Our Abe
It was here in Indiana that Abraham Lincoln honed his legendary rail-splitting prowess. Here that he learned how to steer a flatboat and read Shakespeare. And here that he helped build his own mother’s coffin. His time in this state even moved him to compose poetry. Yet nearly two centuries of historians have often skimmed over the great man’s Hoosier past. On his 200th birthday, a reconsideration.
By Geoffrey Johnson
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Lincoln sat for his first portriat two years after a political trip brought him back to Southern Indiana. |
On Febuary 24, 1846, 12 days after his 37th birthday, Abraham Lincoln wrote from “Springfield, Ills.” to an acquaintance, Andrew Johnston. “Dear Johnston,” the letter began. “Feeling a little poetic this evening, I have concluded to redeem my promise … by sending you the piece you expressed the wish to have”—a reference to the grim poem Mortality, by Scottish poet William Knox, which remained a favorite of Lincoln’s all his life. Continuing, Lincoln made a rare gesture: This almost pathologically private man offered to show Johnston some of his own poetry. “I have a piece that is almost done,” he wrote, “but I find a deal of trouble to finish it.”
A few weeks later, Johnston replied, suggesting, it seems (for the letter has not survived), that Lincoln had been the author of Mortality. Lincoln was flattered. A graduate of the University of Virginia, a lawyer and newspaper editor in Quincy, Illinois, Johnston was in some ways everything the unrefined, self-educated Lincoln aspired to be. Both stalwart Whigs (a forerunner of today’s Republican Party), the men knew one another from the Illinois legislature and from Lincoln’s riding Illinois’s Eighth Circuit as he practiced law. The pair also shared a love of poetry, and now, in an April 18 letter humbly disavowing authorship of Mortality, Lincoln included his own composition. Its subject, like its inspiration, was Hoosier in nature.
“In the fall of 1844,” Lincoln explained as preface, “thinking I might aid some to carry the State of Indiana for Mr. [Henry] Clay [the Whig candidate for president], I went into the neighborhood in that State in which I was raised, where my mother and only sister were buried, and from which I had been absent about fifteen years. That part of the country is, within itself, as unpoetical as any spot of the earth; but still, seeing it and its objects and inhabitants aroused feelings in me which were certainly poetry; though whether myexpression of those feelings is poetry is quite another question.”
Lincoln went on to write that he had divided his long poem into four cantos. The first, “My Childhood-Home I See Again,” devotes five of its 10 stanzas to a meditation on memory, its language ranging from rhetorical excess—“O memory! thou mid-way world / ’Twixt Earth and Paradise”—to precursors of Lincoln’s greatest speeches: “So memory will hallow all / We’ve known, but know no more.” Full of allusions to young friends grown old or dead, the poem is saturated with a sense of loss and emotions that a modern reader can’t help but conclude arose from Lincoln, after a long absence, having visited his mother’s grave:
I range the fields with pensive tread,
And pace the hollow rooms;
And feel (companion of the dead)
I’m living in the tombs.
The second canto sustains the mood, as Lincoln regards Matthew Gentry, a boyhood friend gone mad. For Lincoln, the afflicted friend suffers a fate more dreadful than the grave: He is a “human form with reason fled, / While wretched life remains.” The third canto, a romp called “The Bear Hunt,” strikes an entirely different tone with its wild evocation of ursine slaughter on the Indiana frontier. Johnston did not include this portion when he published Lincoln’s first two cantos (titled as The Return and printed anonymously) in the Quincy Whig on May 5, 1847.
Neither did Johnston publish any of the fourth canto, which either went unfinished or has vanished. For those proud of their Hoosier heritage, it’s a painful loss. Even the solitary quatrain that survives suggests just how important Indiana was to the man Lincoln had become:
The very spot where grew the bread
That formed my bones, I see.
How strange, old field, on thee to tread,
And feel I’m part of thee!
Lincoln here expresses his powerful connection to the state and acknowledges its primary role in his formation. History itself, though, has often been less assertive in regard to this influence. In part, the blame falls on the man himself—in his lifetime, Lincoln did not comment much about the state where he had spent more than a dozen years. Time itself has been an enemy, as it is in any pursuit of real history. What’s more, the mythologizing that began about Lincoln almost immediately after his death often overlooked—and certainly embellished—this period of his life. All of this has sent diligent scholars in search of the verifiable truths surrounding what for many decades now schoolteachers in Indiana have called the future president’s “formative years.”
