Lincoln looking south from Peoria

By Michael Lynch

Although not as popular as some of his other works, Abraham Lincoln’s speech at Peoria, IL—delivered over the course of some three hours on October 16, 1854—is one of his more important public addresses.  The speech combines history, reason, and moral appeal in an attack on the extension of slavery.  Lincoln was no abolitionist—he did not call for the immediate eradication of slavery in states where it had always existed—but he considered its extension north of the Missouri Compromise line to be both a moral and a political wrong.  The compromise had held for more than thirty years before Stephen Douglas’s Kansas-Nebraska Act overturned it in 1854 by permitting slavery in northern territories whose populations voted to permit the institution.

The Peoria speech contains one of my favorite passages from the entire Lincoln corpus:

Before proceeding, let me say I think I have no prejudice against the Southern people. They are just what we would be in their situation. If slavery did not now exist amongst them, they would not introduce it. If it did now exist amongst us, we should not instantly give it up. This I believe of the masses north and south. Doubtless there are individuals, on both sides, who would not hold slaves under any circumstances; and others who would gladly introduce slavery anew, if it were out of existence. We know that some southern men do free their slaves, go north, and become tip-top abolitionists; while some northern ones go south, and become most cruel slave-masters.

It’s a surprisingly charitable statement for a speech devoted to a divisive political issue, especially since Lincoln believed the stakes in the debate over slavery in the territories to be incredibly high.

Abraham Lincoln in 1854. Wikimedia Commons

In fact, in the same speech he denounced slavery as a “monstrous injustice” and its spread as an existential threat to American principles which “forces so many really good men amongst ourselves into an open war with the very fundamental principles of civil liberty—criticising [sic] the Declaration of Independence, and insisting that there is no right principle of action but self-interest.”  Since Lincoln saw the slave question in such stark and consequential terms, the natural thing to do would have been to demonize those who upheld the institution and its extension.  He not only refrained from doing so, but asserted that only historical circumstances accounted for the difference of opinion.

Perhaps one of the reasons for his refusal to castigate the South over the slave issue was the fact that he believed it such a difficult problem to solve.  Lincoln freely admitted that he couldn’t prescribe a remedy for slavery.  He told the Peoria audience that his “first impulse would be to free all the slaves, and send them to Liberia,—to their own native land.”  He dismissed the prospect of granting them social and political equality, stating that his “own feelings will not admit of this; and if mine would, we well know that those of the great mass of white people will not.”   Lincoln did believe “that systems of gradual emancipation might be adopted; but for their tardiness in this, I will not undertake to judge our brethren of the south.”

To modern ears, Lincoln’s desire to see the freedmen sent out of the country and his unwillingness make them his equals make him seem woefully backward.  But his conviction that the slave question had no easy answers was one of the reasons he was reluctant to condemn those who disagreed with him about it.  Faced with the most divisive, emotive political issue of his time, Lincoln did not assume that individuals on the other side of it were his moral inferiors.  Even as he demonized the institution of slavery, he humanized those who disagreed with him about it.  This willingness to distinguish between issues and their proponents would serve him well when he presided over a nation at war, a war that gave him the opportunity to enact the sweeping solution to the slavery problem from which he shrank in 1854.

For anyone trying to evaluate Lincoln as a moral role model, the Peoria speech shows him at both his worst and best.  His remarks about political and social equality between whites and blacks revealed him to be a man of his time with all the attendant prejudices.  On the other hand, the empathy he expressed toward the South seems remarkably enlightened by any standard of political rhetoric.  Most modern Americans have long since outpaced Lincoln in terms of our beliefs about race, but in terms of knowing how to handle emotive political issues it seems we haven’t caught up with him yet.  He knew that you could attack people’s opinions without attacking the people themselves.  That’s a lesson we could learn today, when political differences remain as heated as they were in Lincoln’s day.

—Michael Lynch graduated from LMU with a degree in history, worked at the Abraham Lincoln Library and Museum as an assistant curator, and now teaches survey-level history courses on campus. He holds an M.A. in history from the University of Tennessee and blogs about historical topics at pastinthepresent.wordpress.com.

A journalism instructor on Lincoln the writer

Kevin Coyne, who teaches at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, discusses the lessons writers should learn from Lincoln:

Writing doesn’t get much clearer than the Gettysburg Address, the first thing I ask my students to read. It’s barely a third of the length of an op-ed column. As Garry Wills has memorably pointed out, Lincoln is reimagining America from the very first line, by taking Jefferson’s words to heart in a way that the slaveholding Jefferson himself did not, and by elevating the Declaration of Independence, with its promise that “all men are created equal,” above the Constitution, which reneges on that promise, as the defining document of our nation. If you’re going to ask a boy from Maine to die fighting a boy from Georgia in a field in Pennsylvania, you’d better be clear on why, and he was.

