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32<P><EM><STRONG>Midwest Today</STRONG></EM><STRONG>, February 1993</STRONG>
33<HR ALIGN=LEFT><IMG SRC="lincoln.gif" WIDTH="145" HEIGHT="228"
34ALIGN="LEFT" BORDER="0" VSPACE="5" HSPACE="10" NATURALSIZEFLAG="3"><BR>
35<BR>
36</P>
37
38<H1>IN SEARCH OF THE <BR>
39REAL ABE LINCOLN</H1>
40
41<H3>He was on the national stage only six years, but in that period
42this enigmatic man from the Heartland became the human fulcrum
43that kept the American nation from collapsing</H3>
44
45<P><BR>
46<BR>
47<I>&quot;Die when I may, I want it said of me by those who know
48me best, that I always plucked a thistle and planted a flower
49where I thought a flower would grow.&quot; - Abraham Lincoln</I>
50<BR>
51<BR>
52<A HREF="abequotes.html">Two Short Quotations About Lincoln</A></P>
53
54<P><HR ALIGN=LEFT><STRONG>By LARRY JORDAN</STRONG> <BR>
55<BR>
56One of those rare men uncorrupted by vast power, Abraham Lincoln
57has been more written about than any other head of state with
58the possible exception of Napoleon. But something of a personal
59mystery remains.</P>
60
61<P>A highly secretive man, easy to underestimate, whose inner
62musings were for the most part unknowable, Lincoln remains endlessly
63fascinating to school children, scholars and all those who view
64his life in epic terms.</P>
65
66<P>He was the most severely tested of our leaders, as he held
67the nation to its founding principles, from Illinois prairie towns
68to battlefields where 600,00O Americans died. In a situation without
69precedent, through events of the greatest horror, with almost
70no consistently faithful allies, Lincoln never wavered in his
71resolve.</P>
72
73<P>One-hundred and 84 years after his birth in a Kentucky cabin
74on February 12,1809, myths about Abe Lincoln abound.</P>
75
76<P>Humble he was, and honest - but not a simple country boy whom
77fate thrust unexpectedly into the spotlight. Once, after his election,
78Lincoln told a friend, &quot;You know better than any man living
79that from my boyhood up my ambition was to be President.&quot;</P>
80
81<P>Still, almost from birth, Lincoln seemed likely to wind up
82an &quot;also ran&quot; in life's race. He was poor and had little
83formal schooling. He failed in business as a storekeeper. He was
84unlucky in both love and politics.</P>
85
86<P>His youthful sweetheart, Ann Rutledge, died. The first woman
87he proposed to, turned him down. His subsequent marriage to Mary
88Todd proved a stormy one. He lost more elections than he won.
89Anticipating defeat in his first race for a seat in the Illinois
90legislature in 1832 - and he did lose - Lincoln wrote: &quot;If
91the good people in their wisdom shall see fit to keep me in the
92background, I have been too familiar with disappointment to be
93much chagrined.&quot;</P>
94
95<P>When his business failed, leaving him debt-ridden, he became
96a village postmaster. Had he succumbed to his tendency to melancholy
97and self-doubt, young Abe might well have disappeared into the
98mists of history, just another obscure frontier failure.</P>
99
100<P>But he persisted. He turned to the study of law and grammar.
101Slowly his star rose.</P>
102
103<P>&quot;Lincoln was not a type,&quot; said Robert Ingersoll.
104&quot;He stands alone - no ancestors, no fellows, no successors.&quot;</P>
105
106<P><B>Still Emerging</B></P>
107
108<P>One reason it has taken scholars so long to assess the man
109is that the time in which Lincoln lived was rich in expressive
110evidence. Letter-writing was still a fine art, because pens and
111pencils were the primary means of transcribing words. And Lincoln
112was a prodigious correspondent. Researchers didn't even have access
113to many of the President's personal records for a generation,
114because his son, Robert Todd Lincoln, didn't turn over his father's
115private papers until 54 years after the President's death, and
116they were not opened until 1947.</P>
117
118<P>Historians generally cite these defining moments and characteristic
119in Lincoln's life:</P>
120
121<UL>
122  <LI>The simplicity of his life on the frontier taught Lincoin
123  to value democracy and equality, and gave him a burning sympathy
124  for plain people struggling against the odds.
