Lincoln and Whitman Page 4
If you meet some stranger in the street, and love him or her,
do I not often meet strangers in the street and love them?
If you see a good deal remarkable in me, I see just as much, perhaps more, in you.
. . . what is more subtle than this which ties me to the woman or man
that looks in my face,
Which fuses me into you now, and pours my meaning into you.
We understand, then, do we not?
What I promised without mentioning it, have you not accepted?
What the study could not teach . . .
What the push of reading could not start is started by me personally, is it not?
The bohemian poet, flat broke, down on his luck, his mind teeming with unwritten poems, was on his way to the basement saloon called Pfaff ’s, to drink a beer he could not afford, in company where his gifts and style were certain to be appreciated. His thoughts for the respectably attired men and women he had passed along the way, headed for the Tremont or the St. Nicholas Hotel, may be summed up in his verses:
You will hardly know who I am, or what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.
Failing to fetch me at first, keep encouraged,
Missing me one place, search another,
I stop some where waiting for you.
Whitman’s poetry was elusive, and so was he. But sooner or later he would inspire—with his verse or in person—the people who needed him.
For the rest of the year 1857, despite the nation’s increasing curiosity about the eloquent politician from Illinois, Lincoln avoided controversy, while practicing law. Some of his cases, such as the Rock Island Bridge case in Chicago in September, got him a great deal more publicity than he expected. At that moment, he preferred to work behind the scenes for the Republican Party.
In the spring the Chicago Journal had described him as “the successor of Stephen A. Douglas in the U.S. Senate.” On October 24, the editor of the Urbana Constitution wrote: “Among the notables who have attended our Court the past week, the Hon. A. Lincoln stuck up prominently. We regret to say that his eyesight is failing him seriously: tall as he is, he appears to be entirely unable to see far enough to get a glimpse of that U.S. Senatorship.” Toward the end of the year, he quietly hired John O. Johnson as his political organizer.
Yet Lincoln made no public gesture to confirm this ambition. In fact, after his powerful speech in Springfield against slavery and Senator Douglas’s opinion on Dred Scott, nearly a year passed before Lincoln chose to address any audience outside of a courtroom.
When he finally did speak, in Bloomington on April 6, 1858, for the Young Men’s Association, the lecture was such an eccentric piece of work, in manner and substance, so removed from current events and popular concerns, that it was received coolly. Cosmic in scope, ironical and poetical in style, the discourse has left biographers bewildered ever since. Many have dismissed the “First Lecture on Discoveries and Inventions,” which is a historical ode to human ingenuity since Adam invented the fig-leaf apron. Many have explained it away as a caprice, an indulgence of Lincoln’s zany, nonconformist streak. But one distinguished biographer, J. G. Randall, in his Lincoln the President, decided the speech deserved a closer look. “In its flow of sentences it marks Lincoln as something of a stylist, but that is secondary,” according to Randall. “The main point is that in lecturing on discoveries and inventions he was thinking of enlightenment, of progress down the centuries, of the emancipation of the mind . . .” In a footnote, Randall adds, “Despite its unfavorable reception the lecture has meaning to one who would study the trends of Lincoln’s thought on the eve of his nomination to the presidency.”
Indeed, for anyone interested in Lincoln’s intellectual progress, all three of these speeches—the speech answering Douglas on June 26, 1857; the “First Lecture on Discoveries and Inventions,” delivered on April 6, 1858; and finally the “House Divided” speech of June 16, 1858—are crucial. For nearly two years the intriguing orator gave only these few addresses, and each shows us a different aspect of his mind. The “Lecture on Discoveries and Inventions” begins:
All creation is a mine, and every man, a miner.
The whole earth, and all within it, upon it, and round about it
including himself, in his physical, moral, and intellectual
nature, and his susceptabilities [sic] are the infinitely
various “leads” from which man, from the first, was to
dig out his destiny.
In the beginning, the mine was unopened, and the miner stood naked
and knowledgeless, upon it.
In 1858 only one other writer in America was spinning lines like these: the author of Leaves of Grass. Like Whitman, Lincoln echoed the King James Bible; like Whitman, Lincoln was making a bible of his own, where the will of God gave way before man’s motives and ingenuity. Lincoln’s prose poem is a historical catalogue of discoveries and inventions, beginning with the invention of spinning and weaving, the discovery of iron, and the fashioning of tools like the hammer. “How could the ‘gopher wood ’ for the Ark have been gotten out without an axe? It seems to me an axe, or a miracle, was indispensible [sic],” Lincoln writes. He celebrates the powers of locomotion, “wheel-carriages, and water-crafts— wagons and boats,” as well as food and agriculture, the plow, and reaping and threshing machines. He sings the motive power of sailing vessels, windmills, pumps and waterwheels, and that very modern discovery, steam power. Whitman, in “A Song for Occupations” (published in the 1856 version as “Poem of The Daily Work of The Workmen and Workwomen of These States”), exhorted, “All doctrines, all politics and civilization, exurge from you,” and he wrote of the meanings to be found in
Manufactures, commerce, engineering, the building of cities, every
trade carried on there, the implements of every trade,
The anvil, tongs, hammer, the axe and wedge, the square, mitre, jointer . . .
