Abraham Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln enters the American story as a silhouette before he becomes a figure—long-limbed, awkward, moving through a world of stumps and distances, carrying books as if they were tools and ideas as if they were debts. He is born in a Kentucky cabin that later generations will remake into a shrine and, later still, into a contested metaphor; his childhood is a short ledger of hard labor, thin schooling, and a frontier that measured intelligence by the quality of a fence. The family walks—first to Indiana, then to Illinois—because poverty is not merely a condition, it is an address, and sometimes the only way to improve it is to change the map. He grows in that American way: borrowing other men’s books, arguing with himself, turning chores into calisthenics for endurance, and discovering that his mind prefers the architecture of sentences to the arithmetic of acres. He reads the law the way a starving man reads menus, memorizes poetry to find rhythms stronger than weather, and learns in the rough legislature at Vandalia and Springfield that politics, for all its theatrical rage, is a patient craft built out of listening. The rail-splitter carpenter’s gift is not muscle; it is perspective. He can see through timber to the beam inside it, through crowds to the motive beneath applause, through a statute to the hinge on which it may later turn.

If the frontier gave him endurance, the village gave him language. New Salem—easily romanticized, more easily misunderstood—teaches him the art of speaking plainly enough to be believed and strangely enough to be remembered. He loses elections before he wins them, keeps friends when defeat could have soured a smaller man, and practices the strictest economy in the currency that matters: respect. As a lawyer he discovers a narrow brilliance more useful than genius—the ability to find the controlling point in a case and repeat it with such calm that jurors begin to resent deviation as an insult to their own good sense. He rides the Eighth Judicial Circuit like a traveling craftsman, trading jokes for doors opened and precision for trust, sleeping in taverns that smelled of wet wool and hoping, always, to be assigned the side of the case where law and decency coincide, because he prefers to make his rhetoric serve both at once. He is melancholy in the old-fashioned sense—temperamentally dark, subject to storms that lift only when work persuades them to—and he uses humor as a pulley to move his mind out of holes too deep for ladders. He marries Mary Todd because love, in his register, is an argument he decided not to lose and because ambition, in hers, is a language he already speaks. Their house is a school for politics and a place of grief: four boys come; two die; the nation will learn their names only because sorrow gets printed when it belongs to a president.

He enters national life not as a conqueror but as a sentence that will not stop echoing: a “house divided” cannot stand. He does not invent the quarrel; he removes its drapery. The debates with Stephen Douglas are not conjuring tricks; they are tutorials in civic thought performed aloud, with crowds as juries and the prairie as courtroom. Douglas believes that popular sovereignty—let each territory vote on slavery—can disinfect the issue by distributing it; Lincoln insists that a republic cannot make human bondage one of the elective appetizers without poisoning the whole meal. He is not yet an abolitionist in the sense that the abolitionists demand; he is an anti-extension moralist with a lawyer’s mind and a farmer’s patience, saying, again and again, that if slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. The Republicans, a new party made of many old quarrels, choose him in 1860 because he can be believed in the North without being feared in the border states, because he looks like a man who remembers debts, and because their other giants have accumulated enemies while he was accumulating arguments. He wins with a minority of the popular vote and an electoral map that draws a clean fracture through a culture that had preferred to pretend its fractures were threads.

The winter of disunion arrives like a long bad weather. South Carolina secedes in December, the other Deep South states follow, and the outgoing administration shrinks from a constitutional exertion it cannot imagine as legal. Lincoln, still in Springfield, writes letters that sound like a man tightening bindings on a crate whose contents are about to slide, and chooses his cabinet with a stubborn preference for opposing minds: Seward the worldly New Yorker at State, Chase the iron abolitionist at Treasury, Bates the old Whig from Missouri for law, later Stanton at War, a furnace of energy and suspicion, a cabinet of rivals because rivalry is the honest name for what the party is. He arrives in Washington in disguise not because he confuses drama with safety but because a plot uncovered in Baltimore gives him a choice between theatrical prudence and funeral pageantry, and he chooses prudence. The inaugural address is the sound of a man refusing to turn anger into a sentence he cannot later revise. He declares the Union perpetual not because he loves words but because he believes the Constitution to be a machine whose parts make that conclusion necessary. He promises no attack, insists on holding federal property, and offers an appeal that has not lost its ache: “We are not enemies, but friends.”

