He was prized among his early companions as a wit and story-teller. The women complained because at their parties all the men were drawn off to hear Abe Lincoln's stories. When he came to be a public speaker, he feathered the shafts of his argument with jest and anecdote. The vein of humor in him was rich and deep; it helped him through the hard places. When as President he announced to his cabinet the Emancipation Proclamation, he first refreshed himself by reading to them a chapter from Artemus Ward.
His early growth was in rough soil, and some of the mud stuck to him,—his jests were sometimes broad. But if coarse in speech he was pure in life, and neither the rancor of political hate nor the research of unsparing biographers ever charged him with an unchaste act.
Along with this rollicking fun he had a vein of deepest melancholy. In part it was temperamental. The malarial country sometimes bred a strain of habitual depression. His mother was the natural daughter of a Virginia planter, and had the sadness sometimes wrought by such pre-natal conditions; it was said she was never seen to smile. Lincoln's early years had hardships and trials, over many of which he triumphed, and triumphed laughing; but there were others for which there was neither victory nor mirth. Some of his early letters of intimate friendship (as given in Hay and Nicolay's biography), show a singular capacity for romantic affection, and gleams of hope of supreme happiness. But death frustrated this hope, and the disappointment brought him to the verge of insanity. In his domestic life,—it was an open secret,—he had some of the experience which disciplined Socrates. Perhaps we go to the root of his sadness if we say that in his deepest heart he was a passionate idealist, and by circumstances he was long shut out from the natural satisfaction of ideality. His partner Herndon said of him, "His melancholy dripped from him as he walked."
Out of these experiences he brought a great power of patience and a great power of sympathy. These armed him for his work. He became invincible against the perversities and follies of men, and the blows of fate. He ripened into a tenderness such as prompted him, when burdened with cares beyond measure, to give a sympathetic hearing to every mother who came to the President with the story of her boy's trouble.
To take another brace of qualities, he was at once a powerful fighter and an habitual peace-maker. His long, gaunt, sinewy frame, and his tough courage, made him a formidable antagonist, but it was hard to provoke him to combat. Lamon,—whose biography is a treasury of good stories, sometimes lacking in discretion, but giving an invaluable realistic picture,—relates an encounter with the village bully, Jack Armstrong. The "boys" at last teased Lincoln into a wrestling match, and when his victory in the good-natured encounter provoked Jack to unfair play, Abe shook him as a terrier shakes a rat. Then he made peace with him, drew out the better quality in him; and the two reigned "like friendly Cæsars" over the village crowd, Abe tempering Jack's playfulness when it got too rough, and winning the boys to kindly ways.
In that day and region, men were very frank about their religious beliefs and disbeliefs. The skepticism or unbelief which lies unspoken in the hearts of a multitude of men,—silent perhaps out of regard to public opinion, perhaps from consideration for mother or wife—found free and frequent utterance in the West, long before Robert Ingersoll gave it eloquent voice. Lincoln, though we have called him an idealist at heart, habitually guided himself by logic, by hard sense, and by such evidence as passes in a court of law. He was one of the class to whom books like Tom Paine's Age of Reason appealed strongly. In early life he wrote a treatise against Christianity. A politic friend to whom he showed his manuscript put it in the stove, but the writer was not changed in his opinions. To Christianity as a supernatural revelation he never became a convert, but the belief in "a Power that makes for righteousness" grew with his growth and strengthened with his strength.
With deepening experiences, the awe and mystery of life weighed heavily on him. When travelling on circuit, his days spent in law-cases, diversified with sociability and funny stories, he would sometimes be seen in the early morning brooding by the fire-place with hands outspread, and murmuring his favorite verses,—a soliloquy on the mournfulness and mystery of life: "Oh, why should the spirit of mortal be proud!"
In his early youth he read eagerly and thoroughly such few books as came in his way. Later, his taste for reading seemed to grow less. He had a keen instinct for reality, and perhaps he found little in books that satisfied him. For poetry and philosophy he had small aptitude, and in science he had no training. What books he read he seemed to digest and get the pith of. Once, made suddenly conscious by defeat of his lack of book-culture, he took up Euclid's geometry, and resolutely studied and re-studied it. Doubtless that helped him in the close logic which often characterized his speeches. The strength of his speeches lay in their logic, their close regard to fact, their adaptation to the plain people of whom he was one, their homely illustrations, and, as the years developed him, an appeal to some high principle of duty. His chief library was men and women. From them, and from his own experience, he drew the elements of his politics, history, philosophy.
He had the ambition natural to a man of high powers. With all his genial sociability, he was in a way self-centered. His associates often thought him,—and Lamon shares the opinion—not only moody and meditative, but unsocial, cold, impassive; bent on his own ends, and using other men as his instruments. Partly we may count this as the judgment of the crowd to whom Lincoln's inner life was unimaginable. He shared their social hours, and then withdrew into thoughts and feelings and purposes which he could share with no one. Doubtless, too, he was in fault for some of that neglect of the small courtesies and kindnesses which besets men whose own thoughts fascinate them too strongly. There is a graphic touch, in the story of his love affairs, of a girl who rejected his advances because she had seen him on a hot day walk up a hill with a woman and never offer to relieve her of the baby she was carrying.
As a lawyer he won more than ordinary success, making good his lack of erudition by shrewdness and knowledge of human nature. It was observed that he always tried a case honestly and fairly; that he was not fond of controversy, and always preferred to settle a case out of court; that he never argued well or strongly unless his conviction was fully on his client's side; that, if unconvinced himself, he simply brought forward the proofs which fairly counted on his side, and left the decision to others; and that he was so little attentive to gain that, although he became one of the leading lawyers of Illinois, he never accumulated much money.