It would be hard to find a brief summary that covered as wide a range of pre–Civil War popular music as the songs Mrs. Johns mentions here. The songs mirrored Lincoln’s eclectic interests. Mrs. Johns created categories for her songs (tragic, comic, serious, and so on) but from today’s perspective, we can assign more specific ones: sensational, sentimental, religious, humorous, and patriotic. Lincoln embraced them all.
Among the sensational songs played by Mrs. Johns that evening were “The Irish Mother’s Lament” (about a woman who curses her three sons for disobeying her orders and then goes mad with grief after they drown in a lake), Henry Russell’s “The Maniac” (about a delusional man chained in an asylum), and Russell’s thrilling “The Ship on Fire” (a burning vessel is sinking, and all aboard are terrified). These songs are in line with several other sensational ballads Lincoln is known to have enjoyed, including “Fair Ellender” (in which a bride-to-be kills her fiancé’s ex-girlfriend, and then the fiancé kills the bride-to-be and himself), “Lord Randall” (about a man poisoned by his sweetheart), and “The Oxford Girl” (in which a man bludgeons his partner to death and throws her corpse into a river). These and similar songs gave musical life to the kind of sensational themes found in penny newspapers and pulp novels of the day.
The sentimental genre is typified by another song Mrs. Johns performed that night, the Irish ballad “Kathleen Mavourneen,” designed to draw tears with its portrait of the death of a loved one. In the song a man repeatedly asks his somnolent lover, Kathleen, to wake up; she cannot, because she is dead. Sentimentality is also prominent in other songs Lincoln loved, such as “The Inquiry” and “Twenty Years Ago.” In “The Inquiry,” the speaker asks the wind, the ocean, and the moon if there is any place “where weary man may find / The bliss for which he sighs,” “‘Where miserable man may find a happier lot,” “Where free from toil and pain, / The weary soul may rest?” The answer given by the natural elements, thrice repeated is, “No.” The song makes an upturn at the end, when Faith, Hope, and Love answer, “Yes, in Heaven.”62
Nostalgia floods “Twenty Years Ago,” which Hill Lamon often sang for his friend. Lamon wrote:
One “little sad song”—a simple ballad entitled “Twenty Years Ago”—was, above all others, his favorite. He had no special fondness for operatic music; he loved simple ballads and ditties, such as the common people sing, whether of the comic or pathetic kind; but no one in the list touched his great heart as did the song of “Twenty Years Ago.” Many a time, in the old days of our familiar friendship on the Illinois circuit, and often at the White House when he and I were alone, have I seen him in tears while I was rendering, in my poor way, that homely melody.63
The song’s poignancy lies in its contrast between the dour theme that everything is fleeting and the optimistic one that death is part of the world’s natural rhythm and that friendship and joy make life worth living. The song’s speaker tells his friend Tom about visiting his childhood home and seeing old sights: a familiar tree, a school playground, a sledding hill, a river flanked by willow trees, a bubbling spring, a grapevine swing where the youths formerly “played the beau / And swung our sweethearts ‘pretty girls,’” a tree on which they inscribed their names, and an old churchyard where the speaker’s sweetheart now lies. Everything has changed: the tree is bigger, the stream is narrower, the swing is ruined, the initials carved on the tree have been removed by “some heartless wretch,” and so on. But life goes on and nature is eternal, symbolized in the song (as in Whitman’s “Song of Myself”) by the ever-sprouting grass. The contrast is caught in the second verse:
The grass is just as green, dear Tom, barefooted boys at play
Were sporting just as we did then, with spirits just as gay;
But the Master sleeps upon the hill, which, coated o’er with snow,
Afforded us a sliding place just twenty years ago.64
The song doesn’t mention an afterlife. The last verse simply says, “Few are left of our old class, excepting you and me; / And when our time shall come, dear Tom, and we are called to go, / I hope they’ll lay us where we played just twenty years ago.” Offering no image of heaven or spiritual reunion with loved ones, the song is closer in spirit to Bryant’s poem “Thanatopsis” than to heaven-directed works like Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin or Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s The Gates Ajar.
