Why wasn’t Lincoln more upset that his private letter had been published? Actually, his connection with Shakespeare was something he wanted to publicize. Newspapers often announced his theatergoing, as on April 4, 1864, when a Washington paper ran a notice that “The president, with Mrs. Lincoln and Sec. Seward and family, will visit Ford’s Theatre this evening to witness Edwin Forrest’s grand impersonation of King Lear.”76
Lincoln found that Shakespeare’s universal appeal lay in his depiction of shared human qualities. Disloyalty, jealousy, revenge, hatred, madness, self-destructiveness, tomfoolery, devotion, faith, depression—they were all there in Shakespeare’s plays, delivered in language so carefully calibrated that they remained under artistic control.
The president sometimes paused in a conversation to read or recite a Shakespearean passage. In particular, Shakespeare’s dark passages reflected the agony he experienced during the war. Of all the forms of chaos Lincoln faced, the inner demons that sometimes overtook him were the most painful. These demons were especially harsh when he witnessed death, both in his family and in the Union military. But in Lincoln’s case, depression was not a crippling factor for long periods. Melancholy Shakespearean passages provided him with relief. They offered structured, resonant versions of gloom. They organized sad topics and made them meaningful. Reciting dark writings aloud let him project his depression outward so that it was filtered through the improving lens of poetry. The rhythms and images of verse crystallized his private experience in a manner similar to the way his finest speeches crystallized and uplifted the national experience.
Take his reading from Macbeth after the Battle of the Wilderness, the grinding standoff in May 1864 between Grant and Lee in the woods of northern Virginia. When told of the battle’s high casualty count, he cried, “My God! my God! Twenty thousand poor souls sent to their final account in one day. I cannot bear it! I cannot bear it!” His pallid face, disheveled hair, and dark rings under his eyes gave him a ghastly look. He found solace in one of the gloomiest passages in literature. He picked up a Shakespeare volume and leafed to Macbeth’s most famous soliloquy. He said, “I cannot read it like [Edwin] Forrest, but it comes to me to-night like a consolation.” The haunting words came forth slowly in Lincoln’s high-pitched voice:
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.77
This passage held special poignancy for Lincoln because it translated into beautiful language the universal fact of human mortality, a fact driven home with painful frequency during the Civil War.
Another Shakespearean passage that especially moved him was King Claudius’s guilt-ridden speech in Hamlet about killing his brother, the king of Denmark. Claudius has committed the murder out of a thirst for power; now he tries to gain expiation by praying, but he finds he cannot do so because fratricide is too great a crime for God to forgive. Calling this passage “one of the finest touches of nature in the world,” Lincoln recited all forty lines of the soliloquy—from “O my offence is rank!” to “All may be well!”—to the artist Francis Carpenter.78 “He repeated this entire passage from memory,” Carpenter remarked, “with a feeling and appreciation unsurpassed by anything I ever witnessed upon the stage.”
Next, Carpenter recalled, the president recited Richard III’s soliloquy that begins “This is the winter of our discontent.” Most actors, Lincoln told Carpenter, delivered the lines too bombastically. The tone must be bitterly satirical because Richard is scheming to seize power from those he serves with outward loyalty. Lincoln delivered Richard’s speech, in Carpenter’s words, “with a degree of force and power that made it seem like a new creation to me.”
Doubtless, there were personal associations for Lincoln in such passages. Like Richard, Claudius, or Macbeth, Lincoln wrestled with the complexities of political power. He fought against a cruel form of oppression, slavery, with strong executive actions that themselves were at times called despotic—and that, in the end, got him killed (John Wilkes Booth regarded him as an evil “king”). Within his own administration, Lincoln confronted would-be usurpers, such as Salmon Chase or William Henry Seward, who may have reminded him of Shakespeare’s power-hungry schemers. There were also analogies between the personal and political crimes in Shakespeare’s plays and America’s fratricidal struggle over the national sin of slavery.