125  <LI>A man of action when circumstances demanded it, Lincoln's
126  tremendous strength came in handy in tussles on the frontier,
127  such as when he vanquished the town bully in a wrestling match
128  in New Salem..
129  <LI>&quot;The Rail Splitter&quot; was a title Lincoln earned.
130  His vagabond farmer father put an ax in his hand when Abe was
131  only eight. As President, he understood the character of the
132  backwoodsmen, and shared their love of lonely forests.
133  <LI>Rivermen in Civil War day found a President who knew their
134  problems. Abe was a flatboat oarsman who rode the Mississippi
135  waves as a youth and knew the Iowa shores.
136  <LI>His romance with Ann Rutledge ended with her death of malaria.
137  But her love inspired him, and deepened at an early age the emotions
138  which eventually were to crystallize in Lincoln the humanitarian
139  and emancipator.
140  <LI>The small businessman had Lincoln's full sympathy after his
141  own unsuccessful venture in storekeeping in New Salem.
142  <LI>Sword in hand, Captain Lincoln drilled his volunteer company
143  at New Salem, IL., for the Blackhawk Indian war. It was a little-relished
144  foretaste of the day when he would be forced to call for Northern
145  volunteers in the Civil War. But it broadened his conception
146  of the soldier's task.
147  <LI>Marriage to the socially prominent Mary Todd united Lincoln
148  with the ambitious woman credited with driving him to the Presidency.
149  Mary's fiery character helped to push the gentle frontiersman
150  to great heights.
151</UL>
152
153<P>Abe entered politics by becoming a candidate for the Illinois
154state legislature. He promised that, if elected, he would use
155$2.50 of his $3-a-day salary to pay off the debts of his store.
156(He won the election).</P>
157
158<P>Forged in the fires of his debates with Stephen A. Douglas
159was the steel of Lincoln's oratory.</P>
160
161<P>Nearly 128 years after his death, more than 6,000 people subscribe
162to a monthly journal about Lincoln's life. Schools in Canada,
163Australia and England offer Lincoln study fellowships; Taiwan
164has a Lincoln Society and Tokyo's Meisei University even has a
165Lincoln Center. There are three or four dozen new biographies
166of the 16th President produced every year.</P>
167
168<P>In Lincoln's hometown of Springfield, IL., in the basement
169beneath the Old State Capitol where Lincoln gave his famous &quot;House
170Divided&quot; speech in 1858, is the Illinois State Historical
171Library which contains thousands of documents and hundreds of
172personal items. Curator Thomas Schwartz fields scores of queries
173on a daily basis.</P>
174
175<P><B>Log Cabin Birth</B></P>
176
177<P>Born on a farm three miles south of Hodgenville, Kentucky,
178Lincoln moved with his parents and sister Sarah to what is now
179Spencer County, Indiana when he was seven. Two years later, his
180mother, Nancy Hanks Lincoln, died of milk sickness, and the next
181year his father remarried. When Abraham was 19, his only sibling,
182Sarah (who had by then married), died in childbirth.</P>
183
184<P>In 1830, Abe and his father, stepmother and other relatives
185moved to a site ten miles southwest of Decatur, IL. on the north
186bank of the Sangamon River (now Lincoln Trail Homestead State
187Park). And when he was 22, he left home.</P>
188
189<P>Apparently, Abraham Lincoln was always a bookworm. A contemporary
190of his recalled having encountered young Abe during his stint
191as a clerk in a general store, &quot;at full length on the counter,
192his head resting on a bolt of blue denim as he studied a book
193in his hand. He wore the same shirt and one suspender and the
194linsey trousers which he had worn in the dooryard of the tavern,
195but his feet were covered only by his blue yarn socks.&quot;</P>
196
197<P>As a village postmaster, Abe also got a chance to read the
198newspapers that came in, thus learning about the world. But for
199all his erudition, Abe could also be hot-tempered. A proposed
200duel between Lincoln and another man was averted only after friends
201on both sides intervened.</P>
202
203<P>In 1842, Lincoln and Mary Todd were married after having at
204one point broken off their engagement for 18 months when Abe became
205bedridden with depression, and they lived at the Globe tavern
