The French in the Heart of America

by John H. Finley

Lincoln the youth had not only those ancient companionships but the intimate counsel of the greatest of teachers of democracy. He knew, too, the homely wisdom of Greece as well as he knew the treasured sayings of his own people handed on from generation to generation. He was as familiar with the larger-horizoned gossip and philosophies of Shakespeare's plays as with those which gathered around the post-office of Clary's Grove, where later this youth as postmaster carried the letters in his hat and read the newspapers before they were delivered. He loved Burns for his philosophy that "a man's a man for a' that." So with these and others he found his high fellowships, even while he "swapped" stories (enriched of his reading) with his neighbors at the store or his fellow lawyers at the primitive taverns.

But there were less personal associations. He made the fundamental laws of a wilderness State an acquisition of his instincts. There is preserved in a law library in New York the much-worn copy of the statutes of Indiana enacted in the first years of the existence of that State. It is stated that he learned these statutes by copying extracts from them—and from the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States, and the Ordinance of the Northwest, included in the same volume—on a shingle when paper was scarce, using ink made of the juice of brier-root and a pen made from the quill of a turkey-buzzard, and shaving the shingle clean for another extract when one was learned, till his primitive palimpsest was worn out. But whatever the medium of their transmigration from matter to mind, they became the law of his democracy, sacred as if they had been brought to him on tables of stone by a prophet with shining face. It was in that school, I believe, that he learned his nationalism, his devotion to the Constitution—to which in maturer years he gave this famed expression: "I would save the Union, I would save it in the shortest way under the Constitution…. My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that. What I do about slavery and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union, and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union." [Footnote: Letter to Horace Greeley, August 22, 1862.]

And when he had freed the negro by a proclamation that violated the letter of the Constitution, it was still that boy of the woods speaking in the man—the boy who had learned his lesson beyond all possibility of forgetting or misunderstanding—"I felt that measures otherwise unconstitutional might become lawful by becoming indispensable to the preservation of the Constitution through the preservation of the nation."

It was from those shingles that he learned, too, the place of the State in this nationalism. Its paternalism has grown tremendously since 1824, when democracy was a negative, a repressive and not a positive, aggressive political and social spirit, but, as it was, it gave him the foundation of the political structure within whose lines he had to build later.

And with all this was a self-discipline in the two great knowledges by which men have climbed from savages to gods—language and mathematics. He was told one day that there was an English grammar in a house six miles from his home, and he at once walked off to borrow it. And he studied geometry and algebra alone. This may seem to you an inconsequential thing, but having myself on those same prairies not far away from the Sangamon acquired my algebra with little teaching and my solid geometry with only the tuition of a book and of the sun or a lamp, I am able to appreciate what the hardship of that self-schooling was. It was more agreeable to watch the clouds while the horses rested at the end of the furrow, to address, as did Burns, lines to a field-mouse, or to listen to the song of the meadow-lark, than to learn the habits of the three dimensions then known, of points in motion, of lines in intersection, of surfaces in revolution, or to represent the unknown by algebraic instead of poetic symbols.

But his private personal culture, as one [Footnote: Herbert Croly, Lincoln as more than an American in his "Promise of American Life," pp. 89-99.] has observed, had no "embarrassing effects," because he shared so completely and genuinely the amusements and occupations of his neighborhood. No "taint of bookishness" disturbed the local fellowships which gave him opportunity to express in "familiar and dramatic form" of story and illustration his more substantial philosophy and so find for it the perfect speech. His neighbors called him by homely, affectionate names, thinking he was entirely one of them—a little more clever, a little less ambitious in the usual channels of business and enterprise. He had no "moral strenuousness of the reformer" and no "exclusiveness" of learning. He "accepted the fabric of traditional American political thought." He seemed "but the average product," and yet, as this same writer has said, "at bottom Abraham Lincoln differed as essentially from the ordinary western American of the middle period as St. Francis of Assisi differed from the ordinary Benedictine monk of the thirteenth century." [Footnote: Croly, "Promise of American Life," p. 90.] He was not, like Jackson, simply a large, forceful version of the plain American trans-Alleghany citizen; he made no clamorous, boastful show of strength, powerful as he was physically and intellectually. He shared genuinely, with no consciousness of his own distinction, the "good-fellowship of his neighbors, their strength of will, their excellent faith, and above all their innocence." But he made himself, by discipline of his own, "intellectually candid, concentrated, and disinterested and morally humane, magnanimous and humble." This is not the picture of a conventional, generic democrat; and this is not, we are assured by the earlier writers, the picture of the westerner of that period. Indeed, Mr. Croly insists that while these Lincolnian qualities are precisely the qualities which Americans, in order to become better democrats, should add to their strength, homogeneity, and innocence, they are just the qualities (high intelligence, humanity, magnanimity, and humility) which Americans are "prevented by their individualistic practice and tradition from attaining or properly valuing." "Their deepest convictions," he contends, "make the average unintelligent man the representative democrat, and the aggressive, successful individual the admired national type." To them Lincoln is simply "a man of the people" and an example of strong will.

But the man who said this did not know that land of Lincoln—which was the valley of La Salle, and even before that the valley of the tribe of men— for I believe its inhabitants knew that he was the embodiment of what they coveted for themselves; that he was not their ordinary average but their best selves.

Their individualism has been, I must say again, under practical compulsions and has had fruits that deceive the eye. It is so insistent upon national productivity, but none the less is it joined to a high idealism that worships just the qualities that were so miraculously united in Abraham Lincoln. To be sure, some remember for their own excuse his coarse stories; some recall for their own justification his acceptance of the political standards that he found; but the great body of the people keep him in reverence and affection as the incarnation of patience, honesty, fairness, magnanimity, humility; not for his strength of will primarily, but for his strength of charity and honesty, and in so doing they reveal the ideal that is in and under their own individual struggle.

Montalembert said that "a social constitution which produced a Lincoln and others like him is a good tree whose sure fruit leaves nothing to envy in the product of any monarchy or aristocracy." Lincoln was not, we want to believe, a freak, a sport of nature, but the "sure fruit" that should not only leave nothing to envy in others, but leave nothing to question in the soundness of a democracy that gives evidence of its spirit in remembering Abraham Lincoln more tenderly, more affectionately, more reverentially than any one else in its history. It is less to his praise but more accurate, I think, that, as his biographer put it: "His day and generation uttered itself through him." He expressed their ugliest forms and their most beautiful developments.

None the less is it remarkable that not only should the virility and nobility of the frontier have been exhibited in him, but that the consummate skill and character known to the world's centres of culture should have had, in his speech and intellectual attitude and grasp, a new example.