county, Indiana, in my eighth year– We reached our new home about the time the State came into the Union– It was a wild region, with many bears and other wild animals still in the woods– There I grew up– There were some schools, so called; but no qualification was ever required of a teacher, beyond the reading, writing, and Arithmetic “readin, writin, and cipherin” to the Rule of Three– If a straggler supposed to understand latin, happened to sojourn in the neighborhood, he was looked upon as a wizzard– There was absolutely nothing to excite ambition for education. Of course when I came of age I did not know much– Still somehow, I could read, write, and cipher to the Rule of Three, but that was all– I have not been to school since– The little advance I now have upon this store of education, I havehave picked up from time to time under the pressure of necessity–

I was raised to farm work, which I continued till I was twenty two– At twenty one I came to Illinois, and passed the first year in Illinois— Macon County — Then I got to New-Salem ( then at that time in Sangamon, now in Menard County, where I remained a year as a sort of Clerk in a store– then came the Black-Hawk war; and I was elected a Captain of Volunteers — a success which gave me more pleasure than any I have had since– I went the campaign, was elated, ran for the Legislature the same year (1832) and was beaten — the only time I ever have been beaten by the people– The next, and three succeeding biennial elections, I was elected to the Legislature– I was not a candidate afterwards. During this Legislative period I had studied law, and removed to Springfield tomake practice it– In 1846 I was once elected to the lower House of Congress– Was not a candidate for re-election– From 1849 to 1854, both inclusive, practiced law more assiduously than ever before– Always a whig in politics, and generally on the whig electoral tickets, making active canvasses– I was losing interest in politics, when the repeal of the Missouri Compromise aroused me again– What I have done since then is pretty well known —

If any personal description of me is thought desired desirable, it may be said, I am, in height, six feet, four inches, nearly; lean in flesh, weighing, on an average, one hundred and eighty pounds; dark complexion, with coarse black hair, and grey eyes — no other marks or brands recollected–

First Campaign Statement (March 9, 1832)

By

On June 10, 2013

In The Railsplitter

Ranking

#18 on the list of 150 Most Teachable Lincoln Documents

Annotated Transcript

Context.  Abraham Lincoln was twenty-three-years-old and working as a clerk in a store in the small village of New Salem, Illinois (situated about 20 miles north of Springfield along the Sangamo or Sangamon River) when he announced himself in 1832 as a candidate for the Illinois state house of representatives. Lincoln competed against twelve other candidates for four at-large seats. He finished eighth in the August election, falling short of victory by only about 150 votes. His well-crafted campaign statement from March, which detailed his policy positions on issues such as river improvements, may have contributed to what was a reasonably strong showing for someone who had only been living in the district for less than a year. (By Matthew Pinsker)

“To the People of Sangamo County….”

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“Presidents Message – No. III (3d.) Internal Improvements,” Southern Times and State Gazette (Columbia, SC), January 3, 1831

How Historians Interpret

“At his friends’ urging, Lincoln in March 1832 announced himself a candidate for the state legislature. The move was another demonstration of the young man’s supreme self-confidence, his belief that he was at least the equal, if not the superior, of any man he ever met. To be sure, the post he was seeking was not an elevated one … Nevertheless, Lincoln’s decision to announce himself a candidate for the state legislature in March 1832 was a revealing one. Less than a year earlier he had been, in his own words, a ‘friendless, uneducated, penniless boy, working on a flatboat – at ten dollars per month.’ … Other candidates had influential politicians present their names to the electorate, but Lincoln, lacking such support, appealed directly to the public in an announcement published in Springfield’s Sangamo Journal. In drafting and revising it, he probably had some assistance form John McNeil, the storekeeper, and possibly from schoolmaster Mentor Graham, and they may have been responsible for its somewhat orotund quality … In a concluding paragraph Lincoln spoke for himself, rather than for his community, and here he employed his distinctive style, avoiding highfalutin language in favor of simplicity and directness.”

—David H. Donald, Lincoln (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), 42-43

 

“In his campaign announcement of 1832, Lincoln had told the people of Sangamon County that his chief desire was to be ‘esteemed of my fellow men, by rendering myself worthy of their esteem.’ In a brief two years, Lincoln’s abilities and experiences began to coalesce into his gifts of leadership. His intellectual curiosity had pushed beyond the romantic and religious classics he read in his Indiana years to Enlightenment authors who offered critiques of religion. Now feeling at home after living three years in New Salem, he was beginning to find his own voice, not just around the fireside at the country store, but in campaigning in the countryside beyond the little town, where he was known for his clearheaded thinking, whimsical storytelling, and self-deprecating humor. Lincoln’s ambitions for public service were about to be tested and shaped in the larger arena of the Illinois Ninth General Assembly.”

— Ronald C. White, Jr., A. Lincoln: A Biography (New York: Random House Inc., 2009), 60

 

“In his 1832 campaign announcement, Lincoln above all championed government support for internal improvements which would enable subsistence farmers to participate in the market economy and thus escape rural isolation and poverty … Lincoln’s ambition, like that of many politicians, was rooted in an intense craving for deference and approval. But unlike many power-seekers, Lincoln was expansive and generous in his ambition. He desired more than ego-gratifying power and prestige; he wanted everyone to have a chance to escape the soul-crushing poverty and backwardness that he had experienced as a quasi-slave on the frontier.”

— Michael Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln: A Life (2 volumes, originally published by Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008) Unedited Manuscript By Chapter, Lincoln Studies Center, Volume 1, Chapter 3 (PDF), pp. 248-251

 

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To the People of Sangamo County March 9, 1832
 
FELLOW-CITIZENS: Having become a candidate for the honorable office of one of your representatives in the next General Assembly of this state, in accordance with an established custom, and the principles of true republicanism, it becomes my duty to make known to you—the people whom I propose to represent—my sentiments with regard to local affairs.
Time and experience have verified to a demonstration, the public utility of internal improvements. That the poorest and most thinly populated countries would be greatly benefitted by the opening of good roads, and in the clearing of navigable streams within their limits, is what no person will deny. But yet it is folly to undertake works of this or any other kind, without first knowing that we are able to finish them—as half finished work generally proves to be labor lost. There cannot justly be any objection to having rail roads and canals, any more than to other good things, provided they cost nothing. The only objection is to paying for them; and the objection to paying arises from the want of ability to pay.
…The probable cost of this contemplated rail road is estimated at $290,000;—the bare statement of which, in my opinion, is sufficient to justify the belief, that the improvement of Sangamo river is an object much better suited to our infant resources.
Respecting this view, I think I may say, without the fear of being contradicted, that its navigation may be rendered completely practicable, as high as the mouth of the South Fork, or probably higher, to vessels of from 25 to 30 tons burthen, for at least one half of all common years, and to vessels of much greater burthen a part of that time. From my peculiar circumstances, it is probable that for the last twelve months I have given as particular attention to the stage of the water in this river, as any other person in the country. In the month of March, 1831, in company with others, I commenced the building of a flat boat on the Sangamo, and finished and took her out in the course of the spring. Since that time, I have been concerned in the mill at New Salem. These circumstances are sufficient evidence, that I have not been very inattentive to the stages of the water….
…What the cost of this work would be, I am unable to say. It is probable, however, it would not be greater than is common to streams of the same length. Finally, I believe the improvement of the Sangamo river, to be vastly important and highly desirable to the people of this county; and if elected, any measure in the legislature having this for its object, which may appear judicious, will meet my approbation, and shall receive my support.
It appears that the practice of loaning money at exorbitant rates of interest, has already been opened as a field for discussion;  so I suppose I may enter upon it without claiming the honor, or risking the danger, which may await its first explorer. It seems as though we are never to have an end to this baneful and corroding system, acting almost as prejudicial to the general interests of the community as a direct tax of several thousand dollars annually laid on each county, for the benefit of a few individuals only, unless there be a law made setting a limit to the rates of usury. A law for this purpose, I am of opinion, may be made, without materially injuring any class of people. In cases of extreme necessity there could always be means found to cheat the law, while in all other cases it would have its intended effect. I would not favor the passage of a law upon this subject, which might be very easily evaded. Let it be such that the labor and difficulty of evading it, could only be justified in cases of the greatest necessity.
Upon the subject of education, not presuming to dictate any plan or system respecting it, I can only say that I view it as the most important subject which we as a people can be engaged in. That every man may receive at least, a moderate education, and thereby be enabled to read the histories of his own and other countries, by which he may duly appreciate the value of our free institutions, appears to be an object of vital importance, even on this account alone, to say nothing of the advantages and satisfaction to be derived from all being able to read the scriptures and other works, both of a religious and moral nature, for themselves. For my part, I desire to see the time when education, and by its means, morality, sobriety, enterprise and industry, shall become much more general than at present, and should be gratified to have it in my power to contribute something to the advancement of any measure which might have a tendency to accelerate the happy period….
…But, Fellow-Citizens, I shall conclude. Considering the great degree of modesty which should always attend youth, it is probable I have already been more presuming than becomes me. However, upon the subjects of which I have treated, I have spoken as I thought. I may be wrong in regard to any or all of them; but holding it a sound maxim, that it is better to be only sometimes right, than at all times wrong, so soon as I discover my opinions to be erroneous, I shall be ready to renounce them.
Every man is said to have his peculiar ambition. Whether it be true or not, I can say for one that I have no other so great as that of being truly esteemed of my fellow men, by rendering myself worthy of their esteem. How far I shall succeed in gratifying this ambition, is yet to be developed. I am young and unknown to many of you. I was born and have ever remained in the most humble walks of life. I have no wealthy or popular relations to recommend me. My case is thrown exclusively upon the independent voters of this county, and if elected they will have conferred a favor upon me, for which I shall be unremitting in my labors to compensate. But if the good people in their wisdom shall see fit to keep me in the background, I have been too familiar with disappointments to be very much chagrined. 
Your friend and fellow-citizen,
New Salem, March 9, 1832. 
A. LINCOLN.

Lyceum Address (January 27, 1838)

By

On June 10, 2013

In The Railsplitter

Ranking

#19 on the list of 150 Most Teachable Lincoln Documents

Annotated Transcript

Context.  In the fall of 1837, an abolitionist newspaper editor named Elijah Lovejoy was murdered by a pro-slavery mob while trying to defend himself and his printing presses near Alton, Illinois. The murder riveted and polarized the nation, and although Abraham Lincoln did not mention Lovejoy by name in his speech to the Young Men’s Lyceum in January 1838, most historians consider it obvious that he had the incident in mind as he deplored mob violence and urged Americans to uphold their faith in law and republican institutions. In the excerpts from the speech below, Lincoln focused on the threat from what he termed a “Towering genius” who might disturb the successful American experiment in self-government because he desired a new form of glory. Lincoln ominously warned that such a figure might assert himself by “emancipating slaves” or “enslaving free men.” Lincoln was merely in his late twenties at that time, a young, novice attorney and state legislator, still unmarried and renting a room above a store in town. (By Matthew Pinsker)

“That our government should have been maintained….”

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HD Daily Report, January 27, 1838

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Josiah Holbrook, American Lyceum, or Society for the Improvement of Schools and Useful Knowledge, 1829

“It will be seen from the following…,” Wisconsin Territorial Gazette and Burlington Advertiser, October 12, 1837

Elijah Lovejoy, Letter to the Editor of Emancipator, The Liberator, November 10, 1837

“The Death of Rev. Elijah P. Lovejoy…,” The Liberator, December 8, 1837

 

How Historians Interpret

“The day that this article appeared, Lincoln gave a speech to the Young Men’s Lyceum in Springfield. Titled ‘The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions,’ it focused primarily on recent outbreaks of mob violence, which Lincoln roundly condemned, adding his voice to the Illinois Whig chorus denouncing the upsurge in riots and lynching. (A year earlier he had attacked ‘that lawless and mobocratic spirit…which is already abroad in the land.’) … In the midst of his ostensibly nonpartisan address, Lincoln slyly alluded to the danger posed by a coming Caesar, a man ‘of ambition and talents’ who would ruthlessly pursue fame and power, overthrowing democratic institutions to achieve his ends. Rhetorically, Lincoln asked if such a person would be content to follow traditional paths to distinction: … Since the rules of the Lyceum forbade political speeches, Lincoln could not directly attack Douglas, but because his audience was politically aware, he could assume that they had read ‘Conservative No.2’ earlier in the day and thus understood that Douglas was the target of his remarks about the coming Caesar. It was evidently a clever maneuver to circumvent the ban on partisanship at the Lyceum.”

—Michael Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln: A Life (2 volumes, originally published by Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008) Unedited Manuscript By Chapter, Lincoln Studies Center, Volume 1, Chapter 5 (PDF), pp. 438-440

 

“The lecture was written for yet another great agency of American oratory, the town lyceum (in this case, the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, one of a nationwide network of 3,000 such speech-making societies begun by Josiah Holbrook in 1826), and Lincoln took as his topic exactly the question of how to guarantee “The Perpetuation of our Political Institutions.” His answer to the temptations of power was not an appeal to Jeffersonian virtue, but to the countervailing authority of law. Any glance around the American scene would reveal ‘accounts of outrages committed by mobs,’ leading to disgust across the republic with ‘the operation of this mobocratic spirit’ and finally a resort to a dictator who, like Napoleon, would promise order but deliver despotism. The only preventative was for ‘every lover of liberty’ to ‘swear by the blood of the Revolution, never to violate in the least particular, the laws of the country; and never to tolerate their violation by others.'”

— Allen C. Guelzo, Lincoln: A Very Short Introduction, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 47

 

“Lincoln began writing his historical drama in his much-remarked Lyceum Address delivered in Springfield in January of 1838. At the time, he was twenty-eight and had little reason to suspect, despite the distance he had already traveled from his hardscrabble days as a farm boy on the middle border, that he would become a central figure in his own story. The subject of Lincoln’s speech was how and whether the extraordinary political institutions of the United States could be sustained in the face of challenges of a different sort to the next generation of Americans. As James Russell Lowell had written, ‘It is only first-rate events that call for and mould first-rate characters.’ … In Lincoln’s rendering of these themes in the Lyceum speech, the sons of the Founders – his generation – were denied the opportunities for greatness afforded their sanctified fathers who fought the American Revolution and then wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. The heroic Founders had taken possession of the land and built ‘a political edifice of liberty and equal rights.’ They sought immortality through acts of creation. ‘If they succeeded, they were to be immortalized; their names were to be transferred to counties and cities, and rivers and mountains; and to be revered and sung and toasted through all time..They succeeded.'”

— Jean H. Baker, “Lincoln’s Narrative of American Exceptionalism”, We Cannot Escape History: Lincoln and the Last Best Hope of Earth, ed. James M. McPherson (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 35-36

 

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 …That our government should have been maintained in its original form from its establishment until now, is not much to be wondered at. It had many props to support it through that period, which now are decayed, and crumbled away. Through that period, it was felt by all, to be an undecided experiment; now, it is understood to be a successful one. Then, all that sought celebrity and fame, and distinction, expected to find them in the success of that experiment. Their all was staked upon it:—their destiny was inseparablylinked with it. Their ambition aspired to display before an admiring world, a practical demonstration of the truth of a proposition, which had hitherto been considered, at best no better, than problematical; namely, the capability of a people to govern themselves. If they succeeded, they were to be immortalized; their names were to be transferred to counties and cities, and rivers and mountains; and to be revered and sung, and toasted through all time. If they failed, they were to be called knaves and fools, and fanatics for a fleeting hour; then to sink and be forgotten. 
They succeeded. The experiment is successful; and thousands have won their deathless names in making it so. But the game is caught; and I believe it is true, that with the catching, end the pleasures of the chase. This field of glory is harvested, and the crop is already appropriated. But new reapers will arise, and they, too, will seek a field. It is to deny, what the history of the world tells us is true, to suppose that men of ambition and talents will not continue to spring up amongst us. And, when they do, they will as naturally seek the gratification of their ruling passion, as others have so done before them. 
The question then, is, can that gratification be found in supporting and maintaining an edifice that has been erected by others? Most certainly it cannot. Many great and good men sufficiently qualified for any task they should undertake, may ever be found, whose ambition would aspire to nothing beyond a seat in Congress, a gubernatorial or a presidential chair; but such belong not to the family of the lion, or the tribe of the eagle. What! think you these places would satisfy an Alexander, a Caesar, or a Napoleon? Never! Towering genius disdains a beaten path. It seeks regions hitherto unexplored. It sees no distinction in adding story to story, upon the monuments of fame, erected to the memory of others. It denies that it is glory enough to serve under any chief. It scorns to tread in the footsteps of any predecessor, however illustrious. It thirsts and burns for distinction; and, if possible, it will have it, whether at the expense of emancipating slaves, or enslaving freemen. Is it unreasonable then to expect, that some man possessed of the loftiest genius, coupled with ambition sufficient to push it to its utmost stretch, will at some time, spring up among us? And when such a one does, it will require the people to be united with each other, attached to the government and laws, and generally intelligent, to successfully frustrate his designs.
Distinction will be his paramount object; and although he would as willingly, perhaps more so, acquire it by doing good as harm; yet, that opportunity being past, and nothing left to be done in the way of building up, he would set boldly to the task of pulling down.

Letter to John Johnston (January 12, 1851)

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On June 10, 2013

In The Railsplitter

Ranking

#25 on the list of 150 Most Teachable Lincoln Documents

Annotated Transcript

Context.  Abraham Lincoln grew up in what we call today a blended family. His mother Nancy died when his sister Sarah was eleven and he was only nine. Lincoln’s father Thomas then remarried to a widow named Sarah Bush Johnston who had her own children and the families merged together in on a small farm in southern Indiana. That was how Lincoln grew up until the extended clan relocated to Illinois in the early 1830s. In this letter, Abraham Lincoln explained to his step-brother John Johnston why he had not replied to earlier letters warning of his father’s ill health and why he had decided not to come and visit. The content and tone of the letter suggests that there might have been serious strains in the relationship between father and son. Thomas Lincoln died a week after this letter was written. (By Matthew Pinsker)

“I sincerely hope Father may yet recover his health….”