Politics also helps explain Lincoln’s attraction to the comic figure of Falstaff. Although debauched, vain, and deceptive, Falstaff is also an unwitting voice for democracy in the history plays. Based on the fifteenth-century Puritan rebel martyr Sir John Oldcastle, Falstaff mocks pretensions of the sort that, later on, chivalric American Southerners held dear. The Confederacy was built largely on the Southern code of honor—pride in the Cavalier traditions of gentility, independence, and hierarchical order. In a famous passage, Falstaff demolishes honor:
What is honour? A word. What is in that word “honour”? What is that “honour”? Air. A trim reckoning! Who hath it? He that died o’ Wednesday. Doth he feel it? No. Doth he hear it? No. ’Tis insensible then? Yea, to the dead. But will it not live with the living? No. Why? Detraction will not suffer it. Therefore I’ll none of it. Honour is a mere scutcheon. And so ends my catechism. (Henry IV, part 1, 5.1.129–39)
Falstaff here deconstructs the kind of ersatz honor that became the underpinning of Southern culture. The historian William Robert Taylor writes of the South, “The right of a state to secede . . . could not be questioned. The honor of the South demanded that Southerners stand up and be counted; it required that they not retire cowering from the field of action.”79 Falstaff calls honor merely “air,” a “word” that people die for. Applied to the Civil War, the South’s fighting to defend the institution of slavery in the name of honor was a sham.
Both the North and the South could see themselves reflected in Shakespeare. But as in other forms of culture, Lincoln sought possibilities for unity, not division, in the Bard of Avon, who captured all human motivations and passions in characters and language that spoke to many Americans of his day.
FEELING THE POPULAR PULSE
He felt the same way about other writers. His was an era when poetry had a far wider audience than it has had in our era. Experimental poets like Whitman and Dickinson were too far ahead of the time to be widely appreciated. The public loved more conventional versifiers, especially the Fireside Poets—Longfellow, Whittier, James Russell Lowell, and Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.—as well as female poets such as Lydia Huntley Sigourney.
Although Lincoln did not have time for extensive reading as president, books were readily available to him. During his time in office, he borrowed some 1,215 books from the Library of Congress.80 Mary Lincoln, an avid reader, made major additions to the White House library, which was then located in a well-upholstered oval room above the Blue Room. Before Millard Fillmore’s administration, the Executive Mansion was said to have been “entirely destitute of books.”81 Abigail Fillmore, a teacher, wanted books around her. Her husband, who had formerly been her student, got an appropriation from Congress to buy volumes that included Shakespeare, Milton, Dr. Johnson, Jefferson, Aesop’s Fables, and Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. Presidents Pierce and Buchanan added little to the book collection. Mary Lincoln applied her shopping expertise in 1861 and 1862 toward large purchases of books, including eight volumes of Longfellow, twenty-one volumes of Irving, and books of poetry by Sigourney, Bryant, and Felicia Hemans, along with books about travel and history and novels by Harriet Beecher Stowe, Cooper, and Scott. In all, she bought 153 volumes at a price of nearly $500.
Of course, neither Lincoln’s Library of Congress borrowings nor Mary’s additions to the White House library tell us with certainty about specific authors he read. But from various sources, we can make confident statements about his preferences in reading and music. He liked simple, direct poems and songs that were either melancholy, patriotic, sentimental, or comically nonsensical.
His longtime attraction to poems about death and transience grew during the war. N. P. Willis recalled riding once with the president and the first lady when Lincoln suddenly recited lines from Willis’s “Parrhasius,” a bleak poem about an enslaved Greek man who was taken to an artist who had the man tortured so that he could capture his torment on canvas. The artist declares, “Old man! we die / Even as the flowers, and we shall breathe away / Our life upon the chance wind, even as they!”82 Everything humans hold dear—money, love, friendship, the hope of heaven—are vain, the artist says, and “what thrice-mocked fools are we!”
Lincoln found the full range of tones he enjoyed, from gloomy to comic, in the verse of Thomas Hood. “The Haunted House,” a Hood poem of more than 350 lines that he read aloud to a White House visitor, is a Poe-like piece about a deserted mansion, overrun by vegetation, insects, bats, and rats, that gives rise to thoughts of those who have died there—a meditation on human death in the ever-changing physical world.83 Also among the president’s favorites was Hood’s “The Lost Heir,” in which a comically ill-spoken woman of back alleys frantically searches for her missing son, whom she praises extravagantly until she finds him, at which point she promises to break every bone in his body.
