Voices from the Past Part 137

Executive Mansion

May 7, 1863

North versus South, we have a population of 18 million fighting a population of 5 million, folly vs. folly, brother vs. brother, Commander Lee vs. General Lee, Major Crittenden vs. General Crittenden.

Europeans a.s.sure me that my cause is a lost cause. They say I will never eradicate slavery. The South says I will never end slavery because it is an honorable way of life.

Our Indian brothers have sided with the South. But it is the cause of the Union that gives us strength, gives us right.

Union forever...flags...they wave yet do not heal...they acclaim patriotism. But patriotism can blind us. It is a "whirlwind," as Emerson reminds us. For my part, it is my oath to preserve and protect this government of freedom for all men.

My convictions do not wane as cabinet members fail me.

I am firmly convinced that tact can win against men who oppose, who are selfish or temporarily deaf. I believe the citizenry understands me as I understand them, as they pour into my office and talk with me.

May 19, 1863

I reaffirm myself.

I wish to tell that I was a man of the wilderness; I wish to write about my mother, about my village of New Salem, my home in Springfield with its maple trees. I see the sunlight in my office windows and it is also the sunlight of my boyhood and youth.

Tomorrow night, with my lamps lit and candles on my desk, I will begin to find out who I am.

I will begin to go back twenty years, thirty years, forty years. Snow storms will batter our log cabin. I will recall what it was to go hungry. I will try to fit together hours, days, nights. I'll open the prairie schooner of my brain.

I had requested the telegraph office: NO TELEGRAMS between one and 5 a.m.

To commence my diary I will use lines I wrote a few years ago for an Illinois newspaper.

May 20, 1863

I am six feet four inches tall and weigh one hundred and eighty pounds. I am lean, muscular, have dark skin, coa.r.s.e black hair and grey eyes. My legs and arms are long; my hands are large; I wear a size 12 shoe.

I was put to work when I was about eight or nine-farmed out for 13 cents a day. I cut wood, mended fences, herded cattle, dug ditches. At home, I milked our cow, lugged pails of water, cleaned slop, fed the stove. Weather meant almost nothing to my family; we lived exactly like Indians in our 3-sided cabin. We ate like Indians-when we could. At times we said nothing to each other for days on end that could be in any way construed as interesting.

Executive Mansion

May 22, 1863

I was born February 12, 1809, in Hardin County, Kentucky. My parents were born in Virginia, of undistinguished families-second families, perhaps I should say. My mother, who died in my tenth year, was of a family of the name of Hanks...

My paternal grandfather, Abraham Lincoln, emigrated from Virginia to Kentucky about 1781, where a year or two later he was killed by Indians, not in battle, but by stealth, when he was laboring to open a farm in the forest.

My father, at the death of his father, was but six years of age, and he grew up literally without education.

When I was eight he removed from Kentucky to Indiana; we reached our new home about the time the state came into the Union. It was a wild region, with many bears and other wild animals still in the woods...

My father settled in an unbroken forest, and the clearing away of surplus wood was the great task ahead.

Though very young I had an ax put in my hands...and from that, till within my twenty-third year, I was constantly handling that useful instrument.

...A few days before the completion of my eighth year, in my father's absence, a flock of wild turkey approached our new log cabin. Standing inside, I shot through a crack and killed one of them. I have never since pulled a trigger on larger game.

I think that the aggregate of all my schooling did not amount to one year. I was never in a college or academy as a student, and never inside of a college or academy building till I had a law license. After I was twenty- three and had separated from my father, I studied English grammar. I have studied and nearly mastered the six books of Euclid since I became a member of Congress.

Executive Mansion

June 1, 1863

In the wilderness there were some schools, so called, but no qualification was ever required of a teacher beyond "readin', writin' and cipherin' " to the rule of three. If a straggler, supposed to understand Latin, happened to sojourn in the neighborhood, he was looked upon as a wizard. There was absolutely nothing to excite ambition for education. Of course, when I came of age I did not know much. Still, somehow, I could read, write, and cipher to the rule of three... The little advance I now have upon this store of education I have picked up from time to time under the pressure of necessity.

My father lived in k.n.o.b Creek, Kentucky; from this place he removed to Spencer County, Indiana, in the autumn of 1816; I was eight. The removal was partly on account of his resentment of slavery, but chiefly on account of the difficulty in acquiring legal land t.i.tles.

I became a sort of clerk in New Salem; I served as postmaster; then came the Black Hawk War; I was elected a Captain of volunteers, a success which gave me more freedom than any I have had since.

I went on the campaign, a campaign that led nowhere, except to the dead, that row of eleven men, lying in the sun, each head neatly scalped. I ran for legislature the same year (1832), and was beaten. It is the only time I ever have been beaten by the people. The next and three succeeding biennial elections I was elected to the state legislature.

As I rode horseback along the county roads something rode with me, an inner person. Beside the road, my horse browsing, I read a book. I remember sitting by a creek, listening to the frogs in the chill spring air; there was that person, that inner force.

I knew that there was little or no chance for advancement in this rural community unless it came through politics. So, politics had to s.h.i.+ne my shoes and buy my trousers. I would prove that honesty was appreciated here. I would fit it into the crown of my hat.

June 5, 1863

It is a great piece of folly to attempt to make anything out of my early life. It can be all condensed into a simple sentence, and that sentence you will find in Grey's Elegy: "The short and simple annals of the poor."

And I add Grey's lines for myself :

Far from the madding crowd's ign.o.ble strife

Their sober wishes never learned to stray;

Along the cool sequestered vale of life

They kept the noiseless tenor of their way.