the Real Lincoln

The Real Lincoln
By Justin Ewers, US News 12/2/05
Feb 14, 2005, 09:00

He was an up-by-his-bootstraps man of the frontier. Born in a log cabin, he taught himself to read and hacked his way out of the Kentucky backwoods into the national spotlight. At political rallies, posters showed him splitting rails with ax in hand. He was the prairie lawyer who would become the Great Emancipator: Honest Abe--the man who freed the slaves and won the Civil War. When an interviewer asked him about his early days, he summed it up in a phrase: "'The short and simple annals of the poor.' That's my life, and that's all you or anybody else can make of it."

With the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, on April 14, 1865--less than a week after the end of the Civil War--this gilded image became gospel. A thorough accounting of Lincoln's early years seemed to die with him. He left no autobiography. There are fewer than 10 pages of personal reminiscence in his Collected Works. And so his past, in death, hardened into hagiography.

But is this the real Lincoln? Today, the question is very much alive, as scholars show new interest in his forgotten past. Lincoln's prepresidential papers have been consolidated, for the first time, in a new Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield, Ill., the town he called home. An exhibit at the grand opening, in April, will use roughly half of its space to chronicle Lincoln's journey to the presidency. And as the bicentennial of his birth approaches, in 2009, a wave of scholarship is re-examining the early life of the 16th president, using new sources to explore his personal relationships, his rise to power--and just who Honest Abe really was. What researchers have discovered is a man more vacillating, less principled--even much richer than history remembers. "People know Lincoln the wartime leader," says David Herbert Donald, a professor of history at Harvard, "but knowing his early years helps explain how he became one."

The facts. The rough outlines of Lincoln's life before the White House have never been in dispute. He was born in 1809 in a log cabin in Kentucky. His parents were unschooled, and Lincoln himself had no more than a year of formal education altogether. When he was 8, an ax was placed in his hand, "and from that till within his twenty-third year," Lincoln wrote later of himself, "he was almost constantly handling that most useful instrument."

His life was not without early heartache. After the family moved to Indiana, his mother died when he was 9, an older sister when he was 18. His father, a distant man, was unable to fill the void. Lincoln eventually left home, at 22, for Illinois, where he vaulted up the social ladder. He was soon elected to the local legislature, serving four terms. He taught himself law, becoming a respected attorney, then married into one of Springfield's most powerful families. Not long after, he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. In the 1850s, Lincoln joined the Republican Party, a new coalition of northern antislavery groups, and famously debated Stephen Douglas, one of Illinois's sitting senators, about the future of slavery in the Union. In 1860, he ran for president and won.

Historians insist, however, that there were bumps on the road to the White House that have been lost to popular history. "It's easy to just hit people with the slam-dunk of martyrdom and perfection," says Joseph Garrera, president of the Lincoln Group of New York, a historical society devoted to Lincoln scholarship, but his rise to power was more complicated than that. In telling this story, though, historians have faced one major obstacle: Lincoln lived in frontier towns for most of his life. Tangible evidence of his comings and goings is hard to come by. As a result, his early years have often gotten short shrift.

The primary source of information on Lincoln's life in Illinois is a long-neglected collection of interviews conducted by William Herndon, Lincoln's law partner of 16 years. After Lincoln was killed, Herndon set out to gather and transcribe the stories of more than 250 people who had known the president during his time on the frontier. Their memories, though, were shaky--many hadn't seen Lincoln for 30 years or more--and their stories were sometimes contradictory. Herndon compiled some of these accounts into a biography in 1889, but the first historians who were able to access his collection, in the 1940s and '50s, dismissed much of it as "gossip" and moved on.

In the past decade, however, scholars have taken a closer look at what Herndon and his interviewees had to say about Lincoln--and many have been surprised by what they've found. "I'd imbibed this notion that the archive was just old codgers making up stories," says Michael Burlingame, professor emeritus of history at Connecticut College, who first dived into Herndon in the early 1990s. "But as I read through it, I thought this was really interesting--it didn't seem to be implausible." Previous generations, he says, "treated this as a nuclear waste dump, but it's really a gold mine."

To Herndon's sources, Lincoln, at first blush, seemed to be every bit the frontiersman of yore. He emerged, literally, out of the woods in 1831 in a tiny town called New Salem, Ill. He was a gangly man, at 6 foot 4, with a gaunt face atop a narrow frame, who sported ill-fitting pants that barely covered his ankles: "As ruff a specimen of humanity as could be found," one observer called him. Lincoln won the townspeople over, though, with his ribald humor and feats of strength. He fought a local bully in a wrestling match and tried his hand at a series of jobs: miller, storekeeper, surveyor, and postman.

