About the Author
Stephen B. Oates is a
professor of history at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and the
author of eight other
books, including The Fires of Jubilee and To
Purge This Land with Blood. His task in this biography was to perpetuate
Lincoln as he was in the
days he lived. His purpose of this biography was to bring the past into the
present for us and his
students.
The Life of Abraham Lincoln
Although other states such
as Indiana lay claim to his birth, most sources agree that Abraham Lincoln was
born on
February 12, 1809, in a
backwoods cabin in Hodgeville, Kentucky. In an interview during his campaign
for the
presidency in 1860 Lincoln
described his adolescence as "the short and simple annals of the
poor." (p 30). His father
Thomas was a farmer who married Nancy
Hanks, his mother, in 1806. Lincoln had one sister, Sarah, who was born in
1807. The Lincoln family
was more financially comfortable than most despite the common historical
picture of complete
poverty. They moved to
Indiana because of the shaky system of land titles in Kentucky. Because the
Lincoln's arrived in
Spencer County at the same
time as winter, Thomas only had time to construct a "half-faced camp."
Made of logs and
boughs, it was enclosed on
only three sides with a roaring fire for the fourth. The nearest water supply
was a mile away,
and the family had to
survive on the abundance of wild game in the area. Less than two years after
the move to Indiana,
Mrs. Lincoln caught a
horrible frontier disease known as "milk sick.". Thomas Lincoln
returned to Kentucky to find a new
wife. On December 2 he
married Sarah Bush Johnston, a widow with three children, and took them all
back to Indiana.
Although there were now
eight people living in the small shelter, the Lincoln children, especially Abe,
adored their new
stepmother who played a key
role in making sure that Abe at least had some formal education, amounting to a
little less
than a year in all. To
support his family it was necessary that Abe worked for a wage on nearby farms.
"He was strong
and a great athlete, but Abe preferred to
read instead. Although few books were available to a backwoods boy such as
himself, anything that he
could obtain he would read tenaciously" (p 56). Although his formal
education had come to an
end, his self-education was
just beginning. After a three month flatboat journey along the Ohio and
Mississippi, the 19
year old Lincoln returned
to Indiana with an enthusiasm for the lifestyles that he had just encountered.
Unfortunately, his
new-found joy did not last
long as his sister Sarah died in childbirth on January 20, 1828. In 1830 the
Lincoln family
decided to leave Indiana in
hopes of a better future in Illinois. It was soon thereafter that Abraham
became a leader in the
town of New Salem while
operating a store and managing a mill. The next step for such an ambitious man
was
obvious--he entered
politics, finishing eighth out of thirteen in a race for the Illinois House of
Representatives in August of
1832. Abraham Lincoln was a
strong supporter of Whig founder Henry Clay and his "American
System." This system
that arose from the
National Rebublicans of 1824 was in opposition to the powerful Democratic party
of President
Andrew Jackson. Lincoln
agreed with Clay that the government should be a positive force with the
purpose of serving the
people. Internal improvements were high on
both mens' lists, and this stand made the relatively unknown Lincoln popular
in rural Illinois from the
start. As the Whigs rose in stature throughout the 1830's, so did Lincoln, but
not without paying
his dues along the way. For
eighty days in the spring and early summer of 1832 Lincoln served in the
military. On a
constant search for Black
Hawk, war leader of the Sauk and Fox Indians, he never saw any fighting but he
did prove to
be a superior leader of men
in some of the most trying situations, including threats of desertion. "In
return for his eleven
and a half weeks of service
Lincoln earned a mere $125, but the connections that he made with future
leaders of Illinois
and the experiencing of
life from a soldier's viewpoint proved to be priceless in his future political
career" (p 80). During
this time Lincoln ran for
and won a seat in the Illinois Legislature with bipartisan support. In 1846
Lincoln took his biggest
step in politics to that
point. He won election to Congress as the only Whig from Illinois. His single
term was only
memorable in that he took an unpopular
stand against President James K. Polk and his Mexican War, which Lincoln saw
as unjust. Lincoln made
unsuccessful bids for an Illinois Senate seat in 1855, running as a Whig, and
the Vice Presidency
in 1856, running as a
Republican. In his early days as a lawyer and an Illinois Legislator, Lincoln
was a frequent guest of
the Edward's family and
Mrs. Edward's younger sister, Mary Todd, immediately caught Abe's eye. She was
like no
woman he had ever known
before. Her beauty, intelligence, charm, and ability to lead a conversation was
enough to
cause the usually
unemotional Abraham to propose. Yet he felt he did not love here and they broke
up the engagement.
