From Out of the Top Hat: A Blog from the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library & Museum

With its funds drying up, the Jane Addams Hull House Association, a social service agency in Chicago, shut its doors in January 2012 after 122 years of continuous work.  The demise of the organization that bears her name brings to mind what Jane Addams accomplished in 1889 when she created Hull House.  In doing so, she took Lincoln as a prime inspiration.

Born in 1860, Addams was 29 years old when she founded Hull House as a “settlement” of college-educated women in a working-class neighborhood on the west side of Chicago.  (The house took its name from its original owner of 1856.)  For them, Hull House offered a new experience of social and vocational freedom.  They got to test their book knowledge against the realities of urban life.

Hull House gave direct assistance to the poor, but its mission encompassed an attack on inequality across the board — publicizing inferior housing and working conditions faced by immigrant laborers, acquainting adults and children with the democratic ideals espoused by Lincoln and others.

In the 1880s, a chorus of reformers bewailed the deep class divisions threatening the ideal of citizen equality.  A gap between rich and poor had seemed more acceptable when most people believed (as Lincoln did) that any white man working for wages could acquire capital through diligent labor, and eventually become an employer himself.

By the late 1880s — after a decade of class conflict culminating in Chicago’s Haymarket Riot of 1886 — more and more middle-class reformers joined labor organizers in concluding that equal opportunity was dying out.  To give every man a shot at economic independence, and to preserve a republic of equal citizens, fundamental change could no longer be avoided, they felt.

But what kind of change could equalize life chances?  Addams imagined Hull House as an experimental institution searching for answers.  Weekly lectures on political economy brought in eager crowds, including socialists and anarchists.  The House became a center of intellectual debate, and Lincoln emerged as a staple of the conversation.  Addams modeled her approach to social progress after his.

In the 1850s, he had pushed the American founders’ principle of equality for all, while going slow on the abolition of slavery and seeking an accommodation between free and slave states.  In the 1890s, Addams pushed Lincoln’s goal of equality for all, while pursuing an accommodation between labor and capital, and deeper bonds of understanding between immigrants and native-born Americans.

In her memoir Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910), she noted how much Lincoln had meant to her since childhood.  Her father John Addams, an Illinois State Senator starting in 1854, had known him personally (Lincoln liked to address him as “Double D’ed Addams”).  She could remember the moment her father told her, at age four, that “the greatest man in the world” had died.  He was sobbing as he said it, and looking back years later, Jane saw his torrent of tears over Lincoln as her “baptism” into the wider world.

Devising the Hull House “settlement” — a residence for independent women on the urban frontier, and a living bridge between the classes — assured Addams that she had found a calling worthy of her father’s and Lincoln’s generation, those who had saved the Union and freed the slaves.

But in 1894, when class conflict erupted again in Chicago with the Pullman Strike, she confronted the apparent breakdown of her bridging campaign.  “Labor” and “capital” had reached an impasse, and she was bewildered about how to proceed.  She was tempted by the Socialist program — government ownership of major industries — but decided it was too rigid.  On the other hand, leaving large companies in the hands of men like George Pullman, who could lower his workers’ wages at will, seemed intolerable too.

During hard times in 1894 Jane Addams visited the statue in Lincoln Park, Chicago, for inspiration. The view here, taken by an unknown WPA photographer during the Great Depression of the 1930s, includes a man resting.

In her confusion, Addams sought Lincoln’s help.  She set out on a three-mile pilgrimage from Hull House to Lincoln Park, where Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s acclaimed bronze statue of Lincoln had been dedicated in 1887.  She wanted to meditate at this shrine to her hero, “to look at and gain magnanimous counsel, if I could, from the marvelous Saint- Gaudens statue.”

Reflecting on Lincoln’s ideas, she found him mute on the labor-capital conflict, since he had never encountered “labor” and “capital” in their late-19^th century forms.  But she gathered ample wisdom from the words chiseled into the granite bench that stretches around the statue:  “With malice toward none, with charity for all.”

The injustices built into modern industrial life would have to be addressed pragmatically, she realized, not according to the Socialist vision of a progress unfolding through prescribed historical stages.  To Addams, “pragmatism” meant practical problem-solving, informed by a set of chosen ideals.  Addams took her ideals straight from Lincoln: equality for all and respect for one’s opponents.

One must prepare for partial victories and frequent setbacks. Lincoln had shown the proper patience, being content “to dig the channels through which the moral life of his countrymen might flow.”  Amidst all the turn-of-the-century calls for wholesale social transformation, she found that “the memory of Lincoln… came like a refreshing breeze from off the prairie.”

“In the unceasing ebb and flow of justice and oppression,” she concluded, “we must all dig channels as best we may, that at the propitious moment [something] of the swelling tide may be conducted to the barren places of life.”

Benjamin Chapin’s career as a stage performer peaked on February 12, 1909, when his four-act play Abraham Lincoln at the White House finished its six-day run in New York City.  At least 1,200 customers paid 50 cents, 75 cents, or a dollar to celebrate Lincoln’s one-hundredth birthday at the matinee show of the lavishly appointed Garden Theater on Madison Avenue.

They got to see vignettes of the president dealing with Fort Sumter in 1861, reacting to the battle of Gettysburg in 1863, and getting ready for an evening at Ford’s Theatre in April 1865.  An irascible Secretary of War Stanton and a snarly General Joseph Hooker kept putting Lincoln’s equanimity to the test.  He assuaged them with stories and jokes, and his patient forbearance also worked wonders on his cantankerous wife.  Whether in politics or domestic life, Chapin’s Lincoln put charity first.  When Stanton insisted that a traitor be hung for his crime, Lincoln found a reason to pardon him.