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Abraham Lincoln letter to John Johnston and Thomas Lincoln, December 24, 1848

John Johnston letter to Abraham Lincoln, May 25, 1849

Matilda Johnston Moore, “Interview with William H. Herndon,” September 8, 1865

Sarah Bush Lincoln, “Interview with William H. Herndon,” September 8, 1865

A. H Chapman to William H. Herndon, Charleston, Illinois, September 28, 1865

 

How Historians Interpret

“When Lincoln finally replied to Johnston on January 12, 1851, it was to express a polite but firm unwillingness to make the trip down to Coles County. Mary was still unwell from the birth of William Wallace Lincoln, and, even more to the point, the distance between father and son had simply grown too great to be reconciled, even if the old man was at death’s door. ‘If we could meet now,’ Lincoln told Johnston, ‘it is doubtful whether it would not be more painful than pleasant.’ And almost as if this mysterious inability to find reconciliation with his father reminded Lincoln of another equally painful inability, he dropped back into language from his boyhood which he must have known would be the substance of his father’s religious hopes but which he could only acknowledge as a distant impossibility for himself:… It is hard to imagine the ‘infidel’ of the 1830’s writing such advice, even if it was (as Herndon insisted it only was) designed largely as the dutiful sentiment a tactful but distant son might be expected to offer a dying father. Mixed up together with the sentimentality are all the old echoes of the Lincoln family’s unbending Calvinism; and of Christian redemption. What he was willing to acknowledge as grace for others he could not acknowledge for himself. It was ‘the help of God’ the predestinating Father, not the mediation of Christ the redeeming Son, which was the best Lincoln could offer.”

— AllenC. Guelzo, Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President, (Cambridge: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1999), 159-160

 

 

“The following year, Lincoln’s father passed away. As Thomas lay dying in Charleston, a day’s journey from Springfield, Lincoln rejected his deathbed appeal for a visit. Coldly Lincoln wrote his stepbrother, John D. Johnston, to tell their father ‘that if we could meet now, it is doubtful whether it would not be more painful than pleasant.’ Lincoln neither attended Thomas’s funeral nor arranged for a tombstone to mark his grave. In some men, the painful questioning that often occurs at midlife can lead to despair; in others it produces stagnation. But it can also be a creative if turbulent period in which inner psychological growth takes place and leads to profound self-realization. Out of the crucible of midlife introspection can emerge an awareness of one’s own identity and uniqueness that breeds self-confidence and inspires confidence in others. A hallmark of such pyschologically maturity is an ability to overcome egotism, to avoid taking things personally, to accept one’s shortcomings and those of others with equanimity, to let go of things appropriate for youth and accept gladly the advantages and disadvantages of age. People able to meet these challenges successfully radiate a kind of pyschological wholeness and rootedness that commands respect. They evolve into the unique individuals that they were meant to be. Clearly Lincoln became such a person.”

– Michael Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln: A Life (2 volumes, originally published by Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008) Unedited Manuscript By Chapter, Lincoln Studies Center, Volume 1, Chapter 9 (PDF), pp. 1040-1042

 

“The next winter, when John D. Johnston wrote him two more letters about Thomas Lincoln’s declining health, Abraham Lincoln did not respond. He thought his stepbrother was again crying wolf. Only after he heard independently from Harriet Chapman did he take the news seriously. Repeating his ‘desire that neither Father or Mother shall be in want of any comfort either in health or sickness,’ he explained why he could not come to his father’s sickbed. ‘My business is such that I could hardly leave home now,’ he wrote; besides, his wife was ‘sick-abed’ with ‘baby-sickness.’ Both excuses had some plausibility … The rest of Lincoln’s letter, urging his father to ‘call upon, and confide in, our great, and good, and merciful Maker; who…notes the fall of a sparrow, and numbers the hairs of our heads,’ was in unconvincing and strained language, really addressed to his backwoods relatives who thought in the cliches of Primitive Baptists … Unable to simulate a grief that he did not feel or an affection that he did not bear, Lincoln did not attend his father’s funeral. He was not heartless, but Thomas Lincoln represented a world that his son had long ago left behind him.”

— David H. Donald, Lincoln (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), 153

 Further Reading

  • Richard Hart, “Thomas Lincoln Reconsidered,” For the People (Springfield: Abraham Lincoln Association), 2017 [PDF]

 

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Springfield, Jany. 12. 1851—
Dear Brother: 
On the day before yesterday I received a letter from Harriett, written at Greenup. She says she has just returned from your house; and that Father is very low, and will hardly recover. She also says you have written me two letters; and that although you do not expect me to come now, you wonder that I do not write. I received both your letters, and although I have not answered them, it is not because I have forgotten them, or been uninterested about them—but because it appeared to me I could write nothing which could do any good. You already know I desire that neither Father or Mother shall be in want of any comfort either in health or sickness while they live; and I feel sure you have not failed to use my name, if necessary, to procure a doctor, or any thing else for Father in his present sickness. My business is such that I could hardly leave home now, if it were not, as it is, that my own wife is sick-abed. (It is a case of baby-sickness, and I suppose is not dangerous.) I sincerely hope Father may yet recover his health; but at all events tell him to remember to call upon, and confide in, our great, and good, and merciful Maker; who will not turn away from him in any extremity. He notes the fall of a sparrow, and numbers the hairs of our heads; and He will not forget the dying man, who puts his trust in Him. Say to him that if we could meet now, it is doubtful whether it would not be more painful than pleasant; but that if it be his lot to go now, he will soon have a joyous [meeting] with many loved ones gone before; and where the rest of us, through the help of God, hope ere-long to join them.
Write me again when you receive this. 
Affectionately
A. LINCOLN

Letter to Charles Ray (June 27, 1858)

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“How in God’s name do you let such paragraphs into the Tribune, as the enclosed cut from that paper of yesterday? Does Sheahan write them?”

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“A recently discovered Lincoln letter from early in the 1858 campaign shows his partisan teeth bared even more sharply. ‘How in God’s name do you let such paragraph into the Tribune,’ he wrote to Charles H. Ray, complaining about an article from the previous day’s Chicago Tribune. ‘Does Sheahan write them?’ he added, sarcastically referring to James Sheahan, the Democratic editor of the Chicago Times. Continuing the assault and the gratuitous insults, Lincoln then asked, ‘How can you have failed to perceive that in this short paragraph you have completely answered all your own well put complains of [Horace] Greely [sic] and Sister Burlingame?’ The slur against Massachusetts congressman Anson Burlingame’s manhood might actually qualify this particular letter as the fiercest in the Lincoln partisan canon.”

—Matthew Pinsker, “Lincoln and the Lessons of Party Leadership” in Lincoln and Liberty: Wisdom for the Ages, ed. Lucas E. Morel (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2014), 199.

“Through authoritative communications like these, Lincoln had by July strong-armed the Republican press into full conformity and allegiance, at least in Illinois. Independent-minded, out-of-state renegades like Greely, primarily eager to injure the Buchanan administration by encouraging dissident Democrats like Douglas, proved harder to tame. Their unpredictable behavior convinced stalwart David Davis that the Republican Party remained merely ‘confederated,’ not ‘consolidated,’ and unless brought into line would be powerless to battle ‘the infernal South, that prolific monster of ruin, niggers, and disunion.’ Bring the statewide party and press into line Lincoln did. Now it was time to take the Senate battle to the people.”

—Harold Holzer, Lincoln and the Power of the Press (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2015), 174-175.

 

NOTE TO READERS

This page is under construction and will be developed further by students in the new “Understanding Lincoln” online course sponsored by the House Divided Project at Dickinson College and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. To find out more about the course and to see some of our videotaped class sessions, including virtual field trips to Ford’s Theatre and Gettysburg, please visit our Livestream page at http://new.livestream.com/gilderlehrman/lincoln

 

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My dear Sir, 

How in God’s name do you let such paragraphs into the Tribune, as the enclosed cut from that paper of yesterday? Does Sheahan write them? How can you have failed to perceive that in this short paragraph you have completely answered all your own well put complaints of Greely [Greeley] and Sister Burlingame? What right have you to interfere in Indiana, more than they in Illinois? And what possible argument can be made why all Republicans shall stand out of Hon. John G. Davis’s way in his district in Indiana that can not be made why all Republicans in Illinois shall stand out of Hon. S.A. Douglas’s way? The part in larger type is plainly editorial, and your editorial at that, as you do not credit it to any other paper. I confess it astonishes me. 

Yours truly, A. Lincoln.

Fragment on Stephen Douglas (December 1, 1856)

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#43 on the list of 150 Most Teachable Lincoln Documents

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“With me, the race of ambition has been a failure—a flat failure; with him it has been one of splendid success.”

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“Lincoln’s envy of the younger Douglas’s ascendency seemed to drip from him when in 1856 he wrote: ‘wenty-two years ago, Judge Douglas and I first became acquainted; we were both young then—he a trifle younger than I. Even then we were both ambitious, I, perhaps quite as much as he. With me, the race of ambition has been a failure—a flat failure. With him it has been one of splendid success. He name fills the Nation, and it is not unknown in foreign lands.’  Lincoln acknowledged the stellar rise of the diminutive Douglas. The first time he saw Douglas—buttonholing legislators in Vandalia in 1834 to pass two self-serving bills—Lincoln’s play on words disparaged the five-foot four-inch Easterner as ‘the least man I ever saw.’”

—Reg Ankrom, Stephen A. Douglas: The Political Apprenticeship, 1833-1843 (Jefferson: McFarland, 2015), 4.

“This extraordinary admission was by a man who was not down on himself for past failures. Rather it was an honest summing up of where he had been. Now he sensed he was close to attaining that ‘eminence’ that he for so long had seen the Little Giant enjoy. And once again, it would be a speech by Douglas that would prod him into the arena after he spent the first half of 1857 exclusively on his legal business. Just as he ignored the outcry over the Kansas-Nebraska Act for months, he said nothing publicly about the Dred Scott decision of March until June, two weeks after listening to an extemporized speech at Springfield by Douglas who defended ‘that principle of self-government which recognizes the right of the people of each State and Territory to form and regulate their own domestic institutions.’ Equipped with a published copy of the address, Lincoln critiqued Douglas’s ‘vaunted doctrine of self-government’ as a ‘deceitful pretense for the benefit of slavery.’”

—Martin H. Quitt, “In the Shadow of the Little Giant: Lincoln Before the Great Debates”, Journal of  Abraham Lincoln Association 36, 2015.

“A Democratic paper, in commenting on this address, sneered at Lincoln as a failure in whatever he turned his hand to. He probably would not have disagreed strenuously. Around that time he wrote a private memo contrasting his lack of success with Douglas’s string of accomplishments: ‘Twenty-two years ago Judge Douglas and I first became acquainted. We were both young then; he a trifle younger than I. Even then, we were both ambitious; I, perhaps, quite as much so as he. With me, the race of ambition has been a failure – a flat failure; with him it has been one of splendid success. His name fills the nation; and is not unknown, even, in foreign lands. I affect no contempt or the high eminence he has reached. So reached, that the oppressed of my species, might have shared with me in the elevation, I would rather stand on that eminence, than wear the richest crown that ever pressed a monarch’s brow.’ In 1858, the relatively obscure Lincoln would challenge the internationally famous Douglas in what became known as the Lincoln-Douglas debates, not the Douglas-Lincoln debates. They would help raise Lincoln to national prominence and fatally injure the Little Giant’s chances to win the presidency. In time, most people would remember Douglas only as Lincoln’s debate opponent, while the name of Lincoln would ‘fill the nation’ and be revered in foreign lands.”

—Michael Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln: A Life (2 volumes, originally published by Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008) Unedited Manuscript By Chapter, Lincoln Studies Center, Volume 1, Chapter 11 (PDF), pp. 1239-1240.

NOTE TO READERS

This page is under construction and will be developed further by students in the new “Understanding Lincoln” online course sponsored by the House Divided Project at Dickinson College and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. To find out more about the course and to see some of our videotaped class sessions, including virtual field trips to Ford’s Theatre and Gettysburg, please visit our Livestream page at http://new.livestream.com/gilderlehrman/lincoln

 

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Twenty-two years ago Judge Douglas and I first became acquainted. We were both young then; he a trifle younger than I. Even then, we were both ambitious; I, perhaps, quite as much so as he. With me, the race of ambition has been a failure—a flat failure; with him it has been one of splendid success. His name fills the nation; and is not unknown, even, in foreign lands. I affect no contempt for the high eminence he has reached. So reached, that the oppressed of my species, might have shared with me in the elevation, I would rather stand on that eminence, than wear the richest crown that ever pressed a monarch’s brow.

Autobiography Written for John Scripps (June 1, 1860)

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Contributing editors for this page include Lisa Staup

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#48 on the list of 150 Most Teachable Lincoln Documents

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“Abraham Lincoln was born Feb. 12, 1809, then in Hardin, now in the more recently formed county of Larue, Kentucky.”

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“John Locke Scripps, a senior editor of the Chicago Press and Tribune, managed to convince Lincoln to write an autobiographical account that would serve as the basis for a campaign biography. This essay of just over three thousand words would prove to be Lincoln’s longest work of autobiography. His description of his early education is typical of the essay’s unusual third-person style: ‘A. now thinks that the aggregate of all his schooling did not amount to one year. He was never in a college or Academy as a student; and never inside of a college or academy building till since he had a law-license. What he has in the way of education, he has picked up.’ Lincoln began his autobiography referring to himself as ‘A’ and progressed to ‘Mr. L.’ Remarkably brief about certain periods of his life, the essay stops in 1856 and does not include the 1858 debates with Stephen A. Douglas that first brought him to national attention. Lincoln’s sparse account tells us as much as he wanted the public to know. Scripps would recall the difficulty he encountered ‘to induce [Lincoln] to communicate the homely facts and incidents of his early life.’ Plainly uncomfortable talking about his childhood in Kentucky and Indiana, Lincoln told Scripps, ‘It is a great piece of folly to attempt to make anything out of my early life.’”

—Ronald C. White, A Lincoln: A Biography, (New York: Random House Publishing Group, 2009), 7-8.

“Lincoln was ashamed not only of his family background but also of the poverty in which he grew up. When John Locke Scripps interviewed him in 1860, Lincoln expressed reluctance ‘to communicate the homely facts and incidents of his early life. He seemed to be painfully impressed with the extreme poverty of his early surroundings—the utter absence of all romantic and heroic elements,’ and even questioned the proposal to have a biography written. ‘Why Scripps,’ said Lincoln, ‘it is a great piece of folly to attempt to make anything out of my early life. It can all be condensed into a single sentence and that sentence you will find in Gray’s Elegy; ‘The short and simple annals of the poor.’ That’s my life, and that’s all you or anyone else can make of it.’”

—Michael Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln: A Life, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 15-16.

 

NOTE TO READERS

This page is under construction and will be developed further by students in the new “Understanding Lincoln” online course sponsored by the House Divided Project at Dickinson College and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. To find out more about the course and to see some of our videotaped class sessions, including virtual field trips to Ford’s Theatre and Gettysburg, please visit our Livestream page at http://new.livestream.com/gilderlehrman/lincoln

 

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Abraham Lincoln was born Feb. 12, 1809, then in Hardin, now in the more recently formed county of Larue, Kentucky. His father, Thomas, & grand-father, Abraham, were born in Rockingham county Virginia, whither their ancestors had come from Berks county Pennsylvania. His lineage has been traced no farther back than this. The family were originally quakers, though in later times they have fallen away from the peculiar habits of that
people. The grand-father Abraham, had four brothers—Isaac, Jacob, John & Thomas. So far as known, the descendants of Jacob and John are still in Virginia. Isaac went to a place near where Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee, join; and his decendants are in that region. Thomas came to Kentucky, and after many years, died there, whence his decendants went to Missouri. Abraham, grandfather of the subject of this sketch, came to Kentucky, and was killed by indians about the year 1784. He left a widow, three sons and two daughters. The eldest son, Mordecai, remained in Kentucky till late in life, when he removed to Hancock county, Illinois, where soon after he died, and where several of his descendants still reside. The second son, Josiah, removed at an early day to a place on Blue River, now within Harrison [Hancock] county, Indiana; but no recent information of him, or his family, has been obtained. The eldest sister, Mary, married Ralph Crume and some of her descendants are now known to be in Breckenridge county Kentucky. The second sister, Nancy, married William Brumfield, and her family are not known to have left Kentucky, but there is no recent information from them. Thomas, the youngest son, and father of the present subject, by the early death of his father, and very narrow circumstances of his mother, even in childhood was a wandering laboring boy, and grew up litterally without education. He never did more in the way of writing than to bunglingly sign his own name. Before he was grown, he passed one year as a hired hand with his uncle Isaac on Wata[u]ga, a branch of the Holsteen [Holston] River. Getting back into Kentucky, and having reached his 28th. year, he married Nancy Hanks—mother of the present subject—in the year 1806. She also was born in Virginia; and relatives of hers of the name of Hanks, and of other names, now reside in Coles, in Macon, and in Adams counties, Illinois, and also in Iowa. The present subject has no brother or sister of the whole or half blood. He had a sister, older than himself, who was grown and married, but died many years ago, leaving no child. Also a brother, younger than himself, who died in infancy. Before leaving Kentucky he and his sister were sent for short periods, to A.B.C. schools, the first kept by Zachariah Riney, and the second by Caleb Hazel.
 
