EXHIBITIONS > a search for heroes > text

Abraham Lincoln's America, in History and Memory

By Thomas F. Schwartz
Illinois State Historian

Abraham Lincoln was a self-made person in an era of self-made individuals. The term is mistakenly viewed as a person who goes from rags to riches or in Lincoln's case, from log cabin to the White House. Many men followed that path in Lincoln's life. He was not unusual in that regard. But self-made had a deeper meaning than financial success or social achievement.

Self-made individuals also focused on how to improve one's intellectual and moral sensibilities as well as one's character. For an autodiadac such as Lincoln, America held the promise of opportunity and betterment for those who applied themselves through education and hard work. Self-made also implied an element of reinvention, allowing people to move to the frontier and begin anew. Thomas Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln's father, moved the family from Kentucky to Indiana and finally to Illinois in search of greater wealth and a more comfortable life. It was a futile search for Thomas Lincoln and the many attempts only taught young Abraham Lincoln that the backbreaking physical labor associated with agriculture was not for him. As Lincoln later quipped his father taught him to work hard on the farm but not to love it. Indeed, Abraham Lincoln spent much of his early adulthood at odd jobs requiring strenuous physical exertion such as plowing fields, harvesting crops, and splitting rails for fencing. At 6'4", Lincoln towered over most people of the day who were on average a foot shorter. His good humor, folksy stories, intellectual curiosity, and physical strength only enhanced his tall lean frame. But he always was looking for ways out of his father's chosen life into something that required less physical and more mental prowess. He was given an opportunity to take a flatboat of goods from Illinois down the Mississippi to New Orleans for Denton Offutt, a New Salem merchant. At 22 and free of his parents' control, Lincoln took the goods to New Orleans. New Orleans was a thriving city that excited the senses. But it was also here that Lincoln most likely witnessed a slave auction that became one of many encounters with America's national sin.

Lincoln tried his hand at a number of professions while at New Salem, Illinois located on the bluffs of the Sangamon River. James Rutledge and John Cameron, two entrepreneurs who sought to create a thriving commercial center along the Sangamon established New Salem in the late 1820s. As a clerk in Offutt's store Lincoln was attracted to the life of a merchant. Lincoln endeared himself to the locals, so much so that they appointed him postmaster. He served briefly in the militia when Blackhawk reentered Northern Illinois in 1832. Returning to New Salem, Lincoln tried his hand at storekeeping with William Berry. Both failed miserably. Not to be discouraged, Lincoln taught himself surveying and was elected to the state legislature. It was in Vandalia, where Lincoln met the leading minds of Illinois. Many quickly recognized Lincoln's talent and ability and encouraged the young man from New Salem to study law as the best way to advance himself. Lincoln briefly flirted with the idea of becoming a blacksmith ultimately conceding to the lure of law.

Books and newspapers were Lincoln's chief means to know the world beyond frontier Illinois. Lincoln read everything he could find. As postmaster, Lincoln had the luxury of reading newspapers before the subscribers came to pick them up. Not a speed reader but a methodical and deep reader, Lincoln liked to read aloud. As he later explained to his law partner, William Herndon, it allowed him to see it, read it and hear it making the repetitive process more likely to be retained in his brain. Jack Kelso, the Natty Bumpo of New Salem, recited the verse of Robert Burns and William Shakespeare by heart, introducing the young Lincoln to these great poets and playwrights. Lincoln read about the Founders and the American Revolution. But of chief importance, he read Blackstone, Chitty and other legal tomes that provided the intellectual foundations to practice law.

By 1837, New Salem was quickly becoming a ghost town. When it became clear that the Sangamon River was not navigable people no longer saw much of a future for the village. The financial panic in 1837 merely accelerated the exodus. On April 15, 1837 the 28-year-old lawyer packed his belongings and relocated to Springfield, Illinois. It would be 28 years later to the day that Lincoln would die in Washington, D.C. at the Peterson House, across from Ford's Theatre.   <top>

In a special session of the legislature, Springfield was named the new capitol of Illinois beating out Vandalia and challenges from other communities such as Purgatory. The capitol city offered many opportunities to a young lawyer with political ambition. Lincoln became the junior partner of one of the leading lawyers and politicians in Illinois, John Todd Stuart. Stuart encouraged Lincoln to study law while a member of the legislature in Vandalia and saw great promise in the lanky youth. Lincoln?s most influential legal mentor was Stephen Trigg Logan. In their three-year partnership, Logan taught Lincoln more law than he ever learned from Stuart who was away in Congress for much of the time. Logan eventually ended his partnership with Lincoln to assume his son-in-law as a partner. Lincoln no longer felt the need to be a junior partner and set up his own legal firm taking on a young intellectual, William Henry Herndon, as his partner.