Part of the very large 1909 playbill

For a 34-year-old writer-impersonator who had toiled for a decade on lyceum platforms and vaudeville stages as a Lincoln look-alike, this February 12 spent behind the New York City footlights was a day to relish.  It gave him hope that his play might hit the jackpot and get picked up for a national tour.

Chapin had felt that hope once before.  In the spring of 1906, his brand-new show had appeared for three weeks at the Liberty Theater on West 42^nd Street.  But he got mixed reviews at best.  After the last performance on April 15 — the anniversary of Lincoln’s death — Chapin was forced back on the road.  His one-act “playlet” performance ran on vaudeville stages as far west as California, where his dignified show, as the Los Angeles Times remarked, was squeezed into “a hodge-podge of noisy variety.”

Only the gathering excitement for the 1909 Lincoln Centenary got Chapin his one-week revival at the Garden Theater.  In a publicity flyer chock-full of testimonials from Mark Twain and lesser lights, Chapin reproduced the most glowing lines from his 1906 notices.  Often those reviews had also expressed strong misgivings about the show.

One after another, critics judged his play to be “of very little moment,” as John Corbin said in the New York Sun.  They noted that Chapin, who’d never acted before 1906, lacked the theatrical skills to evoke a character so multi-sided as Lincoln.  And his rudimentary scripting fell short of delivering the “sterner” side of the president’s leadership, as one writer called it, along with his personal sweetness.

Yet even Chapin’s detractors agreed that he excelled at summoning Lincoln’s physical presence: his towering, ungainly frame, his shambling, awkward movements.  The performer’s meticulous make-up and fine command of Lincoln’s mannerisms transfixed many spectators.  Those who had never seen Lincoln in the flesh got a good sense from Chapin of why many in the older generation continued to dwell so insistently on the president’s appearance.

The public could easily abide the play’s flaws, said the reviewers, since Chapin’s “embodiment” of Lincoln offered such a wholesome and patriotic payoff.  People should be sure to take their children to see it.  “With Lincoln present in the flesh, walking and talking, a living man and not a silent figure in the dim pages of history,” said the Los Angeles Times, “anything but absolute respect for the vehicle [the play] is impossible.”

Chapin’s centennial run appears to have marked the end of his theatrical aspirations.  As that door closed, another opened.  By 1913, he had turned to film, and by 1917, the first four episodes of his planned Lincoln “Cycle” — an extended biographical epic — were playing at the Strand, one of Manhattan’s premier “picture palaces.”

In 1906 and 1909, the New York Times and other papers cautioned playgoers not to expect too much from Chapin’s work.  But in 1917, to the filmmaker’s delight, the paper issued a different sort of warning:

“Patrons of the Strand,” said the Times, “should be condemned to seeing trashy modern photoplays all the rest of their days if they do not flock to see the Lincoln cycle on exhibition there this week.”

Benjamin Chapin never got to finish his Lincoln Cycle.  He fell ill on Lincoln’s birthday in 1918 and died a few months later, apparently of tuberculosis, in a sanitarium in Liberty, New York.  He was only 43 years old.  But he had pioneered the impersonation of Lincoln on stage and screen alike.  “He took dead history and made it live again,” the Chicago Tribune wrote. Next to a short obituary, the paper placed a photo of Chapin taken from the side, in full Lincoln dress, looking down appreciatively at an American flag.

In Lincoln’s day, “nostalgia” meant something different than it does today.  Then it was a rarely heard medical word.  Doctors used “nostalgia” to describe a debilitating, even life-threatening, form of homesickness, one afflicting soldiers most of all.  As far as we know, Lincoln, like most people, never used the term.

Only in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries did “nostalgia” evolve into the commonly used word we know today: a remembrance of earlier times that feels somewhat sorrowful, somewhat sweet.

Historians have shown that wistful longing for the bygone world of earlier generations became a defining feature of modern society.  Nostalgia for rural rhythms and the old family hearth helped modern Americans and Europeans adjust to the industrial time clock and the novel pressures of urban living.

Popular fiction and Hollywood films spread the nostalgic frame of mind with 20^th century mega-hits from The Wizard of Oz to Gone With the Wind.  “There’s no place like home” applied as much to the vanished plantation culture of Tara as to the dwindling free-labor homesteads of Kansas.

Lincoln’s generation didn’t know the word “nostalgia,” but many pined for their ever-so-humble “Home, Sweet Home,” one of the most popular songs of the Civil War.  Union prisoners detained at Libby Prison in Richmond sang it regularly.  “Auld Lang Syne” was another staple of the day: a Union band played it at Appomattox Courthouse as Grant made his way into the McLean home to accept Lee’s surrender.

The president’s own favorite nostalgic song may have been “Dixie”: “one of the best tunes I have ever heard,” he told a crowd outside the White House on April 10, 1865.  He asked a band to play it, quipping that the Confederate anthem was once again national property.  (It had been widely played in the North before the war.)

In other words, Lincoln’s cohort loved the sentimental evocation of olden times just as much as their descendants did.  The difference was that later generations gradually realized, as Lincoln and his peers did not, that the vibrant culture of small-town, pre-industrial America had come to an end.

If Lincoln didn’t know the word “nostalgia,” he still produced a remarkable poem in the mid-1840s that captured its most essential element: the joining of sorrow and satisfaction in a remembrance of the past.  Yet this aspiring poet threw overboard the pious reverence for “home” that marked the wistful songs and poems of his own day as much as it did the later culture of nostalgia.

In 1844, at age 35, Lincoln made a return visit to Spencer County, Indiana, where he’d grown from a lad of 7 to a man of 21.  The experience of returning home had put him into a “poetizing mood,” he later wrote, despite the “unpoetical” character of this Hoosier “neighborhood.”

