The Life and Writings of Abraham Lincoln (40 page)

This closing to a long letter is interesting for the quaint phrasing that Lincoln uses in a business recommendation
.

Springfield, April 24, 1844

A
S TO
the real estate, we can not attend to it as agents, and we therefore recommend that you give the charge of it, to Mr. Isaac S. Button, a trustworthy man, and one whom the Lord made on purpose for such business.

Yours &c                      

    L
OGAN
& L
INCOLN

Lincoln makes clear his stand on abolitionism and the question of the annexation of Texas. The position he takes here—to let slavery exist where it was already established, but to prevent its spread into new territory—was to be the attitude he was to hold all his life, until the exigencies of war demanded that the slaves be freed as a military measure
.

Springfield, October 3, 1845

W
HEN
I saw you at home, it was agreed that I should write to you and your brother Madison. Until I then saw you I was not aware of your being what is generally called an Abolitionist, or, as you call yourself, a Liberty man, though I well knew there were many such in your country.

I was glad to hear that you intended to attempt to bring about, at the next election in Putnam, a union of the Whigs proper and such of the Liberty men as are Whigs in principle on all questions save only that of slavery. So far as I can perceive,
by such union neither party need yield anything on the point in difference between them. If the Whig Abolitionists of New York had voted with us last fall, Mr. Clay would now be President, Whig principles in the ascendant, and Texas not annexed; whereas, by the division, all that either had at stake in the contest was lost. And, indeed, it was extremely probable, beforehand, that such would be the result. As I always understood, the Liberty men deprecated the annexation of Texas extremely; and this being so, why they should refuse to cast their votes [so] as to prevent it, even to me seemed wonderful. What was their process of reasoning, I can only judge from what a single one of them told me. It was this: “We are not to do evil that good may come.” This general proposition is doubtless correct; but did it apply? If by your votes you could have prevented the extension, etc., of slavery would it not have been good, and not
evil
, so to have used your votes, even though it involved the casting of them for a slave-holder? By the
fruit
the tree is to be known. An
evil
tree cannot bring forth
good
fruit. If the fruit of electing Mr. Clay would have been to prevent the extension of slavery, could the act of electing have been evil?

But I will not argue further. I perhaps ought to say that individually I never was much interested in the Texas question. I never could see much good to come of annexation, inasmuch as they were already a free republican people on our own model. On the other hand, I never could very clearly see how the annexation would augment the evil of slavery. It always seemed to me that slaves would be taken there in about equal numbers, with or without annexation. And if more
were
taken because of annexation, still there would be just so many the fewer left where they were taken from. It is possibly true, to some extent, that, with annexation, some slaves may be sent to Texas and continued in slavery that otherwise might have been liberated. To whatever extent this may be true, I think annexation an evil. I hold it to be a paramount duty of
us in the free States, due to the Union of the States, and perhaps to liberty itself (paradox though it may seem), to let the slavery of the other States alone; while, on the other hand, I hold it to be equally clear that we should never knowingly lend ourselves, directly or indirectly, to prevent that slavery from dying a natural death—to find new places for it to live in, when it can no longer exist in the old. Of course I am not now considering what would be our duty in cases of insurrection among the slaves. To recur to the Texas question, I understand the Liberty men to have viewed annexation as a much greater evil than ever I did; and I would like to convince you, if I could, that they could have prevented it, if they had chosen.…

Andrew Johnston had been in the Illinois House of Representatives with Lincoln in 1839. He, like Lincoln, was an experimenter in verse, and the two men sent each other their poems for criticism. Poe’s “The Raven” had been published for the first time in January, 1845, yet its fame had already penetrated into the backwoods country of Illinois. Johnston had written a parody on it. Lincoln’s own poem, printed here, is in the melancholy romantic vein popular in the early part of the nineteenth century
.

Tremont, April 18, 1846

F
RIEND
J
OHNSTON
: Your letter, written some six weeks since, was received in due course, and also the paper with the parody. It is true, as suggested it might be, that I have never seen Poe’s “Raven”; and I very well know that a parody is almost entirely dependent for its interest upon the reader’s acquaintance with the original. Still there is enough in the polecat, self-considered, to afford one several hearty laughs. I think four or five
of the last stanzas are decidedly funny, particularly where Jeremiah “scrubbed and washed, and prayed and fasted.”

I have not your letter now before me; but, from memory, I think you ask me who is the author of the piece
²
I sent you, and that you do so ask as to indicate a slight suspicion that I myself am the author. Beyond all question, I am not the author. I would give all I am worth, and go in debt, to be able to write so fine a piece as I think that is. Neither do I know who is the author. I met it in a straggling form in a newspaper last summer, and I remember to have seen it once before, about fifteen years ago, and this is all I know about it. The piece of poetry of my own which I alluded to, I was led to write under the following circumstances. In the fall of 1844, thinking I might aid some to carry the State of Indiana for Mr. Clay, I went into the neighborhood in that State in which I was raised, where my mother and only sister were buried, and from which I had been absent about fifteen years. That part of the country is, within itself, as unpoetical as any spot of the earth; but still, seeing it and its objects and inhabitants aroused feelings in me which were certainly poetry; though whether my expression of those feelings is poetry is quite an other question. When I got to writing, the change of subjects divided the thing into four little divisions or cantos, the first only of which I send you now and may send the others hereafter.

Lincoln sends Johnston another-poem based on the insanity of a school friend. There is reason to suspect that Lincoln’s interest in the insanity of his friend had a subjective basis—that he had feared that he himself might go mad. The terrible fits of melancholy which had come over him in the past had doubtless led him to speculate on that unhappy possibility
.

Springfield, September 6, 1846

F
RIEND
J
OHNSTON
: You remember when I wrote you from Tremont last spring, sending you a little canto of what I called poetry, I promised to bore you with another some time. I now fulfil the promise. The subject of the present one is an insane man; his name is Matthew Gentry. He is three years older than I, and when we were boys we went to school together. He was rather a bright lad, and the son of the rich man of a very poor neighborhood. At the age of nineteen he unaccountably became furiously mad, from which condition he gradually settled down into harmless insanity. When, as I told you in my other letter, I visited my old home in the fall of 1844, I found him still lingering in this wretched condition. In my poetizing mood, I could not forget the impression his case made upon me. Here is the result:

If I should ever send another, the subject will be a “Bear-Hunt.”

Fortunately the poem to which Lincoln alluded in the last line of his previous letter to Johnston has been preserved. It is probably based on an actual experience which may have taken place during his boyhood in Indiana
.