Almost immediately
thereafter, Lincoln began to feel terrible guilt and unhappiness over what he
had done and what he
then realized he had lost.
He became so depressed that for a short time many of those around him feared
that he was
going to commit suicide.
Until he longed for her so much that a spark wasreignited between the old
lovers and they
remarried. After receiving
the Republican Party nomination for the 1858 Illinois senatorial race, Lincoln
gave his
historically famous, yet
questionably radical "House Divided" speech Lincoln had lost this
election against Douglas but he
had strengthened the
Republican Party and won national recognition in the process. As a result of
holding his own with
the "Little
Giant" (referring to Douglas's physical stature and political power), the
entire nation was able to see just how
great and powerful of a
leader Abraham Lincoln could become. Lincoln put the Senatorial defeat in its
proper perspective
six years later when he
said, "It's a slip, and not a fall." (p 143) After Illinois chose Lincoln
over the more radical William
Seward and Edward Bates, he
almost reluctantly turned his attention to the national scene. Lincoln's true
desire was to be
a Senator, where Abe
believed that he could concentrate on the most important issues more closely.
Since he honestly
did not believe that he had
a chance of actually winning the presidency, one of the main reasons that he
was running was
to gain more notoriety for
the 1864 senatorial. Nevertheless, Lincoln had thrown his hat in the ring and
he ran on the
Republican platform of: 1)
opposition to the extension of slavery 2) opposition to "nativist"
demands that naturalization
laws be changed to limit
the rights of immigrants 3) support of federally sponsored internal
improvements, a protective
tariff, a railroad to the
Far West, and free land for Western settlers. This stand was obviously very
attractive to Northern
and Western voters. When
election day finally came, Lincoln simply waited, first in his office at the
statehouse and later in
the telegraph office. When
the final results came in at about two o'clock in the morning, Abraham Lincoln
had become the
sixteenth President of the
United States with 1,866,452 popular votes. However he, did not receive a
single vote in ten
Southern states, and
largely because of his victory, frustrated, humiliated, and defeated
Southerners began the process of
secession, beginning with
South Carolina in 1860. Abraham Lincoln was chosen by destiny as the man to
lead the Nation
through its most trying hour,
and it is quite probable that he understood just how trying it would be. Upon
recalling how
he felt immediately after
learning of his victory, Lincoln replied, "I went home, but not to get
much sleep, for I then felt as I
never had before, the responsibility
that was upon me." (p 231) By Lincoln's inauguration day in March of 1861,
seven
states had already seceded
from the Union, electing Jefferson Davis as President of their Confederacy. In his
inaugural
address Lincoln attempted
to avoid aggravating the slave states that had not yet seceded. He asked the
South to
reconsider its actions, but
also reinforced his belief that the Union was perpetual, and that states could
not secede, saying,
"In your hands, my
dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not mine, is the momentous issue of civil
war." (p 288) Lincoln
also announced that because
secession was unlawful he would hold the federal forts and installations in the
South. All
sided with the Union
basically because they were assured by Lincoln that the war was being fought to
preserve the Union,
and not to destroy slavery.
In a letter to Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune, on August 22,
1862, Lincoln
confirmed this position
saying: "My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is
not either to save or to
destroy slavery. 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." (p 290) Just as
he had previously said that
he would, on January 1, 1863, Abraham Lincoln declared that all slaves residing
in states and
districts still in
rebellion against the United States were to be free. Although this was a bold
move meant to upset the
Southern war effort, the
signing of the Emancipation Proclamation had no immediate affect because it
applied only to the
Confederate states over
which the federal government had no control. The proclamation did not apply to
the slave states
under Union control because
there was no legal justification for Lincoln to apply it in those places. It
had to be classified
as a "military
measure," such as depriving the South of the services of her slaves.