He discovered a similarly attractive mix of gloom and levity in Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. The president frequently recited from memory Holmes’s “The Last Leaf,” about a once-robust man who has become a tottering figure with a cane on the street. Holmes had based the poem on Herman Melville’s paternal grandfather, Thomas Melvill, a Revolutionary War hero who declined notably over the years. A bittersweet reflection on the passage of time, the poem makes much of the transition from healthful youth to infirm old age. The speaker says that he cannot help but grin at the old man’s three-cornered hat and old-fashioned breeches, vestiges of an earlier time. Predicting his own demise, the speaker remarks that when he, too, someday becomes “The last leaf upon the tree, / . . . Let them smile, as I do now, / At the old forsaken bough / Where I cling.”84 Holmes is suggesting that everyone is a leaf on the tree of life, initially green and finally crumbling. This was the same dust-to-dust theme, negating pretensions that lay behind Lincoln’s attraction to other poems about impermanence, such as William Knox’s “Mortality” or William Cullen Bryant’s “Thanatopsis.”
Like Shakespeare, Holmes could be comical to the point of absurdity. “September Gale,” another Holmes poem Lincoln enjoyed, describes a man driven to a frenzy when a windstorm rips his clothes from a laundry line and carries them heavenward, making the man have a wild dream about his favorite breeches being ripped apart when a huge flying demon puts them on.
Even such nonsense implies that all humans are subject to larger forces, whether storms, illness, or death. From such poems, Lincoln got a laugh and a lesson in humility. He did not, as did Melville or Dickinson, look into the abyss and respond with premodernistic relativism that verged on nihilism. Without shrinking from mortality, he retained his faith in vigorous human effort aimed at justice. We’re frail beings, he saw, but that does not negate our efforts to bring about change. Each of us must try to make our contribution, no matter how lowly our sphere.
This is the message of another Holmes poem he liked, “The Chambered Nautilus.” The poem describes the beautiful spiral-shaped shell of a mollusk, the nautilus, which the speaker finds on a beach. The speaker imagines the life of the small creature: its time of youth in the sea, its arrival on the shore, and its death. The nautilus, however, leaves behind a pearl-like shell, each spiral chamber of which speaks to the mollusk’s unceasing effort, while alive, to build its tiny, lovely home.
Lincoln was moved by this theme of humble work wherever he found it, as in “Your Mission,” a song he heard performed by the “singing evangelist” Philip Phillips at the third annual meeting of the United States Christian Commission, held in the House of Representatives in January 1865. Lincoln was supportive of the Christian Commission and its leader George H. Stuart, who gave him a Cromwell Bible and kept in touch with him during the war. Some five thousand volunteer agents of the commission had distributed millions of Bibles, hymnbooks, and religious newspapers to soldiers and seamen. Phillips’s song validated Lincoln’s belief that even the lowliest worker merits respect. One can be a common sailor, the song says, and not a captain, a laborer in the valley instead of a mountain climber, a person doing menial work rather than a millionaire, and yet still make a significant contribution to the world. Lincoln enjoyed the song so much that he scribbled a note to George Stuart:
Near the close let us have “Your Mission” repeated by Mr. Philips. Dont say I called for it. LINCOLN85
Phillips, delighted by the president’s request, later sent him a letter of thanks along with a hymnbook containing the lyrics of “The Mission.”
Lincoln had also requested a repeat performance of a song at the previous year’s Christian Commission meeting. A chaplain’s singing of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” stirred him so much that his eyes moistened and he shouted, “Sing it again!”86 Lincoln was responding, indirectly, to the example of the martyred John Brown, for, as everyone at the time knew, Julia Ward Howe had written “The Battle Hymn” in 1862 after hearing troops sing “John Brown’s Body.” She borrowed
from the song its melody and the chorus “Glory, glory hallelujah,” replacing the image of Brown’s soul marching on with that of God’s truth marching on. Her husband, Samuel Gridley Howe, had been one of the Secret Six who had funded Brown’s abolitionist activities. Her anthem, with its memorable words about God fighting for the Union with his “terrible swift sword,” recalled John Brown’s battles against slavery in Kansas, where he used swords to slay proslavery settlers, and at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, where he had seized guns at a federal arsenal in an attempt to trigger a slave rebellion. It is hard to imagine that Lincoln didn’t have John Brown in mind when he requested the repetition of “The Battle Hymn” at the Christian Commission event.
