Along with other circuit companions, Lamon helped boost Lincoln into the presidency. At the 1860 Republican convention in Chicago, held in the hall called the Wigwam, Lamon printed three hundred counterfeit tickets to maximize the number of Lincoln’s supporters, who out-screamed their opponents. Armed with pistols, a bowie knife, and brass knuckles, Lamon served as the president-elect’s bodyguard in dangerous situations. Lincoln appointed him as the US marshal of the District of Columbia. Lamon hosted the ceremonies dedicating the soldiers’ cemetery at Gettysburg on November 19, 1863, and sat near Lincoln on the platform while the president delivered his address.
It was while traveling on the law circuit that Lincoln developed the quality that Emerson said made him unique: his ability to encompass the entire range of experience. On a rudimentary level, riding on the circuit immersed him in raw nature to a degree he had not known since his frontier childhood. The distance he and his fellow lawyers covered between the various towns averaged around thirty-five miles and stretched as far as fifty. Known as the mud circuit, the Eighth Circuit led David Davis to write in exasperation, “Bad roads, broken bridges, swimming of horses and constant wettings are at the main incidents of Western travel.”37 Lincoln got wetter than the others, for his height and long legs made him the chosen tester of streams, into which he waded with his pants legs rolled up in search of shallow areas for crossing.
Traveling the circuit was like revisiting precivilized America. The Illinois countryside, as one of Lincoln’s companions remarked, “was then quite as desolate and almost as solitary as Creation’s dawn, . . . And the broad prairies were in the same condition of virginity and desolation that they had been since Columbus saw the welcome light of San Salvador.”38 Another traveler in Illinois reported: “For miles and miles we saw nothing but a vast expanse of what I can compare to nothing else but the ocean itself. . . . The tall grass seemed like the deep sea. . . . It seemed as if we were out of sight of land, for no house, no barn, no tree was visible, and the horizon presented the rolling waves in the distance.”39
The inns or farmhouses where the lawyers stayed were of the crudest variety—cramped, bug infested, with leaky roofs, few beds, wretched food, and no indoor plumbing. Lincoln’s friend Judge David Davis reported, “every thing [was] dirty & the eating horrible,” with “the table greasy—table cloth greasy—floor greasy,” and with the typical bedroom “a dirty place—plenty of bedbugs &, &.”40 Most of the travelers, Herndon noted, “would growl—complain— . . . And whine about what they had to eat—how they slept— . . . And how disturbed by fleas, bedbugs, or what not.”41 Traveling on the circuit, Davis said, involved confronting “bad roads, broken bridges, swimming of horses, . . . and being eaten up by bedbugs and mosquitoes.”42 But Lincoln didn’t gripe. For someone who had been weaned in the most primitive conditions in childhood, the rough environment was familiar, even bracing. The closest he came to complaining was when he joked about the food at inns, as when he once looked at his plate and said, “Well—in the absence of anything to eat I will jump into this Cabbage.”43 Another time, he allegedly told his host, “If this is coffee, please bring me some tea, but if this is tea, please bring me some coffee.”44 Despite these minor issues, he loved the circuit. As David Davis testified, Lincoln was “as happy as he could be when on this Circuit. . . . This was his place of Enjoyment.”45
Part of the enjoyment came from his invigorating experiences in the towns he visited. Court sessions in the circuit towns, which lasted from three days to a week, were reminiscent of the raucous frontier gatherings of his youth. Because people living in isolated Illinois places had few sources of entertainment, they swarmed to town on the court days. They traded horses, shot craps, bought goods from peddlers and quack doctors, engaged in wrestling matches, danced to fiddlers, and drank copiously. And they loved witnessing trials. The typical courtroom scene involved spectators, often drunk and puffing cigars or chewing tobacco, crowding onto benches and reacting noisily to the proceedings.