Young Abe also seems to have had a soft side. Within a few years of his arrival, many in New Salem said Lincoln fell in love with a young woman named Ann Rutledge, a local tavern keeper's daughter. Historians have quarreled about Ann for generations, with some insisting there was no such relationship. Even Herndon was surprised to hear about her. But Douglas Wilson, codirector of the Lincoln Studies Center at Knox College, convincingly argued recently in a book called Honor's Voice that of 24 people Herndon talked to who knew Lincoln and Ann at the time, 22 said he courted her. They were engaged to be married, it seems, in 1835. But that August, tragedy struck--Rutledge contracted "brain fever" (probably typhoid) and died.

Later, Lincoln would be celebrated for stoically hiding his emotions in times of trouble--the man one friend described as "the most shut-mouthed" who ever lived told a client after a heartbreaking loss in a senatorial race in 1858 that he felt like "the boy who stumped his toe. I am too big to cry and too badly hurt to laugh." But after Rutledge's death, Lincoln seems to have come apart at the seams. "He made a remark one day when it was raining that he could not bare [sic] the idea of its raining on her grave," one witness remembered. "That was the time the community said he was crazy." So racked with grief was Lincoln that many worried he would commit suicide. Herndon inferred from this that Rutledge was Lincoln's "true love" --that he mourned her death for the rest of his life. Most historians today think Lincoln's reaction to her sudden departure had more to do with his own past: "It reminded him," says Connecticut College's Burlingame, "of the death of his mother."

As Lincoln battled his personal demons, he would continue to have strained relationships with women. He ultimately courted and may have proposed to as many as four Illinois ladies during his 20s and 30s. His fumbling performances were not something he was proud of: After breaking off one engagement, he wrote cruelly to a friend about the young lady's "want of teeth [and] weatherbeaten appearance" --not to mention her girth. "A fair match to Falstaff," he joked, "nothing could have commenced at the size of infancy, and reached her present bulk in less than thirty-five or forty years."

Ambivalence. Lincoln in this period also seems to have been plagued by self-doubt. "I can never be satisfied with any one who would be blockhead enough to have me," he wrote. In 1840, he won the hand of young Mary Todd, the sharp, vivacious daughter of a prosperous Kentucky banker--a woman her brother-in-law said "could make a bishop forget his prayers." They seemed a good match--both had great ambition and loved poetry and politics. But Lincoln, only a few weeks later, inexplicably called it off. Herndon's sources were sure he had fallen in love with another woman: To one, Lincoln apparently confided "that he thought he did not love [Mary Todd] as he should and that he would do her a great wrong if he married her."

Lincoln's tortured personal life took a turn for the worse when one of his few close friends, Joshua Speed, with whom he'd been living for four years, announced he was moving to Kentucky. As he had after Rutledge died, Lincoln fell into what seems to have been a near-suicidal depression. For a week, he allowed only the doctor and Speed to see him. So worried was he about his friend's safety, Speed made sure "to remove razors from his room--take away all knives and other such dangerous things."

Scholars still can't agree on what so rattled Lincoln during this period. Some believe Herndon's story--that he never got over Rutledge. Others give credence to comments Herndon said Lincoln made to him, worrying he'd gotten syphilis from a prostitute. Lincoln himself told Speed that he was not afraid to die but for the fact "that he had not done anything to make any human being remember that he had lived."

Most scholars attribute Lincoln's depression in large part to guilt. He couldn't recover, he wrote over a year later to Speed--when he and Mary were still not married--with the "never-absent idea that there is one still unhappy whom I have contributed to make so. That still kills my soul." Later he added: "Before I resolve to do one thing or the other, I must regain my confidence in my own ability to keep my resolves when they are made."

Resolution. Why does it matter how much Lincoln agonized over marriage? Quite frankly, scholars say, because this was one of the few times in his life that a man who would become known for his single-minded determination actually wavered. He didn't snap out of his gloom for over a year, when he finally returned to Mary, asked her forgiveness, and then married her in a hastily arranged ceremony. After that, "the debilitating episodes of the 'hypo' " --as Lincoln called his depressions--"did not recur," writes Wilson, and instead of struggling with self-doubt, Lincoln "became known for his resolution." From then on, James McPherson wrote in the New York Review of Books , "once he made a decision, he stuck with it--a matter of no small importance when the issues became Union or Disunion. Victory or Defeat. Slavery or Freedom." As Lincoln would famously tell those who opposed his Emancipation Proclamation, "The promise, being made, must be kept."