In 1845 and 1846, he produced 24 four-line stanzas to express his sentiments — “though,” he quipped, “whether my expression of those feelings is poetry is quite another question.”  It might just be “doggerel.”

The manuscript of Lincoln's poem is in the Library of Congress, but fine printings of it have been made. This is from 1971.

His first stanza hit at the heart of nostalgia: its paradoxical blend of emotions.  (This is the original text, as given in Roy Basler’s Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, vol. 1, pp. 367ff.  A slightly different version appears on pp. 378 and 385ff. of Basler.)

My childhood-home I see again,
And gladden with the view;
And still, as mem’ries crowd my brain,
There’s sadness in it too.

The gladness in his memory, according to the rest of the poem, has nothing to do with remembering his family life or good times with friends or neighbors.  The 24 stanzas mainly recount some highly unpleasant facts picked up on his 1844 trip, such as the deaths of half of his childhood friends.

I hear the lone survivors tell
How nought from death could save,
Till every sound appears a knell,
And every spot a grave.

I range the fields with pensive tread,
And pace the hollow rooms;
And feel (companion of the dead)
I’m living in the tombs.

The most unpleasant fact of all was the lingering insanity of his schoolmate Matthew Gentry, who had lost his mind at age 19 (when Lincoln was 16).  Twelve of the poem’s 24 stanzas concern the madness of Matthew, son of the richest man in the region.

Poor Matthew! I have ne’er forgot
When first with maddened will,
Yourself you maimed, your father fought,
 And mother strove to kill …

And when at length, tho’ drear and long,
Time soothed your fiercer woes –
How plaintively your mournful song,
Upon the still night rose.

I’ve heard it oft, as if I dreamed,
Far-distant, sweet, and lone;
The funeral dirge, it ever seemed
Of reason dead and gone.

To drink it’s strains, I’ve stole away,
All silently and still,
Ere yet the rising god of day
Had streaked the Eastern hill.

Air held his breath; the trees all still
Seemed sorr’wing angels round.
Whose swelling tears in dew-drops fell
Upon the list’ning ground.

Here Lincoln remembers, in his youth, prowling the landscape in the dim light of dawn to savor Matthew’s funeral dirge for enlightenment.  Nature itself has absorbed Matthew’s suffering.  “Air held his breath,”Lincoln writes, in his single best poetic phrase.  The atmosphere is laden with Matthew’s lament, his song a melancholic “air” in its own right.

The memory of Matthew is sorrowful, but enlivening too.  Finding poetic words to voice the memory lets Lincoln capture and contain his sadness. Lincoln has realized that the act of writing provides solace and hope.  Art can help relieve his own torment over the suddenness of death, and the fragility of reason.  The poem stands as a secular prayer of sorts, an urgent appeal for the preservation of life and sanity.

At this moment in his life, poetry offered him a comfort that religion or theology could not.  “My Childhood-home I See Again” reveals a Lincoln buoyed up by a steely and stoic faith, poised to embark on his successful 1846 Congressional “canvass” against Methodist preacher Peter Cartwright.

Part two of a two-part essay.  Part one appeared on November 10th.

Herndon’s 1866 lecture on Ann Rutledge drew the scorn of many who read the newspaper excerpts.  Critics ripped him for going public with Lincoln’s alleged buried-heart comment, a statement certain to anguish the widowed Mary Lincoln.

After watching Ann’s coffin descend into the grave in 1835, Abraham supposedly declared that his “heart, sad and broken, was buried there.”  To Herndon, this meant that Lincoln had lived out the rest of his life without truly loving another woman.

In 1866, no one disputed the reliability of the buried-heart remark, supplied to Herndon, he said, by an unnamed “friend.”  They just blasted Herndon for disclosing it, and claiming that it set the future course of Lincoln’s love life.  As it turns out, they could have challenged the comment’s legitimacy too.

In their edition of Herndon’s Lincoln, his 1889 biography of his partner, Douglas Wilson and Rodney Davis assert (p. 429, n. 6) that Herndon’s lecture silently reveals William Greene, a Lincoln acquaintance since 1831, as his unnamed source.  But the quotation is nowhere to be found, they say, in Greene’s communications with Herndon.  Nor did any other person pass along the buried-heart comment to Herndon.

So where did Herndon get those words?  I suspect that he composed them himself after reading an 1862 newspaper article in the Menard County Axis, a Democratic weekly published in nearby Petersburg.  Sent to him by one of his informants, this piece gushed over the president’s phenomenal rise from New Salem dry goods clerk to Commander-in-Chief.  “What a model of ambition … for the youths of the land,” the story exclaimed.

The Democratic newspaper in which the Lincoln-Rutledge folklore began, 27 years later.

The Axis had picked up the oral tradition of Lincoln’s romance with a beautiful young New Salem woman — “the youth had wrapped his heart with hers” — and cited his desolation over her death as one of the many obstacles he’d overcome on his arduous road to national renown.

The article described him standing by her grave, so distraught “as the cold clods fell upon the coffin, he sincerely wished that he too had been enclosed within it.”  By this account, the stricken Abraham wished he could leave his entire body with Ann, not just his “heart.”  He was saying he wanted to die.  He was not saying he couldn’t love another woman.  Burying his heart was apparently Herndon’s idea, not Lincoln’s.

As if to admit that he had no informant’s testimony to back up his public withering of Mary Lincoln — a woman who, according to him, had never received her husband’s deepest affection in 23 years of marriage — Herndon made a surprising claim in the 1889 biography.