This is not to say that religious songs did not resonate with Lincoln. Quite the contrary. The song that Lincoln asked Mrs. Johns to make her finale that night, “He Doeth All Things Well, or, My Sister,” doubtless moved him deeply because of the pious glow it cast around deceased loved ones. The song must have made him think of people he had lost—his mother, his sister, and, perhaps, Ann Rutledge. The song’s speaker follows a beloved sister’s life from the cradle to the grave, chiming in after several of life’s successive phases, happy or tragic, with the phrase “He doeth all things well.” The speaker blesses the sister as she lies in the cradle, and as years pass, “a wild idolatry” of her overcomes the speaker, who worships “at an earthly shrine” and forgets “He who doeth all things well.” For a time, the sister “obscure[s] the light, which round His throne doth dwell.” But then she dies. The speaker cries, “And oh! That cup of bitterness—let not my heart rebel, / God gave—He Took—He will restore—‘He doeth all things well.’”65
Despite Lincoln’s materialist bent, he did not surrender the hope that, in the song’s words, “He will restore.” At Baptist services in Indiana, the Lincoln family had sung hymns from Starke Dupuy’s hugely popular compilation Hymns and Spiritual Songs, including “O, When Shall I See Jesus,” “How Tedious and Tasteless the Hour When Jesus I No Longer See,” “Jesus, My All, to Heaven Has Gone,” and “Alas! And Did My Savior Bleed.”66 During the 1850s, Lincoln reportedly visited a dying woman who wanted him to write her will. He comforted her by reading Bible passages and reciting the words of the hymn “Rock of Ages.” A Springfield printer who accompanied him that day remarked, “Mr. Lincoln, I have been thinking that is very extraordinary that you should so perfectly have acted as pastor as well as attorney.” Lincoln paused and replied, “God, and eternity, and heaven were very near to me to-day.”67
Faith was a comforting resource for Lincoln, a sometime churchgoer though never a church member. But he could also break into a playful parody of religion. His law circuit companions guffawed when, on a difficult carriage ride between Urbana and Danville, he walked ahead on the muddy road and, in exasperation, bellowed out a twisted version of a Methodist hymn. He sang, “Mortal man with face of clay, / Here to-morrow, gone to-day!”—adding, as Whitney notes, “verses even more ridiculous: verses which he improvised and sang without regard [to] / time, tune or metre.”68
Lincoln liked to joke about erring or ignorant preachers. Judge Davis once turned to him in court complaining about some lawyer’s tediously long document, and Lincoln drawled, “It’s like the lazy preacher that used to write long sermons, and the explanation was, he got to writin’ and was too lazy to stop.”69 Lincoln adopted a raspy squeal to imitate an illiterate Ohio preacher who, having failed to interest his “Bretern and sistern” in the Bible story of Noah’s “three sons—ahem—namelie, Shadadadarack, Meshisick, and Belteezer,” said, “Dear perishing friends, ef you will not hear on toe me on this great subject, I will only say this, that Squire Nobs has recently lost a little bay mare with a flaxy mane and tail amen!”70 Another of his jokes involved a minister who declared that God made a perfect man, Jesus, but no perfect woman. A lady in the congregation stood up and said she disagreed, insisting that she had been hearing about a perfect woman for the past six years. When the minister asked who that ideal woman was, she replied, “My husband’s first wife!”
If Lincoln managed to both respect religion and parody it, the same can be said of his wry attitude toward other social conventions.
