Founders' Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln (10 page)

Paine was the first founder Lincoln encountered writing in his own voice. Washington appeared in Weems’s
Life
in the third person; Weems included some of his authentic sayings and writings, but many of the words Weems assigned Washington were made up. Paine wrote for himself.

Paine also wrote surpassingly well. Weems told good stories—we still remember the cherry tree, two centuries later—but he told them in runaway sentences, never using five words when he could use twenty. Washington’s own prose was grave and a little stiff, like the man himself. Paine had the punch of an editorial writer, with the clarity and speed of a good reporter.

This made Paine important to Lincoln the future writer and speaker. Lincoln already knew how to tell stories; Paine showed him how to make and win arguments.

Paine’s knack for ridicule made him particularly useful to Lincoln, who already had the knack himself. Paine could nail down his points with similes that fixed them in the memory. He called the Book of Jeremiah “a medley of unconnected anecdotes”—then added, “as if the various and contradictory accounts that are to be found in a bundle of newspapers . . . were put together without date, order,
or explanation.” Paine could turn ideas he did not like into slapstick, by means of speed and concreteness. Christians, he wrote, accepted “the amphibious idea of a man-god; the corporeal idea of the death of a god; the mythological idea of a family of gods; and the christian system of arithmetic, that three is one,
and one is three.”

At his funniest Paine used the
reductio ad absurdum
, taking an idea and pushing it until the consequences become ludicrous. Paine’s bugaboo, the story of Christ dying for our sins, became this when placed in an astronomical context: “Are we to suppose that every world, in the boundless creation, had an Eve, an apple, a serpent, and a redeemer? In this case, the person who is irreverently called the Son of God . . . would have nothing else to do than to travel from world to world, in an endless succession of death, with scarcely a momentary
interval of life.”

It took Lincoln a while to master these techniques—humor and seriousness can be an unstable mix—but as a mature debater and speechmaker he would use them all. In the 1850s, he would argue that his rivals had become too casual about slavery: they “cease speaking of it as in any way wrong, [they] regard slavery as one of the common matters of property, and speak of negroes as we do of our
horses and cattle.” The first two phrases defined the problem; the simile of the third planted it on the family farm. When rivals accused him of being in favor of race mixing, he protested that just because he did not want a black woman for a slave did not mean he desired her for a wife. “I need not have her for either. I can just
leave her alone.” Here he demolished an argument with concreteness, cutting through lurid fears with a plain personal reaction. As president, he defended onerous wartime measures with the
reductio ad absurdum
: Americans were no more likely to maintain them in peacetime than a sick man would “persist in feeding
upon . . . emetics” once he became well. All these techniques are related to the stretching and teasing of good storytelling—to the Man of Audacity milking his own embarrassment. But Paine and the older Lincoln used them to poke holes in the arguments of their enemies.

They are common techniques that Lincoln could have picked up in many places. Jonathan Swift was a master of this kind of mockery, and
Gulliver’s Travels
was a classic that was in print all during Lincoln’s life. We could easily call Lincoln’s exercises in this style of humor Swiftian—except for one thing. There is no indication that Lincoln ever read Swift, or even mentioned him, Gulliver or Lilliput. Paine was the mocking humorist he did read.

Lincoln would retain traces of Paine’s style for much of his life, but there was a barrier between him and the author of
The Age of Reason
that prevented him from becoming a full-fledged Paine-ite. That was Paine’s optimism.

Paine believed that studying the world would demonstrate God’s “
MUNIFICENCE” (all caps) because he believed that the world was a good place. “Do we not see a fair creation prepared to receive us the instant we were born—a world furnished to our hands that cost us nothing? Is it we that light up the sun; that pour down the rain; and fill the earth with abundance? Whether we sleep or wake, the vast machinery of the universe
still goes on.” Paine is like Augustine Washington in Weems’s
Life
teaching young George about God’s bounty.

Paine is half right. The world is a good place—except when it’s not. What of the many coughs and rattles in the machinery of the universe—floods, famines, droughts, plagues, eruptions, earthquakes? What of the one-on-one disasters and retail catastrophes that fill every life—the death of Paine’s first wife? The deaths of Nancy Lincoln, Sarah Grigsby, and Ann Rutledge? Paine, from conviction or temperament, heroism or stupidity, looked the other way. Lincoln could not.

As with the world, so with fathers. Paine’s outrage over the substitutionary atonement sprang from his horror at the notion that a good father could sacrifice a son in payment for sin. Any father who did it, he was certain, “
would be hanged.” On the question of what fathers would or would not do, Lincoln reserved judgment.