Lincoln letter turns up on Antiques Roadshow

Written in the summer of 1860, the letter is addressed to William Jones, an early employer of Lincoln’s in Indiana.  Jones went on to serve in the Union Army despite being well advanced in years, losing his life at Atlanta in 1864.  This document is not included in the Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, although a few others with the same date made it into the collection.

“A base forgery”

Right now Americans have presidential politics on the brain. On this date in 1860, Abraham Lincoln was thinking about the same thing.

Having been selected as the Republican nominee, he had just discovered, via a letter from Anson G. Chester, that a Chicago newspaper had printed a speech purporting to be Lincoln’s own work.  The remarks criticized Thomas Jefferson as a ”repulsive” character who profited from the bondage of his own illegitimate children.  Lincoln responded to Chester as follows:

The extract upon a newspaper slip which you sent, and which I herewith return, is a base forgery, so far as its authorship is imputed to me. I never said anything like it, at any time or place. I do not recognize it as anything I have ever seen before, emanating from any source. I wish my name not to be used; but my friends will be entirely safe in denouncing the thing as a forgery, so far as it is ascribed to me.

On September 6, the Illinois State Journal denounced the anti-Jefferson speech as a “bold and deliberate forgery,” claiming that “Mr. Lincoln has ever spoken of Mr. Jefferson in the most kindly and respectful manner, holding him up as one of the ablest statesmen of his own or any other age, and constantly referring to him as one of the greatest apostles of freedom and free labor.”

That wasn’t the end of Lincoln’s Jefferson problem; a few weeks later, he had to issue another denial.  His law partner William H. Herndon claimed that Lincoln did indeed have a low opinion of Jefferson, but in 1859 Lincoln praised the author of the Declaration of Independence:

All honor to Jefferson—to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyrany and oppression.

Yet another new Lincoln document turns up

This time it’s a brief authorization for a prisoner discharge, from the Royal Oak Historical Society Museum in Michigan.

How might cable news have covered the Gettysburg Address?

Robert Brustein has a tongue-in-cheek take on this question.

Software may help in search for new Lincoln documents

Abraham Lincoln researchers are joining forces with computer science and linguistics expert Patrick Juola to determine the authorship of anonymous newspaper articles possibly penned by a young Lincoln, according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

Mr. Juola has spent the past five years developing J Gaap, or Java Graphical Authorship Attribution Program. The software program identifies patterns in written documents — such as syntax use or repetition of certain words — and can use the information it gains from documents with known authors to determine the authorship of other documents.

Researchers know that Lincoln wrote anonymous contributions to the Sangamo Journal, a newspaper published weekly in Springfield, said Daniel W. Stowell, director and editor of the Papers of Abraham Lincoln Project. The project exists to identify and publish all documents written by or to Lincoln.

But the researchers know that other people also wrote anonymous letters to the paper during the same time period, and there were also readers, including Lincoln, who wrote using pseudonyms.

“The challenge was trying to figure out a systematic way and a more scientific way of determining what Lincoln wrote and what he didn’t,” Mr. Stowell said.

To meet that challenge, he turned to Mr. Juola and his software program.

Mr. Stowell’s team in Springfield has begun compiling and digitizing about 1,000 articles and letters they found in 350 to 400 issues of the Sangamo Journal. They will soon send the digitized newspaper articles to Duquesne, where Mr. Juola’s software will begin to analyze the documents and sort them into three groups: written by Lincoln, not written by Lincoln and authorship unclear.

If he didn’t say it, he should have

By Michael Lynch

Since I started blogging about history a few years ago, I’ve spent quite a bit of time perusing news feeds, looking for history-related items that might make for suitable posting fodder.  Because of the way search engines operate, they’ll often pull up irrelevant articles simply because the articles in question contain a particular word or set of words.

I’m often struck by how many news stories reference “Abraham Lincoln” even though they have little to do with him, just because the reporter who wrote the article decided that a Lincoln quote would spice things up, or because the subject of the article decided that invoking the Great Emancipator would be a good idea.  To illustrate the ubiquity of Lincoln quotes—both authentic and spurious—here are a few examples taken from items I stumbled across in the last couple of days.

In a news story about husbands and wives supporting different candidates in South Carolina’s Republican primary, one reporter invoked Lincoln’s famous “house divided” metaphor, which in turn was a quotation taken from the New Testament.

