Ode to Lincoln

After six volumes, there’s really no right way to begin. Lincoln still remains a mystery to me in a way. All I can say after spending such so much time with him is that he’s the greatest man I’ve ever known, ever read about. I’m still not quite sure what drove him other than his love for his fellows and his search for truth.

Michael and I have read biographies about this man. We read 1.2 million words of Shelby Foote. And, after 1.5 million of Sandberg’s words, I can say that he is the greatest American to ever live to me and could be one of the greatest men to ever live. The biographers try to attribute to him some raging ambition beneath the surface from a quote of his talking about wanting to be in the family of the lion or the tribe of the eagle. But I really do believe he was just another man grappling with what life is, what it can mean, and how to maintain some sort of dignity in the minutia and suffering of it.

I don’t really cry when reading and the occasional laugh is usually from some foot soldier’s journal commenting on the conditions his officer is making him endure. Lincoln’s Prairie years had my sides hurting. He must be the funniest man I’ve ever spent time with. Time and time again I had to put the book down to just stop from laughing. He had this joy of life and an insatiable need to tell stories to make others smile and feel at home. The feeling I felt is the one he tried to put into every man. The feeling that you were with him beside the fireplace and just going over life as you found it that day. You never really feel alone when you’re with this man, although he may be the most solitary figure to walk this earth.

He had a soft heart. Many men thought him too weak to be a leader. Growing up on the frontier one would think he would be a hardened fatalist. And in a way he was deep down, for his favorite poem was ‘mortality’ by William Knox which he would recite impromptu on many somber occasions. He honored and cherished life as he found it. He didn’t hunt for game and several times when there was a pig stuck in the mud, he would stop his buggy to go help it out. A heart like his that breaks each time it sees something in pain is magnificent, grand, and may well put him in the family of Aslan. It makes his wanderings through the woods for weeks on end after he lost his first love much more painful to the reader. Such a deep feeling heart makes one wonder how he could back the constant need for military drafts due to the slaughter happening on the front lines in the civil war. Such contradictions made him all the more human, and he could often be found weeping with the widows who came and visited him in the White House when telling him how death pitilessly snatched all their life’s meaning away from them. I knew he was thinking about Willie when those widows walked away.  

Even with his bleeding heart, he had what farmers of his time would call a ‘long head.’ He could see into things much farther than others. The poets would liken him to a captain of a ship. He could see shores, read the stars of current events, and understand the shape-shifting sea of human affairs better than any of his time and maybe ever since. And what is remarkable is that this long head came from long nights of his own making. He was self-taught and self-made, through and through. He would walk miles and miles just to get the next book he was to study. For the brief time that he did go to school, he walked nine miles there and nine miles back, daily. One time he got such a fever for learning that he went to go see a fellow give a talk on law thirty-six miles away just to find out what it was all about. He walked the whole way. After spending the day out in the fields or on the river, he would sit by the fire puzzled, fascinated, and immersed in Euclid.

He learned how to reason from such study. He molded his mind into the logician of his day. In one of his textbooks, he wrote what would be a maxim of his life and of his thinking, ‘deliberate slowly, act promptly.’ His thoughts on religion were so touching, so honest, and so human. They came from a man who wasn’t sure about what’s next, who built his own mother’s casket, and laid over his first lover’s grave to protect her from the drops of rain from the summer storm. He had a faith in Providence, but he had his arguments with It too. All in all, in his actions and in his musings, he earned and suffered for his nickname, ‘Honest Abe.’

I won’t go on too much longer, and I’m going to end with a story. The brevity of this post and to end with a story would honor him most. The only other book that I can think has had such an impact on me is the Brothers Karamazov. These six volumes will be what I would grab first in a house fire should another one happen. It was the journey of a lifetime to travel with this man from the prairie to President and experience the triumphs and the tragedies that marked his fate. I believe his north star was that behind all the folly and tragedy that seems to be mingled inside and outside of man he believed that goodwill towards others in thought and in deed can overcome all. He believed that if you could really get to know the other, you’d say he was made-up of the same good stuff you find yourself thinking you’ve got an overabundance of. He lived out his famous words, ‘with malice towards none, with charity towards all’ when imploring others not to judge their southern brethren after the Civil War.

If you spend time with him and go on his life’s journey with him with these books, the night at Ford’s Theater will move you to a depth of grief and sadness that will permanently mark your soul. In the same way, his funeral train across America and the eulogies others of his time wrote about him will sear your conscience and seal your heart to act always with goodwill towards your fellows, to see what’s best in them, and try to make your life’s work do what his irrevocably did, make men’s life better by being better yourself, make their life more free by becoming more free yourself, and their hearts just a bit more tender and sincere by never hardening your own, despite all life’s suffering convincing you to.