Here is where his affection for humorous music comes in. A song Mrs. Johns sang at the Decatur jamboree, “I Won’t Be a Nun,” speaks to his taste for erotic humor. He evidently enjoyed off-color songs. Dennis Hanks reported that Lincoln liked “Little Smuty Songs I wont Say any thing a Bout would Not Look well in print”—though Hanks did mention a song about a “turban’d Turk” who keeps “a hundred wives under lock and key / . . . Yet long may he pray with his Alcoran / Before he can love like an Irishman.”71 Like that song, “I Won’t Be a Nun” is suggestive rather than explicit—but it was still risqué for the era. It tells of a woman who declares that she is too pretty and too wild to be sent off by her mother to be a nun. “I’m sure I cannot tell what’s the mischief I have done,” the woman says coyly, but “I’m so fond of pleasure that I cannot be a nun.”72
If such songs raised eyebrows in polite society, the other humorous songs Mrs. Johns sang that evening tickled ribs. One of them, “The Widdy McGee,” mocks middle-class courting rituals. The song is about a timid man who tells himself, day after day, to go court a certain widow, but each time he embarks, some bird flying about—a crow, a starling, a magpie, etc.—makes him think it’s bad luck to court on that day, until the last day of the week, when he shows up to woo her at a church only to find that it’s her wedding day. We can surmise that Lincoln saw in the song a comic version of his own nervousness over wooing Mary Todd, not to mention his superstitiousness (a believer in prophetic dreams, he grew up among frontier folk for whom “the flight of a bird in at the window, the breath of a horse on a child’s head, the crossing by a dog of a hunter’s path, all betokened evil luck in store for some one”).73
Whatever his response was to the song, we can be sure that he reacted enthusiastically to other of Mrs. Johns’s humorous choices that night—“Old Dan Tucker,” “Lucy Long,” and “Jim Crow.” These were minstrel standards: songs introduced onstage by whites in blackface who caricatured the language, appearance, and behavior of black people. Today, the inherent racism in minstrel shows is widely understood, which has made it difficult for Lincoln biographers to talk about his love of “darky” performances. But in Lincoln’s cultural context, minstrel songs could at times have a subversive edge. Dan Tucker, the protagonist of the song of that name, is a prankster who flouts mainstream white conventions and boasts about his toughness and sexual prowess. He disrupts normal language, too, because much nonsense is mixed in with his boasts and his threats of violence. “Lucy Long” is at points misogynistic, as when the narrator says he will trade her for corn if she proves to be a shrewish wife, but elsewhere it is daring, as in the chorus, which enjoins Lucy to “take your time,” and in verses that invite her to “tarry”—both of which suggest that she may be inclined to delay marriage until she can enjoy a sexual affair beforehand.74 “Jim Crow,” which later became the sobriquet of racial segregation, was T. D. Rice’s famous song that, in its original version, spoofed black people and yet imagined extraordinary powers for them. Like the backwoods superman Davy Crockett of frontier humor, Jim Crow brags of immense feats: “I wip my weight in wildcats / I eat an Alligator, / And tear up more ground / Dan kiver 50 load of tater.”75
The cloaked progressiveness of minstrel music is especially visible in a song that Lincoln often asked Lamon to sing to him: “De Blue Tail Fly.” Lincoln called it “the buzzing song.”76 It is about an enslaved man who protects his master from flies until one bites a horse that throws the master, who dies from the fall. As in many minstrel songs, the black speaker wears a submissive mask—he waits on “massa” and tries to ward off the flies—but after his master dies, he says indifferently, “Ole Massa’s gone, now let ’im rest, / Dey say all tings am for de best.” The constantly repeated chorus shows that the man is glad his master is gone: “Jim crack corn I don’t care, / Ole Massa gone away.”
Minstrel music sometimes got political, as in another song Lincoln loved, “Zip Coon.” The song’s black speaker mentions Andrew Jackson’s assault on the Bank of the United States, which has been “blone to the moon,” and says that Zip can now replace Jackson: “An de bery nex President, will be Zip Coon.” And who will be his vice president? None other than that wild figure of popular humor, Davy Crockett:
Zip shall be President, Crocket shall be vice,
An den dey two togedder, will hab de tings nice.77
In the topsy-turvy political world of humorous songs, then, an African American—or, at least, a pretend one—can become president, and a frontier screamer can be his vice president. Through to today, Americans are accustomed to seeing the subversive impact of popular music. Blues, jazz, rock, punk, rap, and so on—popular music has been like the prow of an icebreaker, bursting through the frozen sea of convention. The same was true in Lincoln’s time.
