eroticism and sacrilege of his poems. Lincoln may have responded to Burns enthusiastically for reasons similar to those of Walt Whitman, who was fascinated by the combination of pessimism and humanism, iconoclasm and democracy in Burns. Whitman noted “the black and desperate background” in several of Burns’s poems, with their passages about “hypochondria, the blues.”41 At the same time, Whitman loved Burns’s “steel-flashes of wit, home-spun sense, or lance-like puncturing,” as well as his fundamental sympathy for lowly creatures of the animal kingdom, such as the field mouse, and average workers on farms and in small villages. “He had a real heart of flesh and blood beating in his bosom,” Whitman wrote; “you could almost hear it throb.” This intensely human quality in Burns made him for Whitman a symbol of democracy and union. In Whitman’s words, Burns was “the essential type of so many thousand—perhaps the average . . . of the decent-born young men and the early mid-aged, not only of the British Isles; but America, North and South, just the same.”
Lincoln loved Burns so much so that he learned by heart many of his poems—in the original Scottish dialect, no less. If we look at a couple of Burns poems Lincoln memorized we see the combination of gloom and optimistic humanism that he, like Whitman, enjoyed. “Tam O’Shanter,” which Lincoln often recited, is a bacchanalian poem about a drunken worker, with his long-suffering wife waiting at home, who gallops through a storm and has both horrific and erotic visions in a weird fantasy interrupted by lines about the ephemerality of pleasure. Burns writes: “But pleasures are like poppies spread, / You seize the flower, its bloom is shed: / Or like the snow falls in the river, / A moment white then melts forever.”42 This pungent reminder of life’s transience interrupts an otherwise adventurous poem about working-class life and marital discord, adding the kind of “black and desperate background” that Whitman found in Burns’s poetry—and that Lincoln, with transience always on his mind, appreciated. Another of Lincoln’s favorites, Burns’s “Holy Willie’s Prayer,” is a humorous, trenchant satire on religious hypocrisy and Calvinistic theology. The speaker, a self-righteous orthodox Christian, is a callous seducer who denounces a card-playing, bibulous friend whom he judges will be damned by a God who “sends one to heaven and ten to hell”—a slap at the Calvinistic doctrines of election and predestination, which appalled Lincoln.
Milton Hay testified that “He could very nearly quote all of Burns’ Poems from memory.” William Greene commented that Lincoln “knew all of Burns by heart.”43
While it’s virtually impossible that Lincoln could recite all of Burns’s long, idiosyncratic poems, Hay’s and Greene’s statements that he did so raise the issue of Lincoln’s astonishing capacities for memorizing poems or prose passages. Multiple other witnesses also attested to his skill in spontaneous recitations. Oliver Wendell Holmes’s poems “The Last Leaf” and “Lexington”; Byron’s “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage”; Poe’s “The Raven”; Constance’s speech to the Cardinal in Act 4 of Shakespeare’s King John; Claudius’s soliloquy “Oh! my offense is rank, it smells to heaven” (Hamlet, act 3, scene 3); King Richard’s speech “For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground / And tell sad stories of the death of kings” (Richard II, act 3, scene 2)—these are just a few poems or passages Lincoln is said to have recited from memory. No other president—indeed, few people, other than trained actors—have matched Lincoln’s reciting ability.
Lincoln did not recite poems to show off. The journalist Noah Brooks testified that when Lincoln quoted poems in conversation, he did so “always with the air of one who deprecated the imputation that he might be advertising his erudition.”44
In any case, Lincoln was not erudite in the sense of, say, the multilingual polymath John Quincy Adams or the learned Thomas Jefferson, with his library of more than five thousand volumes. “The truth about Mr. Lincoln,” William Herndon opined, “is that he read less and thought more than any man in his sphere in America.”45 This statement is misleading. Lincoln actually read quite a lot, especially in the New Salem years. But he read selectively, and he memorized even more selectively. And, yes, he thought deeply about what he read. He chose to memorize pieces that were truly meaningful to him, and he recited them when they matched his emotions of the moment. In the truest sense, these were, for him, lived poems. They projected his innermost feelings. Because the authors he recited were characteristically subtle, Lincoln felt that the complexity of his emotions was beautifully captured in their lines. Of Burns’s poignant elegy “Lament for James, Earl of Glencairn,” Lincoln remarked, “Burns never touched a sentiment without carrying it to its ultimate expression and leaving nothing further to be said.”46 Poetry, for Lincoln, ushered emotion to the outer limit of expression.