At this time his father resided on Knob-creek, on the road from Bardstown Ky. to Nashville Tenn. at a point three, or three and a half miles South or South-West of Atherton’s ferry on the Rolling Fork. From this place he removed to what is now Spencer county Indiana, in the autumn of 1816, A. then being in his eigth year. This removal was partly on account of slavery; but chiefly on account of the difficulty in land titles in Ky. He settled in an unbroken forest; and the clearing away of surplus wood was the great task a head. A. though very young, was large of his age, and had an axe put into his hands at once; and from that till within his twentythird year, he was almost constantly handling that most useful instrument—less, of course, in plowing and harvesting seasons. At this place A. took an early start as a hunter, which was never much improved afterwards. (A few days before the completion of his eigth year, in the absence of his father, a flock of wild turkeys approached the new log-cabin, and A. with a rifle gun, standing inside, shot through a crack, and killed one of them. He has never since pulled a trigger on any larger game.) In the autumn of 1818 his mother died; and a year afterwards his father married Mrs. Sally Johnston, at Elizabeth-Town, Ky—a widow, with three children of her first marriage. She proved a good and kind mother to A. and is still living in Coles Co. Illinois. There were no children of this second marriage. His father’s residence continued at the same place in Indiana, till 1830. While here A. went to A.B.C. schools by littles, kept successively by Andrew Crawford, — Sweeney, and Azel W. Dorsey. He does not remember any other. The family of Mr. Dorsey now reside in Schuyler Co. Illinois. A. now thinks that the agregate of all his schooling did not amount to one year. He was never in a college or Academy as a student; and never inside of a college or accademy building till since he had a law-license. What he has in the way of education, he has picked up. After he was twentythree, and had separated from his father, he studied English grammar, imperfectly of course, but so as to speak and write as well as he now does. He studied and nearly mastered the Six-books of Euclid, since he was a member of Congress. He regrets his want of education, and does what he can to supply the want. In his tenth year he was kicked by a horse, and apparently killed for a time. When he was nineteen, still residing in Indiana, he made his first trip upon a flat-boat to New-Orleans. He was a hired hand merely; and he and a son of the owner, without other assistance, made the trip. The nature of part of the cargo-load, as it was called—made it necessary for them to linger and trade along the Sugar coast—and one night they were attacked by seven negroes with intent to kill and rob them. They were hurt some in the melee, but succeeded in driving the negroes from the boat, and then “cut cable” “weighed anchor” and left.
 
March 1st. 1830—A. having just completed his 21st. year, his father and family, with the families of the two daughters and sons-in-law, of his step-mother, left the old homestead in Indiana, and came to Illinois. Their mode of conveyance was waggons drawn by ox-teams, or A. drove one of the teams. They reached the county of Macon, and stopped there some time within the same month of March. His father and family settled a new place on the North side of the Sangamon river, at the junction of the timber-land and prairie, about ten miles Westerly from Decatur. Here they built a log-cabin, into which they removed, and made sufficient of rails to fence ten acres of ground, fenced and broke the ground, and raised a crop of sow[n] corn upon it the same year. These are, or are supposed to be, the rails about which so much is being said just now, though they are far from being the first, or only rails ever made by A.
 
The sons-in-law, were temporarily settled at other places in the county. In the autumn all hands were greatly afflicted with augue and fever, to which they had not been used, and by which they were greatly discouraged—so much so that they determined on leaving the county. They remained however, through the succeeding winter, which was the winter of the very celebrated “deep snow” of Illinois. During that winter, A. together with his step-mother’s son, John D. Johnston, and John Hanks, yet residing in Macon county, hired themselves to one Denton Offutt, to take a flat boat from Beardstown Illinois to New-Orleans; and for that purpose, were to join him—Offut—at Springfield, Ills so soon as the snow should go off. When it did go off which was about the 1st. of March 1831—the county was so flooded, as to make traveling by land impracticable; to obviate which difficulty the[y] purchased a large canoe and came down the Sangamon river in it. This is the time and the manner of A’s first entrance into Sangamon County. They found Offutt at Springfield, but learned from him that he had failed in getting a boat at Beardstown. This lead to their hiring themselves to him at $12 per month, each; and getting the timber out of the trees and building a boat at old Sangamon Town on the Sangamon river, seven miles N.W. of Springfield, which boat they took to New-Orleans, substantially upon the old contract. It [6] was in connection with this boat that occurred the ludicrous incident of sewing up the hogs eyes. Offutt bought thirty odd large fat live hogs, but found difficulty in driving them from where [he] purchased them to the boat, and thereupon conceived the whim that he could sew up their eyes and drive them where he pleased. No sooner thought of than decided, he put his hands, including A. at the job, which they completed—all but the driving. In their blind condition they could not be driven out of the lot or field they were in. This expedient failing, they were tied and hauled on carts to the boat. It was near the Sangamon River, within what is now Menard county.
 
During this boat enterprize acquaintance with Offutt, who was previously an entire stranger, he conceved a liking for A. and believing he could turn him to account, he contracted with him to act as clerk for him, on his return from New-Orleans, in charge of a store and Mill at New-Salem, then in Sangamon, now in Menard county. Hanks had not gone to New-Orleans, but having a family, and being likely to be detained from home longer than at first expected, had turned back from St. Louis. He is the same John Hanks who now engineers the “rail enterprize” at Decatur; and is a first cousin to A’s mother. A’s father, with his own family & others mentioned, had, in pursuance of their intention, removed from Macon to Coles county. John D. Johnston, the step-mother’s son, went to them; and A. stopped indefinitely, and, for the first time, as it were, by himself at New-Salem, before mentioned. This was in July 1831. Here he rapidly made acquaintances and friends. In less than a year Offutt’s business was failing—had almost failed,—when the Black-Hawk war of 1832—broke out. A joined a volunteer company, and to his own surprize, was elected captain of it. He says he has not since had any success in life which gave him so much satisfaction. He went the campaign, served near three months, met the ordinary hardships of such an expedition, but was in no battle. He now owns in Iowa, the land upon which his own warrants for this service, were located. Returning from the campaign, and encouraged by his great popularity among his immediate neighbors, he, the same year, ran for the Legislature and was beaten—his own precinct, however, casting its votes 277 for and 7, against him. And this too while he was an avowed Clay man, and the precinct the autumn afterwards, giving a majority of 115 to Genl. Jackson over Mr. Clay. This was the only time A was ever beaten on a direct vote of the people. He was now without means and out of business, but was anxious to remain with his friends who had treated him with so much generosity, especially as he had nothing elsewhere to go to. He studied what he should do—thought of learning the black-smith trade—thought of trying to study law—rather thought he could not succeed at that without a better education. Before long, strangely enough, a man offered to sell and did sell, to A. and another as poor as himself, an old stock of goods, upon credit. They opened as merchants; and he says that was thestore. Of course they did nothing but get deeper and deeper in debt. He was appointed Post-master at New-Salem—the office being too insignificant, to make his politics an objection. The store winked out. The Surveyor of Sangamon, offered to depute to A that portion of his work which was within his part of the county. He accepted, procured a compass and chain, studied Flint, and Gibson a little, and went at it. This procured bread, and kept soul and body together. The election of 1834 came, and he was then elected to the Legislature by the highest vote cast for any candidate. Major John T. Stuart, then in full practice of the law, was also elected. During the canvass, in a private conversation he encouraged A. [to] study law. After the election he borrowed books of Stuart, took them home with him, and went at it in good earnest. He studied with nobody. He still mixed in the surveying to pay board and clothing bills. When the Legislature met, the law books were dropped, but were taken up again at the end of the session. He was re-elected in 1836, 1838, and 1840. In the autumn of 1836 he obtained a law licence, and on April 15, 1837 removed to Springfield, and commenced the practice, his old friend, Stuart taking him into partnership. March 3rd. 1837, by a protest entered upon the Ills. House Journal of that date, at pages 817, 818, A. with Dan Stone, another representative of Sangamon, briefly defined his position on the slavery question; and so far as it goes, it was then the same that it is now. The protest is as follows—(Here insert it)  In 1838, & 1840 Mr. L’s party in the Legislature voted for him as Speaker; but being in the minority, he was not elected. After 1840 he declined a re-election to the Legislature. He was on the Harrison electoral ticket in 1840, and on that of Clay in 1844, and spent much time and labor in both those canvasses. In Nov. 1842 he was married to Mary, daughter of Robert S. Todd, of Lexington, Kentucky. They have three living children, all sons—one born in 1843, one in 1850, and one in 1853. They lost one, who was born in 1846. In 1846, he was elected to the lower House of Congress, and served one term only, commencing in Dec. 1847 and ending with the inaugeration of Gen. Taylor, in March 1849. All the battles of the Mexican war had been fought before Mr. L. took his seat in congress, but the American army was still in Mexico, and the treaty of peace was not fully and formally ratified till the June afterwards. Much has been said of his course in Congress in regard to this war. A careful examination of the Journals and Congressional Globe shows, that he voted for all the supply measures which came up, and for all the measures in any way favorable to the officers, soldiers, and their families, who conducted the war through; with this exception that some of these measures passed without years and nays, leaving no record as to how particular men voted. The Journals and Globe also show him voting that the war was unnecessarily and unconstitutionally begun by the President of the United States. This is the language of Mr. Ashmun’s amendment, for which Mr. L. and nearly or quite all, other whigs of the H. R. voted.
 
Mr. L’s reasons for the opinion expressed by this vote were briefly that the President had sent Genl. Taylor into an inhabited part of the country belonging to Mexico, and not to the U.S. and thereby had provoked the first act of hostility—in fact the commencement of the war; that the place, being the country bordering on the East bank of the Rio Grande, was inhabited by native Mexicans, born there under the Mexican government; and had never submitted to, nor been conquered by Texas, or the U.S. nor transferred to either by treaty—that although Texas claimed the Rio Grande as her boundary, Mexico had never recognized it, the people on the ground had never recognized it, and neither Texas nor the U.S. had ever enforced it—that there was a broad desert between that, and the country over which Texas had actual control—that the country where hostilities commenced, having once belonged to Mexico, must remain so, until it was somehow legally transferred, which had never been done.
 
Mr. L. thought the act of sending an armed force among the Mexicans, was unnecessary, inasmuch as Mexico was in no way molesting, or menacing the U.S. or the people thereof; and that it was unconstitutional, because the power of levying war is vested in Congress, and not in the President. He thought the principal motive for the act, was to divert public attention from the surrender of “Fifty-four, forty, or fight” to Great Brittain, on the Oregon boundary question.
 
Mr. L. was not a candidate for re-election. This was determined upon, and delcared before he went to Washington, in accordance with an understanding among whig friends, by which Col. Hardin, and Col. Baker had each previously served a single term in the same District.
 
In 1848, during his term in congress, he advocated Gen. Taylor’s nomination for the Presidency, in opposition to all others, and also took an active part for his election, after his nomination—speaking a few times in Maryland, near Washington, several times in Massachusetts, and canvassing quite fully his own district in Illinois, which was followed by a majority in the district of over 1500 for Gen. Taylor.
 
Upon his return from Congress he went to the practice of the law with greater earnestness than ever before. In 1852 he was upon the Scott electroal ticket, and did something in the way of canvassing, but owning to the hopelessness of the cause in Illinois, he did less than in previous presidential canvasses.
 
In 1854, his profession had almost superseded the thought of politics in his mind, when the repeal of the Missouri compromise aroused him as he had never been before.
 
In the autumn of that year he took the stump with no broader practical aim or object that [than?] to secure, if possible, the re-election of Hon Richard Yates to congress. His speeches at once attracted a more marked attention than they had ever before done. As the canvass proceeded, he was drawn to different parts of the state, outside of Mr. Yates’ district. He did not abandon the law, but gave his attention, by turns, to that and politics. The State agricultural fair was at Springfield that year, and Douglas was announced to speak there.
 
In the canvass of 1856, Mr. L. made over fifty speeches, no one of which, so far as he remembers, was put in print. One of them was made at Galena, but Mr. L. has no recollection of any part of it being printed; nor does he remember whether in that speech he said anything about a Supreme court decision. He may have spoken upon that subject; and some of the newspapers may have reported him as saying what is now ascribed to him; but he thinks he could not have expressed himself as represented. 

Copybook Verses (1824-1826)

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On June 28, 2013

In The Railsplitter

Contributing editors for this page include Mike Capps

Ranking

#52 on the list of 150 Most Teachable Lincoln Documents

Annotated Transcript

Close Readings

Mike Capps, “Understanding Lincoln” blog post (via Storify), 2016

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How Historians Interpret

“The eleven leaves from Lincoln’s cyphering book deserve a special place in history. They represent the earliest examples remaining of his handwriting, and reflect the effort he put into filling the pages with appropriate rules, problems, and solutions. This was his book, created “by his hand and pen.” These leaves came from the formative years of his life, years that would prepare him in remarkable ways for what lay ahead. Understanding something of the structure and content of his early cyphering work gives us a small but powerful glimpse of the character, commitment, and thirst for knowledge of a lad from Indiana named Abraham. He would be good.”

— McKenzie A. Clements and Nerida F. Ellerton, “Abraham Lincoln’s Cyphering Book and the Abbaco Tradition,” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association 36, no. 1 (2015): 1-17.

“This may have been a Lincoln family tradition. In a dictionary kept by the family of Lincoln’s uncle Mordecai there appears the following inscription: “Mordecai Lincoln his hand and pen he Will be good, but you know when. When he is good then you may say The time is come and will hurray this was Wrote by Mordecai Lincoln in the twenty third year of his adge in the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and ninety three in the second year of the Common Wealth.”

—  Michael Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 1 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 28.

“His last school, probably the one that he attended longest of the five to which he was exposed, was taught by Azel W. Dorsey, the treasurer of Spencer County and a sometimes storekeeper. It met in the same cabin that Crawford has used, and Abe’s attendance was more regular than it had been with Swaney. Dennis Hanks insisted that he had given Abe much of his early instruction in reading, spelling, and writing, but since Dennis was barely literate, his claim must be suspect. Abe became proud of his penmanship, often writing letters for other members of the family and for some of the neighbors. The earliest known specimen of his script was a piece of doggerel that he penned in a copybook. “Abraham Lincoln, his hand and pen,/ he will be good but God knows when.” He was at the school long enough to develop close relationships with other students, and he began to emerge as a leader among them.”

– Lowell H. Harrison, Lincoln of Kentucky (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2000).

NOTE TO READERS

This page is under construction and will be developed further by students in the new “Understanding Lincoln” online course sponsored by the House Divided Project at Dickinson College and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. To find out more about the course and to see some of our videotaped class sessions, including virtual field trips to Ford’s Theatre and Gettysburg, please visit our Livestream page at http://new.livestream.com/gilderlehrman/lincoln

Searchable Text

Abraham Lincoln
 
his hand and pen
 
he will be good but
 
god knows When
 
Abraham Lincoln his hand and pen he will be good
 
but god knows When Time What an emty vaper
 
tis and days how swift they are swift as an indian arr[ow]
 
Meter
 
fly on like a shooting star the presant moment Just [is here]
 
then slides away in h[as]te that we [can] never say they [‘re ours]
 
but [only say] th[ey]’re past
 
Abraham Lincoln is my nam[e]
 
And with my pen I wrote the same
 
I wrote in both hast and speed
 
and left it here for fools to read

Plan of Campaign (August, 1840)

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On June 28, 2013

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Ranking

#54 on the list of 150 Most Teachable Lincoln Documents

Annotated Transcript

1st. Appoint one person in each county as county captain, and take his pledge to perform promptly all the duties assigned him.

On This Date

[Editorial Note:  The editors of Lincoln’s Collected Works put this undated “Plan of Campaign” as being created sometime in January 1840, but Matthew Pinsker, who edits this site, considers it more likely to have been created in August 1840, following the local Illinois elections.]

HD Daily Report, August 1, 1840

The Lincoln Log, August 1840

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How Historians Interpret

“Perhaps the two most prominent monuments of this aspect of his political life were his campaign plan for 1840 and his 1843 resolutions laying out a pattern of organization embracing local, county and district conventions with committees and captains at every level to carry on the electioneering work.”

—Joel H. Silbey, “‘Always a Whig in Politics’ The Partisan Life of Abraham Lincoln,” The Journal of Abraham Lincoln Studies 8, no. 1 (1986), 21-42.

“Setting aside his earlier fears that an enlarged party machinery could be ripe for manipulation by party elders, in January 1840, he became a coauthor of a circular that would ‘appoint one person in each county as county captain,’ with the precinct captain and section captain ‘to perform promptly all the duties assigned him.’ The Whigs, put on the defensive by the organizational structures of their Democratic opponents, were determined to tighten their own organization. ‘Our intention is to organize the whole State, so that every Whig can be brought to the polls in the coming presidential election.’”

—Ronald C. White, A Lincoln: A Biography (New York: Random House Publishing Group, 2009), 92.

NOTE TO READERS

This page is under construction and will be developed further by students in the new “Understanding Lincoln” online course sponsored by the House Divided Project at Dickinson College and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. To find out more about the course and to see some of our videotaped class sessions, including virtual field trips to Ford’s Theatre and Gettysburg, please visit our Livestream page at http://new.livestream.com/gilderlehrman/lincoln

 

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Lincoln’s Plan of Campaign in 1840
 
 
 
1st. Appoint one person in each county as county captain, and take his pledge to perform promptly all the duties assigned him.
 
Duties of the County Captain
 
1st. To procure from the poll-books a separate list for each Precinct of all the names of all those persons who voted the Whig ticket in August.
 
