Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power (10 page)

Lincoln was sharply aware of the figure he cut. His unprepossessing appearance and physical attributes did much to reinforce his appeal as a man close to the sons of the soil. Gangling and ill-proportioned as a boy, Lincoln turned into what Joshua Speed rather brutally described as “a long, gawky, ugly, shapeless, man.” His angular, leathery face, crowned with wiry hair, usually unkempt, was probably better described as plain, not ugly, and would indeed “brighten like a lit lantern” with the animation of conversation and infectious laughter. But Lincoln certainly described himself as ugly and used his appearance as a weapon against himself, for humorous effect. It was less his height that merited special comment—though at six foot four he was exceptionally tall for his time—than the extraordinary proportions of his long legs, large feet, and, most remarkable of all, his arms. When he stood straight, with his arms at his sides, and his shoulders in their customary droop, the tips of his fingers reached nearly three inches lower than on the normal adult frame. Whether or not, as one observer claimed, Lincoln’s enormous, bony hands resulted from wielding a heavy, cumbersome ax throughout his formative years, there is no doubt that his early regimen helped make him formidably strong. His physical prowess set him apart in New Salem, where a legendary wrestling match with the leader of a group of local rowdies, the Clary’s Grove Boys, won him the admiration of all; that same reputation played its part in winning him his militia captaincy in 1832, and later, as a campaigning politician, helped him see off bullies bent on intimidating voters. Lincoln’s attire only complemented the picture of an unaffected man of the people. Never the dapper politician, he was essentially inattentive to what he wore. His trousers were invariably too short, sometimes verging on the ludicrous. In his debates with Douglas he usually wore a linen coat but no stylish vest, or waistcoat, over his shirt. His brown hat was as faded as his ever-present green cotton umbrella.
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Lincoln used his great gifts in storytelling and humor to reinforce his folksiness, whether amongst the knots of men who gathered informally outside neighborhood stores and on courthouse steps, or at set-piece political rallies. He had excelled in telling anecdotes and cracking jokes since boyhood, and the practice became an important part of his professional repertoire. Few could match him for the sheer number and pertinence of the humorous tales with which he illustrated almost any topic. “The application was always perfect,” Joseph Gillespie recalled, “and his manner of telling a story was inimitable although there was no
acting
in his manner. . . . [H]ow he could gather up such a boundless supply & have them ever ready at command was the wonder of all his acquaintences.” The stories often operated didactically, as parable, explanation, and analogy. Though his early political opponents scolded him for a sort of “assumed clownishness,” his humor really did little if anything to compromise his essential dignity. Generally devoid of malice and sarcasm, and rarely made at anyone’s expense, his jokes and anecdotes left no trail of wounded feelings and political bitterness. Many of Lincoln’s friends detected in him an underlying sadness and reserve, which set limits to his sociability, but few would have dissented from Mentor Graham’s claim that thanks to his lively conversation he was “one of the most
companiable
persons you will ever see in this world.”
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The rapport that Lincoln enjoyed with his public was enhanced by his reputation for honest dealing. The nickname “honest Abe” was not the fabrication of party publicists but a mark of the universal respect in which he was held as a lawyer of scrupulous honesty. This reputation spilled into the political arena, where he was widely perceived as just and fair-minded in debate, and averse to gaining an advantage by foul means. A Springfield colleague, Turner R. King, summarized his political speeches as “candid—fair—honest—courteous,” thus alluding to another source of public admiration, his avoidance of anger and his preference for tolerant debate. “I never in my life saw him out of humor,” recalled the Petersburg lawyer Nathaniel W. Branson. Hill Lamon knew differently (sometimes, he said, Lincoln “would burst out”), but he, too, agreed that Lincoln was in most circumstances good-humored.
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Many thought Lincoln handicapped in some ways as an orator. His voice was unmusical and high-keyed. Early in a speech, before he warmed up, it was “shrill-squeaking-piping, unpleasant,” according to Herndon, who was not alone in alluding to its shrillness. Carl Schurz, another admirer, found his gestures awkward: “He swung his long arms sometimes in a very ungraceful manner. Now and then he would, to give particular emphasis to a point, bend his knees and body with a sudden downward jerk, and then shoot up again with a vehemence that raised him to his tip-toes and made him look much taller than he really was.” But these were scarcely disabling features. Many judged his gestures “striking and original,” not awkward, while his voice had great carrying power and reached to the extremities of even the largest crowd. Lincoln suffered none of the vocal strain that afflicted Stephen Douglas’s rich baritone during their joint debates.