What follows is a story from another one of my heroes, Leo Tolstoy:

To the four corners of the earth began the spread of the Lincoln story and legend. He was wanted. What he seemed to mean was reached for. Hunger and love told men to search him. Travelers on any continent came to expect in humble homes the picture of Lincoln, readiness to talk about him. Of the hundreds of incidents in this field none stood more fascinating than one from Leo Tolstoy of Yasnaya Polyana, Russia, saying: “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. I have heard various tribes of barbarians discussing the New World, but I heard this only in connection with the name Lincoln. Lincoln as the wonderful hero of America is known by the most primitive nations of Asia.”
Traveling in the Caucasus, Tolstoy happened to be the guest of a Circassian tribal chief, a devout Muslim who lived in the mountains far from civilized life, with vague and childish understanding of the outside world. He received Tolstoy with the best of food and drink, after the meal asking his guest to tell him about the outside world, listening with no particular interest till Tolstoy spoke of great statesmen and great generals. Then the tribal chief called in neighbors and sons to listen, wild-looking riders, sons of the wilderness seated on the floor and looking up with a hunger for knowledge. Tolstoy talked about Russian czars and their victories, about foreign rulers and generals. As to Napoleon they wanted more details, asked how his hands looked, how tall he was, who made his guns and pistols, the color of Napoleon’s horse. Tolstoy did his best but could hardly satisfy them when he had told all he knew about Napoleon. Then the chief, a tall, gray-bearded rider, smelling of leather and horses and the earth itself, arose and said very gravely: “But you have not told us a syllable about the greatest general and greatest ruler of the world. We want to know something about him. He was a hero. He spoke with a voice of thunder; he laughed like the sunrise and his deeds were strong as the rock and as sweet as the fragrance of roses. The angels appeared to his mother and predicted that the son whom she would conceive would become the greatest the stars had ever seen. He was so great that he even forgave the crimes of his greatest enemies and shook brotherly hands with those who had plotted against his life. His name was Lincoln and the country in which he lived is called America, which is so far away that if a youth should journey to reach it, he would be an old man when he arrived. Tell us of that man.”
Others shouted, “Tell us, please!” and promised Tolstoy they would pick the best horse in stock and give him as a present. Tolstoy saw their faces shining, eyes burning. He saw rough mountaineer tribesmen thirsting to hear about Abraham Lincoln. He told them of Lincoln as a wise man, a ruler who came from poverty and the plainest of common people. They asked questions. Nine out of ten Tolstoy couldn’t answer. They wanted to know all about Lincoln’s habits, about Lincoln’s influence on the people, how tall he was and how heavy a load he could lift. And they were astonished to hear that Lincoln wasn’t much to look at when riding a horse. “Tell us why he was killed,” said one. Tolstoy did his best; gave them every last item he had about Lincoln. They were lighted over what he told them, spoke “wild thanks,” and the next morning when Tolstoy was leaving the chief brought him a fine Arabian horse as a present for the marvelous story.
One rider went along with Tolstoy to the next town, where Tolstoy hoped to get a picture to send back to the tribe. He managed to find a large photograph of Lincoln. He handed this to the tribesman, who took it with a grave face and hands a little shaky, studied it several minutes like a man in prayer, his eyes filled with tears. Tolstoy asked why he had become so sad. The answer: “I am sad because I feel sorry that he had to die by the hand of a villain. Don’t you find, judging from his picture, that his eyes are full of tears and that his lips are sad with secret sorrow.”
To Tolstoy the incident proved that in far places over the earth the name of Lincoln was worshiped, and the personality of Lincoln had become a world folk legend. Tolstoy believed Lincoln no great general like Napoleon or Washington, nor as skilled a statesman as Frederick the Great and others. Then, ran the inquiry, why should Lincoln overshadow all other national heroes, “He was supreme,” reasoned Tolstoy, through “peculiar moral powers and greatness of character.” Many hardships and much experience brought him to the realization “that the greatest human achievement is love.” And making this specific: “He was what Beethoven was in music, Dante in poetry, Raphael in painting, and Christ in the philosophy of life. He aspired to be divine, and he was.” On a highway of mistakes, he walked true to one main motive, the benefit of mankind. “He was one,” continued Tolstoy, “who wanted to be great through his smallness. If he had failed to become President, he would be no doubt just as great, but only God could appreciate it. The judgment of the world is usually wrong in the beginning, and it takes centuries to correct it. But in the case of Lincoln, the world was right from the start. Sooner or later Lincoln would have been seen to be a great man, even though he had never been an American President. But it would have taken a great generation to place him where he belongs.”
Any form of heroism is doomed to be forgotten unless rooted in four abstractions made concrete in behavior. These Tolstoy would name: humanity, truth, justice, pity. The greatness of Aristotle or Kant he saw as insignificant compared with the greatness of Buddha, Moses, and Christ. “The greatness of Napoleon, Caesar or Washington is moonlight by the sun of Lincoln. His example is universal and will last thousands of years. Washington was a typical American, Napoleon was a typical Frenchman, but Lincoln was a humanitarian as broad as the world. He was bigger than his country-bigger than all the Presidents put together”

Of all great national heroes and statesmen of history Tolstoy would say “Lincoln is the only real giant.” He named many of these heroes to find them lesser than Lincoln “in depth of feeling and in certain moral power.” Deep mystic shadows and a dazzling bright aura gathered around Lincoln’s memory for the famous Russian who put his seal and blessing on it with ecstatic prophecy. “Lincoln was a man of whom a nation has a right to be proud. He was a Christ in miniature, a saint of humanity whose name will live thousands of years in the legends of future generations. We are still too near his greatness, and so can hardly appreciate his divine power; but after a few centuries more our posterity will find him considerably bigger than we do. His genius is still too strong and powerful for the common understanding, just as the sun is too hot when its light beams directly on us.”

Here is Lincoln’s favorite poem which he had memorized by heart.

Written by David Coody