206in Springfield. Eventually, they paid $1,200 for a house now known
207as the Lincoln Home in the business district of town.</P>
208
209<P>While riding the circuit as an ambitious young country lawyer,
210Lincoln also got a chance to preside on several occasions as a
211judge over county court.</P>
212
213<P>People forget that after a stint in the Illinois legislature,
214Abraham Lincoln became a Congressman (in 1847) though his record
215was not exemplary.</P>
216
217<P>That same year, he made his first ten-day speaking tour of
218New England.</P>
219
220<P>He applied (in 1849) for a patent on a &quot;new and improved
221manner of combining adjustable buoyant chambers with steam boats
222or other vessels.&quot; Later that year, he declined first an
223offer of the secretaryship of the Oregon Territory, and later
224the governorship of Oregon. By 1856, Lincoln's political fate
225could have been foretold. He was spending more time on the road,
226as when he accepted an appearance that year to speak before a
227crowd of 10,000 in Kalamazoo, MI.</P>
228
229<P>Though having pressed his first attack on slavery as early
230as 1837, when he opposed an anti-abolitionist resolution passed
231by the Illinois House, &quot;Lincoln was calculating and equivocal
232on the issue of slavery,&quot; contends political analyst Garry
233Wills. He also notes that Lincoln &quot;was nominated [for President]
234by one of the most corrupt conventions ever held. He hid his views
235so carefully that he issued not a single statement, gave not a
236single speech, between his nomination and the 1860 election.&quot;</P>
237
238<P>By today's standards, it could also be said that Lincoln told
239racist and even obscene stories to make his points among his peers.
240One man who served with him in Congress recalled Lincoln's &quot;story
241of the old Virginian stropping his razor on a certain) member
242of a young Negro's body.&quot;</P>
243
244<P>The first Republican to be elected President, Abraham Lincoln
245was given quite a send-off by his fellow Illinoisans: a torchlight
246parade lasting four hours, with elaborate floats - some of which
247were pulled by as many as 24 oxen. But after a 12-day trip and
248many speeches and public appearances, Lincoln had to sneak into
249Washington because of reports of an assassination plot at Baltimore.</P>
250
251<P>Ft. Sumter was attacked by the newly-organized Confederate
252army slightly more than a month after Lincoln's inauguration.</P>
253
254<P>While his conduct of the war overshadowed the other accomplishments
255of Abraham Lincoln's term in office, he is also credited with
256establishing the Department of Agriculture and a system of national
257banks, in addition to actions of lesser but equally enduring significance,
258such as proclaiming the first Thanksgiving.</P>
259
260<P>It is the Emancipation Proclamation, signed only after the
261ailing Lincoln could steady his shaking hand - and the Gettysburg
262address, delivered in 1863 - for which he is best remembered.</P>
263
264<P>Lincoln's address, with its eloquent simplicity, has moved
265people through the generations, the world over. No other speech
266contains so many familiar phrases, and no other has been so widely
267quoted.</P>
268
269<P>The world has carefully noted and will long remember what Lincoln
270said at Gettysburg.</P>
271
272<P>Interestingly, his speech, in which he had succeeded more incisively
273than the Founding Fathers in defining the American ideal, was
274relegated to an obscure position in the newspapers.</P>
275
276<P>The reason is that the speaker preceding him was Edward Everett,
277who as the foremost orator of the time, addressed the crowd of
27815,000 for an hour and 57 minutes.</P>
279
280<P>When it was his turn to speak, President Lincoln took a manuscript
281from an inside pocket, put on steel-rimmed glasses and stood high
282above the crowd.</P>
283
284<P>The audience was restless after three hours of ceremonies and
285began to drift away.</P>
286
287<P>Then he began to speak in the high, reedy-pitched southern
288Indiana twang his friends knew so well but which sounded foreign
289to these Easterners.</P>
290
291<P>Ten sentences - 269 words - two, perhaps three minutes, and
292the President had finished.</P>
293
294<P>The audience had scarcely settled back when it was all over.