2nd. To appoint one person in each Precinct as Precinct Captain, and, by a personal interview with him, procure his pledge, to perform promptly all the duties assigned him.
 
3rd. To deliver to each Precinct Captain the list of names as above, belonging to his Precinct; and also a written list of his duties.
 
Duties of the Precinct Captain.
 
1st. To divide the list of names delivered him by the county Captain, into Sections of ten who reside most convenient to each other.
 
2nd. To appoint one person of each Section as Section Captain, and by a personal interview with him, procure his pledge to perform promptly all the duties assigned him.
 
3rd. To deliver to each Section Captain the list of names belonging to his Section and also a written list of his duties.
 
Duties of the Section Captain.
 
1st. To see each man of his Section face to face, and procure his pledge that he will for no consideration (impossibilities excepted) stay from the polls on the first monday in November; and that he will record his vote as early on the day as possible.
 
2nd. To add to his Section the name of every person in his vicinity who did not vote with us in August, but who will vote with us in the fall, and take the same pledge of him, as from the others.
 
3rd. To task himself to procure at least such additional names to his Section.

Eulogy on Henry Clay (July 6, 1852)

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On June 29, 2013

In The Railsplitter

Contributing Editors for this page include Jin Hong, Kory Loyola, Beatriz Martos and Greg O’Reilly

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#62 on the list of 150 Most Teachable Lincoln Documents

Annotated Transcript

“Mr. Clay’s predominant sentiment, from first to last, was a deep devotion to the cause of human liberty—a strong sympathy with the oppressed every where, and an ardent wish for their elevation.”

On This Date

HD Daily Report, July 6, 1852

The Lincoln Log, July 6, 1852

Close Readings


Posted at YouTube by “Understanding Lincoln” participant Beatriz Martos, Summer 2016


Posted at YouTube by “Understanding Lincoln” course participant Greg O’Reilly, August 2014. You can read a transcript of this video here.

Jin Hong, “Understanding Lincoln” blog post (via Quora), October 24, 2013

Kory Loyola, “Understanding Lincoln” blog post (via Quora), September 29, 2013

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How Historians Interpret

“Lincoln identified himself with Clay, and in this description of Clay’s patriotism he had perfectly described his own. Lincoln, too, loved America mostly because it was a country dedicated to freedom. Lincoln’s eulogy praises Clay as a moderate statesman who avoided the extremes of abolitionism on the one hand and proslavery militancy on the other. A practical politician himself, Lincoln characteristically defined his own positions as centrist. Even some of the specific issues that Lincoln would have to deal with in the future are prefigured in this remarkable oration. The eulogy goes on to credit Clay with taking a constructive interest in resolving the problem of American slavery. The plan Clay favored was compensated emancipation followed by the emigration of the freed people to designated overseas colonies such as Liberia. In years to come Lincoln would have occasion to entertain this proposal before abandoning it. The eulogy praises Clay’s great Missouri Compromise of 1820, and before long Lincoln would be defending that very compromise against first the Kansas-Nebraska bill and then the Dred Scott decision.”

—Daniel Walker Howe, “Why Abraham Lincoln Was a Whig,” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Society 16 (1995).

“In 1852, he injected some political content into his eulogy on Henry Clay. After quoting the Great Compromiser’s eloquent defense of the American Colonization Society, Lincoln offered his own biting commentary on slavery: “Pharaoh’s country was cursed with plagues, and his hosts were drowned in the Red Sea for striving to retain a captive people who had already served them more than four hundred years.” (This concern for divine punishment for the sin of slavery was to reappear in one of his greatest state papers, the second inaugural address.)”

— Michael Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln: A Life (2 volumes, originally published by Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008) Unedited Manuscript By Chapter, Lincoln Studies Center, Volume 1, Chapter 9 (PDF), pp. 1034.

“Lincoln applauds Clay for envisioning national glory as something altogether different from military might and the projection of power throughout the globe. Rather Clay and Lincoln both envision glory in terms of America’s moral worth at home and its moral influence abroad. The true glory of America is measured by the extent to which it advances the cause of liberty as a ‘city upon a hill’ and ‘a light unto other nations.’ Following the Founder, Lincoln’s reflective patriotism applies these Puritan symbols to the American experiment in self-government. The republican critics of democracy said that it was prone to the extremes of tyranny and anarchy. In reply to these critics, Lincoln would subsequently characterize the Civil War as an ordeal that tested the viability of democracy. The success of failure of the American experiment would reverberate throughout the globe, providing hope or despair for the friends of freedom everywhere. Because Clay’s legacy belonged to the world as much as America, Lincoln proclaims him as, ‘freedom’s champion.’ As we may recall, Clay’s American System promised moral support for the fledgling democracies in Latin America who were struggling against Spain’s colonial domination. Lincoln also followed Clay and the Whigs in opposing the Democratic policies of Manifest Destiny and imperial expansion. Further consistent with what we have seen, Lincoln associates patriotism with the qualities of wisdom and intelligence. He admires Clay’s ‘wisdom and patriotism.’ And he extols his undeniable legacy ‘amongst intelligent and Patriotic Americans.’ The implication being that those who place sectional interest above devotion to the Union, whether they are northerners or southerners, are both unreasonable and unpatriotic.”

—Joseph R. Fornieri, Abraham Lincoln, Philosopher Statesman, (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2014), 157.

NOTE TO READERS

This page is under construction and will be developed further by students in the new “Understanding Lincoln” online course sponsored by the House Divided Project at Dickinson College and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. To find out more about the course and to see some of our videotaped class sessions, including virtual field trips to Ford’s Theatre and Gettysburg, please visit our Livestream page at http://new.livestream.com/gilderlehrman/lincoln

 

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… Mr. Clay’s eloquence did not consist, as many fine specimens of eloquence does [do], of types and figures—of antithesis, and elegant arrangement of words and sentences; but rather of that deeply earnest and impassioned tone, and manner, which can proceed only from great sincerity and a thorough conviction, in the speaker of the justice and importance of his cause. This it is, that truly touches the chords of human sympathy; and those who heard Mr. Clay, never failed to be moved by it, or ever afterwards, forgot the impression. All his efforts were made for practical effect. He never spoke merely to be heard. He never delivered a Fourth of July Oration, or an eulogy on an occasion like this. As a politician or statesman, no one was so habitually careful to avoid all sectional ground. Whatever he did, he did for the whole country. In the construction of his measures he ever carefully surveyed every part of the field, and duly weighed every conflicting interest. Feeling, as he did, and as the truth surely is, that the world’s best hope depended on the continued Union of these States, he was ever jealous of, and watchful for, whatever might have the slightest tendency to separate them.
Mr. Clay’s predominant sentiment, from first to last, was a deep devotion to the cause of human liberty—a strong sympathy with the oppressed every where, and an ardent wish for their elevation. With him, this was a primary and all controlling passion. Subsidiary to this was the conduct of his whole life. He loved his country partly because it was his own country, but mostly because it was a free country; and he burned with a zeal for its advancement, prosperity and glory, because he saw in such, the advancement, prosperity and glory, of human liberty, human right and human nature. He desired the prosperity of his countrymen partly because they were his countrymen, but chiefly to show to the world that freemen could be prosperous.
That his views and measures were always the wisest, needs not to be affirmed; nor should it be, on this occasion, where so many, thinking differently, join in doing honor to his memory. A free people, in times of peace and quiet—when pressed by no common danger—naturally divide into parties. At such times, the man who is of neither party, is not—cannot be, of any consequence. Mr. Clay, therefore, was of a party. Taking a prominent part, as he did, in all the great political questions of his country for the last half century, the wisdom of his course on many, is doubted and denied by a large portion of his countrymen; and of such it is not now proper to speak particularly….
… Having been led to allude to domestic slavery so frequently already, I am unwilling to close without referring more particularly to Mr. Clay’s views and conduct in regard to it. He ever was, on principle and in feeling, opposed to slavery. The very earliest, and one of the latest public efforts of his life, separated by a period of more than fifty years, were both made in favor of gradual emancipation of the slaves in Kentucky. He did not perceive, that on a question of human right, the negroes were to be excepted from the human race. And yet Mr. Clay was the owner of slaves. Cast into life where slavery was already widely spread and deeply seated, he did not perceive, as I think no wise man has perceived, how it could be at once eradicated, without producing a greater evil, even to the cause of human liberty itself. His feeling and his judgment, therefore, ever led him to oppose both extremes of opinion on the subject. Those who would shiver into fragments the Union of these States; tear to tatters its now venerated constitution; and even burn the last copy of the Bible, rather than slavery should continue a single hour, together with all their more halting sympathisers, have received, and are receiving their just execration; and the name, and opinions, and influence of Mr. Clay, are fully, and, as I trust, effectually and enduringly, arrayed against them. But I would also, if I could, array his name, opinions, and influence against the opposite extreme—against a few, but an increasing number of men, who, for the sake of perpetuating slavery, are beginning to assail and to ridicule the white-man’s charter of freedom—the declaration that “all men are created free and equal.” So far as I have learned, the first American, of any note, to do or attempt this, was the late John C. Calhoun; and if I mistake not, it soon after found its way into some of the messages of the Governors of South Carolina. We, however, look for, and are not much shocked by, political eccentricities and heresies in South Carolina. … But Henry Clay is dead. His long and eventful life is closed. Our country is prosperous and powerful; but could it have been quite all it has been, and is, and is to be, without Henry Clay? Such a man the times have demanded, and such, in the providence of God was given us. But he is gone. Let us strive to deserve, as far as mortals may, the continued care of Divine Providence, trusting that, in future national emergencies, He will not fail to provide us the instruments of safety and security.

Speech at Republican Banquet (December 10, 1856)

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On June 29, 2013

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Contributing Editors for this page include Kory Loyola

Ranking

#63 on the list of 150 Most Teachable Lincoln Documents

Annotated Transcript

“…Our government rests in public opinion. Whoever can change public opinion, can change the government, practically just so much.”

On This Date

HD Daily Report, December 10, 1856

The Lincoln Log, December 10, 1856

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Kory Loyola, “Understanding Lincoln” blog post (via Quora), September 29, 2013

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How Historians Interpret

“This eloquent address helped clinch Lincoln’s reputation as the leader of Illinois’ Republicans. A correspondent of the Illinois State Journal declared: ‘There is no man upon whom they would so gladly confer the highest honors within their gift, and I trust an opportunity may not long be wanting which will enable them to place him in a station that seems to be by universal consent conceded to him, and which he is so admirably qualified by nature to adorn.'”

—Michael Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln: A Life (2 volumes, originally published by Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008) Unedited Manuscript By Chapter, Lincoln Studies Center, Volume 1, Chapter 11 (PDF), pp. 1221.

“Buchanan won the 1856 presidential election because the anti-Nebraska supporters split between Fillmore and Frémont. Republican William Henry Bissell was elected governor of Illinois. On December 10 at a postelection Republican banquet in Chicago, Lincoln delivered an inspirational speech to members of the base he had helped to create, and an examination of the speech shows he ultimately had more than a celebratory purpose and more than just Republicans in mind. The speech reflects the increasing diversity of Lincoln’s political rhetoric: it emphasizes the themes of liberty and union, the immorality of slavery, folksy humor for satiric effect, problem analysis, numeric analysis of voting, refutation, solution development based on his political-social philosophy, and exhortation. The speech includes the stylistic techniques characteristic of Lincoln’s well-crafted writing, including antithesis, metaphor, and anaphora. In this speech, Lincoln famously observes that public opinion shapes American government and that ‘whoever can change public opinion, can change the government.’  He quotes Buchanan’s accusation that Republicans are trying ‘to change the domestic institutions of existing states” and “doing every thing in our power to deprive the Constitution and the laws of moral authority.’ Lincoln, rather, says the Democrats are the ones who are trying to shift from the American principle of ‘the practical equality of all men’ to ‘the opposite idea that slavery is right.’ Lincoln denies that the majority of Americans believe slavery is right.”

—D. Leigh Henson, “Classical Rhetoric as a Lens for Reading the Key Speeches of Lincoln’s Political Rise, 1852-1856”, Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association 35, 2014.

“As ‘the central idea’ of the regime, the principle of equality was axiomatic to popular government. ‘Our government rests in public opinion,’ Lincoln explained. ‘Whoever can change public opinion, can chance the government, practically just so much. Public opinion, or [on?] any subject, always has a ‘central idea,’ from which all its minor thought radiate. That ‘central idea’ in our political public opinion, at the beginning was, and until recently has continued to be, ‘the equality of men.’’ Lincoln sought to educate public opinion in accordance with this great truth. Indeed the norm of equality was the moral compass whereby he navigated the ship of state.”

—Joseph R. Fornieri, Abraham Lincoln, Philosopher Statesman, (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2014), 15.

NOTE TO READERS

This page is under construction and will be developed further by students in the new “Understanding Lincoln” online course sponsored by the House Divided Project at Dickinson College and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. To find out more about the course and to see some of our videotaped class sessions, including virtual field trips to Ford’s Theatre and Gettysburg, please visit our Livestream page at http://new.livestream.com/gilderlehrman/lincoln

 

Searchable Text

…Our government rests in public opinion. Whoever can change public opinion, can change the government, practically just so much. Public opinion, or [on?] any subject, always has a “central idea,” from which all its minor thoughts radiate. That “central idea” in our political public opinion, at the beginning was, and until recently has continued to be, “the equality of men.” And although it was always submitted patiently to whatever of inequality there seemed to be as matter of actual necessity, its constant working has been a steady progress towards the practical equality of all men. The late Presidential election was a struggle, by one party, to discard that central idea, and to substitute for it the opposite idea that slavery is right, in the abstract, the workings of which, as a central idea, may be the perpetuity of human slavery, and its extension to all countries and colors. Less than a year ago, the Richmond Enquirer, an avowed advocate of slavery, regardless of color, in order to favor his views, invented the phrase, “State equality,” and now the President, in his Message, adopts the Enquirer‘s catch-phrase, telling us the people “have asserted the constitutional equality of each and all of the States of the Union as States.” The President flatters himself that the new central idea is completely inaugurated; and so, indeed, it is, so far as the mere fact of a Presidential election can inaugurate it. To us it is left to know that the majority of the people have not yet declared for it, and to hope that they never will.
All of us who did not vote for Mr. Buchanan, taken together, are a majority of four hundred thousand. But, in the late contest we were divided between Fremont and Fillmore. Can we not come together, for the future. Let every one who really believes, and is resolved, that free society is not, and shall not be, a failure, and who can conscientiously declare that in the past contest he has done only what he thought best—let every such one have charity to believe that every other one can say as much. Thus let bygones be bygones. Let past differences, as nothing be; and with steady eye on the real issue, let us reinaugurate the good old “central ideas” of the Republic. We can do it. The human heart is with us—God is with us. We shall again be able not to declare, that “all States as States, are equal,” nor yet that “all citizens as citizens are equal,” but to renew the broader, better declaration, including both these and much more, that “all men are created equal.”

Farewell Address (February 11, 1861)

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Contributing Editors for this page include Michelle Grasso and Brenda Klawonn

Ranking

#64 on the list of 150 Most Teachable Lincoln Documents

Annotated Transcript

“My friends—No one, not in my situation, can appreciate my feeling of sadness at this parting.”

On This Date

HD Daily Report, February 11, 1861

The Lincoln Log, February 11, 1861

Close Readings

Michelle Grasso, “Understanding Lincoln” blog post (via Quora), October 1, 2013

Posted at YouTube by Brenda Klawonn, Understanding Lincoln participant, Fall 2013

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How Historians Interpret

“Trembling with suppressed emotion and radiating profound sadness, he slowly and distinctly delivered his eloquent remarks: ‘My friends—No one, not in my situation, can appreciate my feelings of sadness at this parting. To this place, and the kindness of these people, I owe every thing. Here I have lived a quarter of a century, and have passed from a young to an old man. Here my children have been born, and one is buried. I now leave, not knowing when, or whether ever, I may return, with a task before my greater than that which rested upon Washington. Without the assistance of that Divine Being, who ever attended him, I cannot succeed. With that assistance I cannot fail. Trusting in Him, who can go with me, and remain with you and be every where for good, let us confidently hope that all will yet be well. To His care commending you, as I hope in your prayers you will commend, I bid you an affectionate farewell.’ ‘We will do it; we will do it,’ responded many in the crowd, who, like the speaker, had tears in their eyes. An editor of the Illinois State Journal called it ‘a most impressive scene. We have known Mr. Lincoln for many years; we have heard him speak upon a hundred different occasions; but we never saw him so profoundly affected, nor did he ever utter an address which seemed to us so full of simple and touching eloquence, so exactly adapted to the occasion, so worth of the man and the hour. Although it was raining fast when he began to speak, every hat was lifted, and every head bent forward to catch the last words of the departing chief.’ The New York World commented that nothing ‘could have been more appropriate and touching,’ while the Chicago Press and Tribune accurately predicted that it ‘will become a part of the national history.’ Lincoln’s friend, Chicago Congressman Isaac N. Arnold, told his House colleagues that there was ‘not a more simple, touching, and beautiful speech in the English language.’ After Lincoln took leave of his family and entered the car, the crowd gave three cheers and then stood silent as the train slowly pulled away.”

—Michael Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 1 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012).

“It was raining now, but the Illinois Journal reporting the event, said ‘every hat was lifted, and every head bent forward to catch the last words of the departing chief,’ and as he finished ‘there was an uncontrollable burst of applause.’ A young observer wrote in his diary that day that an ‘audible good bye & God speed followed him as the train disappeared.’ The Journal called it ‘a most impressive scene. We have known Mr. Lincoln for many years; we have heard him speak upon a hundred different occasions; but we never saw him so profoundly affected nor did he ever utter an address, which seemed to us as full of simple and touching eloquence, so exactly adopted to the occasion, so worthy of the man and the hour.’”

