Episode 10, The Presidential China: We are joined, once again, by our curator Dr. James Cornelius to discuss our Featured Artifact of the Month: The Presidential China. In addition, we answer a question courtesy of Facebook regarding Mr. Lincoln’s Portfolio.
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Today we may hastily ponder what is in some ways still treated as a national holiday: the anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s landing, as leader of three ships, on a Caribbean island on October 12, 1492. In Lincoln’s day this was not a holiday. Only New Year’s Day and the Fourth of July (not even Christmas or Easter) were ongoing ‘official’ holidays.
But in Lincoln’s mind, the occasion of that landing and all that followed it were of the greatest moment. Having jettisoned further publication of his poems after 1846, he turned to less-personal matters. In September 1848 he saw Niagara Falls, and tried to grasp its historical context:
“When Columbus first sought this continent — when Christ suffered on the cross — when Moses led Israel through the Red-Sea … Niagara was roaring here.”
Then, in giving his lectures ‘Discoveries and Inventions’ in 1858 and 1859, he explicitly cited the 1492 voyage of discovery. Revising this talk, he prepared what came to be two distinct lectures, because, it is thought today, he was giving up hope of higher elective office and wanted to be a travelling lecturer. Or, perhaps his mind flagged from the tedium of the law, and he sought a fresh outlet for his intellect.
In any case, Christopher Columbus (he took the Spanish cognate Cristóbal Colón after 1485) was much on Lincoln’s mind as he wrestled with what the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 and the Dred Scott decision of 1857 meant for the future of his nation. He gave his lectures a half-dozen times around central Illinois, to audiences not large; then dropped the matter and returned to politics and law.
Lincoln admired Columbus; the World's Columbian Exposition, in Chicago in 1893, remembered Lincoln on this ticket.
Here he lays it out as plainly as we could wish. He probably believed the following as early as April 1858, and certainly by February 1859. By Lincoln’s compass,
“in the world’s history, certain inventions and discoveries occurred, of peculiar value, on account of their great efficiency in facilitating all other inventions and discoveries. Of these were the arts of writing and of printing — the discovery of America, and the introduction of Patent-laws. The date of the first … is unknown; but it certainly was as much as fifteen hundred years before the Christian era; the second — printing — came in 1436, or nearly three thousand years after the first. The others followed more rapidly — the discovery of America in 1492, and the first patent laws in 1624.”
Can it be any clearer how a man, who missed the American Revolution yet often urged his contemporaries to uphold its principles, viewed the “discovery” of America? It was of an importance to progress — to invention, to further discovery, to efficiency — behind only the invention of writing and printing.
If Lincoln’s view does not comport with polite received opinion today, he did not predict our future, but instead carried on in like vein. “Though not apposite to my present purpose, it is but justice to the fruitfulness of that period, to mention two other important events — the Lutheran Reformation in 1517, and, still earlier, the invention of negroes, or, of the present mode of using them, in 1434. But, to return to the consideration of printing …”
The image of Columbus stuck in his mind; he used it twice in his campaign against Douglas in September 1858. First at Paris, Illinois, in the eastern part of the state: “The idea of Popular Sovereignty was floating about the world several ages before the author of the Nebraska bill saw daylight — indeed, before Columbus set foot on the American continent.” Lincoln repeated this sarcastic gibe word for word for the benefit of those in the western part of the state, at Edwardsville, on September 11th.
Thereafter we have no evidence that he wrote or spoke about the Genoese-born sailor. His reasons to write the word ‘Columbus’ in 1860 through 1865 all concern the capital city of Ohio, or the small town in western Kentucky much fought over by warring Federals and Confederates. Yet today we may imagine that in Lincoln’s own voyage of discovery — to the heart of the American experiment, in his war against the ‘popular sovereignty’ fiction that Douglas tried to impose upon the construction of the Constitution, for a new way to “invent” a role for negroes outside of Africa — he continued to ponder the fearlessness and hope that those sailors possessed.
Most people have a favorite Lincoln Speech and many have a favorite Lincoln phrase. For over a century the hands-down winner among the speeches has been the Gettysburg Address, partly because so many schoolchildren started memorizing it in the late 1800s.
As for the phrases, the most beloved of them all may come from the end of the Second Inaugural Address: “with malice toward none, with charity for all.” For many people, “government of the people, by the people, for the people,” from the end of the Gettysburg Address, and “the better angels of our nature,” the last words of the First Inaugural, have proven equally memorable.
What about Lincoln’s greatest paragraphs? We don’t usually think of him as having written in paragraph-length units. We see him as the craftsman of elegant speeches, or historic one-liners. Yet his longer addresses depended upon powerfully built paragraphs to construct rock-solid arguments. These speeches amounted to legal briefs designed to meet and refute all possible objections. The First Inaugural contains a succession of such paragraphs, subjecting the idea of secession to logical and historical demolition.
To my mind, the most exquisite Lincoln paragraphs come from speeches delivered before he was president. Not yet knowing that he was speaking for the ages, he could address his audiences less formally, and at greater length. He could indulge in tangents, and join satirical dismissal to dispassionate reason.
In his great speeches from 1854 to 1860, he built a meticulous case against slavery, and for the necessity of tolerating it where it was constitutionally protected. Tolerating it did not diminish his hatred for it. If anything, his middle-of-the-road acceptance of slavery (it might last another hundred years, he announced) drove him to greater rhetorical heights in denouncing it.
Two of Lincoln’s most scintillating paragraphs come from the same speech, his 26 June 1857 address in Springfield on the Dred Scott decision of that year. Responding to Chief Justice Roger Taney’s majority opinion — which denied Dred Scott his freedom and ruled that no black person, free or slave, could ever become a citizen — Lincoln heaped scorn on slavery’s backers.
Lincoln attacked Douglas on all the issues of 1857, but focused on the Dred Scott ruling.
They “have him [the slave] in his prison house,” cried Lincoln, in the concluding lines of a longer paragraph. “They have searched his person, and left no prying instrument with him. One after another they have closed the heavy iron doors upon him, and now they have him, as it were, bolted in with a lock of a hundred keys, which can never be unlocked without the concurrence of every key; the keys in the hands of a hundred different men, and they scattered to a hundred different and distant places; and they stand musing as to what invention in all the dominions of mind and matter, can be produced to make the impossibility of his escape more complete than it is.”
Later in the speech, Lincoln went after Taney’s claim that the authors of the Declaration of Independence excluded black people when they spoke of “all men” being created equal. On the contrary, said Lincoln, the authors plainly meant to include them. Of course they did not mean that all men, at present, were equal in every respect. But they were most assuredly equal in their right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
“This they said, and this they meant,” proclaimed Lincoln, toward the end of a paragraph on Taney and the Declaration. This section offers a discerning statement about how moral progress takes place over the long haul of history.
“They meant simply to declare the right, so that the enforcement of it might follow as fast as circumstances should permit. They meant to set up a standard maxim for free society, which should be familiar to all, and revered by all; constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people of all colors everywhere. The assertion that ‘all men are created equal’ was of no practical use in effecting our separation from Great Britain; and it was placed in the Declaration, not for that, but for future use. Its authors meant it to be, thank God, [and] it is now proving itself, a stumbling block to those who in after times might seek to turn a free people back into the hateful paths of despotism.”