295The applause was perfunctory, a few hand claps - polite recognition
296for a man who &quot;also spoke.&quot;</P>
297
298<P>The President's &quot;few appropriate remarks&quot; - which
299the planners of the event had asked him to make only as an afterthought
300- fell flat.</P>
301
302<P>&quot;That speech won't scour,&quot; Lincoln remarked afterward
303to a friend. &quot;It's a flat failure and the people are disappointed.&quot;
304(Lincoln was again using a homely phrase. Any farm boy of his
305day knew that when wet soil clung to a plow,the mold-board wouldn't
306scour.)</P>
307
308<P>The next day, the <I>Chicago Tribune</I> was one of the few
309newspapers to praise the speech, correctly prophesying that it
310would &quot;live among the annals of men.&quot;</P>
311
312<P>Another Chicago newspaper, <I>The Times</I>, called it &quot;silly,
313flat and dishwatery.&quot;</P>
314
315<P>But even Everett was not deaf to what he later called &quot;the
316unexpected masterpiece of oratory that fell from Lincoln's lips.&quot;
317He wrote to the President the very next day: &quot;I should be
318glad if I could flatter myself that I came so near the central
319thought of the occasion in two hours as you did in two minutes.&quot;</P>
320
321<P>Lincoln replied that he was &quot;pleased to know that, in
322your judgment, the little I did say was not entirely a failure.&quot;</P>
323
324<P><B>Always Improving</B></P>
325
326<P>What amazes Lincoln buffs was his capacity for growth, his
327intellectual resourcefulness, given the obstacles and miseries
328he had experienced during most of his life.</P>
329
330<P>Horace Greely wrote (in a book that's a favorite of President,
331Bill Clinton), that Lincoln &quot;was not born king of men ...
332but a child of the common people, who made himself a great persuader,
333therefore a leader, by dint of firm resolve, patient effort, and
334dogged perseverance. He was open to all impressions and influences,
335and gladly profited by the teachings of events and circumstances,
336no matter how adverse or unwelcome. There was probably no year
337of his life when he was not a wiser, cooler, and better man than
338he had been the year before.&quot;</P>
339
340<P>For all of his serene amiability, Lincoln at six-feet, four
341inches not only towered physically over most of his contemporaries,
342but intellectually as well.</P>
343
344<P>His private secretary, John Hay, acknowledged that some cabinet
345members found insufferable Lincoln's alleged &quot;intellectual
346arrogance.&quot;</P>
347
348<P>His law partner in Illinois, William Herndon, remembered that
349Lincoln &quot;was not impulsive, fanciful or imaginative; but
350cold, calm and precise. He threw his whole mental light around
351the object.&quot; And his language &quot;contained the exact coloring,
352power and shape of his ideas:&quot;</P>
353
354<P>When he did not want to discuss certain matters, he loaded
355his sentences with what the political analyst Willmoore Kendall
356called &quot;verbal parachutes&quot; - phrases he could use to
357bail out of anything he said.</P>
358
359<P><B>Legacy of Words</B></P>
360
361<P>Historians have commented that Lincoln's was the only Presidency
362in our history which would lose its meaning if you took away its
363words. Lincoln even wrote statements and documents for underlings
364- cabinet secretaries and other government officials - in a sort
365of ghost-writing in reverse. So prodigious was his output that
366it greatly surpassed Shakespeare's one million words.</P>
367
368<P>More than most, Lincoln was in love with language. And his
369fascination with the telegraph influenced him to write and speak
370in an abbreviated, direct and the telegraphic manner. Garry Wills
371explains that Lincoln's rhetoric was &quot;surprisingly masculine,
372with no filler .. [and] without copula. He didn't like to use
373pronouns. [But] in almost every sentence there's an echo of the
374previous.&quot; His style, says Wills, was &quot;closer to poetry
375than prose.&quot;</P>
376
377<P>As Gerald Parshall commented in a cover story for <I>U.S. News
378&amp; World Report</I>, (Oct. 5,1992): &quot;When Lincoln ...