—John C. Waugh, One Man Great Enough: Abraham Lincoln’s Road to Civil War (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2007).

 

NOTE TO READERS

This page is under construction and will be developed further by students in the new “Understanding Lincoln” online course sponsored by the House Divided Project at Dickinson College and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. To find out more about the course and to see some of our videotaped class sessions, including virtual field trips to Ford’s Theatre and Gettysburg, please visit our Livestream page at http://new.livestream.com/gilderlehrman/lincoln

 

Searchable Text

February 11, 1861
My friends—No one, not in my situation, can appreciate my feeling of sadness at this parting. To this place, and the kindness of these people, I owe every thing. Here I have lived a quarter of a century, and have passed from a young to an old man. Here my children have been born, and one is buried. I now leave, not knowing when, or whether ever, I may return, with a task before me greater than that which rested upon Washington. Without the assistance of that Divine Being, who ever attended him, I cannot succeed. With that assistance I cannot fail. Trusting in Him, who can go with me, and remain with you and be every where for good, let us confidently hope that all will yet be well. To His care commending you, as I hope in your prayers you will commend me, I bid you an affectionate farewell

Letter to Andrew McCormick (January 1, 1841)

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On June 29, 2013

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Ranking

#77 on the list of 150 Most Teachable Lincoln Documents

Annotated Transcript

“For Heaven’s sake, for your friends sake, for the sake of the recollection of all the hard battles we have heretofore fought shoulder, to shoulder, do not forsake us this time.”

On This Date

HD Daily Report, January 1, 1841

The Lincoln Log, January 1, 1841

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How Historians Interpret

“Lincoln’s natural talents for party leadership appeared early. Writing to Captain Andrew McCormick, one of the legendary Long Nine in the Illinois legislature who had helped him move the state capital to Springfield in the late 1830s, a thirty-one-year-old Lincoln noted in a letter that was first published in 1957, ‘I have just learned, with utter astonishment, that you have some notion of voting for Walters.’ William Walters was a Democratic newspaper editor who was competing for a patronage contract from the assembly as state printer, vying against Lincoln’s close friend and Whig ally Simeon Francis. ‘It can not be,’ Lincoln wrote emphatically, ‘that one so true, firm, and unwavering as you have ever been, can for a moment think of such a thing.’”

—Matthew Pinsker, “Boss Lincoln: A Reappraisal of Abraham Lincoln’s Party Leadership” in The Living Lincoln, Ed. Thomas A. Horrocks, Harold Holzer, and Frank J. Williams, (Southern Illinois University Press, 2011), 22.

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Dear Captain:
I have just learned, with utter astonishment, that you have some notion of voting for Walters.  This certainly can not be true.  It can not be, that one so true, firm, and unwavering as you have ever been, can for a moment think of such a thing.  What!  Support that pet of all those who continually slander and abuse you, and labour, day and night, for your destruction.  All our friends are ready to cut our throats about it.  An angel from heaven could not make them believe, that we do not connive at it.  For Heaven’s sake, for your friends sake, for the sake of the recollection of all the hard battles we have heretofore fought shoulder, to shoulder, do not forsake us this time.  We have been told for two or three days that you were in danger; but we gave it the lie whenever we heard it.  We were willing to bet our lives upon you.  Stand by us this time, and nothing in our power to confer, shall ever be denied you.  Surely!  Surely! You do not doubt my friendship for you.  If you do, what under Heaven can I do, to convince you.  Surely you will not think those who have been your revilers, better friends than I.  Read this & write what you will do.
 
Your friend,
Lincoln
 

First Lecture on Discoveries and Inventions (April 6, 1858)

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“Man is not the only animal who labors; but he is the only one who improves his workmanship. This improvement, he effects by Discoveries, and Inventions.”

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“Many have dismissed the ‘First Lecture on Discoveries and Inventions,’ which is a historical ode to human ingenuity since Adam invented the fig-leaf apron. Many have explained it away as a caprice, an indulgence of Lincoln’s zany, nonconformist streak. But one distinguished biographer, J.G. Randall, in his Lincoln the President, decided the speech deserved a closer look. ‘In its of flow of sentences it marks Lincoln as something of a stylist, but that is secondary,’ according to Randall. ‘The main point is that in lecturing on discoveries and inventions he was thinking of enlightenment, of progress, down the centuries, of the emancipation of the mind . . .’ In a footnote, Randall adds, ‘Despite its unfavorable reception the lecture has meaning to one who would study the trends of Lincoln’s thought on the eve of his nomination to the presidency.’ Indeed, for anyone interested in Lincoln’s intellectual progress, all three of these speeches—the speech answering Douglas on June 26, 1857; the ‘First Lecture on Discoveries and Inventions,’ delivered on April 6, 1858; and finally the ‘House Divided’ speech on June 16, 1858—are crucial. For nearly two years the intriguing orator gave only these few addresses, and each shows us a different aspect of his mind.”

—Daniel Mark Epstein, Lincoln and Whitman: Parallel Lives in Civil War Washington, (New York: Random House Publishing Group, 2007), 30-31

NOTE TO READERS

This page is under construction and will be developed further by students in the new “Understanding Lincoln” online course sponsored by the House Divided Project at Dickinson College and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. To find out more about the course and to see some of our videotaped class sessions, including virtual field trips to Ford’s Theatre and Gettysburg, please visit our Livestream page at http://new.livestream.com/gilderlehrman/lincoln

 

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All creation is a mine, and every man, a miner.
 
The whole earth, and all within it, upon it, and round about it, including himself, in his physical, moral, and intellectual nature, and his susceptabilities, are the infinitely various “leads” from which, man, from the first, was to dig out his destiny.
 
In the beginning, the mine was unopened, and the miner stood naked, and knowledgeless, upon it.
 
Fishes, birds, beasts, and creeping things, are not miners, but feeders and lodgers, merely. Beavers build houses; but they build them in nowise differently, or better now, than they did, five thousand years ago. Ants, and honey-bees, provide food for winter; but just in the same way they did, when Solomon refered the sluggard to them as patterns of prudence.
 
Man is not the only animal who labors; but he is the only one who improves his workmanship. This improvement, he effects by Discoveries, and Inventions. His first important discovery was the fact that he was naked; and his first invention was the fig-leaf-apron. This simple article—the apron—made of leaves, seems to have been the origin of clothing—the one thing for which nearly half of the toil and care of the human race has ever since been expended. The most important improvement ever made in connection with clothing, was the invention of spinning and weaving. The spinning jenny, and power-loom, invented in modern times, though great improvements, do not, as inventions, rank with the ancient arts of spinning and weaving. Spinning and weaving brought into the department of clothing such abundance and variety of material. Wool, the hair of several species of animals, hemp, flax, cotten, silk, and perhaps other articles, were all suited to it, affording garments not only adapted to wet and dry, heat and cold, but also susceptable of high degrees of ornamental finish. Exactly when, or where, spinning and weaving originated is not known. At the first interview of the Almighty with Adam and Eve, after the fall, He made “coats of skins, and clothed them” Gen: 3-21.
 
The Bible makes no other alusion to clothing, before the flood. Soon after the deluge Noah’s two sons covered him with a garment; but of what material the garment was made is not mentioned. Gen. 9-23.
 
Abraham mentions “thread” in such connection as to indicate that spinning and weaving were in use in his day—Gen. 14.23— and soon after, reference to the art is frequently made. “Linen breeches, [”] are mentioned,—Exod. 28.42—and it is said “all the women that were wise hearted, did spin with their hands” (35-25) and, “all the women whose hearts stirred them up in wisdom, spun goat’s hair” (35-26). The work of the “weaver” is mentioned— (35-35). In the book of Job, a very old book, date not exactly known, the “weavers shuttle” is mentioned.
 
The above mention of “thread” by Abraham is the oldest recorded alusion to spinning and weaving; and it was made about two thousand years after the creation of man, and now, near four thousand years ago. Profane authors think these arts originated in Egypt; and this is not contradicted, or made improbable, by any thing in the Bible; for the alusion of Abraham, mentioned, was not made until after he had sojourned in Egypt.
 
The discovery of the properties of iron, and the making of iron tools, must have been among the earliest of important discoveries and inventions. We can scarcely conceive the possibility of making much of anything else, without the use of iron tools. Indeed, an iron hammer must have been very much needed to make the first iron hammer with. A stone probably served as a substitute. How could the “gopher wood” for the Ark, have been gotten out without an axe? It seems to me an axe, or a miracle, was indispensable. Corresponding with the prime necessity for iron, we find at least one very early notice of it. Tubal-cain was “an instructer of every artificer in brass and iron[”]—Gen: 4-22. Tubal-cain was the seventh in decent from Adam; and his birth was about one thousand years before the flood. After the flood, frequent mention is made of iron, and instruments made of iron. Thus “instrument of iron” at Num: 35-16; “bed-stead of iron” at Deut. 3-11—- “the iron furnace [”] at 4-20— and “iron tool” at 27-5. At 19-5— very distinct mention of “the ax to cut down the tree” is made; and also at 8-9, the promised land is described as “a land whose stones are iron, and out of whose hills thou mayest dig brass.” From the somewhat frequent mention of brass in connection with iron, it is not improbable that brass—perhaps what we now call copper—was used by the ancients for some of the same purposes as iron.
 
Transportation—the removal of person, and goods—from place to place—would be an early object, if not a necessity, with man. By his natural powers of locomotion, and without much assistance from Discovery and invention, he could move himself about with considerable facility; and even, could carry small burthens with him. But very soon he would wish to lessen the labor, while he might, at the same time, extend, and expedite the business. For this object, wheel-carriages, and water-crafts—wagons and boats—are the most important inventions. The use of the wheel & axle, has been so long known, that it is difficult, without reflection, to estimate it at it’s true value.
 
The oldest recorded allusion to the wheel and axle is the mention of a “chariot” Gen: 41-43. This was in Egypt, upon the occasion of Joseph being made Governor by Pharaoh. It was about twentyfive hundred years after the creation of Adam. That the chariot then mentioned was a wheel-carriage drawn by animals, is sufficiently evidenced by the mention of chariot-wheels, at Exod. 14-25, and the mention of chariots in connection with horses, in the same chapter, verses 9 & 23. So much, at present, for land-transportation.
 
Now, as to transportation by water, I have concluded, without sufficient authority perhaps, to use the term “boat” as a general name for all water-craft. The boat is indispensable to navigation. It is not probable that the philosophical principle upon which the use of the boat primarily depends—towit, the principle, that any thing will float, which can not sink without displacing more than it’s own weight of water—was known, or even thought of, before the first boats were made. The sight of a crow standing on a piece of drift-wood floating down the swolen current of a creek or river, might well enough suggest the specific idea to a savage, that he could himself get upon a log, or on two logs tied together, and somehow work his way to the opposite shore of the same stream. Such a suggestion, so taken, would be the birth of navigation; and such, not improbably, it really was. The leading idea was thus caught; and whatever came afterwards, were but improvements upon, and auxiliaries to, it.
 
As man is a land animal, it might be expected he would learn to travel by land somewhat earlier than he would by water. Still the crossing of streams, somewhat too deep for wading, would be an early necessity with him. If we pass by the Ark, which may be regarded as belonging rather to the miracalous, than to human invention the first notice we have of water-craft, is the mention of “ships” by Jacob—Gen: 49-13. It is not till we reach the book of Isaiah that we meet with the mention of “oars” and “sails.”
 
As mans food—his first necessity—was to be derived from the vegitation of the earth, it was natural that his first care should be directed to the assistance of that vegitation. And accordingly we find that, even before the fall, the man was put into the garden of Eden “to dress it, and to keep it.” And when afterwards, in consequence of the first transgression, labor was imposed on the race, as a penalty—a curse—we find the first born man—the first heir of the curse—was “a tiller of the ground.” This was the beginning of agriculture; and although, both in point of time, and of importance, it stands at the head of all branches of human industry, it has derived less direct advantage from Discovery and Invention, than almost any other. The plow, of very early origin; and reaping, and threshing, machines, of modern invention are, at this day, the principle improvements in agriculture. And even the oldest of these, the plow, could not have been conceived of, until a precedent conception had been caught, and put into practice—I mean the conception, or idea, of substituting other forces in nature, for man’s own muscular power. These other forces, as now used, are principally, the strength of animals, and the power of the wind, of running streams, and of steam.
 
Climbing upon the back of an animal, and making it carry us, might not, occur very readily. I think the back of the camel would never have suggested it. It was, however, a matter of vast importance.
 
The earliest instance of it mentioned, is when “Abraham rose up early in the morning, and saddled his ass,[”] Gen. 22-3 preparatory to sacraficing Isaac as a burnt-offering; but the allusion to the saddle indicates that riding had been in use some time; for it is quite probable they rode bare-backed awhile, at least, before they invented saddles.
 
The idea, being once conceived, of riding one species of animals, would soon be extended to others. Accordingly we find that when the servant of Abraham went in search of a wife for Isaac, he took ten camels with him; and, on his return trip, “Rebekah arose, and her damsels, and they rode upon the camels, and followed the man” Gen 24-61[.]
 
The horse, too, as a riding animal, is mentioned early. The Redsea being safely passed, Moses and the children of Israel sang to the Lord “the horse, and his rider hath he thrown into the sea.” Exo. 15-1.
 
Seeing that animals could bear man upon their backs, it would soon occur that they could also bear other burthens. Accordingly we find that Joseph’s bretheren, on their first visit to Egypt, “laded their asses with the corn, and departed thence” Gen. 42-26.
 
Also it would occur that animals could be made to draw burthens after them, as well as to bear them upon their backs; and hence plows and chariots came into use early enough to be often mentioned in the books of Moses—Deut. 22-10. Gen. 41-43. Gen. 46-29. Exo. 14-25[.]
 
Of all the forces of nature, I should think the wind contains the largest amount of motive power—that is, power to move things. Take any given space of the earth’s surface—for instance, Illinois—- and all the power exerted by all the men, and beasts, and running-water, and steam, over and upon it, shall not equal the one hundredth part of what is exerted by the blowing of the wind over and upon the same space. And yet it has not, so far in the world’s history, become proportionably valuable as a motive power. It is applied extensively, and advantageously, to sail-vessels in navigation. Add to this a few wind-mills, and pumps, and you have about all. That, as yet, no very successful mode of controlling, and directing the wind, has been discovered; and that, naturally, it moves by fits and starts—now so gently as to scarcely stir a leaf, and now so roughly as to level a forest—doubtless have been the insurmountable difficulties. As yet, the wind is an untamed, and unharnessed force; and quite possibly one of the greatest discoveries hereafter to be made, will be the taming, and harnessing of the wind. That the difficulties of controlling this power are very great is quite evident by the fact that they have already been perceived, and struggled with more than three thousand years; for that power was applied to sail-vessels, at least as early as the time of the prophet Isaiah.
 
In speaking of running streams, as a motive power, I mean it’s application to mills and other machinery by means of the “water wheel”—a thing now well known, and extensively used; but, of which, no mention is made in the bible, though it is thought to have been in use among the romans—(Am. Ency. tit—Mill) [.] The language of the Saviour “Two women shall be grinding at the mill &c” indicates that, even in the populous city of Jerusalem, at that day, mills were operated by hand—having, as yet had no other than human power applied to them.
 
The advantageous use of Steam-power is, unquestionably, a modern discovery.
 
And yet, as much as two thousand years ago the power of steam was not only observed, but an ingenius toy was actually made and put in motion by it, at Alexandria in Egypt.
 
What appears strange is, that neither the inventor of the toy, nor any one else, for so long a time afterwards, should perceive that steam would move useful machinery as well as a toy.

Letter to Mary Owens (August 16, 1837)

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“I want in all cases to do right, and most particularly so, in all cases with women. I want, at this particular time, more than any thing else, to do right with you, and if I knew it would be doing right, as I rather suspect it would, to let you alone, I would do it.”

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“Not surprisingly, Mary Owens rejected this diffident proposal. As she later explained, “Mr. Lincoln was deficient in those little links which make up the chain of woman’s happiness…Not that I believed it proceeded from a lack of goodness of heart; but his training had been different from mine; hence there was not that congeniality which would otherwise have existed.”  Lincoln had behaved in ways that she understandably considered thoughtless and insensitive to her feelings. One day, for example, while riding with other New Salem young women and their swains, they have to a creek. All the men save Lincoln gallantly helped their companions cross. Owens chided her escort, You are a nice fellow!   I suppose you did not care whether my neck was broken or not.” Lincoln replied laughingly that he reckoned she was plenty smart enough to care for herself.”

—Michael Burlingame, The Inner World of Abraham Lincoln (University of Illinois Press, 1997), 134.

“Evidently Lincoln wished to escape gracefully from a romance now gone stale. If so, the lady obliged him. She ignored his letter, and they never met again.”

—Benjamin P. Thomas, Abraham Lincoln: A Biography (SIU Press, 2008), 70.