He responded with equal emotion to other pro-Northern poems and songs. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem “The Building of the Ship” moved him to tears when the journalist Noah Brooks recited it to him. The antislavery Longfellow had written the poem in 1849, a moment of national crisis over slavery in the western territories taken in the Mexican War. In Longfellow’s first version, the poem was pessimistic; it depicted inspired shipbuilders (the nation’s founders) working long and hard to construct a beautiful, sturdy ship, the Union, which now seemed destined to be “Wrecked upon some treacherous rock, / Or rotting in some noisome dock.”87 When Charles Sumner objected to this negative ending, Longfellow rewrote it and had the passengers say at the end: “Our hearts, our hopes, are all with thee, / Our hearts, our hopes, our prayers, our tears, / Our faith triumphant o’er our fears, / Are all with thee,—are all with thee!”
These passionate words overwhelmed Lincoln. Brooks recalled, “As he listened to the last lines, . . . his eyes filled with tears, and his cheeks were wet. He did not speak for some minutes, but finally said, with simplicity: ‘It is a wonderful gift to be able to stir men like that.’”88
He also embraced antislavery songs. In early 1862, he invited to the White House the Hutchinson Family singers, the ardently antislavery group from New Hampshire whose songs included “Get off the Track,” about the unstoppable train of abolition roaring through the nation, and “Lincoln and Liberty,” which had Lincoln slaying “the slaveocrats’ giant,” Stephen Douglas. Lincoln, who had heard the Hutchinsons when they visited Springfield in the 1850s, was so pleased by their White House performance that he encouraged them to sing to General McClellan’s troops in Virginia. They got a pass and traveled to the Union camps, where they sang, among other songs, John G. Whittier’s militant “We Wait Beneath the Furnace Blast,” which urged Northern troops to fight against “the demon, . . . SLAVERY!”89 Word of the performance reached McClellan, who disapproved of any connection between the war and emancipation. He revoked the Hutchinsons’ pass and issued an order saying, “They will not be allowed to sing to the troops.”90 The group returned to Washington and called on the treasury secretary Salmon Chase, who read Whittier’s abolitionist hymn to Lincoln. The president remarked, “I don’t see anything very bad about that. If any of the commanders want the Hutchinsons to sing to their soldiers, and invite them, they can go.”
Lincoln’s enjoyment of antislavery music was in line with his attraction to pro-Northern songs like “Battle Cry of Freedom,” an instant success when it appeared in 1862. Also known as “Rally ’Round the Flag,” the song, written by James Root, described Union soldiers vowing to “hurl the rebel crew from the land that we love best / Shouting the battle cry of Freedom.”91 An amusing incident happened in relation to Root’s song and another popular Civil War anthem also written that year, “We Are Coming Father Abraham.” A poem by James Sloan Gibbons that was set to music by L. O. Emerson, “Father Abraham” described “300,000 more” troops coming to fight for Lincoln from every part of the North. One evening when Lincoln took Tad to see a play at Grover’s Theatre, the boy went down to meet the actors, as he often did. One of them dressed him in an ill-fitting soldier’s wardrobe shirt and cap. Soon Tad was onstage with the actors, one of whom handed a flag to the boy, who waved it vigorously as the actor sang lines that mixed the two patriotic songs:
We are coming Father Abraham, three hundred thousand more,
Shouting the battle cry flag of freedom!
The audience, recognizing Tad as the president’s son, pitched in and sang the patriotic words. Lincoln, at first flummoxed by Tad’s impromptu performance, laughed and hugged the boy when he returned to his seat.92
It is fully understandable that Lincoln would appreciate songs promoting the North and abolition, but what explains his enthusiasm for “Dixie”?
He had first heard “Dixie” in March 1860, when he went with a friend to a minstrel show in Chicago where the song, then new, was performed. Lincoln went wild when he heard it. He clapped along, stomped his feet, and was loudest in crying, “Let’s have it again! Let’s have it again!”93 Lincoln once remarked that music was the one thing God created to produce sheer pleasure. The songs Lincoln loved were folk based and communal, created by the people and for the people, capable of passing from generation to generation and singer to singer. They fostered unity of sections and nations, and of successive generations—as they did for Whitman, the self-styled “bard” who saw poetry as music that bound together people of all nations and all times.
It is difficult to think of “Dixie” as a unifying song, because it became the National Anthem of the Confederacy, but delight in it was widespread during the Civil War.94 A Northerner had written “Dixie,” which then became the South’s signature song while remaining popular among Northerners, too. All the while, it went through variations in lyrics. Despite its Southern emphasis, Northerners reveled in the song’s idealistic nostalgia, as captured in its opening lines:
I wish I was in de land ob cotton,
Old times dar am not forgotten;
Look away! Look away! Look away! Dixie Land.95
A Maine newspaper reported in 1861, “This lively tune has in our cities become as popular as the most ravishing airs of operatic composition. Its effect on the hearer is wonderful, magical.”96 The New York Commercial Advertiser noted, “‘Dixie’ has become an institution. . . . Even those whose souls are so dead as to have no love for music, cannot refrain from an expression of pleasure as the bewitching strains strike the ear, while those who always love anything lively and sweet, fairly leap with joy whenever and wherever they hear it.”