To find reflections of nature’s darkness, and his own, Lincoln turned instead to poetry. He missed many of the great poets of his time: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Tennyson, Whitman never stirred his interest. His favorite poem, disconcertingly, was “Mortality,” a lugubrious meditation on the vanity of human wishes by William Knox, a Scotsman who had died in 1825. Lincoln read it in New Salem, committed it to memory, and would recite it in later years. “I would give all I am worth, and go in debt,” he once declared, “to be able to write so fine a piece as I
think that is.” More to his credit was his love of Robert Burns, whom he admired for his satire; “Holy Willie’s Prayer,” a send-up of a canting hypocrite, was a particular favorite of his.

A third discovery in New Salem was Lord Byron. It is hard now to understand what Byron was to the early nineteenth century. He was both
a poet and a personality, an actor and a hero. He was beautiful, glamorous, rich, witty, and damned—an irresistible combination. Byron’s politics were not unlike Paine’s—he was a liberty-loving aristocrat who died in 1824 fighting to free Greece from the Ottoman Empire. But, unlike Paine, or any other Enlightenment figure, he had access to all the dark emotions—depression, despair, nihilism, madness. The ease of his access makes us now suspect that he was a bit of a poseur. Lincoln, like most of his contemporaries, loved him; when he was on the road, he would look up favorite passages in other people’s volumes of Byron (other people
always had them).

Towering over all was Shakespeare. Lincoln never read
all the plays. This was characteristic of his learning; he was less well read than many a professor or even journalist, but what he read he read deeply. His favorites were the plays in minor keys—the tragedies and the histories (though Shakespeare designed the histories to end well—springtime for Tudors—there is a lot of grimness along the way). Lincoln’s favorite of favorites was
Macbeth
, the play that is set in motion by witches.

In his late twenties and thirties, Lincoln wrote poems of his own, all sad. One, “The Suicide’s Soliloquy,” was thought to have been removed from the files of the
Sangamo Journal
, the local newspaper that ran it, as if to spare Lincoln from being associated with such a grim topic.
A scholar rediscovered it, however, in 2004. One stanza will suffice:

Yes! I’ve resolved the deed to do,

And this the place to do it:

This heart I’ll rush a dagger through,

Though I in hell should rue it!

Lincoln failed utterly to match his words to the sentiments he wished to evoke. The rhyme of “do it” and “rue it” is like rolling barrels down a staircase.

Probably his best touch as a poet came in “The Bear Hunt,” a long description of a wild bear being run down and killed by mounted hunters and baying dogs. As the chase reaches a clamorous pitch, Lincoln,
whose sympathies are with the bear, drops in this mordant little line: “The world’s
alive with fun.” Only a humorist could be that black.

Lincoln loved poetry and turned to it all his life: as a mirror for his moods, as a salve for them, as a capsule in which to deposit them. But he stopped writing it, and seldom quoted it in his speeches. He did better: he assimilated the moods and music, and learned to call on them, when needed, in his prose.

In January 1838
Lincoln gave a speech in which he brought together many of the things he had been learning about politics and self-expression. He also spoke of the founders—their legacy and their passing: what they had accomplished and what would become of it now that they were dead.

His venue was the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield. Lyceums were discussion groups that met in American towns to hear edifying talks, either by locals or by traveling speakers. The highfalutin name (the original Lyceum was Aristotle’s school in ancient Athens) showed the young country’s ambition for self-improvement. Lincoln’s audience at the Young Men’s Lyceum was composed of striplings like Herndon and Matheny who were already his fans. Lincoln, on the eve of his twenty-ninth birthday, could still just claim to be one of them.

His topic was “The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions”—a subject of obvious interest to a politician (he was in his second term in the Illinois House of Representatives). Rhetorically he was on his best behavior—perhaps too much so. His first sentence, after stating the topic, is a long rumble: “In the great journal of things happening under the sun the American people find our account running under date of the nineteenth century of the Christian era.” This was as resonant as a drum, and as empty. But as the young statesman warmed to his subject, he had some interesting things to say.

Lincoln defined America’s political institutions as a system “conducing . . . to the ends of civil and religious liberty,” and he thanked
the founders—“hardy, brave and patriotic”—for establishing it (he would come back to the founders twice more). Their handiwork, he went on, was safe from invasion. The War of 1812 had proved that point: the British, who had beaten Napoleon, had been unable to beat the United States.

America’s institutions, however, faced a threat from within: mob violence. “Accounts of outrages committed by mobs,” said Lincoln, “form the every day news of the times”: “They have pervaded the country” and “have grown too familiar to attract anything more than an idle remark.” He dwelled on two examples—a lynching of five gamblers in Vicksburg in 1835, and the lynching of Francis McIntosh, a colored man, in St. Louis in 1836. The victims were not lambs—both the gamblers and McIntosh were killers—but their deaths were brutal and entirely illegal: the gamblers had been strung up without trial, and McIntosh had been chained to a tree and slowly burned to death.