NOTE TO READERS

This page is under construction and will be developed further by students in the new “Understanding Lincoln” online course sponsored by the House Divided Project at Dickinson College and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. To find out more about the course and to see some of our videotaped class sessions, including virtual field trips to Ford’s Theatre and Gettysburg, please visit our Livestream page at http://new.livestream.com/gilderlehrman/lincoln

 

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Springfield
Aug. 16th 1837
 
Friend Mary. 
You will, no doubt, think it rather strange, that I should write you a letter on the same day on which we parted; and I can only account for it by supposing, that seeing you lately makes me think of you more than usual, while at our late meeting we had but few expressions of thoughts. You must know that I can not see you, or think of you, with entire indifference; and yet it may be, that you, are mistaken in regard to what my real feelings towards you are. If I knew you were not, I should not trouble you with this letter. Perhaps any other man would know enough without further information; but I consider it my peculiar right to plead ignorance, and your bounden duty to allow the plea. I want in all cases to do right, and most particularly so, in all cases with women. I want, at this particular time, more than any thing else, to do right with you, and if I knew it would be doing right, as I rather suspect it would, to let you alone, I would do it. And for the purpose of making the matter as plain as possible, I now say, that you can now drop the subject, dismiss your thoughts (if you ever had any) from me forever, and leave this letter unanswered, without calling forth one accusing murmer from me. And I will even go further, and say, that if it will add any thing to your comfort, or peace of mind, to do so, it is my sincere wish that you should. Do not understand by this, that I wish to cut your acquaintance. I mean no such thing. What I do wish is, that our further acquaintance shall depend upon yourself. If such further acquaintance would contribute nothing to your happiness, I am sure it would not to mine. If you feel yourself in any degree bound to me, I am now willing to release you, provided you wish it; while, on the other hand, I am willing, and even anxious to bind you faster, if I can be convinced that it will, in any considerable degree, add to your happiness. This, indeed, is the whole question with me. Nothing would make me more miserable than to believe you miserable—nothing more happy, than to know you were so.
 
In what I have now said, I think I can not be misunderstood; and to make myself understood, is the only object of this letter.
 
If it suits you best to not answer this—farewell—a long life and a merry one attend you. But if you conclude to write back, speak as plainly as I do. There can be neither harm nor danger, in saying, to me, any thing you think, just in the manner you think it.
 
My respects to your sister.
Your friend
LINCOLN.

Letter to Eliza Browning (April 1, 1838)

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Contributing Editors for this page include Brian Kellett and Jesse O’Neill

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#92 on the list of 150 Most Teachable Lincoln Documents

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“In a few days we had an interview, and although I had seen her before, she did not look as my immagination had pictured her. I knew she was over-size, but she now appeared a fair match for Falstaff; I knew she was called an “old maid”, and I felt no doubt of the truth of at least half of the appelation; but now, when I beheld her, I could not for my life avoid thinking of my mother…”

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Posted at YouTube by “Understanding Lincoln” course participant Brian Kellett, August 2014


Posted at YouTube by “Understanding Lincoln” course participant Jesse O’Neill, July 2014

How Historians Interpret

“This account of the courtship is misleading, for Lincoln’s correspondence with Mary Owens indicates that he ‘had grown very fond’ of her and backed away only after she wounded him severely. A letter he wrote her in December 1836 from Vandalia “shows that Lincoln was in love – deeply in love.’ In it, Lincoln complained of ‘the mortification of looking in the Post Office for your letter and not finding it.’ He scolded her: ‘You see, I am mad about that old letter yet. I don’t like verry well to risk you again. I’ll try you once more anyhow.’ The prospect of spending ten weeks with the legislature in Vandalia was intolerable, he lamented, for he missed her. ‘Write back as soon as you get this, and if possible say something that will please me, for really I have not [been] pleased since I left you.’ Such language, hardly that of an indifferent suitor, tends to confirm Parthena Hill’s statement that ‘Lincoln thought a great deal” of Mary Owens.'”

Michael Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 1 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 520-521.

“There is at least one particular sense in which Lincoln could not have been ‘a very social man’ even if he had been inclined to it, and that concerned the most intimate community he belonged to, his marriage with Mary Todd Lincoln. Although the Lincoln marriage was suspected almost from the start for being ‘a policy Match all around,’ the fact is that all of Lincoln’s attempts at marriage were, in more than a few respects, policy matches. His sadly aborted love match with Ann Rutledge as well as his rebound proposal to Mary Owens were, whatever the quotient of affection in them, both potential marriages-up for Lincoln—Ann Rutledge, of course, belonged to the first family of New Salem (and while that may not have been very much of a social climb from Lincoln’s later perspective, it certainly was from New Salem’s) and Mary Owens was not only ‘jovial’ and ‘social’ but ‘had a liberal English education & was considered wealthy.'”

Allen C. Guelzo, “Come-outers and Community Men: Abraham Lincoln and the Idea of Community in Nineteenth-Century America,” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association 21, no. 1 (2000): 1-29.

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This page is under construction and will be developed further by students in the new “Understanding Lincoln” online course sponsored by the House Divided Project at Dickinson College and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. To find out more about the course and to see some of our videotaped class sessions, including virtual field trips to Ford’s Theatre and Gettysburg, please visit our Livestream page at http://new.livestream.com/gilderlehrman/lincoln

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Springfield,
April 1. 1838.
 
Dear Madam: 
Without appologising for being egotistical, I shall make the history of so much of my own life, as has elapsed since I saw you, the subject of this letter. And by the way I now discover, that, in order to give a full and inteligible account of the things I have done and suffered since I saw you, I shall necessarily have to relate some that happened before.
 
It was, then, in the autumn of 1836, that a married lady of my acquaintance, and who was a great friend of mine, being about to pay a visit to her father and other relatives residing in Kentucky, proposed to me, that on her return she would bring a sister of hers with her, upon condition that I would engage to become her brother-in-law with all convenient dispach. I, of course, accepted the proposal; for you know I could not have done otherwise, had I really been averse to it; but privately between you and me, I was most confoundedly well pleased with the project. I had seen the said sister some three years before, thought her inteligent and agreeable, and saw no good objection to plodding life through hand in hand with her. Time passed on, the lady took her journey and in due time returned, sister in company sure enough. This stomached me a little; for it appeared to me, that her coming so readily showed that she was a trifle too willing; but on reflection it occured to me, that she might have been prevailed on by her married sister to come, without any thing concerning me ever having been mentioned to her; and so I concluded that if no other objection presented itself, I would consent to wave this. All this occured upon my hearing of her arrival in the neighbourhood; for, be it remembered, I had not yet seen her, except about three years previous, as before mentioned.
 
In a few days we had an interview, and although I had seen her before, she did not look as my immagination had pictured her. I knew she was over-size, but she now appeared a fair match for Falstaff; I knew she was called an “old maid”, and I felt no doubt of the truth of at least half of the appelation; but now, when I beheld her, I could not for my life avoid thinking of my mother; and this, not from withered features, for her skin was too full of fat, to permit its contracting in to wrinkles; but from her want of teeth, weather-beaten appearance in general, and from a kind of notion that ran in my head, that nothing could have commenced at the size of infancy, and reached her present bulk in less than thirtyfive or forty years; and, in short, I was not all pleased with her. But what could I do? I had told her sister that I would take her for better or for worse; and I made a point of honor and conscience in all things, to stick to my word, especially if others had been induced to act on it, which in this case, I doubted not they had, for I was now fairly convinced, that no other man on earth would have her, and hence the conclusion that they were bent on holding me to my bargain. Well, thought I, I have said it, and, be consequences what they may, it shall not be my fault if I fail to do it. At once I determined to consider her my wife; and this done, all my powers of discovery were put to the rack, in search of perfections in her, which might be fairly set-off against her defects. I tried to immagine she was handsome, which, but for her unfortunate corpulency, was actually true. Exclusive of this, no woman that I have seen, has a finer face. I also tried to convince myself, that the mind was much more to be valued than the person; and in this, she was not inferior, as I could discover, to any with whom I had been acquainted.
 
Shortly after this, without attempting to come to any positive understanding with her, I set out for Vandalia, where and when you first saw me. During my stay there, I had letters from her, which did not change my opinion of either her intelect or intention; but on the contrary, confirmed it in both.
 
All this while, although I was fixed “firm as the surge repelling rock” in my resolution, I found I was continually repenting the rashness, which had led me to make it. Through life I have been in no bondage, either real or immaginary from the thraldom of which I so much desired to be free.
 
After my return home, I saw nothing to change my opinion of her in any particular. She was the same and so was I. I now spent my time between planing how I might get along through life after my contemplated change of circumstances should have taken place; and how I might procrastinate the evil day for a time, which I really dreaded as much—perhaps more, than an irishman does the halter.
 
After all my suffering upon this deeply interesting subject, here I am, wholly unexpectedly, completely out of the “scrape”; and I now want to know, if you can guess how I got out of it. Out clear in every sense of the term; no violation of word, honor or conscience. I dont believe you can guess, and so I may as well tell you at once. As the lawyers say, it was done in the manner following, towit. After I had delayed the matter as long as I thought I could in honor do, which by the way had brought me round into the last fall, I concluded I might as well bring it to a consumation without further delay; and so I mustered my resolution, and made the proposal to her direct; but, shocking to relate, she answered, No. At first I supposed she did it through an affectation of modesty, which I thought but ill-become her, under the peculiar circumstances of her case; but on my renewal of the charge, I found she repeled it with greater firmness than before. I tried it again and again, but with the same success, or rather with the same want of success. I finally was forced to give it up, at which I verry unexpectedly found myself mortified almost beyond endurance. I was mortified, it seemed to me, in a hundred different ways. My vanity was deeply wounded by the reflection, that I had so long been too stupid to discover her intentions, and at the same time never doubting that I understood them perfectly; and also, that she whom I had taught myself to believe no body else would have, had actually rejected me with all my fancied greatness; and to cap the whole, I then, for the first time, began to suspect that I was really a little in love with her. But let it all go. I’ll try and out live it. Others have been made fools of by the girls; but this can never be with truth said of me. I most emphatically, in this instance, made a fool of myself. I have now come to the conclusion never again to think of marrying; and for this reason; I can never be satisfied with any one who would be block-head enough to have me.
 
When you receive this, write me a long yarn about something to amuse me. Give my respects to Mr. Browning.
Your sincere friend
A. LINCOLN
 
Mrs. O. H. Browning. 

To John Johnston (December 24, 1848)

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#93 on the list of 150 Most Teachable Lincoln Documents

Annotated Transcript

“Your request for eighty dollars, I do not think it best, to comply with now. 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.”

On This Date

HD Daily Report, December 24, 1848

The Lincoln Log, December 24, 1848

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How Historians Interpret

“Abraham Lincoln’s view of his father’s indolence is unrecorded, but he did scold his stepbrother John D. Johnston for that flaw in letters which may reflect his attitude not only toward Johnston but also toward Thomas Lincoln”

—Michael Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Vol. 1 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012).

“A volume of disquisition could not put more clearly before the reader the difference between Abraham Lincoln and the common run of Southern and Western rural laborers. He had the same disadvantages that they had. He grew up in the midst of poverty and ignorance; he was poisoned with the enervating malaria of the Western woods, as all his fellows were, and the consequences of it were seen in his character and conduct to the close of his life. But he had, what very few of them possessed any glimmering notion of, a fixed and inflexible will to succeed. He did not love work, probably, any better than John Johnston; but he had an innate self-respect, and a consciousness that his self was worthy of respect, that kept him from idleness as it kept him from all other vices, and made him a better man every year that he lived.”

—John M. Hay and John G. Nicolay, Abraham Lincoln (Orig. Ed. 1890; New York: Cosimo Inc., 2009), 77.  

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This page is under construction and will be developed further by students in the new “Understanding Lincoln” online course sponsored by the House Divided Project at Dickinson College and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. To find out more about the course and to see some of our videotaped class sessions, including virtual field trips to Ford’s Theatre and Gettysburg, please visit our Livestream page at http://new.livestream.com/gilderlehrman/lincoln

 

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Washington, December 24, 1848
 
Dear Johnston:
Your request for eighty dollars, I do not think it best, to comply with now. 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. It is more important to them, because they have longer to live, and can keep out of an idle habit before they are in it; easier than they can get out after they are in.
 
You are now in need of some ready money; and what I propose is, that you shall go to work, “tooth and nails” for some body who will give you money [for] it. Let father and your boys take charge of things at home—prepare for a crop, and make the crop; and you go to work for the best money wages, or in discharge of any debt you owe, that you can get. And to secure you a fair reward for your labor, I now promise you, that for every dollar you will, between this and the first of next May, get for your own labor, either in money, or in your own indebtedness, I will then give you one other dollar. By this, if you hire yourself at ten dolla[rs] a month, from me you will get ten more, making twenty dollars a month for your work. In this, I do not mean you shall go off to St. Louis, or the lead mines, or the gold mines, in Calif[ornia,] but I [mean for you to go at it for the best wages you] can get close to home [in] Coles county. Now if you will do this, 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. But if I should now clear you out, next year you will be just as deep in as ever. You say you would almost give your place in Heaven for $70 or $80. Then you value your place in Heaven very cheaply for I am sure you can with the offer I make you get the seventy or eighty dollars for four or five months work. You say if I furnish you the money you will deed me the land, and, if you dont pay the money back, you will deliver possession. Nonsense! If you cant now live with the land, how will you then live without it? You have always been [kind] to me, and I do not now mean to be unkind to you. On the contrary, if you will but follow my advice, you will find it worth more than eight times eighty dollars to you.
 
Affectionately Your brother
A. LINCOLN

Letter to Elihu Washburne (February 9, 1855)

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On June 29, 2013

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#94 on the list of 150 Most Teachable Lincoln Documents

Annotated Transcript

“The agony is over at last; and the result you doubtless know. I write this only to give you some particulars to explain what might appear difficult of understanding. I began with 44 votes, Shields 41, and Trumbull 5—yet Trumbull was elected. In fact 47 different members voted for me—getting three new ones on the second ballot, and losing four old ones. How came my 47 to yield to T’s 5? It was Govr. Matteson’s work.”

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HD Daily Report, February 9, 1855

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How Historians Interpret

“Despite the dignity of Lincoln’s public demeanor, he privately suffered a brutal disappointment, describing the ordeal as an “agony.” Though he had engineered Trumbull’s victory for the sake of the anti-Nebraska cause it was difficult to accept the manner of his loss. ‘He could bear defeat inflicted by his enemies with a pretty good grace,’ he told his friend Gillespie, ‘but it was hard to be wounded in the house of his friends.’ After all the hard work, the interminable nights and weekends on the hustings, conversations with fellow politicians, the hours spent writing letters to garner support, after so many years of patient waiting and hopefulness, he seemed as far from realizing his ambition as ever. Fate seemed to take a curious delight in finding new ways to shatter his dreams.”

—Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006), 173.

If Matteson and his friends did resort to bribery, which seems highly likely, then it is easy to understand why Lincoln rejoiced at thwarting the governor’s scheme. “I regret my defeat moderately,” he told Washburne, “but I am not nervous about it. I could have headed off every combination and been elected, had it not been for Matteson’s double game – and the governor’s defeat now gives me more pleasure than my own gives me pain.” Lincoln was not gloating or being vindictive; he was genuinely offended by Matteson’s tactics and regarded the governor’s defeat as an ideological triumph, a rebuke to Democrats who had supported the Kansas-Nebraska Act. “On the whole,” he mused to Washburne, “it is perhaps as well for our general cause that Trumbull is elected. The Neb[raska] men confess that they hate it worse than any thing that could have happened. It is a great consolation to see them worse whipped than I am. I tell them it is their own fault – that they had abundant opertunity to choose between him & me, which they declined, and instead forced it on me to decide between him & Matteson.” Trumbull confirmed Lincoln’s observation, reporting that the pro-Nebraska Democrats “are exhibiting towards me a great deal of ill natured & malignant feeling.” The editor of the Chicago Times told Douglas that Trumbull’s election constituted “the severest blow we could have received.”

— Michael Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln: A Life (2 volumes, originally published by Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008) Unedited Manuscript By Chapter, Lincoln Studies Center, Volume 1, Chapter 10 (PDF), pp. 1148-1149.

“‘There is a long and painful history of that senatorial contest yet to be written,’ insisted Elihu B. Washburne, one of the key figures in the campaign, ‘and when the whole truth is disclosed it will throw a flood of new light on the character of Mr. Lincoln.’ While an examination of the 1855 contest may not ‘throw a flood of new light’ on Lincoln, it does present one of the fullest and most striking portraits yet available of Lincoln as a political leader. Start with his decision to elect Trumbull, which was not simply a selfless gesture. Lincoln helped elect a man whose own supporters had betrayed him. Some overlooked recollections of the contest, plus a letter Lincoln wrote after the election but not discovered until 1989, suggest that Governor Joel A. Matteson (another candidate in the race) was arranging to buy votes in the Trumbull camp when Lincoln intervened. Lincoln had entered the ballot expecting to lose and hoping only to prevent anyone else, including Trumbull, from winning; he switched gears only when he discovered that Matteson was cheating. Yet Lincoln achieved more than just revenge. By supporting a former Democrat, he finished laying the foundation for what would become the Republican party of Illinois—a job he had pursued since the beginning of his campaign the previous November.”

—Matthew Pinsker, “Senator Abraham Lincoln”, Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association 14, 1993.

NOTE TO READERS

This page is under construction and will be developed further by students in the new “Understanding Lincoln” online course sponsored by the House Divided Project at Dickinson College and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. To find out more about the course and to see some of our videotaped class sessions, including virtual field trips to Ford’s Theatre and Gettysburg, please visit our Livestream page at http://new.livestream.com/gilderlehrman/lincoln

 

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Springfield, Feby. 9-1855
 
Hon: E. B. Washburne
 
My dear Sir: 
The agony is over at last; and the result you doubtless know. I write this only to give you some particulars to explain what might appear difficult of understanding. I began with 44 votes, Shields 41, and Trumbull 5—yet Trumbull was elected. In fact 47 different members voted for me—getting three new ones on the second ballot, and losing four old ones. How came my 47 to yield to T’s 5? It was Govr. Matteson’s work. He has been secretly a candidate every since (before even) the fall election. All the members round about the canal were Anti-Nebraska; but were, nevertheless nearly all democrats, and old personal friends of his. His plan was to privately impress them with the belief that he was as good Anti-Nebraska as any one else—at least could be secured to be so by instructions, which could be easily passed. In this way he got from four to six of that sort of men to really prefer his election to that of any other man—all “sub rosa” of course. One notable instance of this sort was with Mr. Strunk of Kankakee. At the beginning of the session he came a volunteer to tell me he was for me & would walk a hundred miles to elect me; but lo, it was not long before he leaked it out that he was going for me the first few ballots & then for Govr. Matteson.
 