379wrote speeches, proclamations or letters, he was communicating
380with himself as much as anyone, thinking with the nib of his pen,
381discovering the path of logic. As a youth, he split logs with
382a single well-aimed blow from his ax. Later in life, the sharp
383edge of his prose found its mark just as efficiently, laying the
384truth bare with poetic, resounding whacks.&quot;</P>
385
386<P>Garry Wills notes that &quot;Opponents would later exaggerate
387his crudity; but as a man on the frontier who neither drank whiskey
388nor smoked cigars, [Lincoln] used his disarming gifts as a storyteller
389in ways that later Americans have preferred not to remember.&quot;</P>
390
391<P>Someone has also observed that Lincoln was a country ham that
392couldn't be cured. &quot;I laugh because I must not weep - that's
393all, that's all,&quot; he once explained.</P>
394
395<P>He read newspapers, the Bible and the Bard (especially &quot;Macbeth,&quot;
396&quot;Hamlet&quot; and &quot;Richard III&quot;) but surprisingly
397little else for a man acclaimed as a genius.</P>
398
399<P>It is also noteworthy that the primitive photography of his
400day, which required long time exposures and stiff poses, failed
401to capture Lincoln's spontaneity and animation. &quot;Graphic
402art was powerless,&quot; wrote John Nicolay, &quot;before a face
403that moved through a thousand delicate gradations of line, contour,
404light, and shade, sparkle of the eye and curve of the lip, in
405the long gamut of expression from grave to gay and back again
406from the rollicking jollity of laughter to the serious, faraway
407look with prophetic intuitions.&quot;</P>
408
409<P>Lincoln was not an isolated, lonely man. He got out often -
410for carriage rides with his wife and visits to the Old Soldier's
411home, (where he stayed to escape the summer heat), to train trips
412to New York or conferences with his generals on various boats.
413At times, he also acted as his own R&amp;D chief, quizzing inventors
414and even testing weapons on or near the White House grounds.</P>
415
416<P>Lincoln's office and cabinet room - &quot;the shop,&quot; as
417he called it - was in what has since become the &quot;Lincoln
418Bedroom&quot; on the second floor of the White House.</P>
419
420<P>There, he sat in a horsehair swivel chair and worked on papers
421plucked from the alphabetized pigeonholes in his high postmaster's
422desk. Amazingly, he only had three clerks on his payroll to help
423him as he won the Civil War, secured the future of democracy,
424and dealt with a Cabinet of prickly men.</P>
425
426<P>Twice a week, he took what he called &quot;public opinion baths,&quot;
427meeting with any citizen - war time or not - willing to stand
428in line to claim a moment with the chief magistrate.</P>
429
430<P>If he had one weakness, it was his indulgence of his wife.
431From all</P>
432
433<P>accounts, Mary was a woman with a mercurial personality, who
434was given to extremes of mood and extravagance. She was dictatorial
435and haughty, petty and jealous, and her life was dominated by
436fears.</P>
437
438<P>Reflecting on his marriage, Lincoln once confided to a friend,
439&quot;My father always said, 'When you make a bad bargain, hug
440it the tighter.'&quot;</P>
441
442<P>When his second Vice President, Andrew Johnson, showed up embarrassingly
443drunk at his swearing in at the Capitol, a fact which mortified
444the audience, Lincoln defended him. But privately he refused to
445see Johnson - except, propitiously, on the one day a clairvoyant
446Chief Executive might need his Vice President - April 14, 1865.</P>
447
448<P>In the weeks preceding his death, Abraham Lincoln was 35 pounds
449underweight. He was 56 but looked much older, his sallow skin
450and sparse beard attesting to his deteriorating condition. He
451walked slowly because his feet hurt, often wore a shawl and was
452increasingly given to bouts of depression. His extremities were
453frequently cold, and he slept fitfully.</P>
454
455<P>He was averse to food in general, dining on an egg and coffee
456for breakfast, a biscuit and apple for lunch, and some soup with
457meat and potatoes for dinner. He would eat dessert if it was apple
458pie.</P>
459
460<P>On one occasion he collapsed from exhaustion, and his physician
461worried the President was on the verge of a &quot;nervous breakdown.&quot;
462So open was the concern about his health, newspapers began speculating
463what would happen to the country if Lincoln died.</P>
