Abe / Lincoln

...they seize the chance to make a killing by selling Sephus into the hardest bondage...

...From 1838 he was on the record as saying that slavery was an egregious injustice...

...The growing boy has an insatiable desire for the world he finds in books: "He didn't just run the words through his eyes, he studied over them, puzzling till he got clear to the bottom...

...At the Illinois Republican convention in 186o, supporters ALGIS VALIUNAS is a writer living in Florida...

...Abe: A Novel of the Young Lincoln, by Richard Slotkin, a professor of American Studies at Wesleyan University and an honored scholar, undertakes to show how Lincoln's youth shaped his formidable mind and character...

...to lead effectively meant being careful, not to get too far ahead of the multitude...

...Constitution guaranteed the rights of individual states to uphold the rights of slave-masters to their possessions...

...fights for his life, and beats a man nearly to death...

...but the division extended to his own heart and mind, as Morris astutely observes...

...Jan Morris, the noted Welsh travel writer and popular historian, observes in her Lincoln: A Foreigner's Quest that if the young Lincoln was outraged by the Peculiar Institution, he kept his feelings to himself for a long time: "His sensibilities may perhaps have been affronted, as myth said, by what he saw during his river voyages into the deep South, but he seems to have expressed no particular thoughts about slavery until he was well into his forties...

...Abe might have been titled Al: Patriotic Gore...

...The passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which contravened the Missouri Compromise of 1820 and permitted residents of the western territories to vote for slavery, and the Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision of 1857, which declared that blacks could not be American citizens, Lincoln perceived as logical steps on the way to forbidding any state in the Union to exclude slavery...

...In March 1837, Lincoln and the other Illinois state assemblyman from Sangamo County presented the House with a protest against a recently passed abolitionist resolution: Although slavery was "founded on both injustice and bad policy," the protest read, incendiary talk is likely only to make things worse, and in any case the U.S...

...It almost seemed as if he would spring and snatch the proffered gift from the Master's mouth...

...the effect can be cliched or even preposterous, as in the gruesome depiction of the pioneers' slaughter of passenger pigeons, the description of clearing the land as "the war against the trees," the sage Indian mentor who keeps Abe from swallowing whole the white man's foolishness, and Abe's earnestly inquiring of his whore what he can do to ensure a woman's pleasure...

...Despite this realization, Abe tries to see that Sephus is turned over to an enlightened owner, who would arrange his slave's emigration to Haiti and freedom...

...Along the way Abe makes the acquaintance of a free-thinking, proto-femiMst lady...

...Legend would have him be the best of men, and he most likely was not that...

...he learned to read and write amid the cacophony of a Knob Creek, Kentucky "blab school," where the students would all read their lessons aloud to themselves so that the teacher could be sure they were hard at work...

...that he learned the essentials from a copy of William Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England he dug out of a barrel of junk sounds like make-believe, but he did regularly walk the twenty miles from New Salem, Illinois, to Springfield and back in order to borrow the books he needed, and he pored over them every chance he got, while manning the counter at a village store...

...he enjoyed all the disadvantages, as only a man gifted with the supreme advantages—genius and courage and tenacity—can...

...in 1862 he told a Committee of Colored Men that American blacks were suffering "the greatest wrong inflicted on any people" (then suggested how much sweeter life would be in, for instance, Liberia...

...Most important, Abe comes to feel and to comprehend the malign power of slavery...

...The Prairie Years and The War Years (19264939): "In wilderness loneliness he companioned with trees, with the faces of open sky and weather in changing seasons, with that individual one-man instrument, the ax...

...His principal opponents were the extreme abolitionists, mostly within his own party, who thought he never went far enough...

...It will in future be our enemy...

...Before Abe's baptismal adventure is over, he is mistaken for an uppity mulatto by New Orleans police, and in making his escape he triggers a riot by a hitherto festive crowd of blacks...

...In fact, as David Herbert Donald has pointed out in his magisterial 1995 biography, Lincoln was only too happy to put his bumpkin upbringing well behind him...

...when he finally issued the Emancipation Proclamation, he claimed that military necessity empowered him to do so...

...This brand of demotic panegyric attained perhaps its loftiest and most insufferable expression in the dubious eloquence of Carl Sandburg's biography, Abraham Lincoln...

...but his peroration declares that the passions must be held tightly in check: "Passion has helped us, but can do so no more...

...and one can be pretty sure that Lincoln, who was notoriously given to outbursts of horse-laughter that more decorous men found unseemly, would have appreciated the joke...

...saving the Union was the only war aim he publicly professed...

...Slotkin notwithstanding, to the young Lincoln rage even in the name of justice is no blessing...

...His sad experience moves him to reflect on might and right: In a world of Wolves, if you want to help the Lambs you need to be more than a little Wolf yourself...

