Abraham Lincoln by Stephen B. Oates Page A

himself, took on a lean, unembellished eloquence, gleaming with apt metaphors and precise allusions. We are all familiar with the brilliance of his best state papers during the war—with the Gettysburg Address, the ringing Second Inaugural. Novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe extolled Lincoln for his literary abilities. There were passages in his state papers, she declared, that ought “to be inscribed in letters of gold.”
    With his love for language, he studied Shakespeare, Byron, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, attracted especially to writings with tragic and melancholy themes. He examined the way celebrated orators turned a phrase or employed a figure of speech, looking for great truths greatly told. Though never much at impromptu oratory, he could hold an audience of fifteen thousand spellbound when reading from a written address, speaking out in a shrill, high-pitched voice of great power. On the platform, he often made a point by leaning his head to the side and leveling his finger. When he was “moved by some great & good feeling,” Herndon observed, “by some idea of Liberty or Justice or Right then he seemed an inspired man” and “those little gray eyes…were lighted up by the inward soul on fires of emotion, defending the liberty of man or proclaiming the truths of the Declaration of Independence.” On such occasions, reported a friend, “he was given to raising both arms high as if to embrace a spiritual presence.”
    Yet, in conversation, this literate and poetic man still showed the ineradicable influence of his Kentucky and Indiana background. All his life he said “sot” for sat , “thar” for there , “kin” for can , “airth” for earth , “heered” for heard , and “one of ’em” for one of them . He claimed that “I han’t been caught lyin’ yet, and I don’t mean to be.” He “pitched into” a difficult task “like a dog at root” until he had it “husked out.” He pointed at “yonder” courthouse and addressed the head of a committee as“Mr. Cheermun.” And he “larned” about life and received an “eddication” in the best school of all—the school of adversity.
    One side of Lincoln was always supremely logical and analytical. He was fascinated by the clarity of mathematics and often spoke and wrote with relentless logic and references to this or that proposition. “Their ambition,” he said of the Founding Fathers, “aspired to display before an admiring world, a practical demonstration of the truth of a proposition, which had hitherto been considered, at best no better, than problematical; namely, the capability of a people to govern themselves .” This too came from self-education, this time in Euclid’s geometry. Law associates recalled how he used to ride the circuit with a copy of Euclid in his saddlebags along with Blackstone and The Revised Statutes of Illinois . More than one of them would wake up in the middle of the night and spot Lincoln, his feet sticking over the footboard of a bed, pondering Euclid in the flickering light of a candle, impervious to the snoring of his colleagues in the crowded tavern room.
    Yet this same Lincoln was superstitious, believed in signs and visions, contended that dreams were auguries of approaching triumph or doom. He even insisted that fat men were ideal jurors because he thought them jolly by nature and easily swayed. He was skeptical of organized religion and never joined a church; yet he argued that an omnipotent God controlled all human destinies.
    He was an intense, brooding man, plagued with chronic depression throughout his life. His friends did not know what to make of his bouts of melancholia, or “hypochondria” or the “hypo” as people called it then. In his earlier years, alienated from his parents, trying to escape their world and rise into the