But poetry did not only express emotion; it channeled it and shaped it. No other form of language is as structured as poetry, especially in the metered, carefully phrased forms that he preferred. For Lincoln, reading poets like Burns and Shakespeare was a master class in the redirection of the amorphous or the uncontrolled.
LIFE LESSONS
Lincoln also learned such lessons in his personal experiences in New Salem, where from the start he found himself engaged in channeling the powerful energies of his cultural, natural, and political environments. It was by regulating these energies that Lincoln developed talents he later used to direct the passions of the Civil War toward national unity.
Lincoln’s talents for fostering unity were strengthened in New Salem, where he experienced life in dizzying variety. His jobs there nurtured flexibility and confidence of the sort that Emerson describes in his essay “Self-Reliance.” Emerson complains, “We are parlor soldiers. We shun the rugged battle of fate, where strength is born.” He points out that if a young college graduate miscarries in his early jobs—if he “is not installed in an office within one year afterwards in the cities or suburbs of Boston or New York”—people say that he is “ruined” and “that he is right in being disheartened and complaining the rest of his life.” Emerson adds, “A sturdy lad from New Hampshire or Vermont, who in turn tries all the professions, who teams it, farms it, peddles, keeps a school, preaches, edits a newspaper, goes to Congress, buys a township, and so forth, in successive years, and always, like a cat, falls on his feet, is worth a hundred of these city dolls. . . . He feels no shame in not ‘studying a profession,’ for he does not postpone life, but lives already. He has not one chance, but a hundred chances.
Emerson was protesting against the formulaic predictability of those who got on a rigid professional track instead of plunging into real-life situations that helped them find their priorities. In New Salem, Lincoln became an Emersonian man, adventurous and resilient. A summary of his experiences during the New Salem years yields a record of occupations even more varied than Emerson’s imaginary list. After returning to New Salem from his summer of 1831 visit to his father in Coles County, Lincoln served successively as an election clerk, the navigator of a raft, a clerk at Denton Offutt’s store, a militiaman in the Black Hawk War (first as a captain and then as a private), a store owner with William Berry, the postmaster of New Salem for three years, and an assistant to the county surveyor John Calhoun, for whom Lincoln laid out townships, home sites, school districts, and roads. During this period, Lincoln also ran for state congress from New Salem, winning on his second try, which led to his serving in the state legislature. He had part-time jobs as a rail-splitter, a millworker, a farmhand, the keeper of a still, and a worker at Samuel Hill’s store. His success was irregular, but like the cat in Emerson’s essay, he always landed on his feet. That was because there was an organic connection between many aspects of his life in New Salem: between his work, his reading, and his accomplishments as an athlete and a militia captain.
His jobs, as varied as they were, actually lent themselves to establishing continuity between different areas of his life. There were two common denominators among his occupations: they were physical but they gave room for socializing and for intellectual growth, and they bonded him with the two main classes in New Salem, the roistering roughs and the social elite. Just as his daily conversation swung between crude frontier jokes and recitations of Burns or Shakespeare, so his human encounters made him adept in traversing social barriers and appealing to people of different backgrounds.
In New Salem, Lincoln did not work, read, and socialize separately. Lincoln’s jobs tending stores—with Offutt, with Berry, and with Hill—included slow periods that he filled with reading. It was at Offutt’s store, where he clerked with Billy Greene, that he studied Kirkham’s Grammar; Billy quizzed him from the book. Lincoln’s other positions in stores allowed similar time for reading. His personal library was small, consisting mainly of eighteenth-century poetry, but he borrowed books from others in the area, including the well-to-do Bennett Abell, the justice of the peace of Bowling Green, and the merchants John McNeill (aka McNamar) and Isaac Chrisman. He was thrilled to be appointed postmaster in 1833, because many newspapers arrived at the post office, and he had ample time to read them. “Mr. Lincoln’s education was almost entirely a newspaper one,” a friend recalled—an exaggeration, to be sure, but nonetheless a testament to Lincoln’s attentiveness to the news of his day and to contemporary popular culture.48 In New Salem, among his favorite newspapers were the Louisville Journal, the St. Louis Republican, and the Sangamo Journal. He also read the Congressional Globe and the Acts of Congress.
But it wasn’t just in the stores or in the post office that he did his reading. His postal work took him on lengthy journeys around the region to deliver mail. On these trips, whether by foot or on horseback, he often carried books or newspapers that he read on the way. On the streets in New Salem, he was often seen holding a book and reading it. Robert B. Rutledge described him walking through the village, absorbed in a book, then stopping for a while to socialize, and “when the company or amusement became dry or irksome,” continuing on his walk.49 He enjoyed reading aloud—a vocal expression of the written word that was a holdover from the “blab” schools of his youth. The fact that he could recite from memory passages that he’d read impressed others. But as Robert Rutledge pointed out, the memorization did not always come automatically. When Lincoln wanted to remember something he would write it down. Rutledge recalled, “I . . . have known him to write whole pages of books he was reading.”