Lincoln, like most lawyers of his time, traveled the fourteen counties that comprised the Eighth Judicial Circuit. Early in his career, he did it out of financial necessity but later he did it because he enjoyed it. Even when railroads made the trip to Champaign and Danville easy travel, Lincoln continued to use his horse, Old Bob, and a buggy to traverse from courthouse to courthouse. Perhaps the many hours in transit allowed Lincoln time to think or perhaps he simply enjoyed the time alone to enjoy the unfolding landscape. Regardless, Lincoln had one of the busiest legal practices in the state. He did not specialize in any particular aspect of law. Rather, Lincoln took whatever cases were brought to him. Although he received his largest fee of $5,000 for representing the Illinois Central Railroad, he also had to sue the company in order to receive payment.

Politics always held the greatest interest for the prairie lawyer. He served in the Illinois legislature from 1834-42 and then one term in the United States House of Representatives from 1847-49. These years as a politician are more noted for teaching him organizational and leadership skills than for any significant legislation. His plain direct speaking style, humor, and ruthless logical reasoning made him a popular stump speaker for the Whig party. After Lincoln's term in Congress ended, he became less engaged in seeking political office and directed his attentions to the practice of law. By his own admission, the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 piqued his interest to reenter the political fray. Sponsored by Illinois Senator Stephen A. Douglas, the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 in effect repealed the Missouri Compromise by giving the inhabitants of the western territories the right to decide the slavery question through popular elections. A vast new region was open to the spread of slavery.

Like many moderates, Lincoln saw the Kansas-Nebraska Act as transforming the debate on slavery. Not only was he concerned that it reopened territories previously closed to slavery, he increasingly recognized that slavery was incompatible with a free society. The moral dimensions of slavery became the focus of Lincoln?s thought and writing. He said of the Kansas-Nebraska Act that, “I particularly object to the new position which the avowed principle of this Nebraska law gives to slavery in the body politic. I object to it because it assumes that there can be moral right in the enslaving of one man to another.” In his series of debates with Douglas in 1858, Lincoln continually reminds his audience that the promise of the Declaration of Independence, “that all men are created equal,” had yet to be extended to blacks. Slavery made a mockery of the American experiment in self-governance.   <top>

Lincoln?s election in 1860 reflected the growing anti-slavery sentiment throughout the North. In an act at reinvention, Abraham Lincoln began growing a beard after his election. Clean-shaven throughout his 51 years of existence, Lincoln?s decision to grow a beard is often credited to a letter written by an eleven year old girl, Grace Bedell urging him to sport whiskers to enhance his appearance. Beards became the defining features of the Civil War generation.

Preserving the Union became the chief war aim. But Lincoln was committed to a Union where slavery would eventually be abolished. And Southerners were all too aware of Lincoln?s views. Military and legal steps toward his goal such as the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment realized the end of forced servitude in the United States. The price for Union and slavery?s end was the death of over 620,000 soldiers. A white supremacist actor, John Wilkes Booth, exacted revenge for the demise of the Confederacy by shooting Lincoln at Ford?s Theatre.

Lincoln?s martyrdom transcended history, placing him in national memory. Whereas George Washington was the “Father” of our country, Lincoln was seen as the “Preserver” of the Union. If the Founding generation provided the intellectual foundations for American democracy, Lincoln was seen as providing it with a heart and soul by removing the national stain of slavery. His image was placed in every public school, carved on Mount Rushmore and stamped on the lowly penny. Norman Rockwell gave us portrayals of a young determined Lincoln while Hollywood screen writers attempted to provide a satirical account of Lincoln in a failed television sitcom “The Secret Diary of Desmond Pfeiffer.”

Lincoln understood that “the struggle of today, is not altogether for today-it is for a vast future also.” Moreover, Lincoln also understood the importance of being dedicated “to the unfinished work” and “to the great task remaining before us.” Don Pollack offers us many ways to contemplate the Abraham Lincoln of history and the Abraham Lincoln of memory. The canvasses evoke both the promise of America that so inspired the self-made Lincoln, the broad landscapes that offered escape and opportunity as well as the unfinished nature of our ongoing experiment in self-governance.   <top>