. . .
The steam-engine, lever, crank, axle, piston, shaft, air-pump, boiler . . .
. . .
The pump, the pile-driver, the great derrick, the coal-kiln and brick-kiln,
Coal-mines, all that is down there, the lamps in the darkness . . .
More than half of Whitman’s fifteen-page poem is taken up with a catalogue of the same discoveries and inventions (including elaborate mining imagery) that Lincoln celebrates.
What, to Lincoln, is the ultimate Divine discovery and invention? The Divine gift, or invention, is speech, “articulate sounds rattled off from the tongue.”
We shall find the capacities of the tongue, in the utterance of articulate sounds, absolutely wonderful. You can count from one to one hundred, quite distinctly in about forty seconds. In doing this two hundred and eighty-three distinct sounds or syllables are uttered, being seven to each second; and yet there shall be enough difference between every two, to be easily recognized by the ear of the hearer . . .
And how convenient, because “One always has the tongue with him [unlike pen and paper], and the breath of his life is the ever-ready material with which it works.”
Speech may be God’s gift, but “writing—the art of communicating thoughts to the mind, through the eye—is the great invention of the world. Great in the astonishing range of analysis and combination . . . great in enabling us to converse with the dead, the absent, and the unborn, at all distances of time and of space . . .”
Finally, Lincoln ranks the arts of writing and of printing with the discovery of America. In a humorous aside, he includes “the introduction of Patent-laws” among the greatest of human inventions. America, in the new religion of Whitman and Lincoln, has received a special dispensation in the history of the human family. “A new country is most favorable—almost necessary—to the immancipation [sic] of civilization and the arts.”
Readers of Leaves of Grass, in the 1856 edition, will recogn
ize in Lincoln’s “Lecture on Discoveries and Inventions” the ideas and images, as well as the tone, expressed in four of Whitman’s poems: “A Song for Occupations,” “Poem of Many In One,” “Poem of a Few Greatnesses,” and “Sun-Down Poem.” The main theme of the “Poem of Many In One” is that America is the greatest hope for the future of all civilizations.
America, curious toward foreign characters, stands sternly by its own,
Stands removed, spacious, composite, sound,
Sees itself promulger of men and women, initiates the true use of precedents . . .
. . .
Any period, one nation must lead,
One land must be the promise and reliance of the future.
And after describing a panorama of American life and industry, Whitman declares:
Language-using controls the rest;
Wonderful is language!
Wondrous the English language, language of live men,
Language of ensemble, powerful language of resistance,
Language of a proud and melancholy stock, and of all who aspire . . .
. . .
Language to well-nigh express the inexpressible,
Language for the modern, language for America.
In “Poem of a Few Greatnesses” we find a precise blueprint for Lincoln’s speech, from the first lines:
Great are the myths, I too delight in them,
Great are Adam and Eve, I too look back and accept them,
Great the risen and fallen nations, and their poets, women, sages,
inventors, rulers, warriors, priests.
And after a litany of praise for all things American—liberty, democracy, youth, old age, and science—Whitman sings another hymn to language:
Great is language—it is the mightiest of the sciences,
It is the fulness, color, form, diversity of the earth, and of men and
women, and of all qualities and processes . . .
. . .
Great is the English speech—what speech is so great as the English?
Leaves of Grass introduced several ideas to Western civilization, ideas so boldly expressed that readers in England, France, and America were shocked by them. These include the equality of all things and beings, the sacredness and supremacy of personality (the “Self ”), and the belief that the poet was “commensurate” with his people, incarnating the sexual and working life of America as well as its geography. Whitman’s verses continue to surprise us today, a century and a half after they were written. And perhaps no idea of his is more startling and eerie than his insistence that his words and his personal presence transcend time and space.
It avails not, neither time or place—distance avails not,
I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many
generations hence,
I project myself, also I return—I am with you, and know how it is.
So it is a notable and significant fact that Abraham Lincoln paraphrases Whitman’s singular concept in this line from a speech given in 1858: “Great [is writing] in enabling us to converse with the dead, the absent, the unborn, at all distances of time and space . . .” This congruity, along with the similarity in tone, is not mere coincidence. The two men were not drawing upon a common source. Lincoln was neither a major poet nor a philosopher, and Whitman’s ideas and style were remarkable—if for no other reason— in that they were not to be found elsewhere. What is evident here is a distinct literary influence. It may not have been conscious. I do not mean to suggest that Lincoln wrote any speech with Leaves of Grass at his elbow. But Whitman’s thoughts are infectious, and they infuse the whole of his book, as he repeats them tirelessly in artful variations. Lincoln, whose memory was famously retentive, had read Whitman’s poetry, and the poet’s fingerprints are all over the “Lecture on Discoveries and Inventions.” The very title of the lecture echoes the “Poem of Walt Whitman, American,” on page 9 of the edition Billy Herndon placed upon the pine table in the law office. “Trippers and askers surround me, / . . . [ask] The latest news, discoveries, inventions . . .”