If Lincoln’s reading helped him win favor with the area’s intelligentsia, his physical prowess made his reputation among a completely different set—the rough, happy-go-lucky frontiersmen who were often at odds with more respectable types.
Within a few miles of New Salem, there were small communities, Clary’s Grove and Little Grove, with gangs that had names like the Gums, the Watkinses, the Dowells, the Arnolds, the Bonds, and the Kirbys.50 Anticipating later groups of American young men Lincoln would deal with, including the b’hoys and gangs of American cities and the torch-bearing Wide Awakes of the 1860 presidential campaign, the frontier roisterers around New Salem were fundamentally good-hearted. They helped people in trouble, and they gave themselves to Jesus at religious revivals. But they were also a tough lot who loved to flout respectability. They got drunk, whooped furiously, and had all-out brawls on the streets of villages or towns. For fun, they would cut the manes and tails off horses or loosen a cinch strap and put a pebble under a saddle just to see a rider thrown. When Baptist preachers were dunking converts in the Sangamon River, they disrupted the ritual by tossing dogs or logs into the river. At frolics they would grab a wild pig and throw it alive into a fire, eating it when it was cooked. The blood sport of gander pulling was one of their favorite pastimes. Once in New Salem they forced a rotund, drunken man into a barrel and pushed it down a steep bank; the man was saved when the barrel was stopped by a tree.
Lincoln witnessed the ravages that these frontiersmen were capable of. The Clary’s Grove Boys, the dominant roughneck group, drove a New Salem store owner, Reuben Radford, out of business with their wild behavior. The group’s members demanded that Radford liberally serve them whiskey. At the time, stores like Radford’s sold alcohol by the barrel, but if they wanted to serve individual drinks, they had to get a license. Radford did not have one, but he agreed to give the Clary’s Grove Boys two drinks apiece. That did not satisfy them, and they became so worked up that they trashed his store. The disheartened Radford wanted to sell off his inventory and vacate the store. He found a buyer in Billy Greene, who in turn quickly sold Radford’s goods to Lincoln and his partner, William Berry. When Lincoln and Berry started their own store, offering for sale Radford’s goods along with other supplies, Lincoln protested when Berry, an alcoholic, pressed him to sell drinks individually. The Lincoln-Berry store soon “winked out,” in Lincoln’s words. When Berry died in January 1835, Lincoln owed creditors a hefty amount—what he and his friends called “the national debt”—that he did not fully pay off until 1848.51
If the Clary’s Grove Boys set off the string of events that drove Lincoln into debt, they had far more positive effects on him as well. They were key players in launching his political career. They had remarkable political sway. As the Illinois governor Thomas Ford explained, “The candidate who had the ‘butcher knife boys’ on his side was almost certain to be elected” in many of the state’s precincts.52 Personal loyalty was crucial to the backwoods roughnecks, who followed the frontier tradition of testing a stranger by seeing if he might qualify as “the best man” in the region.
Lincoln passed the test in tried-and-true frontier fashion. One of the most popular folk legends surrounding Davy Crockett was his winning the friendship and the vote of a man he whipped in a rough-and-tumble fight. Far from provoking continued hostility, the battle led to sincere friendship and political support. The same thing happened to Lincoln. He started working at Dennis Offutt’s store in October 1831, and it was not long before Offutt, noting his clerk’s unusual physical strength, offered to pay ten dollars to anyone in the area who could beat Abe in a fight. A swaggering, bibulous eccentric—dubbed by one historian “the Barnum of New Salem”53—Offutt spread news of his bet, and he was answered by the Clary’s Grove Boys, who put up their strongest champion, Jack Armstrong, to challenge Offutt’s tall, powerful employee, who at the time weighed more than two hundred pounds. Before the fight, Abe specified that he wanted no “wooling & pulling”—meaning that he wanted to wrestle cleanly, without the hair-pulling, eye-gouging, and biting that were standard in rough-and-tumbles.54
On the day of the fight, many people from New Salem and its environs gathered in front of Offutt’s store, where the contest took place. Whiskey, money, and knives were staked on the outcome. Jack Armstrong, described as “a man in the prime of his life, square built, muscular and strong as an ox,” was a formidable opponent, but Abe met the challenge.55 The details of the fight are
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