In Herndon’s Lincoln, he wrote: “speaking of [Ann’s] death and her grave Lincoln once said to me, ‘My heart lies buried there.’”  Of course, in the 1866 lecture, Herndon said the remark had come to him from a “friend.”  In 1866, he made no claim that Lincoln had ever mentioned Ann to him at all.

In his lecture, Herndon made one final statement about Ann Rutledge, and this time the New York Times decided not to publish it — the only Herndon comment on Ann that the paper didn’t quote.  This unused observation may have come from the 1862 Axis story too.

After Ann’s death, the Axis article said, Lincoln recovered from his misery by finding “active exercise” for “both mind and body” in his political career.  Herndon attributed that notion to the same “friend” who’d come up with the buried-heart remark.  Lincoln had “leaped wildly into the political arena,” according to the alleged friend, “as a refuge from his despair.”

If fate had instead allowed Abraham to settle down with “Ann Rutledge, the sweet, tender and loving girl, he would have gravitated insensibly into a purely domestic man.”  Though already a state legislator, Lincoln would supposedly have forsaken electoral ambition for the pleasures of the hearth.

Herndon suspected that, for Lincoln, embracing the storm and stress of politics had depended on Ann’s dying.  It took the jolt of her removal to launch Lincoln on his weary pilgrimage toward the supreme sacrifice: surrendering his life for the people.

In this tragic scenario, Ann’s death, like Abraham’s, could be taken as an indirect act of devotion to the Republic.  Never publicly joined in love, they could be bound together in public service.  The loss of her life in 1835 could be tethered to the loss of his life in 1865.  Lincoln’s entire three-decade public career could be seen as framed by two calamitous events, his fiancée’s death and his own martyrdom.

Looking back from the 21st century, we can only wonder what kind of love Ann and Abraham shared.  “Love” covers a spectrum of emotions, desires, and promises.  There’s no way to be sure how far their bond had progressed along the path from intimate friendship to informal betrothal.

Perhaps they themselves didn’t know.  Anyone who has ever been young and in love can imagine that the devastation Abraham felt at her death may have come, in part, from knowing that they hadn’t been given the time to figure out just where they stood.

We do know that Abraham fell in love again.  Seven years after Ann’s death, Lincoln married the mercurial and passionate Mary Todd.  He let himself feel the promise of a lasting tie with a quick-witted, attentive woman whose extensive education, loyalty to the Whig Party, and endorsement of his ambition would help him rise to whatever heights life had in store for him.

With Mary, Abraham could bring love and politics together in a life of companionship, parenting, service, and, for all their domestic discord, moments of tenderness shielded from public view — maybe a reminder to him of moments he’d shared in his youth with Ann Rutledge.

Part One of a two-part essay

If you’re interested in Lincoln’s young adulthood, get your hands on Douglas Wilson’s and Rodney Davis’s book Herndon’s Informants.  It brings together more than 600 interviews and statements amassed by Lincoln’s law partner after the assassination in 1865.

Many of his sources had known Lincoln before he moved to Springfield in 1837 at the age of 28.  (He arrived for good in the state capital on April 15, exactly 28 years before his death.)

Herndon’s great virtue was his zeal for collecting all the facts of Lincoln’s personal life, no matter how delicate the subject.  He thought the apotheosis of the martyr in 1865 was making northerners forget his flesh-and-blood friend, whom he’d known for a quarter-century.  But Herndon’s great vice was his mixing of pet theories and pat psychologizing into his fact gathering.

On November 16, 1866, he gave a rambling lecture on the subject of New Salem, where Lincoln had lived before Springfield.  The explosive segment of the talk concerned Ann Rutledge, the “beautiful, amiable, and lovely girl” who became Abraham’s intimate friend in the mid-1830s.

Herndon printed his shocking public lecture of 1866 as this broadside, and the story was also covered by many newspapers.

The lecturer faced a huge problem: neither Abraham nor Ann had left any direct evidence of their bond.  They wrote nothing about it, and said nothing to anyone who recorded their words at the time.

Herndon was forthright about relying on fragmentary memories of people looking back 30 years.  For some reason, he didn’t specify that one of his sources — Isaac Cogdal, an old Lincoln acquaintance from New Salem — told him that he’d spoken to the president-elect about Ann Rutledge just five or six years earlier.

At the end of a long day’s work in late 1860 or early 1861, Lincoln had invited Cogdal to his office, hoping to pump him for news about families he’d known in New Salem, including the Rutledges.  Cogdal gladly obliged, and took advantage of the nostalgic occasion to “dare to ask” Lincoln about his early love life.

“Abe is it true that you fell in love with & courted Ann Rutledge?” Cogdal remembered saying. Lincoln supposedly welcomed this query about a touchy, personal topic he’d never discussed even with his closest friends.  It was a subject sure to cause him grief if he talked about it now and word of the conversation somehow got spread around Springfield.

The president-elect’s words, reconstructed orally by Cogdal and written down by Herndon, were, “I loved the woman dearly & sacredly: she was a handsome girl — would have made a good loving wife — was natural & quite intellectual, though not highly Educated — I did honestly — & truly love the girl & think often — often of her now.”

Cogdal’s reliability has been dismissed by many historians, and affirmed by others.  But even if his memory for Lincoln’s sentiments was perfectly accurate, they touch only on Abraham’s retrospective feelings about Ann.  They say nothing about her feelings for him.

Did Ann love him “sacredly” too (and does “sacredly” suggest “eternally,” or just “purely,” “reverentially”)?  How far did she advance toward becoming his “good loving wife,” rather than someone else’s?

