“Nor must Uncle Sam’s Web-feet be forgotten”
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America 250 on Mostly Aesthetics, Part 2: Lincoln as Writer.
1. The greatest prose stylist America has yet produced, was also our greatest president. They long for this to be no coincidence, the writers among us. Although most famous for his famous speeches, Abraham Lincoln also had ambitions in poetry, and even found time to write a little ditty after the battle of Gettysburg, in the voice of Robert E. Lee:
In eighteen sixty three, with pomp, and mighty swell, Me and Jeff’s Confederacy, went forth to sack Phil-del, The Yankees they got arter us, and giv us particular hell, And we skedaddled back again, and didn’t sack Phil-del.
So Lincoln’s poetry was not so good. But he wrote poetic prose more often than you would expect. Those expectations should be low—right?—because, after the 1860 election, everything Lincoln did, and wrote, was about the war, and—inaugurals, annual messages to congress, and Gettysburg Addresses aside—must have been written quickly, without even a typewriter. But look at this 1863 letter to James Conkling. Conkling was for the Union, but against emancipation. Lincoln thought this an inconsistent position, like being for walking, but against moving one’s feet. So, mostly, the letter is legalistic, and argumentative:
The most that can be said, if so much, is that slaves are property. Is there—has there ever been—any question that by the law of war, property, both of enemies and friends, may be taken when needed?
[The emancipation] proclamation, as law, either is valid, or is not valid. If it is not valid, it needs no retraction. If it is valid, it can not be retracted, any more than the dead can be brought to life.
But near the end Lincoln inserts a wonderful lyric passage. The occasion did not demand this, making it all the more something to admire:
The signs look better. The Father of Waters again goes unvexed to the sea. Thanks to the great North-West for it. Nor yet wholly to them. Three hundred miles up, they met New-England, Empire, Key-Stone, and Jersey, hewing their way right and left. The Sunny South too, in more colors than one, also lent a hand. On the spot, their part of the history was jotted down in black and white. The job was a great national one; and let none be banned who bore an honorable part in it. And while those who have cleared the great river may well be proud, even that is not all. It is hard to say that anything has been more bravely, and well done, than at Antietam, Murfreesboro, Gettysburg, and on many fields of lesser note. Nor must Uncle Sam’s Web-feet be forgotten. At all the watery margins they have been present. Not only on the deep sea, the broad bay, and the rapid river, but also up the narrow muddy bayou, and wherever the ground was a little damp, they have been, and made their tracks. Thanks to all. For the great republic—for the principles it lives by, and keeps alive—for man’s vast future,—thanks to all.
Wherever the ground was a little damp: I love that.
2. Ours is an age unique in its destructive polarization, and in our eagerness to demonize “the other side,” right? Does each side, today, “denounce the other as reptiles,” or as “no better than outlaws”? Will people “grant a hearing to pirates or murderers,” but not to their political opponents? When the people of one side talk, do they regard “an unconditional condemnation” of the other side “as the first thing to be attended to”? Indeed, is such condemnation a kind of visa, or badge, “an indispensable prerequisite...to be admitted or permitted to speak at all”? But this is nothing new, it was the same in 1860—and I was going to suggest, originally, that this could give us some perspective. It took a second draft to realize, that parallels between our era and the Civil War, will not calm the alarm bells in our heads. The similarities include the sad fact, that party factions associate each other with The Enemy, and the enemy with the devil. “In your political contests among yourselves,” Lincoln said, rhetorically, to the “Southern people,” in his Cooper Union address,
each faction charges the other with sympathy with Black Republicanism; and then, to give point to the charge, defines Black Republicanism to simply be insurrection, blood and thunder among the slaves.
3. It’s said by some, today, that “all men are created equal,” in the Declaration of Independence, did not mean just that. This is urged as a recent insight of our enlightened times, meant to pierce the wool that blind patriots pull over our eyes. But in fact it’s an old idea, one Lincoln had to fight against, even before he had to fight against armed men: the “principles of Jefferson”
are denied, and evaded, with no small show of success. One dashingly calls them “glittering generalities”; another bluntly calls them “self evident lies”; and still other insidiously argue that they apply only to “superior races.”
Such “expressions,” Lincoln wrote, “are the van-guard—the miners, and sappers—of returning despotism.” I find this fascinating. It is currently a left- or progressive-coded idea, that “all men are created equal” did not mean all men. But in the lead-up to the civil war, this interpretation was the favorite of the opponents of progress, and part of their defense of slavery. In the letter I’m quoting from, Lincoln goes on to write a sentence—which almost scans as iambic—that could be on the wall of his memorial, if the competition were not so fierce:
This is a world of compensations; and he who would be no slave, must consent to have no slave.
See also: Part 1.