Lincoln realized that in order to
peacefully integrate the
former slaves into American society he decided to train them as regular
soldiers, and they fought
gallantly. Some 186,000 colored
troops had been enrolled in the Union army by the end of the war. The famous
poet
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
remarked, "At last the North consents to let the Negro fight for
freedom." (p 340)
Jefferson Davis, and his
war-torn South, had one final hope -- the defeat of Lincoln in the election of
1864. Davis knew
that as long as Lincoln was
in the Office, the industrial superior North would continue to fight, and the
South could not
withstand the war much
longer. If a new "peace" candidate were to be elected, then the
Confederacy might survive.
"Luckily for Lincoln
the tide of the war turned dramatically in September of 1864 when General
Sherman took Atlanta,
an extremely important
Southern rail and manufacturing center. Morale was boosted greatly in the
North, and the
victories continued to
mount under Lincoln's new-found leaders in Ulysses S. Grant and General
Sherman. By the time of
the election in November,
Lincoln won overwhelmingly with 212 of the 233 possible electoral." (p
402) The very weary
President addressed the
Nation the next day with less than victorious words. He stressed that the South
should be dealt
with mildly in order to
bring the entire Nation back together as soon as possible. "Let us all
join in doing the acts
necessary to restoring the
proper practical relations between these states and the Union." (p 409)
What should have been
Lincoln's finest hour was
probably one of his most stressing, because it was now up to him as to where
the Nation was to
go next. It was Good
Friday, April 14, 1865, only five days after the end of the war. Despite
numerous warnings from
some of his closest
advisors, President Lincoln insisted on attending an evening performance of Our
American Cousin at
Ford's Theater. Since
General Grant was expected to attend the play with President Lincoln, the
President's attendance
was highly publicized. John
Wilkes Booth, a staunch Southern supporter, was a well known and popular actor
who felt it
necessary to redeem the
lost cause of the Confederacy. He had previously planned to kidnap President
Lincoln, but when
that plan did not work he
decided to assassinate him instead. He had the help of three others in his
plot, with the intention
of also assassinating Vice
President Johnson, Secretary Seward, and General Grant. The wounded Lincoln was
rushed
across the street to the
Petersen house where he was attended to for nine hours. After fighting for life
like only he could,
President Abraham Lincoln
passed away at 7:22 a.m. on the morning of April 15, 1865. "Even he who
now sleeps, has,
by this event, been clothed with a new
influence...Now his simple and weighty words will be gathered like those of
Washington, and your
children, and your children's children, shall be taught to ponder the
simplicity and deep wisdom of
utterances which, in their
time, passed, in party heat, as idle words." --Reverend Henry Ward
Beecher, 1865 "A greater
work is seldom performed by
a single man. Generations yet unborn will rise up and call him blessed."
--Reverend James
Reed, 1865 "...In all
America, there was, perhaps, not one man who less deserved to be the victim of
this revolution, than
he who has just
fallen." --The London Times, 1865 "Abraham Lincoln...was at home and
welcome with the humblest,
and had a spirit and a
practical vein in the times of terror that commanded the admiration of the
wisest. His heart was as
great as the world, but
there was no room in it to hold the memory of a wrong." --Ralph Waldo
Emerson, 1876 "If one
would know the greatness of
Lincoln one should listen to the stories which are told about him in other
parts of the world.
I have been in wild places
where one hears the name of America uttered with such mystery as if it were
some heaven or
hell...but I heard this
only in connection with the name Lincoln." --Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910)
"In the days before antiseptic
surgery, Lincoln had foreshadowed his
own demise; his efforts to preserve the life of the nation had been successful
at the
cost of its strongest
limb." (p 446)
My View on the Book
I found this book interesting and was
surprised it was not another documentary style written biography. It was
actually
interesting to read due to
Oates’ creative writing style. And being a factual historical story I learned a
little about the life
style of the post-colonial
period and of course, the life of Lincoln himself whom I know like a close
relative now due to
the deep personal as well
as external imagery expressed in this biography.
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