In fact, when Lincoln embarked on his love for her, she was already engaged to someone else.  This man, the merchant John McNamar, had left New Salem and was presumed to have given up on Ann, despite his promise eventually to return to her.  For the moment, Abraham’s “sacred” love meant unrealizable love.

In 1865 and 1866, a number of informants told Herndon that Ann and Abraham had sealed some kind of pact, and were planning to marry after she cleared up her murky status with McNamar.  Naturally, they tried to keep their pact secret, making it all the harder for Herndon’s informants, decades later, to agree about their exact relationship.

But in August 1835, Ann fell ill.  She lingered only long enough for Lincoln to make one last visit to her bedside.  No informant claimed any knowledge of what he and Ann said to each other that day.  Many of them did claim that two weeks later, when Ann expired, Abraham fell completely apart.

Lincoln’s collapse convinced some who’d known nothing about his closeness to Ann that he must have been deeply in love with her, and she with him.  Nothing short of professed and reciprocated love, perhaps with a promise to marry, could account for his wretched state.

Herndon seems to have concurred with this speculation.  Lincoln’s emotional prostration after her death pointed to one conclusion: that Abraham “loved Ann Rutledge with all his soul, mind and strength.  She loved him as dearly, tenderly and affectionately.”

Within weeks, the New York Times and other papers in the U.S. and abroad reprinted almost everything Herndon said about Ann Rutledge.  Many readers regretted his public probing of Lincoln’s private life.  But what infuriated so many readers was not the news of Lincoln’s love for Ann as such.

They were incensed by an additional Herndon revelation.  He said a friend had told him that after Ann was lowered into her grave, Abraham declared (in the friend’s words): “his heart, sad and broken, was buried there.”

That alleged statement by a distraught 26-year-old established to Herndon’s satisfaction that Lincoln had never loved another woman as fully as he had loved Ann Rutledge.  She had been Abraham’s first and final love.

[In Part Two: where Herndon got Lincoln’s alleged words that his heart lay buried in Ann Rutledge’s grave, and how the nation benefited, in Herndon’s estimation, from Ann’s death.]

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.”

Many subsequent presidents have taken Abraham Lincoln as an exemplar of great leadership and character.  The most historically minded among them, from Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson to Barack Obama, have dwelt on his keen grasp of America’s role in the advance of democracy.

Lincoln, for his part, took the famously unsuccessful Whig presidential candidate Henry Clay as his main model of political virtue.  Starting out with little education or material resources — just like Lincoln — Clay had become a galvanizing legislator, charismatic speaker, and zealous booster of America’s destiny as the beacon of liberty.

His failure to reach the presidency, said Lincoln, did nothing to lessen his impact on his times.  He combined three character traits that in Lincoln’s estimation were common enough singly, but rarely found in one man: eloquence, judgment, and implacable will.

Henry Clay is scarcely more than a name today.  He is perhaps less well-known by Americans than the other two members of the mid-19^th century “great triumvirate,” Daniel Webster and John C. Calhoun.

Sculpture of Henry Clay by C.Y. Haynes, 1850, celebrating the senator's support for technology and justice. Haynes's new gilt gesso technique, called a promoetheotype, did not catch on -- just as Clay's and Lincoln's mediating stances never had majority support.

Webster can still get plaudits for memorable speechifying: his rousing “liberty and union, now and forever, one and inseparable,” etched beneath his massive bronze statue in New York City’s Central Park, is familiar to many.  Calhoun is often touted for original political theorizing, especially his concept of the “concurrent majority.”

Clay suffers by comparison.  His major achievement — helping to rein in sectional divisiveness for a third of a century — gradually faded from view after the Civil War undid it.  And his curious status as an anti-slavery slave-owner strikes many people nowadays as thinly masked hypocrisy.  Men like Clay and Thomas Jefferson are often said to have salved their consciences with airy proclamations about equality, while luxuriating from the labor of their chattels.

Yet in his lengthy 1852 eulogy for the departed Clay — a speech delivered in the same Springfield Hall of Representatives where his own body would lie in state in 1865 — Lincoln declared that Clay’s viewpoint on slavery was one of the primary reasons to admire him.  It qualified as paradoxical, Lincoln conceded, but it was emblematic of Clay’s good judgment.

Clay understood, said Lincoln, that the abomination of slavery must be tolerated indefinitely: abolishing it right away would wreak havoc, creating problems for blacks and whites alike.  There was no way “it could be at once eradicated, without producing a greater evil, even to the cause of human liberty itself.” 

In Lincoln’s assessment, Clay’s entire career sprang from an intense commitment to liberty.  “He loved his country partly because it was his own country, but mostly because it was a free country… 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.”  Most people loved their country chiefly because it was their home; Clay loved it chiefly because it was edging the entire world toward freedom for all.

Ironically, Clay’s enthusiasm for the spread of liberty made it easy for him to embrace the “colonization” movement — the campaign to mobilize freed American slaves to resettle in Africa.  All he had to do was perceive black Americans as a maliciously abused people who had still managed to pick up the ideal of liberty from their Euro-American environment.  They could voyage to their “native soil” across the sea as ambassadors of freedom.

At the end of his 1852 eulogy, Lincoln enthusiastically embraced Clay’s colonization program. Liberty for slaves would not come anytime soon, he knew, but when it did come, true liberty would have to occur in two stages.  Individual manumission had to be followed by the release of the entire group from their captivity in theUnited States.

Somehow, Lincoln imagined, the relocation of three million black Americans “to their long-lost fatherland” in Africa might be accomplished “so gradually, that neither races nor individuals shall have suffered by the change.”  They could then embark on a new chapter in the history of liberty: “the possible ultimate redemption of the African race and African continent.”