The Nebraska men, of course, were not for Matteson; but when they found they could elect no avowed Nebraska man they tardily determined, to let him get whomever of our men he could by whatever means he could and ask him no questions. In the mean time Osgood, Don. Morrison & Trapp of St. Clair had openly gone over from us. With the united Nebraska force, and their recruits, open & covert, it gave Matteson more than enough to elect him. We saw into it plainly ten days ago; but with every possible effort, could not head it off. All that remained of the Anti Nebraska force, excepting Judd, Cook, Palmer[,] Baker & Allen of Madison, & two or three of the secret Matteson men, would go into caucus, & I could get the nomination of that caucus. But the three Senators & one of the two representatives above named “could never vote for a whig” and this incensed some twenty whigs to “think” they would never vote for the man of the five. So we stood, and so we went into the fight yesterday; the Nebraska men very confident of the election of Matteson, though denying that he was a candidate; and we very much believing also, that they would elect him. But they wanted first to make a show of good faith to Shields by voting for him a few times, and our secret Matteson men also wanted to make a show of good faith by voting with us a few times. So we led off. On the seventh ballot, I think, the signal was given to the Neb. men, to turn on to Matteson, which they acted on to a man, with one exception; my old friend Strunk going with them giving him 44 votes. Next ballot the remaining Neb. man, & one pretended Anti- went on to him, giving him 46. The next still another giving him 47, wanting only three of an election. In the mean time, our friends with a view of detaining our expected bolters had been turning from me to Trumbull till he he [sic] had risen to 35 & I had been reduced to 15. These would never desert me except by my direction; but I became satisfied that if we could prevent Matteson’s election one or two ballots more, we could not possibly do so a single ballot after my friends should begin to return to me from Trumbull. So I determined to strike at once; and accordingly advised my remaining friends to go for him, which they did & elected him on that the 10th. ballot.
 
Such is the way the thing was done. I think you would have done the same under the circumstances; though Judge Davis, who came down this morning, declares he never would have consented to the 47 men being controlled by the 5. I regret my defeat moderately, but I am not nervous about it. I could have headed off every combination and been elected, had it not been for Matteson’s double game—and his defeat now gives me more pleasure than my own gives me pain. On the whole, it is perhaps as well for our general cause that Trumbull is elected. The Neb. men confess that they hate it worse than any thing that could have happened. It is a great consolation to see them worse whipped than I am. I tell them it is their own fault—that they had abundant opertunity [sic] to choose between him & me, which they declined, and instead forced it on me to decide between him & Matteson.
 
With my grateful acknowledgments for the kind, active, and continued interest you have taken for me in this matter, allow me to subscribe myself
Yours forever
A. LINCOLN—

Letter to Jesse Norton (February 16, 1855)

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On June 29, 2013

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Ranking

#95 on the list of 150 Most Teachable Lincoln Documents

Annotated Transcript

“I have now been beaten one day over a week; and I am very happy to find myself quite convalescent.”

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HD Daily Report, February 16, 1855

The Lincoln Log, February 16, 1855

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How Historians Interpret

“By the time the legislature convened in early January, Lincoln’s hard work lining up the antislavery members paid dividends; Washburne, Norton, Giddings, Ray, and others had overcome the objections of most abolitionists. Lincoln later told Norton: ‘Through the untiring efforts of friends, among whom yourself and Washburne were chief, I finally surmounted the difficulty with the extreme Anti-Slavery men, and got all their votes, Lovejoy’s included.'”

—Michael Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln: A Life (2 volumes, originally published by Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008) Unedited Manuscript By Chapter, Lincoln Studies Center, Volume 1, Chapter 10 (PDF), pp. 1135-1136.

“In 1855, however, Lincoln had been somewhat less cool, complaining to Norton about ‘maneuvering’ of Governor Matteson, which he insisted had ‘forced upon me and my friends the necessity of surrendering to Trumbull.’ The bile here does not make complete sense unless placed in the context of some unique details that Lincoln provided within the newly discovered letter about Matteson’s ‘tampering.’ There have long been other extant accounts from Lincoln describing the results of the 1855 senatorial balloting, but none except for this recently published letter to Norton identify by name those who cast all their ballots with Lincoln or Trumbull, but were still apparently pledged in secret to Matteson. The fact underscores the startling conclusion that Lincoln was almost surely pushed into a last-minute alliance with anti-Nebraska Democrats because the regular Democratic governor of the state was just about to succeed in buying the election. Other previously available evidence from the period has loosely suggested corruption by the Democrats, such as one of the newer letters from Lincoln which reported from the days before the balloting that his men had hoped the Democrats had ‘reached the bottom of the rotten material’ but conceded, ‘What mines and pitfalls they have under us we do not know.’ Only this summary provided to Norton makes explicit what has in the past been mere conjecture and highlights another reality of political culture in the 1850s—it was rife with fraud.”

—Matthew Pinsker ,”Boss Lincoln” in The Living Lincoln, Ed. Thomas Horrocks, Harold Holzer, and Frank J. Williams (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2011), 30-31.

NOTE TO READERS

This page is under construction and will be developed further by students in the new “Understanding Lincoln” online course sponsored by the House Divided Project at Dickinson College and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. To find out more about the course and to see some of our videotaped class sessions, including virtual field trips to Ford’s Theatre and Gettysburg, please visit our Livestream page at http://new.livestream.com/gilderlehrman/lincoln

 

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Springfield, Feb. 16, 1855
Hon: J.O. Norton
 
My dear Sir:
I have now been beaten one day over a week; and I am very happy to find myself quite convalescent.  Your kind letter of the 20th of Jan’y I did not receive till the day before yesterday –owing, I suppose to our great snow-storm.  The day after the election I wrote Washburne the particulars, tolerably fully.  Through the untiring efforts of friends, among whom yourself and Washburne were chief, I finally surmounted the difficulty with the extreme Anti-Slavery men, and got all their votes, Lovejoy’s included.  Cook, Judd, Palmer, and Baker of Alton were the men who never could vote for a whig; and without the votes of two of whom I never could reach the requisite number to make an election. I do not mean that I actually got within two votes of the required number; but I easily enough could have done so, provided I could have assured my friends that two of the above named four would go for me.  In this connection it is necessary to bear in mind that your Senator Osgood, together with Don. Morrison, Kinney & Trapp of St Clair had openly gone over to the enemy.  
It was Govr Matteson’s manoevering that forced upon me and my friends the necessity of surrendering to Trumbull.  He made his first successful hit by tampering with Old man Strunk.  Strunk was pledged to me, which Matteson knew, but he succeeded in persuading him that I stood no chance of an election, and in getting a pledge from him to go for him as second choice.  He next made similar impressions on Hills of DuPage, Parks of your town, and Strawn and Day of LaSalle –at least we saw strong signs that he had, and they being old democrats, and I an old whig, I could get no sufficient access to them to sound them to the bottom.  
That Matteson assured the Nebraska democrats, he could get their men after they should have made a respectable show by voting a few ballots for other men, I think there is no doubt; and by holding up to their greedy eyes this amount of capital in our ranks, it was, that he induced the Nebraska men to drop Shields and take him en masse.  The Nebraska men, since Osgood’s and Don’s defection, had control of the Senate; and they refused to pass the resolution for going into the election till three hours before the joint session was to, and did in fact, commence.  One of the Nebraska senators has since told me that they only passed the resolution when they did, upon being privately assured by the Governor that he had it all safe.  
I have omitted to say that it was well understood Baker would vote for Trumbull, but would go over to Matteson rather than me.  
Passing over the first eight ballots which you have doubtless seen, when, on the ninth, Matteson had 47 –having every Nebraska man, and the Old man Strunk besides, and wanting but three of an election; and when the looser sort of my friends had gone over to Trumbull, and raised him to 35 and reduced me to 15 it struck me that Hills, Parks, Strawn, Day, and Baker, or at least some three of them would go over from Trumbull to Matteson & elect him on the tenth ballot, unless they should be kept on T. by seeing my remaining men coming on to him.  I accordingly gave the intimation which my friends acted upon, electing T. that ballot.  All were taken by surprise, Trumbull quite as much as any one else.
There was no pre-concert about it –in fact I think a pre-concert to that effect could not have been made.  The heat of the battle, andimminent danger of Matteson’s election were indispensably necessary to the result.  I know that few, if any, of my remaining 15 men would have gone from me without my direction; and I gave the direction, simultaneously with forming the resolution to do it.
It is not true, as might appear by the first ballot, that Trumbull had only five friends who preferred him to me.  I know the business of all the men tolerably well, and my opinion is, that if the 51 who elected him, were compelled to a naked expression of preference between him and me, he would at the outside, have 16 and I would have the remainder.  And this again would depend substantially upon the fact that his 16 came from the old democratic ranks & the remainder from the whigs.  Such as preferred him, yet voted for me on the first ballottings and so on the idea that a minority among friends, ought not to stand out against a majority.  
Lest you might receive a different impression, I wish to say I hold Judge Parks in very high estimation; believing him to be neither knave or fool, but decidedly the reverse of both.  Now, as I have called names so freely, you will of course consider this confidential.
Yours much obliged, &c.
A. Lincoln

Letter to Alexander McClure (August 30, 1860)

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#97 on the list of 150 Most Teachable Lincoln Documents

Annotated Transcript

“When you say you are organizing every election district, do you mean to include the idea that you are ‘canvassing’ – ‘counting noses?'”

On This Date

HD Daily Report, August 30, 1860

The Lincoln Log, August 30, 1860

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How Historians Interpret

“Lincoln also asked Alexander K. McClure, chairman of the Pennsylvania State Republican Committee, to keep him informed of the status of the campaign at the local level. On August 27, Lincoln responded to McClure report on the campaign by asking, ‘When you say you are organizing every election district, do you mean to include the idea that you are ‘canvassing’—‘counting noses?’’ Lincoln’s inquiry reveals the keen interest that he took in local party organization during the 1860 campaign. A New York visitor reported after a meeting with Lincoln: ‘He sat down beside me on the sofa and commenced talking about political affairs in my own State with a knowledge of details which surprised me.’”

William C. Harris, “Lincoln’s Role in the 1860 Presidential Campaign” in Exploring Lincoln: Great Historians Reappraise Our Greatest President, Ed. Harold Holzer, Craig L. Symonds, and Frank J. Williams, (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015).

 

NOTE TO READERS

This page is under construction and will be developed further by students in the new “Understanding Lincoln” online course sponsored by the House Divided Project at Dickinson College and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. To find out more about the course and to see some of our videotaped class sessions, including virtual field trips to Ford’s Theatre and Gettysburg, please visit our Livestream page at http://new.livestream.com/gilderlehrman/lincoln

 

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Private
Springfield, Ills. Aug. 30, 1860
 
A.K. McClure, Esq.
My dear Sir,
 
Yours of the 27th was received last evening; as also was one only a few days before.  Neither of these bears quite so hopeful a tone as your former letters.  When you say you are organizing every election district, do you mean to include the idea that you are “canvassing” – “counting noses?”
 
I am always glad to see your letters.   
Yours very truly, 
A.Lincoln

Letter to John Stuart (January 23, 1841)

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#101 on the list of 150 Most Teachable Lincoln Documents

Annotated Transcript

“I am now the most miserable man living. If what I feel were equally distributed to the whole human family, there would not be one cheerful face on the earth. Whether I shall ever be better I can not tell; I awfully forebode I shall not. To remain as I am is impossible; I must die or be better, it appears to me.”

On This Date

HD Daily Report, January 23, 1841

The Lincoln Log, January 23, 1841

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How Historians Interpret

“In fact, Lincoln went ‘crazy for a week or so’ and was nursed back to health at the Butlers’ home, where his friend Orville H. Browning was staying. Browning said his friend ‘was so much affected as to talk incoherently, and to be delirious to the extent of not knowing what he was doing.’ This ‘aberration of mind resulted entirely from the situation he . . . got himself into – he was engaged to Miss Todd, and in love with Miss Edwards, and his conscience troubled him dreadfully for the supposed injustice he had done, and the supposed violation of his word which he had committed.’ Many friends, including James H. Matheny, ‘thought L[incoln] would commit suicide.’ They ‘had to remove razors from his room – take away all Knives and other such dangerous things – &c – it was terrible.’ Joshua Speed wrote that ‘a gloom came over him till his friends were alarmed for his life.’ According to Speed, Lincoln wrote a poem about suicide and declared that he ‘would be more than willing’ to die, but, he said, ‘I have an irrepressible desire to live till I can be assured that the world is a little better for my having lived in it.'”

–Michael Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln: A Life (2 volumes, originally published by Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008) Unedited Manuscript By Chapters, Lincoln Studies Center, Volume 1, Chapter 6 (PDF), pp. 547-548

“Though he had earlier longed to end his commitment to Mary Todd, he now began to suspect. . .that he loved her more than he had thought.  Even more important, he was haunted by ‘the never-absent idea’ that he had made Mary unhappy. . . Losing both his only intimate friend and his fiancée within a matter of days was more than Lincoln could bear, and he collapsed.  Taking to his bed for about a week, he was unwilling to see anyone except his doctor and Speed, who had not yet left for Kentucky.  Years later, Speed said he thought Lincoln might commit suicide. . . Just what specific advice Speed offered his friend is unknown, but my guess is that he told Lincoln that he should either end his relationship with Mary Todd or marry her.  Lincoln acknowledged the correctness of the advice but could not act on it.  Unable to make a choice, he was, as he wrote his law partner, John T. Stuart, ‘the most miserable man living. . .’ More than a year later, he still could not decide.  ‘Before I resolve to do the one thing or the other,’ he confessed to Speed, ‘I must regain my confidence in my own ability to keep my resolves when they are made.'”

–David Herbert Donald, Lincoln (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 44-45

NOTE TO READERS

This page is under construction and will be developed further by students in the new “Understanding Lincoln” online course sponsored by the House Divided Project at Dickinson College and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. To find out more about the course and to see some of our videotaped class sessions, including virtual field trips to Ford’s Theatre and Gettysburg, please visit our Livestream page at http://new.livestream.com/gilderlehrman/lincoln

 

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Jany. 23rd. 1841- Springfield, Ills.
 
Dear Stuart: 
Yours of the 3rd. Inst. is recd. & I proceed to answer it as well as I can, tho’ from the deplorable state of my mind at this time,  I fear I shall give you but little satisfaction. About the matter of the congressional election, I can only tell you, that there is a bill now before the Senate adopting the General Ticket system; but whether the party have fully determined on it’s adoption is yet uncertain. There is no sign of opposition to you among our friends, and none that I can learn among our enemies; tho’, of course, there will be, if the Genl. Ticket be adopted. The Chicago American, Peoria Register, & Sangamo Journal, have already hoisted your flag upon their own responsibility; & the other whig papers of the District are expected to follow immediately. On last evening there was a meeting of our friends at Butler’s; and I submitted the question to them & found them unanamously in favour of having you announced as a candidate. A few of us this morning, however, concluded, that as you were already being announced in the papers, we would delay announcing you, as by your own authority for a week or two. We thought that to appear too keen about it might spur our opponents on about their Genl. Ticket project. Upon the whole, I think I may say with certainty, that your reelection is sure, if it be in the power of the whigs to make it so.
 
For not giving you a general summary of news, you must pardon me; it is not in my power to do so. I am now the most miserable man living. If what I feel were equally distributed to the whole human family, there would not be one cheerful face on the earth. Whether I shall ever be better I can not tell; I awfully forebode I shall not. To remain as I am is impossible; I must die or be better, it appears to me. The matter you speak of on my account, you may attend to as you say, unless you shall hear of my condition forbidding it. I say this, because I fear I shall be unable to attend to any bussiness here, and a change of scene might help me. If I could be myself, I would rather remain at home with Judge Logan. I can write no more.
 
Your friend, as ever—
A. LINCOLN

Fragment on Niagara Falls (September 25, 1848)

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Contributing Editors for this page include Bob Frey

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#102 on the list of 150 Most Teachable Lincoln Documents

Annotated Transcript

“Niagara-Falls! By what mysterious power is it that millions and millions, are drawn from all parts of the world, to gaze upon Niagara Falls? There is no mystery about the thing itself.”

On This Date

[Editorial Note:  This undated fragment is typically attributed to the period during Lincoln’s journey home from his first session in Congress, sometime between September 25-30, 1848.]

HD Daily Report, September 25, 1848

The Lincoln Log, September 28, 1848

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Bob Frey, “Understanding Lincoln” blog post (via Quora), September 30, 2013

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How Historians Interpret

“. . .They briefly visited Niagara Falls, which inspired Lincoln to momentarily rhapsody: ‘Niagara is strong, and fresh to-day as ten thousand years ago.  The Mammoth and the Mastadon—now so long dead, that fragments of their monstrous bones, alone testify, that they ever lived, have gazed on Niagara.  In that long—long time, never still for a single moment.  Never dried, never froze, never slept, never rested’—and here his pen stopped as he recognized that he was not good at this sort of thing.  Later, when Herndon asked him what reflections he had when he saw the falls, he remarked solemnly that he wondered where all that water came from.”