Fort Sumter turns words into war. He moves to resupply the garrison, announces it openly, and allows the Confederacy the choice between endurance and aggressiveness. The cannon that fire at dawn in Charleston Harbor teach the country that it has already crossed the line it was still pretending to debate. He calls for volunteers and discovers that the modern state begins with muster rolls; he calls Congress into special session and begins to stretch the powers of a presidency that the Constitution had not fully explained. He suspends the writ of habeas corpus along the rail arteries where sabotage would have broken the capital’s spine, and then more broadly along the loyal states’ roads as the strain multiplies. He defends the act as a war measure, willing to endure a lawyer’s condemnation to prevent a literal collapse. He allows newspapers to be shut when they actively aid an enemy; he allows dissent to continue when it is merely speech—and the line between those two facts is cut, as wartime lines are, by fallible men with telegraphs and orders. He is accused of tyranny, then of weakness, then of tyranny again, a pendulum common to executives who decide.

The early military story is a long study in disillusion. He hires generals whose reputations come with uniforms and reputations that come with friends. McDowell breaks at Bull Run; McClellan organizes the Army of the Potomac into the greatest field machine the republic has ever seen and then discovers a genius for not using it; the president travels to the front more than a modern audience expects, studying maps with a dilettante’s appetite and a novelist’s instinct for which roads matter. He writes to McClellan in language like a patient but unhappy client: if you are not using the army, might I borrow it? He endures the Peninsula half-victory and the Seven Days’ retreat, replaces, demotes, reinvites, and learns, painfully, that caution in a general can be as costly as rashness. He splits and recombines command in the West, watches Grant hold on at Shiloh and discovers, in that stubbornness, a kind of talent more republican than brilliance: an unwillingness to invent excuses for a job not done. He learns to read dispatch prose the way a farmer reads sky. He waits.

Antietam arrives, then, like a door he had been gripping alone in a hallway. It is not the overwhelming victory he wanted—more a bloody stalemate achieved on Northern soil that halts Lee’s first invasion and allows a president to act without sounding like he is pleading. He turns a military moment into a moral instrument with the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, a warning that if rebel states remain in rebellion on January 1, 1863, the enslaved within them will be “then, thenceforward, and forever free.” He chooses war powers because he believes the Constitution permits what military necessity requires, and because he trusts that the deep law beneath parchment will recognize, later, the justice of a deed that the hour demanded. The final Proclamation, when it comes, is both narrow and immense: it does not touch the loyal slave states or occupied parishes where civil law is in federal hands; it does do the one thing no previous paper had done: turn the war for union into a war that will destroy slavery as it goes. He invites Black men into the national uniform and thereby teaches the nation in the most undeniable grammar: that citizenship can be earned in blood if it is not to be granted in right, and that the color line is an insult to any government that asks men to die under its flag.

The policy shifts the world around the war. In Britain and France, where cotton had once been expected to force recognition of the Confederacy, the moral clarity of emancipation tightens diplomacy’s fingers. Workingmen in Lancashire write across an ocean that they will bear hunger rather than break a cause that has become, finally, as much about them as about the Mississippi. The Trent Affair, an early diplomatic near-catastrophe, had already taught the administration the importance of the small words in neutrality law; emancipation reshapes the larger words in every dispatch. Lincoln’s foreign policy is a habit of caution: he defuses what he can, avoids insult where he can, and uses Seward’s suavity to keep a continental war from becoming an Atlantic one. He never forgets that the longest line on his maps is the line between factions at home.

At home, the act of freeing by proclamation leads to the slow, inglorious, crucial work of making the deed permanent. He enters an alliance with radicals he once thought too impatient, not because he has changed the diameter of his conscience but because events have changed the geometry of what can be done lawfully. He drives, in the last year of his life, the Thirteenth Amendment through a divided Congress with a mixture of high persuasion and low politics that later moralists pretend to dislike and realists recognize as fidelity to an end that demanded means. He sends messengers to wavering Democrats promising patronage, listens to the abolitionists’ sermons and says thank you without promising them more poetry than the votes allow, and finally wrings from a weary House the numbers required to make permanent what war power began. Even then he refuses self-congratulation. The telegraph room, where he has spent nights reading scraps of the republic as if they were chapters, receives him for the quiet pleasure of arithmetic satisfied without blood.