Like his model Clay, Lincoln was so blinded by the bright glow of liberty, and the role former slaves could play in extending it, that he couldn’t perceive a very plain truth: by 1852 Africa was no longer their “fatherland” or “native soil.”

In the last years of his life, Lincoln came to his senses on colonization.  He may still have believed in it in the abstract, but he knew that African-Americans, while sometimes supportive of the idea, had largely repudiated it.  Most black Americans took theUnited States as their homeland, and loved their country — and its ideal of liberty — in spite of the severe restrictions still placed upon their freedom.

On the evening of April 11, 1865, Lincoln delivered the last speech of his life to a large outdoor crowd at the White House.  He endorsed the idea of giving the vote to some black men, signaling his awareness that African-Americans as a group would make their future — and help to spread the principle of liberty — in the United States, not in a foreign land.

John Wilkes Booth was standing in the crowd that night, aghast to hear the president put black men on the path to republican citizenship.  Booth decided then and there to stop Lincoln in his tracks.

The debt-ceiling fracas in Washington has finally ended.  Among its many revelations is President Obama’s persistent identification of his leadership, in style and substance, with Abraham Lincoln’s.  He hasn’t claimed he’s reached Lincoln’s stature; he’s just adopted Lincoln as a model he wants to follow.

When he came into office in January 2009, three weeks shy of Lincoln’s bicentenary, Obama spoke of Lincoln almost continuously, and it seemed to some he might be invoking the cherished hero’s name for political advantage.

In fact, Obama had started thinking and writing about Lincoln even before running for the U. S. Senate in 2004.  That was three years before he declared his candidacy for the presidency on a freezing February day in Springfield, Illinois.  Of course he hoped that appreciating Lincoln would help him politically, but there’s no reason to doubt Obama when he says he’s truly inspired by him.

A century and a half after Lincoln’s death, Obama does seem, under very different historical conditions, to have applied his general approach to governance: insist on reasoned argument as the basis for political debate, seek out bridges to your opponents, look for ways to advance the cause of equality in the long run when the path to it is blocked in the immediate.

During the debt-and-deficit imbroglio, Obama brought Lincoln into the fray as a model compromiser.  He said today’s Congressional Republicans should follow Lincoln’s lead, giving up some of what they wanted (as Obama was doing himself) in order to obtain a desperately needed debt-ceiling extension.

As it happens, he muddied matters in this instance by citing the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1863 as an example of Lincoln’s penchant for compromise.  True, as Obama said, the much-honored Proclamation didn’t actually “free the slaves.”  It only emancipated slaves ensconced behind enemy lines — and then only in principle, since, in those places, the Proclamation was unenforceable.

But that didn’t mean Lincolnwas compromising when he issued the Proclamation.  He was actually freeing all the slaves he believed he could constitutionally liberate in his capacity as commander-in-chief.  If anything, the Proclamation showed Lincoln to be uncompromising.

A better example of Lincoln’s willingness to compromise on slavery might have been his earlier advocacy of compensated emancipation: paying slaveholders for their property.  Many radical abolitionists rejected this idea, since in their eyes it endorsed the principle that the slaves had rightly been treated as property in the first place. Lincoln thought the end result of freedom trumped any theoretical inconsistency involved in spending money for it.

Of course, as Obama would readily agree, Lincoln’s greatness during the Civil War derived from his repeated refusal to entertain compromise on the central issue — the illegitimacy of secession — and from his readiness to act decisively, when conditions were right, for emancipation.

The relatively unknown Lincoln text that may have most influenced Obama’s approach to presidential governance is the Springfield Lyceum speech of 1838.  A fledgling orator still in his 20s, Lincoln declared that the passions of partisanship could bring the Republic down.

Calm deliberation — “cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason” — would keep the nation afloat at a time when many impetuous, self-absorbed men would gladly make a name for themselves by sinking it.

What has become clear during Obama’s 30 months in office — and was demonstrated again during the debt-ceiling donnybrook — is that it’s Obama the temperate, bridging Democratic who is now marching behind a centrist “Party of Lincoln” banner all his own.

The Republicans seem to have gone silent on the railsplitter, willingly conceding him to Obama.  True, Republican intellectuals, such as former George W. Bush staffers Peter Wehner or Michael Gerson, still refer admiringly to Lincoln as a vital figure.  Sarah Palin and others do occasionally quote him in passing.

But when is the last time a national Republican figure made anything more than brief or honorific mention of him?  Even formulaic deference to him seems increasingly rare in the Republican camp.  The last time I remember a Republican candidate or elected official making a point of calling the GOP the “Party of Lincoln” was January 2008, when Rudy Giuliani hailed him as the party’s founding father.

Some surprising parties and people have claimed the legacy over the years. Will it continue?

Giuliani had just been battered in the Florida Republican primary, coming in a distant third to John McCain and Mitt Romney.  Finished off as a presidential prospect, he left the electoral stage with a plea to Republicans to remember that theirs was “the party of Lincoln” as well as of Reagan and Bush.

Giuliani was hoping Republicans could revive their historic ties to “moderates” as well as “conservatives,” building an ethnically inclusive “50-state” party by promoting “self-government” as opposed to “centralized government.”

The “party of Lincoln” rubric made sense to Giuliani as a way of signaling to moderates and non-whites that Republicans welcomed them too.  Now it’s Obama who may be using Lincoln in an appeal to moderates, including Republicans disgruntled by Tea Party inroads.

Unlike Giuliani, he argues that Lincoln endorsed both self-government and government pure-and-simple.  Federal measures are now essential, he says, for attaining goals that Lincoln also espoused in his day: building up infrastructure, ensuring that a new generation of young Americans can rise in the world, and assisting the poor and the disadvantaged to climb onto the nation’s ladder of opportunity.