...Morris contends that, early in his political career, Lincoln was possessed of a driving ambition to no greater end than his own distinction, and she is not altogether wrong...

...incensed by their refusal, he calls them a bunch of "nigger-lovin' Yankee sumbitch[es]," and later terrorizes them with the backing of a posse of vigilantes, asserting that the black man traveling with them has been stolen...

...This understanding put him in an intellectual and moral fix, and he lunged this way and that in his struggles to get himself and a nation out of it...

...He did not say so, but it was also most likely military necessity that confined the Emancipation Proclamation to thosestates still in rebellion...

...For all that, he still hates his father, his father still hates him, and books still enthrall him with the prospect of the splendid life he hopes he might someday live...

...Yet, inexplicably, she has nothing to say about Lincoln's most famous remarks on political ambition, in his 1838 address to the Young Men's Lyceum of Springfield, several months after his anti-abolitionist protest...

...it took Lincoln a long time to settle his own mind on what reasonable men ought to do about slavery...

...the opposition Democrats, who thought he went much too far...

...think you these places would satisfy an Alexander, a Caesar, or a Napoleon...

...his hands rose and the fingers spread a little as if some energy were filling and lifting him...

...The greatest men, he declared, can never be satisfied with even the highest offices available in the settled order of things, for they want the renown that comes only to those who found new orders: "What...

...Lincoln's presidential career may have been a moral tangle, but it was a magnificent political triumph...

...S ome people, however, insist on preferring truth to legend...

...To say that he overcame the most severe disadvantages would miss the point...

...However, the business instincts of Abe's bosses foil his solicitous plan...

...All the same, his glory is undeniable, for somehow he got the most important things done—perhaps the most important things, except for the founding, in our history...

...But in the fullness of time he was to order men to war, and men do not go off to fight and die animated by reason alone...

...As Morris notes, "slavery was never mentioned by name in that hallowed code, but slaves presumably came under the category of property, and property was sacrosanct...

...Joining the hunt for a rogue bear...

...Slotkin's Abe is a ripping good yarn, vividly and sometimes brilliantly written, morally serious in intention...

...and, if possible, it will have it, whether at the expense of emancipating slaves, or enslaving freemen...

...whipping all corners at wrestling, he makes himself a paragon of backwoods virility...

...Abe resolves to prove he is as manly as his father or any other roughhewn pioneer...

...Lincoln invoked the moral supremacy of the Declaration of Independence, with its unqualified assertion that all men are created equal, but he also maintained that this assertion was limited strictly to equal treatment under the law...

...The accomplished lawyer studied the law pretty much on his own...

...Among the books that his stepmother gives him are the very ones that reveal what he is made for: Each [book] had special powers...

...his reputation suffers because of them...

...touched the noble passions, in himself and in the men of the Union...

...he believed that blacks were a physically, mentally, and morally inferior race, that blacks and whites could never live happily together, and that everyone would be better off if American blacks were to be repatriated to Africa or to found a colony of their own, in Colombia perhaps, or on a Caribbean island...

...but he sought out the trials as often as the trials sought him out, and only rarely was he found wanting...

...Lincoln said himself that the task he faced was harder than anything Washington was up against...

...What was the good of knowing the right thing to do, unless you had the power to do it...

...watching his mother's horrible illness and death, which convince him that God more nearly resembles the cruelest men he knows than the tender Father his mother used to tell him about...

...It thirsts and bums for distinction...

...No one knew better than he how readily legend could be made to outdistance the truth of the matter, leaving mere fact far behind in a cloud of triumphal dust...

...Although Lincoln recalled his youth as nondescript, typical of "the simple annals of the poor," his countrymen favored a more heroic view of their political leaders' humble beginnings, and his handlers knew just how to oblige them...

...Even more than with most other political men, it is hard to tell how far Lincoln's words and actions reflected his personal convictions...

...and miscellaneous political discontents who merely wanted him out of the way...

...On Abe's first day at school, when the teacher points out the letters that make up Abe's name, the six-year-old pupil goes on full mental alert: "The boy's white-blue eyes widened and he leaned forward in a way that was almost wolflike...

...splitting those fabled rails...

...it did not apply to those border states —Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, Delaware —where slavery also existed but which were loyal to the Union...

...willing to make allowances for the usual nonsense—such allowances must be made for just about any novel one is likely to read these days —and if one does not mind a historical novel that takes more liberties with the truth than most—the account of the trip downriver is largely one stretcher after another — Slotkin's tale is an impressive and moving piece of work...

...All the mythic folderol aside, the truth about Lincoln is quite enough to astonish...

...The reasoning was not always clear even when the rhetoric was most effective...

...Actually he did express himself on the matter before then, but probably not in the The American Spectator • April 2000 61 way one might expect after reading Slotkin...