And this was the last public oration Lincoln delivered before the “House Divided” speech, which he gave upon being chosen as Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate in June 1858.
On May 31, 1858, his thirty-ninth birthday, Whitman wrote an appeal for “a revolution in American oratory” and “a great leading representative man, with perfect power, perfect confidence in his power . . . who will make free the American soul.”
The diamond-bright head of Donati’s comet, trailing its splendid triple plume, burst forth in the night sky in early June as Lincoln worked on his new speech. The comet would blazon its omens upon the heavens the rest of the year, as Lincoln campaigned against Stephen A. Douglas for his seat in the Senate. The long-tailed luminary was visible overhead to the tens of thousands of farmers, mechanics, and merchants who heard the seven debates that summer and autumn, as the two candidates argued the questions of slavery and freedom, the rights of Negroes, and the meaning of the Constitution. The comet became a focus of wonder and a subject of speculation to millions of readers while they followed the lively debates in newspapers in Boston, New York, Chicago, Richmond, Charleston, and San Francisco. For the first time, editors employed stenographers so they could print the Great Debates word for word. Slavery threatened to divide the Union, North and South, Republican and Democrat. Lincoln and Douglas were battling over far more than a Senate seat; they were fighting for the future of the Republic. The comet, many believed, portended war.
The debates, which began in August and closed in October, take up more than three hundred pages of Lincoln’s Collected Works. They are considered fine examples of American oratory, and they won Lincoln national fame. But the spark that ignited the seven confrontations was the oration Lincoln delivered at the close of the Republican convention that June, a speech that would be remembered long after the thronged and noisy debates were forgotten.
According to his law partner, Lincoln wrote the “House Divided” speech over a period of several weeks, “on stray envelopes and scraps of paper, as ideas suggested themselves, putting them into that miscellaneous and convenient receptacle, his hat.” The stovepipe hat, size 71/8, stood about 6½ inches from brim to crown. The brim was 1¾ inches wide, and the inside band, where Lincoln tucked his notes and letters, measured 2¾ inches. On the heavy silk lining he had written “A. Lincoln, Springfield, Illinois,” in case the stovepipe, with its precious cargo, should be left on a wall peg or newel-post, and be mistaken for another man’s hat.
Let us consider what was going on under Lincoln’s hat. One short line of Whitman might have lodged there: “What is prudence, is indivisible.” As we have noted, the central image of the house divided, originating in the Gospels, had been used by Lincoln and others to illuminate the slavery controversy. The line “I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free” was not new either, having appeared in slightly different forms in an 1855 letter and in several of Lincoln’s speeches during the Frémont campaign. What made the new speech so electrifying was the personal passion with which Lincoln seized upon the “house divided” metaphor, and the poetry that grows out of it in the second half of the argument.
Lincoln knew the Bible better than any other book. The proverb “A house divided against itself cannot stand” appears in Matthew, Luke, and Mark (though never exactly in the words Lincoln used). All three refer to the same incident, in which Christ is suspected of calling upon the aid of Beelzebub, the prince of devils, in the course of working miracles of healing and casting out devils from the afflicted and possessed. Lincoln had wrestled with his own demons, chiefly his overweening ambition. He had warned in his 1838 address to the Young Men’s Lyceum in Springfield: “Towering genius disdains a beaten path . . . It denies that it is glory enough to serve under any chief . . . It thirsts and burns for distinction; and if possible, it will have it, whether at the expense of emancipating
slaves or enslaving freemen.” He was cautioning the young men against “the loftiest genius, coupled with ambition sufficient to push it to its utmost stretch,” in other words, a person just like himself. Lincoln had been born with the makings of a tyrant or a rebel angel. If such a man has any conscience, he faces agonizing moral choices.
So this particular Bible story held a special significance for Lincoln. Christ tells the scribes that Satan cannot cast out Satan, because “if Satan rise up against himself, and be divided, he cannot stand, but hath an end” (Mark 3:26). Only good can drive out evil, and injustice must sooner or later sink of its own weight. Embracing the parable, Lincoln had dedicated himself to truth and justice, refusing to use deceit even in championing a good cause, even under the pressure of ambition to advance his career or increase his personal fortune. “Honest Abe” was not a myth or a publicist’s gimmick; it was a model of American folk virtue in tireless action.
The candidate saw how the metaphor of the house divided could figure in his battle with Douglas and the slavemasters. Knowing that slavery is wrong, Lincoln understood that defending it would not preserve the Union. Knowing that the Founding Fathers had intended to halt the proliferation of human bondage, Lincoln was sure that the Democratic Party, which had opened the territories to slavery with its support of the Dred Scott decision, would sooner or later collapse from within.