In speech after speech during the off-year election campaign of 2010, Obama cited Lincoln’s (undated) note to himself: “the legitimate object of government, is to do for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but can not do, at all, or can not, so well do, for themselves.”

For those fascinated by the ever-evolving place of Lincoln in American culture, the 2012 campaign will be captivating.  Will Obama continue to tout Lincoln as the booster of positive government as well as the practitioner of “compromise”?  Will any Republican candidates pick up on Giuliani’s call to welcome moderates and non-whites into a resurrected “party of Lincoln”?

Eventually, if not in 2012, Republicans and Democrats seem liable to come to blows over the Lincoln mantle, with Republicans promoting him as the protector of individual enterprise, and Democrats lauding him as the defender of equality for all.

Just before Christmas 1859, the 50-year-old Lincoln looked back at his previous decade and noticed that it was split into two roughly equal parts.  For the five years after 1849 (the year he wrapped up his single term in Congress), he’d “practiced law more assiduously than ever before.”  So assiduously, that by 1854 he “was losing interest in politics” as a career.

But in that year he was “aroused again” as a potential candidate for office by “the repeal of the Missouri Compromise.”  The specter of slavery extension north of the Missouri Compromise line of 36°30” — made possible by the Kansas-Nebraska Act — revived his taste for electoral battle.

Win or lose, he’d seized the issue that would crystallize his sharpest thinking, his strongest feeling, and his deftest political calculation.  He would stake out a position at the center of northern opinion on slavery and cling to it with fierce resolve, hating slavery with the passion of an abolitionist, and loving union with the moderation of a conservative.

The rekindling of his political aspirations in 1854 gives the period 1849-1854 a special poignancy in the arc of his public career.  It’s the last bloc of time in his life when he wasn’t sure how to proceed with his life.  Ambitious for public service but lacking concrete options, Lincoln had settled into the law.

Yet for all his relentless activity on the legal circuit, this was a time of vocational limbo, perhaps even (as Michael Burlingame argues in Abraham Lincoln:  A Life, vol. 1, pp. 357-62) a forty-something’s passage through a “mid-life crisis.”

His striking eulogy for President Zachary Taylor in the summer of 1850 suggests how his mind was churning.  He was roaming widely and deeply in thought and feeling, connecting political and military affairs to timeless quandaries about the human condition.

Taylor died in the White House on July 9, after only 16 months in office.  Two days earlier, Lincoln had arrived in Chicago to defend a client in U.S. District Court.  On July 10, with the trial just under way, news of Taylor’s demise reached the city by telegraph.  That evening, a meeting was held to pick the city’s eulogist, and the visiting lawyer and wordsmith from Springfield was promptly chosen.

Lincoln agreed to do the job — he didn’t “feel at liberty to decline” — but he warned the selection committee not to expect much.  “The want of time for preparation,” he wrote, “will make the task for me a very difficult one to perform, in any degree satisfactory to others or to myself.”

When the trial ended on July 24 with exoneration for his client Charles Hoyt (found not guilty of infringing on another man’s water-wheel patent), Lincoln put the final touches on his speech and delivered it the following afternoon at City Hall.

In the main body of the eulogy, Lincoln dramatically recounted Taylor’s exploits in the Mexican War, going out of his way to praise him as an intrepid fighter in the very war Lincoln himself had opposed.  This was one general, he said, who had fearlessly taken the battle to the enemy.  This was also a leader who instinctively put the needs of the whole army, and nation, ahead of personal pique.  By the usual standard of military honor, Taylor would have deprived Colonel William Worth (who’d spoken ill of Taylor in Washington) of further opportunities for heroism.  Instead, he thought only of putting the best officers in place, and he judged Worth one of the best.

Lincoln was praising Taylor for selflessness as much as courage.  Moral stature mattered in war and politics.  It mattered in part, said Lincoln, because with his death, all that was left of Taylor or any other man was “the fruits of his labor, his name, his memory and example.”

Taylor’s sudden end called to Lincoln’s mind both the fragility of the republic — which other leader would now step forward to help rein in the people’s discordant passions? — and the evanescence of human life.  The death of a great man like Taylor forced everyone to confront the brute fact “that we, too, must die.”

High office or privileged station offered no protection against the final leveling.  Yes, personal virtue was revealed by the grandeur of one’s civic accomplishments, but it was also measured by a humble acceptance of life’s brevity.  Lincoln pitched no rosy outcome for Taylor beyond the grave, and sang no hymn to the permanence of his fame.

The eulogist took heart instead from a steadfast stoicism, reminding the audience of Taylor’s last words: “I have done my duty, I am ready to go.”  (As reported in the press on July 10, the president had said,  “I die.  I am ready for the summons.  I have endeavored to do my duty.  I am sorry to leave my old friends.”)

Lincoln went on to state that if they had served their nation with “singleness of purpose,” dying leaders would know they had secured “that country’s gratitude” and “its best honors.”  Lincoln sealed his eulogy by reciting 6 of the 14 stanzas of William Knox’s 1818 poem “Oh, why should the spirit of mortal be proud?”  He selected verses stressing the common “pilgrimage road” that the living shared with the dead:

So the multitude goes, like the flower or the weed,

That withers away to let others succeed;

So the multitude comes, even those we behold,

To repeat every tale that has often been told.

Newspapers as well as 1865 sheet music misattributed the poem to Lincoln himself.