Lincoln became an attention-grabbing favorite on the law circuit. He would arrive in a town with saddlebags and some books draped over his horse, on which he sat holding an oversize greenish-brown umbrella on which his name was sewn in white thread. Although he was a fine horseman, he made what a witness called “an eccentric picture,” with his umbrella and “his feet not far from the ground.”46
In court, as in his political speeches, Lincoln used his Barnumesque awkwardness—his assumed clownishness, as it was then called—to draw in sensation lovers and then allowed his nobler qualities to emerge through his potent reasoning and expressive language. When speaking before a jury, Lincoln at first appeared, in Herndon’s words, “awkward, angular, ungainly, odd,” with his voice “shrill, squeaking, piping” and his head jerking back and forth for emphasis. But in the course of his address, his voice became melodious and “his form dilated, swelled out, and he rose up a splendid form, erect, straight, dignified
If his exterior oddness attracted attention, so did his unusual kindness. In his years on the circuit, Lincoln became a welcome presence among Illinois townspeople. A reporter who traveled with him was struck by the fact that he “knew, or appeared to know, every body we met, the name of every tenant of every farm-house, and the owner of every plat of ground. Such a shaking of hands—such a how-d’ye-do. . . . He had a kind word, a smile and a bow for every body on the road, even to the horses, and the cattle, and the swine.”48 Everywhere he went, Lincoln exhibited the openness that led Emerson to note that he “draws equally all classes, all the extremes of society, till we say the very dogs believe in him.”49 David Davis observed that Lincoln preferred the “simple life” on the circuit to practicing law in a city, “where, although the remuneration would be greater, the opportunity would be less for mixing with the great body of the people, who loved him, and whom he loved.”50 Wherever he went on the circuit, another law colleague wrote, “he brought sunshine. All men hailed him as an addition to their circle. He was genial; he was humorous.”51
Lincoln knew how to use stories or jokes to sway a jury. “In court,” Herndon noted, “he was irrepressible and apparently inexhaustible in his fund of stories.”52 One story, adapted from an anecdote in the 1739 jest book Samuel Treat had given him, was effective in the trial of a client charged with assault who had merely been defending himself against an attacker. Lincoln compared his client to a farmer carrying a pitchfork who used its prongs to fend off a fierce dog, killing the animal. When asked by the dog’s owner why he didn’t use the other end of the pitchfork, the farmer replied, “Why did [the dog] not come after me with his other end?”53 Lincoln drove the point home by holding an imaginary dog in his hands and shoving it hindmost toward the jury.
In another trial, where his client was being sued for $10,000 for having assaulted a newspaper editor, Lincoln stared at a paper in his hand and started laughing, at first softly and then wildly. His laughter was contagious, for the entire courtroom was soon in hysterics, though no one knew what the joke was. In a lull, Lincoln brought himself under control and explained that the plaintiff had originally wanted $1,000 but, believing that Lincoln’s client was wealthy, had multiplied the amount tenfold. Laughter, Lincoln said, was the only response to the absurd demand. His theatrics won the day, for the plaintiff was awarded only $300. The judge in the case said of Lincoln’s “peculiar laugh” and “wonderfully funny facial expression” that “a comedian might well pay thousands of dollars to learn them.”54
Another time Lincoln got the courtroom in stitches when he compared the plaintiff to a hog walking under a fence so crooked that it kept coming up on the same side. He made the plaintiff seem ridiculously confused.
As a storyteller, Lincoln really got going when the workday was over. After dinner, he either entertained a small group in Judge David Davis’s room or joined large storytelling sessions in a local barroom or parlor. The gatherings in Judge Davis’s room were boisterous but exclusive. The jovial Davis responded heartily to Abe’s storytelling. Frequently on the circuit he invited a few to his room to hear Lincoln tell stories.
For Lincoln’s public storytelling fests, in contrast, everyone was welcome. In a large room filled with noisy spectators, he and other storytellers regaled a mixed group that included lawyers, plaintiffs, defendants, and townspeople. In these public sessions, which often stretched into the early morning hours, Lincoln honed his skills in reaching the popular mind. He had a friendly competition with two other lawyer raconteurs he often traveled with, William Engle of Menard County and James Murray of Logan County. The three riffed on one another’s tales. Abe would tell a story, and then someone would cry out to William Engle, “Now Uncle Billy, you must beat that or go home.” Engle would respond, “Boys, the story just told by Lincoln puts me in mind of a story that I heard once as a boy.” When Engle finished, someone would say to James Murray, “Now is your time. Come on, Murray, do your level best or never come here again to tell your stories.”55 Murray performed, and then it was Lincoln’s turn again, then Engle’s, and so on for hours in front of listeners who applauded, hurrahed, and laughed until their sides ached. Because rural folk had few sources of fun, some followed the three jesting lawyers from county to county, much like groupies of a later era who followed their favorite band from gig to gig. Lincoln, for his part, found on the circuit cultural enrichment while remaining relatively free of immediate domestic concerns. Those with him were delighted that they could enjoy him all week long. In the words of David Davis, “Why, he kept us all from dying of what the French call ennui! We would all have been dead long ago but for Lincoln! He is a whole show by himself, the drollest man on earth, full of humor and anecdote, and a whole magazine of knowledge besides.”56
By calling Lincoln “the drollest man on earth” and “a whole magazine of knowledge besides,” Davis paid homage to both Lincoln the Barnumesque entertainer and Lincoln the knowledge seeker. The law circuit not only opened up for Lincoln fresh avenues to popular language through creative storytelling; it also provided intellectual stimulation. Those who gathered in Judge Davis’s room sometimes discussed serious topics. Henry Whitney recalled, “We frequently talked philosophy, politics, political economy, metaphysics and men; in short, our subjects of conversation ranged through the universe of thought and experience.”57
It was Lincoln, in particular, who “ranged through the universe of thought and experience.” Davis and the others, while they enjoyed discussions, had an equally strong penchant for small talk. Lincoln, though sociable, was uninterested in directionless chatter. When superficial conversation broke out, he frequently headed in either of two directions: toward popular culture or toward high culture.