—David Herbert Donald, Lincoln (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), pp. 132

“Herndon told a story that illustrated Lincoln’s remarkable capacity to focus on what he considered the essentials of any matter. Herndon visited Niagara Falls some time after Lincoln had seen the falls in 1849. Telling Lincoln his impressions of this wonder of nature, Herndon waxed eloquent in typical nineteenth-century romantic fashion, declaiming of rush and roar and brilliant rainbows. Exhausting his adjectives, he asked Lincoln what had made the deepest impression on him when he saw the falls. ‘The thing that struck me most forcibly,’ Lincoln replied, ‘was, where in the world did all that water come from?’ Herndon recalled this remark after nearly forty years as an example of how Lincoln ‘looked at everything…. His mind, heedless of beauty or awe, followed irresistibly back to the first cause…. If there was any secret in his power this surely was it.'”

–James M. McPherson, “The Hedgehog and the Foxes,” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association 12.1 (1991)

NOTE TO READERS

This page is under construction and will be developed further by students in the new “Understanding Lincoln” online course sponsored by the House Divided Project at Dickinson College and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. To find out more about the course and to see some of our videotaped class sessions, including virtual field trips to Ford’s Theatre and Gettysburg, please visit our Livestream page at http://new.livestream.com/gilderlehrman/lincoln

 

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Niagara-Falls! By what mysterious power is it that millions and millions, are drawn from all parts of the world, to gaze upon ← Niagara Falls → ? There is no mystery about the thing itself. Every effect is just such as any inteligent man knowing the causes, would anticipate, without [seeing] it. If the water moving onward in a great river, reaches a point where there is a perpendicular jog, of a hundred feet in descent, in the bottom of the river,—it is plain the water will have a violent and continuous plunge at that point. It is also plain the water, thus plunging, will foam, and roar, and send up a mist, continuously, in which last, during sunshine, there will be perpetual rain-bows. The mere physical of ← Niagara Falls → is only this. Yet this is really a very small part of that world’s wonder. It’s power to excite reflection, and emotion, is it’s great charm. The geologist will demonstrate that the plunge, or fall, was once at Lake Ontario, and has worn it’s way back to it’s present position; he will ascertain how fast it is wearing now, and so get a basis for determining how long it has been wearing back from Lake Ontario, and finally demonstrate by it that this world is at least fourteen thousand years old. A philosopher of a slightly different turn will say ← Niagara Falls → is only the lip of the basin out of which pours all the surplus water which rains down on two or three hundred thousand square miles of the earth’s surface. He will estim[ate with] approximate accuracy, that five hundred thousand [to]ns of water, falls with it’s full weight, a distance of a hundred feet each minute—thus exerting a force equal to the lifting of the same weight, through the same space, in the same time. And then the further reflection comes that this vast amount of water, constantly pouring down, is supplied by an equal amount constantly lifted up, by the sun; and still he says, “If this much is lifted up, for this one space of two or three hundred thousand square miles, an equal amount must be lifted for every other equal space, and he is overwhelmed in the contemplation of the vast power the sun is constantly exerting in quiet, noiseless opperation of lifting water up to be rained downagain.
 
But still there is more. It calls up the indefinite past. When Columbus first sought this continent—when Christ suffered on the cross—when Moses led Israel through the Red-Sea—nay, even, when Adam first came from the hand of his Maker—then as now, Niagara was roaring here. The eyes of that species of extinct giants, whose bones fill the mounds of America, have gazed on Niagara, as ours do now. Co[n]temporary with the whole race of men, and older than the first man, Niagara is strong, and fresh to-day as ten thousand years ago. The Mammoth and Mastadon—now so long dead, that fragments of their monstrous bones, alone testify, that they ever lived, have gazed on Niagara. In that long—long time, never still for a single moment. Never dried, never froze, never slept, never rested,

Letter to Stephen Douglas (July 29, 1858)

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Contributing Editors for this page include Michael Normant

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#107 on the list of 150 Most Teachable Lincoln Documents

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“Yours of the 24th. in relation to an arrangement to divide time and address the same audiences, is received; and, in apology for not sooner replying, allow me to say that when I sat by you at dinner yesterday was not aware that you had answered my note, nor certainly, that my own note had been presented to you.”

On This Date

HD Daily Report, July 29, 1858

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How Historians Interpret

“Lincoln then wrote a challenge for Judd to deliver to Douglas, formally proposing that they ‘divide time, and address the same audiences’ . . . Judd handed over Lincoln’s challenge, which Douglas ‘angrily and emphatically declined to consider on the ground that it was a childish idea and that he would be belittling himself and dignifying Lincoln.’  (Another reason for Douglas’s hesitation was his respect for Lincoln’s ability.  As the senator told Joseph O. Glover, ‘I do not feel, between you and me, that I want to go into this debate. The whole country knows me and has me measured. Lincoln, as regards myself, is comparatively unknown, and if he gets the best of this debate, and I want to say he is the ablest man the Republicans have got, I shall lose everything and Lincoln will gain everything. Should I win, I shall gain but little.’)  Judd replied that ‘if Douglas refused it would then be published broadcast throughout the state, coupled with the assertion that Douglas was afraid to meet Lincoln in debate.’  Indeed, the Little Giant would have looked unmanly. . .Douglas offered a counterproposal: noting that the Democratic State Central Committee had committed him to speak at party meetings throughout the state, Douglas declined to share time with Lincoln at those events, but he would agree to debate in each of the state’s nine congressional districts, except for the two where they had already in effect debated (i.e., Chicago and Springfield).  In picking up the gage thus flung down, Douglas peevishly and falsely suggested that Lincoln was plotting to include a National Democratic candidate for the senate in the debates. Forwarding this response to Lincoln, Judd observed that it ‘is a clear dodge, but he has made the best case he could.’  On July 29, protesting against the ‘unjust’ insinuations of ‘attempted unfairness,’ Lincoln accepted Douglas’s terms.”

–Michael Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln: A Life (2 volumes, originally published by Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008) Unedited Manuscript By Chapters, Lincoln Studies Center, Volume 1, Chapter 12 (PDF), pp. 1342-1344

NOTE TO READERS

This page is under construction and will be developed further by students in the new “Understanding Lincoln” online course sponsored by the House Divided Project at Dickinson College and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. To find out more about the course and to see some of our videotaped class sessions, including virtual field trips to Ford’s Theatre and Gettysburg, please visit our Livestream page at http://new.livestream.com/gilderlehrman/lincoln

 

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Springfield,
July 29. 1858
 
Hon. S. A. Douglas 
Dear Sir 
Yours of the 24th. in relation to an arrangement to divide time and address the same audiences, is received; and, in apology for not sooner replying, allow me to say that when I sat by you at dinner yesterday was not aware that you had answered my note, nor certainly, that my own note had been presented to you. An hour after I saw a copy of your answer in the Chicago Times; and, reaching home, I found the original awaiting me. Protesting that your insinuations of attempted unfairness on my part are unjust; and with the hope that you did not very considerately make them, I proceed to reply. To your statement that “It has been suggested recently that an arrangement had been made to bring out a third candidate for the U. S. Senate who, with yourself, should canvass the state in opposition to me &c.” I can only say that such suggestion must have been made by yourself; for certainly none such has been made by, or to me; or otherwise, to my knowledge. Surely you did not deliberately conclude, as you insinuate, that I was expecting to draw you into an arrangement, of terms to be agreed on by yourself, by which a third candidate, and my self, “in concert, might be able to take the opening and closing speech in every case.”
 
As to your surprise that I did not sooner make the proposal to divide time with you, I can only say I made it as soon as I resolved to make it. I did not know but that such proposal would come from you; I waited respectfully to see. It may have been well known to you that you went to Springfield for the purpose of agreeing on the plan of campaign; but it was not so known to me. When your appointments were announced in the papers, extending only to the 21st. of August, I, for the first time, considered it certain that you would make no proposal to me; and then resolved, that if my friends concurred, I would make one to you. As soon thereafter as I could see and consult with friends satisfactorily, I did make the proposal. It did not occur to me that the proposed arrangement could derange your plan, after the latest of your appointments already made. After that, there was, before the election, largely over two months of clear time.
 
For you to say that we have already spoken at Chicago and Springfield, and that on both occasions I had the concluding speech, is hardly a fair statement. The truth rather is this. At Chicago, July 9th, you made a carefully prepared conclusion on my speech of June 16th.; twentyfour hours after I made a hasty conclusion on yours of the 9th.; you had six days to prepare, and concluded on me again at Bloomington on the 16th.; twentyfour hours after I concluded on you again at Springfield. In the mean time you had made another conclusion on me at Springfield, which I did not hear, and of the contents of which I knew nothing when I spoke; so that your speech made in day-light, and mine at night of the 17th. at Springfield were both made in perfect independence of each other. The dates of making all these speeches, will show, I think, that in the matter of time for preparation, the advantage has all been on your side; and that none of the external circumstances have stood to my advantage.
 
I agree to an arrangement for us to speak at the seven places you have named, and at your own times, provided you name the times at once, so that I, as well as you, can have to myself the time not covered by the arrangement. As to other details, I wish perfect reciprocity, and no more. I wish as much time as you, and that conclusions shall alternate. That is all.
Your obedient Servant
A. LINCOLN—

Letter to Thomas Corwin (October 9, 1859)

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#108 on the list of 150 Most Teachable Lincoln Documents

 

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We must have though a man who recognizes the slavery issue as being the living issue of the day; who does not hesitate to declare slavery a wrong, nor to deal with it as such; who believes in the power and duty of Congress to prevent the spread of it. 

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How Historians Interpret

“Despite his modesty, Lincoln between August 1859 and March 1860 positioned himself for a presidential run by giving speeches and corresponding with party leaders in several states, among them Iowa, Ohio, Wisconsin, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and Kansas.  At the same time, he labored to keep Republicans true to their principles by having them steer a middle course between the Scylla of Douglas’s popular sovereignty and the Charybdis of radical abolitionism.  Only thus could he and his party capture the White House.  And only thus could a lesser-known Moderate like himself lead the ticket.  Lincoln took encouragement from the ever-widening rift in the Democratic party over such issues as a federal slave code for the territories and the reopening of the African slave trade.  To Herndon and others he said, in substance: ‘an explosion must come in the near future. Douglas is a great man in his way and has quite unlimited power over the great mass of his party, especially in the North.  If he goes to the Charleston Convention [of the national Democratic party in 1860], which he will do, he, in a kind of spirit of revenge, will split the Convention wide open and give it the devil; & right here is our future success or rather the glad hope of it.’ Herndon recalled that Lincoln ‘prayed for this state of affairs,’ for ‘he saw in it his opportunity and wisely played his line.'”

–Michael Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln: A Life (2 volumes, originally published by Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008) Unedited Manuscript By Chapters, Lincoln Studies Center, Volume 1, Chapter 14 (PDF), pp. 1525

NOTE TO READERS

This page is under construction and will be developed further by students in the new “Understanding Lincoln” online course sponsored by the House Divided Project at Dickinson College and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. To find out more about the course and to see some of our videotaped class sessions, including virtual field trips to Ford’s Theatre and Gettysburg, please visit our Livestream page at http://new.livestream.com/gilderlehrman/lincoln

 

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Confidential

Springfield, Oct. 9, 1859

Hon. Thomas Corwin

My dear Sir:

Reaching home yesterday I for the first received yours of Sept. 24.  I reply in a hurry, because of the sentence in your letter, in these words, “I was sorry to hear from you, that a moderate man on our side would lose Illinois by 50,000.”  Whether you understood me as having said this in the speech at Cincinnati, or somehow else, I am not certain; but I am certain I have not meant to say it anywhere.  I did say at Cincinnati, that a candidate who shall turn up his nose at the Republican cause, could not carry Illinois by 50,000, but I am not considering such a man as “a moderate man on our side.”  I understand such a man as not being on our side at all; and as seeking to drive us to abandon our side ourselves.  They know we would organize to prevent the spread and nationalizing of Slavery; and yet they tell us they are tired of this view, and they invite us to abandon this view, and to join them against the Administration on the tariff, extravagances, live oak contracts, and the like –the very old issues upon which the whig party was beat out of existence.  Now I have expressed, and today repeat, that such an arrangement would lose Illinois by 50,000.  The thing is pretense.  The whigs here were in a minority of 15,000.  A full fifth of them have openly gone over to the enemy; still last year the Republicans had a large plurality, and very nearly a clear majority.  How was this?  Simply that more democratshave gone with us, than whigs have gone against us.  What brought these democrats with us?  The Slavery issue.  Drop that issue and they have no motive to remain, and will not remain with us.  It is idiotic to think otherwise. 

 

Do you understand me as saying Illinois must have an extreme anti-slavery candidate?  I do not so mean.  We must have though a man who recognizes the slavery issue as being the living issue of the day; who does not hesitate to declare slavery a wrong, nor to deal with it as such; who believes in the power and duty of Congress to prevent the spread of it.  It would be unfavorable to us, I think, to have one who is bent on having a “rumpus” over the Fugitive Slave Law.  The present law I do not think is a very seemly one, but I do think an efficient fugitive slave law is demanded [by] the Constitution.  I said this is in the canvass last year; and I said nearly the same in the Cincinnati speech.  But I think you understand me.

 

Yours very truly,

A. Lincoln

Application for Patent (March 10, 1849)

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#122 on the list of 150 Most Teachable Lincoln Documents

 

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How Historians Interpret

“. . .Lincoln’s steamboat invention was utilitarian and not simply an exercise of his intellect or a self-aggrandizing means of fame and fortune (although if his model had been manufactured and he had realized some profit, he surely would not have complained or refused).  Growing up as a pioneer farmer and boatman, Lincoln knew the necessity for reliable transportation not just for travel but also to take farm products to market, and he hoped his invention would help facilitate river navigation.  It was the realization of Lincoln’s understanding of the needs of the western American as well as an outgrowth of his long-held political belief in internal improvements.  Lincoln had championed Henry Clay’s American System since his first term as a state legislator in 1834 and continued it into his presidential terms.”

—Jason Emerson, Lincoln the Inventor (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2009), 13

“By [November 1860], the outlines of [Lincoln’s] biography had grown familiar.  But readers were surely surprised when the reigning bible of technology, Scientific American—otherwise devoting its latest issue to newly invented carriage wheels and gas meters—focused, too, on an eleven-year-old device for buoying vessels over river shoals.  Neither the blueprint, nor the four-foot wooden model he had first floated in a Springfield trough more than eleven years earlier, had matured to the development phase, and in truth seemed unlikely to work.  But the editors had learned that it had been invented ‘by no less a personage than the President elect of the United States.’  Abraham Lincoln’s 1849 patent (number 6469), though it had failed to attract investors, much less revolutionize river travel as once he had dreamed, now received the full Scientific American treatment, with the would-be inventor’s handmade wooden model exhaustively described and faithfully reproduced in woodcut.  The journal tactfully sidestepped the scientific merits of Lincoln’s idea, gently conceding that ‘we hope the author of it will have better success in presiding as Chief Magistrate over the people of the entire Union than he has had as an inventor.’  But the magazine was clearly impressed, suggesting that Lincoln’s little-known foray into science demonstrated ‘the variety of talents possessed by men’—one man in particular.  In face, no other president before or since has ever held a federal patent.  As the magazine pointed out, ‘it is probable that among our readers there are thousands of mechanics who would devise a better apparatus for buoying steamboats over [sand]bars, but how many of them would be able to compete successfully in the race for the Presidency?'”

—Harold Holzer, Lincoln President-Elect: Abraham Lincoln and the Great Secession Winter 1860-1861 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008), 137

NOTE TO READERS

This page is under construction and will be developed further by students in the new “Understanding Lincoln” online course sponsored by the House Divided Project at Dickinson College and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. To find out more about the course and to see some of our videotaped class sessions, including virtual field trips to Ford’s Theatre and Gettysburg, please visit our Livestream page at http://new.livestream.com/gilderlehrman/lincoln

 

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March 10, 1849
 
…To all whom it may concern:
Be it known that I, Abraham Lincoln, of Springfield, in the county of Sangamon, in the state of Illinois, have invented a new and improved manner of combining adjustable buoyant air chambers with a steam boat or other vessel for the purpose of enabling their draught of water to be readily lessened to enable them to pass over bars, or through shallow water, without discharging their cargoes; and I do hereby declare the following to be a full, clear, and exact description thereof, reference being had to the accompanying drawings making a part of this specification. Similar letters indicate like parts in all the figures.
The buoyant chambers A. A. which I employ, are constructed in such a manner that they can be expanded so as to hold a large volume of air when required for use, and can be contracted, into a very small space and safely secured as soon as their services can be dispensed with…
…I wish it to be distinctly understood, that I do not intend to limit myself to any particular mechanical arrangement, in combining expansible buoyant chambers with a vessel, but shall vary the same as I may deem expedient, whilst I attain the same end by substantially the same means. What I claim as my invention and desire to secure by letters patent, is the combination of expansible buoyant chambers placed at the sides of a vessel, with the main shaft or shafts C, by means of the sliding spars, or shafts D, which pass down through the buoyant chambers and are made fast to their bottoms, and the series of ropes and pullies, or their equivalents, in such a manner that by turning the main shaft or shafts in one direction, the buoyant chambers will be forced downwards into the water and at the same time expanded and filled with air for buoying up the vessel by the displacement of water; and by turning the shaft in an opposite direction, the buoyant chambers will be contracted into a small space and secured against injury.
Witness 
Z. C. ROBBINS 
A. LINCOLN
H. H. SYLVESTER

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