The middle years of the war balance on a pair of names: Vicksburg and Gettysburg. In the West, Grant’s siege on the Mississippi is a demonstration of pressure as strategy—digging canal, running batteries, surrounding a city the way a dull sound surrounds the ear, until Pemberton yields on July 4 and the river becomes, again, a Union highway. In the East, Meade’s stand on the ridges and the slopes of a Pennsylvania town achieves what the Army of the Potomac had so often failed to hold: the field after three days of slaughter organized into episodes that have become our folk Bible—Little Round Top, Pickett’s Charge, a copse of trees that ought to be anonymous and is not. Lincoln writes a letter to a mother on New England stationery that seems to anticipate the words he will speak in November—the dead have consecrated the ground beyond any power of his to add or detract—and then he goes to the ceremony and speaks ten sentences that taught the language how to say itself more truly. The Gettysburg Address is short because the problem it addresses is long. He binds founding and future together with a phrase about a new birth of freedom that refuses to sound like revenge. He defines democracy with a preposition: of, by, for. He refuses to sell consolation as closure.

War makes government. He knows this and is not proud of it. Still, he signs the Homestead Act, which plants the idea of freehold in the prairie and invites millions of future stories to organize themselves around kitchen tables; he signs the Morrill Act and gives land to colleges that will teach farm boys calculus and metallurgy and, in time, teach professors humility by requiring them to demonstrate utility; he signs the Pacific Railway Acts that feed bond and land to rails and teach geography to obey timetables; he signs the National Banking Acts and the Legal Tender Acts and invents a federal finance that will outlive both him and the debt that built it; he signs the charter for a Department of Agriculture that begins in seed statistics and grows into a republic arguing with its own appetite; he approves a stronger Patent Office because he is the only president to hold a patent, a device meant to lift boats over shoals, a metaphor perhaps for a life spent looking for mechanical answers to moral obstructions. He uses the telegraph as if it were a new sense—the wires from the War Department into his mind—and he lets photography teach the nation how its leader looks, refusing to hide the lank face because he trusts, in some fierce place, that democracy must learn to love the ordinary.

He does not pretend to holiness. He orders the largest mass execution in American history when he allows thirty-eight Dakota men to hang after an uprising fueled by broken treaties and starved children—and he reduces the list from three hundred at the cost of hatred in Minnesota because due process means something even when vengeance is fashionable. He drafts soldiers, then faces riots in New York where resentment and racism slaughter innocents; he grants clemency where his lawyers will allow it and refuses it where the arithmetic of discipline insists he must. He exiles Vallandigham rather than cage him, then lets him return by election because democracy cannot be protected only by comfortable opponents. He reads the Bible as literature and solace and refuses to join any church because orthodoxy, for him, is a smaller word than faith. He is not always right. He was often late when late meant cautious and cautious meant cruel. He learned as he went and corrected with the same energy he applied to deciding.

By 1864 he is, impossibly, both the favorite and the loneliest man in a country that has killed its illusions. The war’s toll makes the summer feel like doom; Grant’s Overland Campaign grinds down names we once thought immortal; the newspapers start rehearsing how to replace him with someone more resplendent in failure. He writes a private memorandum, folds it, has his cabinet sign the outside unknowing, promising to cooperate with a successor in prosecuting the war to victory—an act of humility disguised as contingency. Then Sherman takes Atlanta, Sheridan scours the Shenandoah, Farragut curses torpedoes at Mobile Bay, and the mood shifts because citizens are not only moral beings; they are animals of momentum. He wins reelection with soldiers voting in the field, and the second inaugural is not a victory speech. It is a sermon crafted by a man who insists he is not a preacher and who uses theology because prose cannot otherwise describe the scale of what has occurred. “Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away.” He sketches a paradox of responsibility in two lines that have never stopped gnawing: both read the same Bible and pray to the same God; the prayers cannot be answered for both. He refuses to call Providence a partisan. He refuses to call the nation innocent.

The end of the fighting is a mosaic of surrenders and survivals. Richmond burns; Jefferson Davis flees with a treasury measured in legend; Lee meets Grant in a small room at Appomattox where the victorious man writes terms as if he is remembering how it feels to lose, allowing officers to keep their sidearms and men to keep their horses because planting will decide whether bitterness becomes famine. Lincoln walks the streets of the fallen Confederate capital and sits, briefly, in the chair Davis used, not as a taunt but as a private symbol that furniture does not make governments. He returns to Washington with a plan as gentle and as hard as his nature—bring the states back with “malice toward none, with charity for all,” insist on emancipation’s permanence, invite suffrage for the intelligent and the veteran Black men as a beginning. He refuses the word punishment as a policy; he embraces the word policy as a form of kindness. He knows that the victory that matters is not the victory over armies but the victory over habits.