464
465<P>He confided to a friend, &quot;I hardly know how to rest. It
466may be good for the body. But what is tired in me lies within,
467and can't be got at.&quot;</P>
468
469<P>Lincoln's grief over the loss of his second son, Willie, due
470to illness was so intense, he twice had the boy's body disinterred
471to gaze on his face.</P>
472
473<P>He thought and talked about death often - with sadness and
474resignation rather than fear. He reflected, &quot;If I am killed,
475I can die but once; but to live in constant dread of it is to
476die over and over again.&quot; To reinforce this point, one of
477the pigeonholes in his desk had a bulky envelope marked &quot;Assassination.&quot;
478It contained 80 threats on his life. He was shot five days after
479the end of the Civil War, and after having dreamt vividly of his
480own demise.</P>
481
482<P>Thomas Schwartz says there are intimations that an unsuccessful
483plot against the leader of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, was
484hatched in the White House - contributing to later suspicions
485that Lincoln's murder involved elements of the South who may have
486retaliated by aiding the Booth conspiracy.</P>
487
488<P>As for his place in history, Lincoln was philosophical. &quot;I'll
489do the very best I know how, the very best I can, and I mean to
490keep doing so until the end. If the end brings me out all right,
491what is said against me won't amount to anything. If the end brings
492me out wrong, ten angels swearing I was right will make no difference.&quot;</P>
493
494<P>&nbsp;</P>
495
496<H2>ILLINOIS POET CARL SANDBURG</H2>
497
498<P><BR>
499</P>
500
501<H2>TALKED OF LINCOLN</H2>
502
503<P><B>(Sidebar)</B></P>
504
505<P>Fellow Illinois native and prairie poet Carl Sandburg was born
506in Galesburg, IL. 13 years after &quot;Abraham Lincoln was shoveled
507into the tombs,&quot; while the Civil War was still being fought
508at the crossroads store. It was a section of the Heartland rich
509in Lincoln lore, and men still young who put on their blue uniforms
510on the Fourth of July often spoke of their neighbor who lay buried
511a scant hundred miles away and of the debate he held with &quot;The
512Little Giant&quot; at Knox college.</P>
513
514<P>These stories made an impression upon a sensitive boy, who,
515although he quit school when he was 13, read all he could find
516about Lincoln.</P>
517
518<P>Sandburg went on to win a Pulitzer Prize, do editorial work
519for The Chicago Daily News, and become a poet of international
520renown. He also wrote a book on Lincoln, which remains a definitive
521portrait even today.</P>
522
523<P>In a fascinating magazine interview published 54 years ago,
524the eloquent Carl Sandburg commented insightfully on Abraham Lincoln:</P>
525
526<P>&quot;Lincoln was too big and too complicated to be painted
527in a few strokes. There is too much subtlety about him, there
528are too many delicate halftones; you cannot picture him in simple
529lines.</P>
530
531<P>&quot;I should say that the two salient characteristics were
532his sadness and his humor - a sadness born of sympathy and understanding,
533and a humor which ran from the finest threads of irony to the
534coarseness of the livery stable.</P>
535
536<P>&quot;He came from a breed and a region where the language
537of Shakespeare still persisted and he knew the value of obsolete
538words and did not hesitate to use them. He developed a style which
539was the result of natural feeling, deep thought and his early
540environment. He had the poet's sense of rhythm. To give you an
541example, in the last draft of the Gettysburg speech he substituted,
542'It is altogether fitting and proper' for the less euphonious
543'This we may in all propriety do.'</P>
544
545<P>&quot;He was a dreamer and a man of revery, as all poets are,
546while at the same time he had the practical qualities of Edison
547- a combination you don't often find. Besides, he was endowed
548with New Testament patience and Old Testament stubbornness.</P>
549
550<P>&quot;Although many people do not know it, he was a man of
551piety and of deep religious belief, and evidence of this is to
552be found in all his speeches and messages. But he did not parade
553his religion. While he attended church, he usually sat alone in
554the pastor's room, so that he might hear without being seen.&quot;</P>
555
556<P>&nbsp;</P>
557
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