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Lincoln’s power over his audiences derived far less from his physical attributes than from the clarity and directness with which he appealed to their understanding. Taking pains to provide cogent explanations of complex or obscure subjects had been a hallmark of his youth. Anna C. Gentry, who was acquainted with Lincoln during his years in Indiana, remembered how, as “the learned boy among us unlearned folks,” he patiently explained to her the movement of the earth, the moon, and the planets. Preparing his addresses, whether to juries or to political rallies, he devoted enormous attention to making himself understood by all, however poorly educated. He spoke extemporaneously, though he prepared notes for the most important of his speeches, and used the clearest, simplest language. It was this concern for clarity that chiefly prompted his anecdotes, not merriment for its own sake. Observing his developing rhetorical control over a period of three decades, Joseph Gillespie recognized that Lincoln “confined himself to a dry bold statement of his point and then worked away with sledge hammer logic at making out his case.” When the young New Englander Edward L. Pierce encountered Lincoln for the first time, in Chicago in the mid-1850s, he was powerfully struck with the Illinoisan’s “logical and reflective power, and the absence of all attempt throughout his speech to produce a sensational effect.” Pierce considered this an unusual style for the West, but failed to notice how much Lincoln had learned from the “frontier utilitarianism” of his idol, Henry Clay.
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Lincoln especially admired what he called Clay’s “great sincerity and thorough conviction . . . of the justice and importance of his cause.” He was far less enamored of the “florid and exuberant rhetoric” of a Daniel Webster or the declamatory style of an Edward Everett, both widely esteemed as political orators. As Gillespie said, he “despised ornament or display.” What made his speeches compelling was a lawyer’s mode of analysis allied to a Clay-like earnestness. His oratory fell into the “forensic” category of Whig rhetoric, typified by historical review, the examination of precedents, close questioning, and the call to arms against an identified threat. Having heard him many time before a jury, Judge Thomas Drummond remarked that when thoroughly roused Lincoln “would come out with an earnestness of conviction, a power of argument, a wealth of illustration, that I have never seen surpassed.” It was an earnestness which could build to impassioned eloquence.
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As one of his party’s most effective speakers, Lincoln found himself called on regularly to take the stump during state and national canvasses, whether or not he was a candidate for office himself. He first made his mark as a self-composed, assured, often humorous speaker in Sangamon County in the boisterous campaign of 1836. The year of his arrival in the front rank, though, was 1840, when he survived the disfavor into which the Springfield junto had fallen amongst rank-and-file Whigs. Hurt, like his fellow leaders, by the internal improvements issue, Lincoln feared he would be punished by the county nominating convention, which was dominated by delegates from the country areas. But his value as a talented and entertaining stump speaker overrode other considerations. He not only secured his renomination to the state legislature but won appointment as a Whig presidential elector. In both the rumbustious Log Cabin campaign of that year and the Clay-Polk canvass four years later, Lincoln spoke far and wide, notably in the southern parts of the state, where he could address his fellow Kentuckians in their own accents.
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It was an enjoyable role, one he performed energetically and well. As well as giving many more people the opportunity to see a rising star, it allowed Lincoln to deepen his knowledge of public opinion in a state where evolving patterns of immigration, settlement, and economic development were creating a variety of political subcultures.

LINCOLN’S ILLINOIS: CULTURAL REGIONS AND THE DEBATES OF
1858

“Yankees” originating from New England and New York dominated the area of
settlement around the Chicago hub. The area of southern cultural dominance was in
its lower reaches (“Egypt”), settled by Tennesseeans and Carolinians in particular; Kentuckians predominated farther north. Settlers from Ohio and Pennsylvania most influenced the culture of the intermediate “midlands” region.
[
Source:
Kenneth J. Winkle,
The Young Eagle: The Rise of Abraham Lincoln
(Dallas: Taylor, 2001), pp. 23–25.]