He does not live to test his kindness against the country’s thirst for vengeance or the country’s capacity for fatigue. The actor in a black coat steps into the box at Ford’s, the pistol cracks, and a Friday becomes a century. He dies the next morning in a boardinghouse bed too short for him; his body is carried through cities that grieving invents: Philadelphia, New York, Chicago, a continent of black crepe and eyes that had not expected to weep for a man they had once called names. Andrew Johnson, sworn at noon on a crowded Sabbath, will try to use mercy to buy peace and will end by buying confusion—proof that mercy without preparation is a currency depreciated by every hand that touches it. The country makes of Lincoln what the country always makes of its martyrs: a mirror for its other desires. The South resents and then appropriates his gentleness as a justification for the very defiance that would have shocked him; the North loves him beyond what anyone can bear and reruns his sentences as if they were spells; Black Americans, for whom he risked political ruin to secure a freedom he did not always know how to extend in civil forms, join his name to a hope the century will sell and resell at foul prices. The man slips away; the emblem remains.

What endures underneath the emblem is a method. He tells the truth he can afford to tell at the moment when telling it increases, not decreases, the law’s power. He speaks to the better angels without pretending that angels run armies. He treats the Constitution as a living machine—limited in peace, elastic in war, answerable to amendment when the old parts will not do—and then returns, as quickly as he dares, to peacetime dimensions because he is not courting Caesarism. He practices a politics of increments with a moral destination. He changes his mind when reality presents a better reading and refuses to pretend he had intended it all along. He hires the men he cannot defeat and keeps them when they cannot defeat themselves. He pardons when example will not be corrupted by mercy, and he refuses to pardon when the army’s life depends on the discipline of the one. He cannot be flattered because he cannot be softened by it; he can be moved by suffering because suffering is the only argument that does not require footnotes.

He is, in the end, an American inventor of a type of leadership this republic had not yet seen: a president who uses weakness like a tool and sadness like a lens. He does not strut; he leans. He does not declaim; he reasons until his reasoning becomes a kind of music. He does not promise a future he cannot build; he invites a present to act as if the future were judging. He fails, sometimes; he apologizes, sometimes; he defers, often; he waits, and then he leaps, and history remembers the leap and forgets the waiting. He leaves behind a larger state and a freer people, a stronger federal architecture and a repaired Union, a constitutional amendment that represents the loudest possible “never again” that parchment can say and a silence in the chair that no successor has managed to fill with similar authority without similar restraint.

There are footnotes to every paragraph: the Dakota gallows, the draft made cruel by its arithmetic, the newspapers gagged when they mistook sedition for wit, the men shot at dawn because the army cannot forgive certain sleep. He is not absolved by victory; he is complicated by it. But complications do not cancel the scale of his achievement. He takes a country falling apart and teaches it to move in one direction even when that direction required it to break an old self in two. He takes an evil embedded in law and teaches law how to spit it out without spitting out itself. He takes a people accustomed to short sentences and teaches them to endure a long one, full of commas, clauses, and a period that arrived too late for him to see it.

If you want one last picture, take the smallest. He is alone in the telegraph room past midnight, coat off, spectacles down his nose, reading a dispatch that tells him a regiment has held a bridge. He exhale-laughs the way men do when relief is too tired to cheer. He writes a note—four words, maybe five—to Stanton, and then another to a mother he does not know whose son is coming home alive because of a decision the president made to send a second train with ammunition. He folds the notes the way he folded the memorandum of possible defeat in August, with a care that suggests he knows history has a taste for scraps. He stands, stretches the old frame, and walks out into a corridor the gaslights make friendly, as if the house itself were grateful to have been used for something more honest than hospitality. He pauses at a door behind which Mary is speaking to a seamstress about a dress that will never be worn again. He keeps walking. The night is not yet done. The country is not yet saved. It will be saved soon, because he has made it impossible to go back without admitting that we prefer the past to justice. He has made even our regrets honorable.

He taught the nation a new way to talk about itself—quiet at first, then hard, then forgiving—and a new way to measure victory: not by the humiliation of an enemy but by the enlargement of the circle in which citizens sit. The flag that followed coffins in 1865 is the same cloth that followed regiments in 1863; it meant something larger at the end because he refused to let it mean anything smaller than a government fighting for a definable good. He is, finally, a man whose greatest talent was not to be right at first, but to become right in time, and to explain how he got there in words so clear that his opponents had to improve themselves merely to disagree with him honorably. We will argue about him as long as we argue about the country. That is the truest proof that he did his work well. He built a house that can hold an argument this size and not collapse.