...but he was the best man for the task to hand, and that makes him, one can say unreservedly, our greatest hero...

...So one wants to believe in any case...

...However, bookish youngsters are of no particular use on the frontier, and Abe's father is determined to teach his son what a real man's work is...

...62 April 2000 • The American Spectator...

...A plantation owner low on cash offers Abe and his fellow boatmen a night with one of his slaves in exchange for a barrel of meal and a keg of whisky...

...So far Abe's story 60 April 2000 - The American Spectator might sound something like Tonio Kroger's or Stephen Dedalus's, though in rather a different milieu...

...is rapt by a performance of Richard III starring the renowned actor Junius Brutus Booth, who happens to be the father of John Wilkes Booth...

...Let those materials be moulded into general intelligence, sound morality and, in particular, a reverence for the constitution and laws...

...A house divided against itself cannot stand, he would aver in a famous 1858 speech...

...Yet at least until the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln never did say that the war was being fought to free the slaves...

...Moral ugliness and danger abound on the Big River, and they are unforgettable teachers...

...The Truth About Abe Was Astonishing Enough Abe: A Novel of the Young Lincoln Richard Slotkin Henry Holt /478 pages I $27.50 Lincoln: A Foreigner's Quest Jan Morris Simon & Schuster / 205 pages / $23 REVIEWED BY Algis Valiunas I t has been said that Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) was born in a log cabin that he had built with his own hands...

...However, the evident nobility of purpose does have a certain slickness to it, appealing not so much to the better angels of our nature as to hot-button liberal reflexes...

...In any event, he also held that the Constitution did not allow for abolition...

...This young Lincoln has crossed the very long bridge to the twenty-first century...

...only gradually does Abe realize that Sephus must have murdered his master, a man Abe knew...

...Still, if one is...

...That black man, Sephus, claims to be the sole survivor of an attack on another boat bound from Kentucky to New Orleans...

...The most superb writer among American presidents had less than a year of schooling...

...There is considerable truth in this discovery...

...Reason, cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason, must furnish all the materials for our future support and defence...

...but in this case the thoughtful and dreamy boy is not cut out to be an artist...

...Towering genius disdains a beaten path...

...From first to last his presidency was a balancing act...

...He remembered the riot in the street, how he stood higher than the crowd and they all looking up at him, listening, and if he'd known what to do with them...

...surrenders his virginity to a five-dollar whore, top-of-the-line goods, and with a heart of gold...

...Never...

...Lincoln cultivated a way of reasoning that44 Somehow he got the most important things done...

...All a boy had to do was learn to speak like a republican man, and there wasn't anything he couldn't be or do...

...This lesson is not easily learned...

...But the Orator and the Elocution, they were the keys: for their teaching was how a man should speak when he rises an equal among the citizens of the republic—how he should stand, how he should say words, how he should reason, and with plenty of pictures and examples in case you didn't take the idea right off...

...ellipsis in the original] the rage rising in him, rage not like a sin but like a blessing, rage that comes of knowing in your soul you deserved to get justice and meant to have it or die...

...Life tried him, and hard...

...Circumstances required the most delicate sense of what was politically feasible...

...lugged into the hall a couple of rails purportedly taken from a fence Lincoln had helped build thirty years before...

...Morris is right on the mark when she sizes up the problem of political maneuver that Lincoln had to deal with...

...Historians have understandably taken Lincoln's words as evidence of his own most passionate desires...

...a flatboat is his Yale and his Harvard...

...A journey down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers to New Orleans, when he is 19 years old—his first sight of the world beyond Kentucky and Indiana—provides the needed instruction...

...slaughtering hogs...

...yet Lincoln still has to learn firsthand certain unfragrant truths about the republic that his beloved books overlook...

...He probably had often to bite back the words he wanted most to say, to refrain from doing the things he wanted most to do...

...the crowd went wild, as crowds are known to do, and henceforth Lincoln had himself a sobriquet and an image of the sort that helps mark a man as presidential timber: the Rail Splitter, dauntless son of toil, tamer of wilderness, exemplary noble hayseed...

...When the refractory manner of a woman slave reminds him of hisstepmother's manner toward his father, shame overwhelms him...

...Slotkin's boy Lincoln possesses an animal vitality that lights up his intelligence and that causes him to crave knowledge as a predator craves prey...

...he cornpanioned with his ax no longer than he absolutely had to, made his way up in the world with the help of influential men who took a shine to him, and enjoyed a distinguished and prosperous legal career, arguing hundreds of cases before the Illinois Supreme Court, earning substantial fees as advocate for railroads, then the biggest business going in America...

...To think that the two women might be alike in any respect at all strikes him as a mortal insult to his Ma...

...Some of the things he did say are nothing less than appalling to any decent person today...

...Abe has a lot to overcome...