Still, it was not a happy match. Herndon was far from the only friend of Lincoln's who came to despise his wife. (He called Mary "the hell-cat of the age.") Nevertheless, the couple made their marriage last through the turbulent years ahead, including the deaths, in childhood, of two of their four sons. (A third would die six years after the assassination.) Lincoln would always be a melancholy man, but the debilitating, suicidal depressions that plagued him in his youth would never return.

In a book published last month, another scholar, C. A. Tripp, came to a radically different conclusion about Lincoln's depression and personal problems--attributing them to the fact that he was "predominantly homosexual." For evidence, Tripp, who died before his book was published, points out that Lincoln, while they were rooming together, slept in the same bed with his friend Joshua Speed for four years, that he used the salutation "Yours forever" only in letters to Speed, and that his despair in 1841 was the result of Speed's own imminent marriage. Tripp is not the first Lincoln scholar to make this claim. Carl Sandburg, in his 1924 biography, wrote enigmatically that Lincoln and Speed's relationship had "a streak of lavender and spots soft as May violets."

Controversy. Most historians, however, don't see much of a case for a gay Lincoln. Many men slept in beds together in the 19th century, they point out. Tripp is flatly wrong when he claims Speed is the only one to whom Lincoln signed his letters "Yours forever" --he addressed notes to at least half a dozen other people that way. His book has been called "a hoax and a fraud" by his former coauthor, who walked off the project. And for many scholars, the very fact that Lincoln made no attempt to hide his relationship--and even spoke about it as president--confirms their suspicions of Tripp's thesis. "I simply cannot believe that, if the early relationship between Joshua Speed and Lincoln had been sexual, the president of the United States would so freely and publicly speak of it," writes historian Donald.

Whatever the root of Lincoln's romantic struggles, his political career, too, seemed to be getting off to a rough start. "The fact is, in his 20s and 30s, he was something of a political hack," says Burlingame, who is writing a four-volume biography of Lincoln. A member of the Whig Party, he made a habit, not uncommon at the time, of publishing anonymous letters in local newspapers ridiculing and mocking his party's political opponents, the Democrats. Burlingame, in his research, says he has come across more than 200 such letters he believes were penned by Lincoln. In them, Lincoln is more hatchet man than Honest Abe: He could be clever, but on more than a few occasions, he was simply disappointing--engaging in the same race-baiting politics he would later deplore. In the presidential elections of 1836 and 1840, for example, he accused the Democratic candidate, Martin Van Buren, of having supported black suffrage--a cardinal sin, he seemed to suggest. The bottom line, says Burlingame, is that "he took the low road in politics much more than people acknowledge."

Here, too, though, Lincoln seems to have learned an important lesson. In 1842, in the midst of his prenuptial problems with Mary, Lincoln wrote a pseudonymous letter in a local paper mocking the Democratic state auditor, James Shields, for being, among other things, "a fool as well as a liar." Outraged, Shields managed to identify his slanderer and challenged Lincoln to a duel.

Honor. Broadswords in hand, Shields and Lincoln crossed into Missouri together (dueling was illegal in Illinois), but, fortunately for both men, the duel never came to a head. Lincoln agreed to withdraw his claim, and their seconds persuaded them to call it off. The young politician was clearly shaken by the episode, and historians think it had a deep impact: "Lincoln may, for the first time, have understood 'honor' and honorable behavior as all-important, as necessary, as a matter of life and death," writes Wilson. And though he would occasionally dabble in political mudslinging again in his life, he refused to dive into this sort of politics in any serious way again. As he told an Army officer who asked him about the affair when he was president, "I do not deny it, but if you desire my friendship, you will never mention it again."

In spite of this setback, Lincoln's star continued to rise--for a few more years, at least. In 1846, four years after his dust-up with Shields, he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. Many supporters thought his time had finally come. But when he moved to Washington, ready to seize the national stage, he was flummoxed: He couldn't get any of his bills passed. His only notable speech, criticizing the ongoing Mexican War, was considered vaguely disloyal back home. And after two humdrum years in office, Lincoln returned to Springfield, telling Herndon he considered himself "politically dead."