The governor of Colorado, in promoting a public opinion initiative earlier this month, quoted a passage from Lincoln’s debates with Stephen Douglas.

A state senator adapted a well-known phrase from the Gettysburg Address to describe a Rhode Island town that has gone into receivership in the wake of economic trouble, quipping that the town’s government is now “of the receiver, by the receiver and for the receiver.”

A recent story about a Kiwanis club’s efforts to aid children included this nugget: “Lincoln said, ‘No Man Stands So Tall as When He Stoops to Help a Child.’”  A number of websites attribute the statement to Lincoln, but as far as I know, he never said or wrote any such thing.

A Nigerian newspaper issued a story on petroleum subsidies, opening with the quote, “If you would win a man to your cause, first convince him that you are his sincere friend.”  I’m not sure what this has to do with petroleum subsidies, but at least that quote is authentic; it comes from a speech Lincoln delivered to a temperance group in 1842.

Comedian Stephen Colbert told fans at a rally, “As Abraham Lincoln said at Gettysburg, ‘Give me some money.’”  Needless to say, you won’t find that statement in the published Lincoln corpus.

I can’t think of any other historical figure who is quoted and misquoted so often, and in so many different contexts.  I suppose this has to do with Lincoln’s reputation as a wordsmith and the high regard in which he’s held as a paragon of wisdom and prudence.  A Lincoln quote is an automatic appeal to authority; if the man who wrote the Gettysburg Address, won the Civil War, and freed the slaves can help bolster you’re argument, then you’re already more than halfway there.

This need to get Lincoln on one’s side has led to so many misattributions that you can find websites devoted to debunking them.  If even the current President of the United States is not safe from this phenomenon, then maybe the safest bet is to stick with the well-worn examples from Lincoln’s undisputed published writings, or perhaps to rely on our own rhetoric and stop trying desperately to get Lincoln on our side.

—Michael Lynch graduated from LMU with a degree in history, worked at the Abraham Lincoln Library and Museum as an assistant curator, and now teaches survey-level history courses on campus. He holds an M.A. in history from the University of Tennessee and blogs about historical topics at pastinthepresent.wordpress.com.

New Lincoln documents found at National Archives

A researcher working for the Papers of Abraham Lincoln project has uncovered new documents at the National Archives, including the first page of the official copy of his Second Annual Message to Congress.

The whereabouts of this first page were previously unknown, and the second page of is still missing.  The complete text was known only from printed copies, such as the official printing used by the editors of the Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln.  You can read the full document by clicking here.  The conclusion includes some memorable prose:

Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation. We say we are for the Union. The world will not forget that we say this. We know how to save the Union. The world knows we do know how to save it. We—even we here—hold the power, and bear the responsibility. In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free—honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best, hope of earth. Other means may succeed; this could not fail. The way is plain, peaceful, generous, just—a way which, if followed, the world will forever applaud, and God must forever bless. 

“The grief of a loss so overwhelming”

During his remarks at Ground Zero to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, George W. Bush quoted one of the most famous and controversial pieces of writing associated with Lincoln.

 

The letter to Lydia Bixby has a tangled history, and even the details contained in the text itself are muddled.  Mrs. Bixby actually lost two sons, rather than five, to the war.  The mistake seems to have originated with Massachusetts Adjutant General William Schouler, who informed Gov. John Andrew that all five of Mrs. Bixby’s sons died in battle.  Andrew forwarded this information to the War Department, and from there it made its way to the Executive Mansion.

As for the three surviving sons, one received an honorable discharge, another left the army before being discharged, and the third was captured and reportedly deserted to the enemy.  Ironically, Mrs. Bixby’s family claimed that she was a Confederate sympathizer who had little regard for Lincoln.  The text was printed in the newspapers, and forged facsimile copies continue to circulate today, although the original is long since lost.

Perhaps the most interesting debate surrounding the Bixby letter is the question of whether or not Lincoln actually composed it. According to some oral testimony, Lincoln’s secretary John Hay may have claimed to be the original author.  Hay also pasted a copy of the letter into a scrapbook containing some of his writing, which Lincoln authority Michael Burlingame considered evidence for his authorship.

Other researchers, such as Ed Steers, think it more likely that the Bixby letter is an authentic Lincoln composition.  Lincoln’s eldest son Robert reported that Hay denied any association with the letter to him, and believed that his father was indeed the author. Whatever the letter’s origin, the fact that it continues to be such a popular text to invoke in times of sacrifice and suffering is due not only to its literary power, but to Lincoln’s unparalleled place in American memory.

The complete document, along with annotations, is available online in the Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln.