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

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.

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!