As president, Lincoln frequently requested bands to play the song, as when he greeted serenaders from a White House window on April 10, 1865, the day after Appomattox and four days before his death. He said to the group, “I have always thought ‘Dixie’ one of the best tunes I have ever heard. . . . I now request the band to favor me with its performance.”97 He got a laugh from the crowd when he said that he thought the North had “fairly captured” the song after “our adversaries over the way attempted to appropriate it.” He knew that “Dixie” had nationwide appeal. Culture, for him, was national, not sectional, and music above all embodied the pleasure that culture could bring.
Just as significant as his cross-sectional devotion to “Dixie” was his love of sentimental songs that held appeal on both sides. Among the sentimental songs popular in the Confederacy were “Rock Me to Sleep, Mother,” “My Wife and Child,” “O, Come to Me, Love, in a Beautiful Dream,” “O! Touch Not My Sister’s Picture,” “Mother Is the Battle Over,” and “Who Will Care for Mother Now.” Similar-themed songs on the Union side included “Mother on the Brain,” “Mother I Am Going,” “Soldiers Wife,” “When This Cruel War Is Over,” “Our Sweethearts at Home,” “Mother Kissed Me in My Dream,” and “Tell Mother I Die Happy.”
The most popular sentimental song of the Civil War was the classic “Home, Sweet Home.” With a wistful melody written by the British composer Henry Rowley Bishop and lyrics by the American actor/dramatist John Howard Payne, the song, which first appeared in an 1823 opera, is egalitarian and universal; it says that even the humblest home, with its simple pleasures and memories, is preferable to palaces or exotic pleasures.
The song created unexpected comradeship on the war front. The camps of the opposing armies were sometimes separated only by a hundred yards or so, and regimental bands gave evening performances. Before one battle in April 1863, a Union band struck up “Dixie,” eliciting cheers from Confederate soldiers camped just across the Rappahannock River. The Confederate band followed with a Northern song, “Yankee Doodle,” and the federal soldiers cheered. Then came “Home, Sweet Home,” which made both sides cheer. On December 30, 1862, the evening before the Battle of Murfreesboro (or Stones River), the forces of Braxton Bragg and William Rosecrans enjoyed a similar moment of musical amity. One regiment’s band played “Home, Sweet Home,” and soon all regimental bands in both armies were playing the song, with the Union and Confederate soldiers singing the plaintive lyrics in unison.98
Lincoln, too, responded fervently to the song. In 1862, the nineteen-year-old Italian singer Adelina Patti visited the White House. Born in Spain to Italian parents who had moved to America, Patti had been a child prodigy and by her teenage years was a famous singer of both operatic and popular vocal music. In the Red Room, she performed for the president and the first lady, who were still grieving over Willie’s death. After her first song failed to impress them, Lincoln asked her to sing “Home, Sweet Home.” She did, and, as she recalled, “when Mr. Lincoln thanked me his voice was husky and his eyes were full of tears. By that time I was so wrought up over the situation myself that I was actually blubbering when we were taking leave of the recently bereaved parents.”99
JESTER IN CHIEF
On one memorable occasion, Lincoln’s taste for popular songs got him into trouble. After the Battle of Antietam, he went to the front to review McClellan’s troops. His bodyguard and friend Ward Hill Lamon, whom Lincoln had appointed as the marshal of the District of Columbia, accompanied him on the trip, along with others.100 The party arrived in the Antietam area on October 1, 1862, two weeks after the battle. Lincoln joined McClellan and others who reviewed the army over the following days. At one point, the president, who was riding in an army ambulance distant from the battlefield, asked Lamon to sing a song. Lamon, capturing the sober spirit of the aftermath of the battle, chose what he knew to be Lincoln’s melancholy favorite, “Twenty Years Ago,” about time’s passage and the death of loved ones. Then someone present (reportedly not Lincoln) asked for more. Lamon came out with a few ditties, including “Picayune Butler,” a popular minstrel song about a