The typical popular song of that era was flexible and variable: the tune remained the same, but the words were constantly revised by different performers—so much so that in some cases no “original” version can be identified with certainty. Virtually all minstrel songs appeared in different versions, as did many other songs, including several Mrs. Johns sang that evening. Two of them, “Old Dan Tucker” and “Rosin the Bow,” have special relevance to Lincoln. The lilting melody of “Rosin” provided the music for the Hutchinson’s campaign song “Lincoln and Liberty,” in which Lincoln appears as the potent “rail-maker statesman,” skilled in “felling and mauling” trees, the “good David,” with his “unerring” sling, who slew “the Slaveocrat’s giant” (that is, Stephen A. Douglas, known as the Little Giant).78 Among the many versions of “Old Dan Tucker” were the Hutchinsons’ “Get Off the Track,” which warned people to get out of the way of the train of Emancipation, and another Lincoln campaign ditty in which Abe becomes the Crockett-tough destroyer of political opponents:
Old Abe is coming down to fight,
And put the Democrats to flight;
He’s coming with the wedge and maul
And he will split ’em one and all.
Get out the way, you little giant
You can’t come in, you’re too short and pliant.79
Although the image of Abe as a rail-splitting ironman who fought his way to victory was a favorite among songwriters and the Northern public, Lincoln himself saw music as a unifying force, not a divisive or competitive one.
The nation as a whole, after all, was what was chiefly on his mind. He doubtless got special pleasure out of the patriotic songs that he knew from childhood on. “Hail Columbia,” which was the unofficial national anthem of the United States until “The Star-Spangled Banner” took its place in 1931, was regularly played at events during his presidency. In this musical tribute to the heroes of the American Revolution, there is no sectional strife, only a united effort against a common enemy. The watchword of the song is unity, as promoted in the chorus:
Firm, united let us be,
Rallying round our liberty,
As a band of brothers joined,
Peace and safety we shall find.80
Chief among this Revolutionary “band of brothers” were the founding fathers, especially George Washington. “Hail Columbia” makes a ringing proclamation—“Let Washington’s great name / Ring through the world with loud applause”—followed praise of Washington’s “God-like pow’r.” Lincoln, with his love of humor, couldn’t resist taking so high-flown a song off its pedestal, as he did, according to Dennis Hanks, when he joined in singing, “Hail Columbia, happy land, / If you ain’t broke I will be damned.”81
SOARING HIGH
If Lincoln’s musical experiences broadened his knowledge of popular culture, his reading during the law years enriched his knowledge of high culture and science. He didn’t read widely in fiction; his preference was for poetry or nonfiction. In the latter area, he profited from his partnership with Herndon, who read widely and had one of the largest private libraries in Springfield. A bookseller there said that “Mr. Herndon read every year more new books in history, pedagogy, medicine, theology, and general literature, than all the teachers, doctors, and ministers in Springfield put together.”82 Herndon reported that Lincoln took advantage of his book collection. “I had an excellent private library,” he recalled, “probably the best in the city for admired books. To this library Mr. Lincoln had, as a matter of course, full and free access at all times.”83
Among the “admired books” that Herndon said that Lincoln had access to were ones by Immanuel Kant, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Theodore Parker, Thomas Carlyle, Henry Ward Beecher, David Strauss, Joseph Ernest Renan, and Ludwig Feuerbach. Because Herndon said only that these were “the kind of books which Lincoln had access to and sometimes peeped into,” we cannot know the extent of Lincoln’s familiarity with them.84 If we imagine that he looked into the authors just mentioned, we can say that he got doses of idealist philosophy (Kant and Emerson), liberal Protestantism and antislavery sentiment (Parker and Beecher), higher criticism of the Bible (Strauss and Renan), and materialist humanism (Feuerbach).
He was also interested in science. He perused Robert Chambers’s Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, which anticipated Darwin in its denial of special creation and its argument that life forms evolve over time. He was especially excited when in the mid-1850s Herndon brought to the law office The Annals of Science: Being a Record of Inventions and Improvements. Lincoln looked it over carefully and remarked, “It’s got up on the right plan; because it gives the successes and failures of experiments. The history of the successes of life & experiment shows what can be done in art, science—philosophy; & economizes time and expense. The history of failures shows what cannot
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