The Life and Writings of Abraham Lincoln Read Free Page B

that passage intellect, character and spiritual vision find their perfect fusion; and the writer of it distilled into a few lines of unforgettable eloquence all the sorrows, the chastened resignation and the passionate hopes of a great people emerging from such travail as nations seldom have to endure.
    December, 1939

THE LIFE OF
ABRAHAM LINCOLN

THE LIFE OF
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
    W HEN a man has become so famous that he is known to everyone, his identity as a person is likely to be lost. His most prominent physical features are emphasized by caricaturists until they come to stand for the man himself. A single adjective describing one phase of his personality is repeated until it takes on the value of a nickname. All the underlying subtleties and inconsistencies that go to make up the real man are forgotten or suppressed; finally he becomes as conventionalized as his memorial statue—and with no more insides to him than there is to the bronze casting.
    No one in American history has suffered more from this process of oversimplification than has Abraham Lincoln. We think of him as a tall dark figure muffled in a shawl and wearing a high silk hat that is apparently never removed. We remember all the little things about his costume—the unpressed, ill-fitting clothes, the bulky umbrella, and the little black tie, always slightly askew. We know that his contemporaries considered him homely, but we are so used to seeing pictures of his face that we have come to consider it sadly beautiful. It is everywhere about us, and we must be poor indeed if we do not have Lincoln’s portrait on our persons at this very moment, for it is stamped in copper on every penny that comes from the mint.
    Long familiarity with his name and his appearance has made us feel that we know all about this man. His honesty, his kindness and his passion for justice have been described to us ever since we were schoolchildren. And all the things that have been said about him are true—but they are not true enough. The Lincoln we have so firmly fixed in our minds isnot a person but a concept. The man himself lies deeper. His character was extraordinarily complex; his motives are not easily understood—and they have often been misinterpreted; contrary to popular belief, his rise to fame was neither accidental nor unsought for; and, more important than anything else, he was a human being like the rest of us, with all the weaknesses and faults common to mankind. It is a confirmation of his inherent greatness that despite the flaws he still seems great, and he grows more interesting on closer study.
    There is only one way to understand this man as a person and as a force in history. No amount of reading biographical accounts of him will give the whole picture; no study of history or contemporary records will give as complete an understanding of his curiously complex personality as well as his own words do. We are fortunate in having a large body of his writings and speeches. Much has been lost, of course; carelessness, fire, time and deliberate destruction have taken their toll. But the material that remains is so rich that the man who emerges from Lincoln’s own record of himself can be seen whole and true in an unconscious self-portrait that is sometimes most revealing when its author was most unaware of what he was saying about himself.
    It is important, too, to understand the man as he actually was, for his reality as a person is fast disappearing behind the clouds of myth and fancy that have been cast around him. The Lincoln legend is not without its value as a part of American folklore but it has no place in history, except that the myth should be taken into consideration as a part of the deep impression made by Lincoln on the minds and hearts of his people.
    The fact that the American people have made Abraham Lincoln into a hero and a god is not to be regretted. In their very act of deification the people have indicated what they themselves most admire in a