By 1865, thanks to the wide reprinting of the eulogy, many people associatedthis poem with Lincoln.  Some people thought he’d written it himself.  After his death, hundreds of newspapers around the country ran the complete poem, many of them attributing it to him.  They noted how often he’d recited it from memory, remembering his lost friends and family members.  The final stanza got the most play, and it comforted many readers in part because they knew it had comforted him:

’Tis the wink of an eye, ’tis the draught of a breath,

From the blossoms of health, to the paleness of death.

From the gilded saloon, to the bier and the shroud,

Oh, why should the spirit of mortal be proud!

In April, Steven Spielberg announced Sally Field as his choice to play the president’s wife in Lincoln, the feature film coming in 2012 to a theater near you.   The director said he’d always wanted her for the part.  Why?  Because the two-time Oscar recipient could capture “all the fragility and complexity that was Mary Todd Lincoln.”

There’s no telling how much screen time Sally Field will actually get in the picture, based on Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals.  Goodwin’s story centers on Lincoln, his 1860 Republican presidential competitors (Edward Bates, Salmon Chase, and William Seward), and his Secretary of War Edwin Stanton.  But selecting Field to star opposite Daniel Day-Lewis, an “Abraham” with two Oscars of his own, suggests that Spielberg may intend more than a passing glance at Mary. 

Given Field’s stature in American popular culture, even a few scenes in such a high-profile venture will affect the image of Mrs. Lincoln for a long time to come.  Let’s hope that the screenplay by Pulitzer Prize-winner Tony Kushner, and Spielberg’s direction, will bring out the full “complexity” of Mary’s “fragility.” 

For all her temperamental swings and failures of judgment, this perpetually insecure soul — emotionally shredded, like her husband, by the death of their 11-year-old son Willie in early 1862, and badgered by Washington critics as a pathetic Western parvenu, if not also a closet secessionist — managed somehow to keep her husband’s health and the Union’s welfare hovering near the front of her mind. 

Too often her ups and downs are reduced to individual craziness, the product of her Todd family’s history of mental distress, aggravated by personal setbacks beginning when she was six with the loss of her mother.  A discombobulated Mary is easily positioned, after Willie’s death, as a spiritualist crank and a continuing burden on her long-suffering spouse.

Lincoln’s forbearance in the face of her tongue-lashings and manic shopping binges bolsters his image as a selfless saint, safely detached from her disorders.  But anyone who has ever been in a decades-long relationship will suspect this picture is one-sided.

Her splenetic displays, and his high-minded silence or forlorn withdrawal, were likely built into the relationship they’d created with one another.  The sparks were part of the substance.

The essential corrective to the portrayal of Mary as an out-of-control, self-aggrandizing deviant — the perfect foil for a charitable servant of the people — is to insist on her intimate ties with Abraham over 22 years of marriage.  In Springfield those ties included political as well as domestic intercourse.  In Washington, she gradually lost her political role, but her civic enthusiasm, and her ardor for her husband’s success and well-being, never waned. 

There’s no reason to think their “scenes,” as Mary labeled one of their White House spats, prevented them from enjoying, and needing, one another’s company.  There’s every reason to believe their angry standoffs were followed, at least some of the time, by eager reconciliation.  Their complexity as a couple helped shape her fragility as an individual.

Any depiction that takes Mrs. Lincoln as the nutty nuisance, the bothersome drag on the forgiving Mr. Lincoln, distorts their quarter-century of impassioned partnership.  So does any portrayal that misses Mary’s ongoing public engagement after Abraham stopped soliciting (or even listening to) her political judgments.

Goodwin’s engrossing Team of Rivals devotes only a few pages to Mary, but it gives Kushner and Spielberg all the evidence they’ll need to show that this long marriage kept being renewed by mutual fervor for politics and public service.

Mary and Abraham had both fallen for Henry Clay’s Whig politics long before they fell for each other.  They fell for each other in part because of their shared political vision.  Once in the national capital, she sought out new ways to exercise her political passions.  After Willie’s death, she poured herself all the more intensively into one of them: hospital work.  

As historian Michael Burlingame points out in his biography Abraham Lincoln:  A Life (vol. II, p. 495), “she won [occasional newspaper] praise for ‘the generous devotion with which she has tenderly cared for the sick and wounded soldiers.’”  Praise came from her husband too, writes Burlingame: “Lincoln gave her $1,000 out of his own pocket to buy Christmas turkeys for the hospitalized troops and helped her distribute them.”

One result of Mary’s inattention to publicity: no contemporary illustration of her hospital work exists. This 1861 scene of volunteers and visitors was probably less ghastly than what she usually saw.

Catherine Clinton (Mrs. Lincoln: A Life, p. 196) observes that Mary “visited the hospitals two or three times a week,” undeterred by what one newspaper called “the fear of contagion and the outcries of pestilence.”

In Team of Rivals (p. 457), Goodwin notes that Mary brought the men “baskets of fruit, food, and fresh flowers . . . to mask the pervasive stench of disinfectant and decay.”  She sat down beside them to write letters to their families.  One young man learned who she was only after the letter bearing her signature had been delivered. 

Urged by Lincoln secretary William Stoddard to curry general favor for her labors, Mary stuck with relative anonymity, having found, as Goodwin writes, “something more gratifying than public acknowledgment (p. 459).”  She got the reward of registering firsthand the soldiers’ devotion to her husband and their fidelity to the Union cause.

In Lincoln, Spielberg and Kushner have the rare chance to give us the Mary who made her husband proud alongside the Mary who made him fret.  The Lincolns collaborated in family building and public service.  She shored him up even as she weighed him down.  He let her find new purpose even as he left her aside, to embark on a presidential calling all his own.

A film centered on civilian leaders in wartime cannot attempt a full treatment of the Lincoln marriage.  But it can let Sally Field signal a fully human Mary, courageous as well as distraught.