Almost four hundred miles in length from its northern boundary to its southern tip, Illinois was typical of the then Northwest in its broad patterns of settlement. As in Indiana and Ohio, its northern counties attracted migrants from New England and the wider Northeast, though at the time of Lincoln’s arrival, in 1830, that region was still in essence a wilderness. In the southern and central counties, poor white pioneers from Kentucky, Virginia, and the border slave states had developed an economy that mixed subsistence, primitive barter, and a limited circulating currency; some of them had tried, and just failed, to introduce slavery into the new state. They were, in Governor Thomas Ford’s description, “a very good, honest, kind, hospitable people, unambitious of wealth, and great lovers of ease and social enjoyment.” The arrival of free-state immigrants into the northern prairies and the area around Lake Michigan gave rise to a profound clash of cultures. Southerners treated the northern farmers and merchants—much wealthier, more enterprising—with great suspicion, judging that the “genuine Yankee was a close, miserly dishonest, selfish getter of money, void of generosity, hospitality, or any of the kindlier feelings of human nature.” Closely related to this was their conviction that all easterners were covert abolitionists, a judgment reinforced by the advance of radical antislavery parties in Chicago and its surrounding counties in the 1840s and 1850s. For their part, northerners regarded the southerner as “a long, lank, lean, lazy, and ignorant animal, but little in advance of the savage state; one who was content to squat in a log-cabin, with a large family of ill-fed and ill-clothed, idle, ignorant children.” Such stereotypes profoundly affected political stances. Southerners, for instance, opposed the building of a canal from Lake Michigan to the Illinois River “for fear it would open a way for flooding the State with Yankees.” One Jacksonian bitterly complained that “the Yankees spread everywhere.” He expected them to overrun Illinois, for they “could be found in every country on the globe.”
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Sectional chauvinism drew extra nourishment from religious antagonism. An important element of conflict during the early years of statehood was the clash between the rough, uneducated gospel pioneers, traveling on foot or by horse, unpaid, and ready to suffer chronic physical hardship in the cause of Christ, and a new breed of college-trained, well-dressed, more sophisticated ministers, settled urbanites, who set about establishing Bible, tract, and missionary societies, Sunday schools, and other benevolent and educational operations. The conflict took on a sectional character since these more polished and intellectual preachers, men like John Mason Peck, came largely from the North and East. At issue were religious experience and Yankee cultural imperialism. The preacher “Daddy” Briggs typified the hard-shell Baptists of southern counties; speaking of the richness of God’s grace he declared, “It tuck in the isles of the sea and the uttermost parts of the ‘yeth.’ It embraced the Esquimaux and the Hottentots, and some, my dear brithering, go so fur as to suppose that it takes in these poor benighted Yankees; but
I
don’t go that fur.” Where such Yankee-hating became most intense, people’s politics were staunchly Democratic, with the Whigs and later the Republicans perceived as the parties most open to New England influence.
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Lincoln knew well enough the conflicting outlooks associated with these two cultures, which coexisted in the central counties of the state. A large majority of Springfield’s inhabitants in its early days were of Kentucky extraction, but its citizens also included several refined and educated New Englanders, as indeed was true of New Salem: from these Lincoln learned something of the flavor of New England well before he first visited that region, campaigning for Zachary Taylor in 1848. Attending Springfield’s First Presbyterian Church, he was surrounded by conservatives with the strongest ties to the South, while the antislavery origins of the Second Presbyterian Church proffered firsthand evidence of the more radical outlook of members of the New England diaspora. We can be sure he grasped the relationship between these attitudes, church loyalties, and voting behavior. Amongst the minority of antislavery clergy in Springfield were Albert Hale, pastor of the Second Presbyterian Church, and Lincoln’s Baptist neighbor and friend Noyes W. Miner. Both were college-trained Yankees. Hale, like Lincoln, had taken a stand against the Mexican War. Miner accepted a call from Springfield’s Baptist Church in 1854 and, as a determined opponent of slavery, he had an uneasy relationship with the conservatives in his congregation. An old lady with southern connections told him, “Mr. Miner, . . . your prayers almost kill me.”
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