By embracing both, he opened his vision in ways similar to some of the era’s major authors: Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Hawthorne, Melville, and Poe. The richness of their writings stemmed from these authors’ democratic embrace of all levels of culture, from the sensational to the sublime, from the ephemeral to the timeless. “I contain multitudes,” says the speaker of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. So, too, did Lincoln.
HE HEARD AMERICA SINGING
Lincoln grew close to the popular mind by attending local performances in towns on the Eighth Circuit. A fellow lawyer said Lincoln would go by himself to “any little show or concert”—even to “a small show of magic lanterns &c. really for children.”58 Most of the towns didn’t offer much in the way of serious theater. The culture Lincoln found in his travels usually came in the form of musical performances, sometimes concerts and sometimes impromptu sing-alongs. In music, a friend noted, “his tastes were simple and uncultivated, his choice being old airs, songs, and ballads”—“of a style,” a law colleague explained, “to please the rustic ear.”59
Like Walt Whitman, he enjoyed attending concerts given by family singers—groups of four or more performers, usually close relatives, who sang popular songs and played instruments. During the Civil War, he became a big fan of the Hutchinson Family Singers, who performed all types of songs, including political ones like “Lincoln and Liberty,” the 1860 campaign song that became so popular at rallies that it helped him win the election.
On the law circuit, Lincoln frequently went to hear the Newhall Family, a traveling troupe consisting of the parents, two sisters, a brother, and a brother-in-law. One of the songs the family sang that especially appealed to him was “Ben Bolt,” a nostalgic ballad whose narrator tells a childhood friend that many of the people and things he once loved are now gone. In a hotel on the circuit, Lincoln had a memorable encounter with the teenage Lois E. Newhall, one of the sisters in the group. The Newhalls had been performing in town that week, and several lawyers encouraged Lincoln to repay them by singing “some of the songs for which you are already famous.” Lois offered to strike up a tune on her melodeon so that he could give a solo performance. He replied, “Why, Miss Newhall, if it would save my soul, I couldn’t imitate a note that you would touch on that instrument. I never sang in my life; and those fellows know it. They are simply trying to make fun of me!” He offered to recite from memory a poem; it was his favorite, William Knox’s “Mortality,” which, with its emphasis on death and transience, was a kind of literary version of “Ben Bolt.” Lois was brought to tears by his delivery of the poem, and she asked him to write it out for her. The next morning, while she was eating pancakes, he handed it to her.60
A particularly telling incident from that period shows the breadth of Lincoln’s exposure to popular music. The pianist and singer Jane Martin Johns had arranged for a fine Gilbert piano to be shipped from Boston to Decatur, one of his stops on the circuit. When the wagon carrying the piano stopped at the front steps of the Macon House Hotel in Decatur, Mrs. Johns asked men nearby to move the piano into the parlor. The tall Lincoln stepped forward, taking off his gray shawl and saying to Leonard Swett, “Come on, Swett, you are the next biggest man.” Lincoln went to the hotel’s basement and returned with two long boards, which the two men used as a ramp to maneuver the piano inside. After dinner that evening, Lincoln attached the legs of the piano and positioned the instrument against the wall. Jane Johns seated herself at the piano and played a medley of songs. She began with instrumental pieces, including “Washington’s March” and “The Battle of Prague,” and then launched into popular ballads, with which her listeners sang along. She recalled:
For tragedy, I sang Henry Russel[l]’s “Maniac” and “The Ship on Fire,” then made “their blood run cold” with the wild wail of the “Irish Mother’s Lament.” For comic, we sang “The Widdy McGee” and “I Won’t Be a Nun,” topping off with “Old Dan Tucker,” “Lucy Long,” and “Jim Crow,” the crowd joining in the chorus. These were followed by more serious music, . . . “Moonlight, Music, Love and Flowers,” “Rocked in the Cradle of the Deep,” “Pilgrim Fathers,” “Bonaparte’s Grave,” and “Kathleen Mavourneen.” . . . As a finale, I sang “He Doeth All Things Well” after which Lincoln, in a very grave manner, thanked me for the evening’s entertainment and said: “Don’t let us spoil that song by any other music tonight.” Many times afterwards I sang that song for Mr. Lincoln and for Governor [Richard J.] Oglesby, with whom it was also a favorite.
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