His career on the ropes, Lincoln went back to work at what historians now realize was a hugely successful law practice. "Law may not have been his first love--politics was--but law was his bread and butter," says Cullom Davis, professor emeritus at the University of Illinois-Springfield, who recently oversaw the completion of the Lincoln Legal Papers Project, which has brought together some 96,000 legal documents pertaining to Lincoln. According to Davis's estimates, Lincoln probably handled around 5,100 cases over the course of his career--twice as many as previous historians had assumed--and earned perhaps twice as much money. "His campaign supporters like to make him a simple man from a log cabin," says Davis, "but by the mid-1850s, you'd have to say he was enjoying an upper-middle-class lifestyle." By some estimates, he was one of the wealthiest lawyers in the state.

Myth. However successful he may have been, Lincoln the young attorney, like the young politician, was not quite the man of principle he would become. "One of the enduring myths about Lincoln the lawyer is this heroic image of a guy who would only take clients and causes with which he was philosophically and politically comfortable," says Davis, "which is nonsense." Lincoln represented people across the philosophical and political spectrum--from murderers to farmers fighting over cows, from adulterers to doctors accused of malpractice. In one celebrated case in 1847, he even defended a Kentucky slave owner who wanted to keep some of his slaves in Illinois, where slavery was illegal. Lincoln lost.

But again, he seems to have gained something of great value from this period. An advantage of traveling the circuit court up to six months a year, as Lincoln was doing in the 1850s, was the opportunity to meet a lot of people. His name was soon known throughout the state. Lincoln may have taken on dubious clients, but some of them--several high-profile railroad companies, in particular--brought him national attention. "It's one of those historical coincidences," says Davis: Lincoln just happened to be working in Illinois when the railroads came through needing legal counsel. "But this is the first time he was noticed by the people in Baltimore, New York, Philadelphia, and Boston." The exposure would come in handy later.

As Lincoln pondered another run at politics, there is no doubt he was conscious of his own weaknesses. "Lincoln himself was deeply aware of how imperfect he was and how limited he was," says Joshua Wolf Shenk, author of an upcoming book on Lincoln's melancholy. But for today's historians, it is the existence of a more complicated Lincoln--riddled with doubt as a young man, inured to the sordid political games of his era, a man who used his law practice in not entirely principled ways--that makes his rise so impressive. He was, in the end, thoroughly human.

And yet, unlike so many other thoroughly human men, when push came to shove, Lincoln rose above his shortcomings and tackled, head on, the most challenging issue of his day. After stumbling out of Congress in 1849, Lincoln's real political rise began five years later, in 1854, when two new territories were established--Kansas and Nebraska--in a wave of controversy. His future nemesis, Stephen Douglas, pushed the bill through Congress, called the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which created the future states, including a provision that would allow voters in the territories to determine for themselves whether slavery would be allowed in their area. Antislavery forces felt Douglas had opened Pandora's box: In a single stroke, he had overturned more than 30 years of legislation preventing slavery from expanding northward.

For Lincoln, it was a massive political jolt--and his great opportunity. "Kansas-Nebraska was a wake-up call--a shock that re-energized him," says McPherson. He had never been much of a race man in the past. Remember, says Daniel Stowell, director of the Papers of Abraham Lincoln, this was a man whose "ideal statesman was a Kentucky slave owner named Henry Clay." But he had seen slavery in action and would write to Speed's sister in 1841 about being haunted by the sight of shackled slaves on the Ohio River, "like so many fish upon a trot-line [sic]."

Whatever his previous views, when the time came, Lincoln leapt into the political ring, condemning Kansas-Nebraska, denouncing the injustice of slavery, and, soon enough, joining the leadership of the new Republican Party. He was not the country's most passionate abolitionist, by any means--or even a true abolitionist at all. "There was no doubt," writes Thomas Keneally in Abraham Lincoln , "that Lincoln believed both propositions on slavery: that it was morally offensive yet constitutionally guaranteed."

But, as he had throughout his early life, Lincoln would demonstrate an incredible capacity to grow--eventually becoming, by the end of his presidency, the greatest abolitionist of his time. By 1860, slavery had become the defining issue of the presidential campaign. When seven states seceded before he was able to take the oath of office, Lincoln knew that challenges lay ahead. Before he left Illinois for the White House, he told a group of journalists: "Well, boys, your troubles are over now; mine have just begun."