Abraham Lincoln and the Myths of History

Abraham Lincoln is generally considered one of the two or three greatest US presidents to have held that office. Many historians consider him the greatest of presidents, certainly the one who served during the most difficult of circumstances. As we will see throughout this semester, however, many--most?--contemporaries doubted that Lincoln had the capabilities to adequately perform the job. How did those perceptions change? How do we measure this nebulous concept of “greatness”?



Abraham Lincoln has come to represent for many all that is good about the United States. A self-made man who, by his own efforts and intelligence was able to rise from a lowly backwoodsman to become president of the United States. Lincoln certainly did not attain this esteemed position based upon his good looks; he himself often referred to the ugliness that his physical presence beamed to those around him. Abnormally tall for his time at 6’4”, he was also quite thin--indeed, from what we can tell from the photographs of the man, his face often took on a gaunt look that deepened the crevices in his face.



Lincoln was also famously self-educated; his only formal education was the several months in a frontier school, were they teachers were only slightly more educated than their students. Here Lincoln learned the rudiment of reading and basic math skills: “Ciphering to a factor of three.” Although initially resistant to attending even this rudimentary school, Lincoln was soon consumed with the need to acquire more knowledge, and worked his way through the meager libraries of neighbors. By the time he reached adulthood, Lincoln had memorized large parts of the Christian Bible, parts of the plays of Shakespeare, and favored poets like Robert Burns.

Lincoln’s obsessive reading is one of the enduring images that we have of him--particularly reading by the firelight in the log cabin he was raised in. Like some other aspects of his life, this scene has been idealized; his obsession with reading was, in fact, a point of contention with his father, mainly because Lincoln devoted time to reading during the working day, when there was plentiful natural light. Lincoln abhorred physical labor, and when he reached the age when he could leave the family farm, he quickly made his escape, first on a raft down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers to make money, and later to the Illinois frontier settlement of New Salem, where he clerked in a general store, began reading the law, and made his first foray into politics. With his move off the farm, he abandoned the world of physical labor, and rarely looked back on it.

New Salem eventually failed because the Sangamon River, which the town had staked its fortune to, proved to be unnavigable for boats of a commercial size. Lincoln moved to a nearby city named Springfield, further downstream on the Sangamon. Springfield was a growing commercial center when Lincoln first road awkwardly into town (Lincoln, observers tell us, did most things awkwardly), although as a larger city in the middle of the state, town fathers were in the midst of making a bid toward becoming the state capitol, since the population in the northern part of the state was beginning to grow rapidly. Before this time, the southern part of the state, populated largely by poor white farmers who had been less than successful or lost their farms in the upper South (particularly Kentucky, like Lincoln’s own father) had predominated. These refugees from the upper South tended to vote for the party of low taxes and small government; this was personified by Andrew Jackson and his Democratic Party. Lincoln, on the other hand, quickly became a partisan of Kentuckian Henry Clay and the Whig Party, and particularly of Clay’s “American Plan” of government assistance for internal improvement like canals and river dredging (of the sort that would have made New Salem more likely to succeed).



In Lincoln’s early political career, we see little attention paid to slavery, the issue that would come to define his later years. The main political division in the country when Lincoln first became active in politics was the main issue that divided Democrats and Whigs, the role of government in promoting economic prosperity--by either keeping taxes low and promoting free trade, or by using public funds for internal improvements and using tariffs to protect domestic industry from foreign competition. While opposition to slavery--its abolition--interested very few whites in the country, most whites in the North were hostile to the extension of Slave Power. Slavery had been prohibited from the Northwest Territory (the country north and west of the Ohio River), and by virtue of the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which prohibited the extension of slavery north of the southern boundary of the state of Missouri.

As Lincoln became more deeply involved in politics, however, this dynamic began to change, and the issue of slavery came to a more prominent position in the national consciousness. As more of the North American continent was opened up to white settlement, slave owners, dependent upon the labor of their slaves for the creation of wealth, became more strident in insisting on the right to bring their “property” with them--and the opposition to slavery, perceiving that allowing slavery into this new territory would give the slave-owning class and undue advantage, became more adamant about keeping slavery out of this “free” territory. Lincoln led the opposition to the Mexican War based on his conviction that the territory gained from Mexico from this war would be added to the slave-holding column, and tip the balance of power toward the pro-slavery forces.

After retiring from politics, Lincoln re-entered the fray in response to his long-time Illinois rival Stephen A. Douglas’ advocacy of “popular sovereignty” to decide whether slavery should be extended to these new territories. While opening this question to a popular democratic vote seemed to many to be a perfectly suitable solution to this conundrum, Lincoln foresaw the instability this plan would engender (“Bleeding Kansas”), as well as facilitating slavery’s further existence; it was expected by many that by preventing slavery’s extension that this would eventually end slavery itself. This Lincoln and others saw as a desirable situation, but this, of course, roused supporters of the continuation of slavery to greater, more desperate actions to facilitate its continuation.

This conflict eventually led Lincoln to be elected President of the United States, and led in turn to the Civil War.