On May 30, 1922, a century ago, a great crowd, including Abraham Lincoln’s only surviving son, 78-year-old Robert Todd Lincoln, gathered for the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial. To celebrate this momentous centennial, let us reflect upon the making of the literary Lincoln.
On February 12, 1809, a boy was born in a log cabin in the backwoods of the American Middle West. He grew up with little formal schooling and never traveled beyond a few rural counties. But Abraham Lincoln was suffused with an overarching sense of purpose. When others taunted him that he was wasting his time “readin’ and learnin’,” young Abe answered, “I will study and get ready, and some day my chance will come.” In books he found wise counselors that shaped his aspirations before the world had yet heard of him. “The things I want to know are in books,” young Abraham told those who doubted him. “My best friend is the man who’ll git me a book I ain’t read.” Too poor to buy books, he borrowed them, once walking 40 miles to get one.
Cousins Dennis and John Hanks, who shucked corn and split rails with Lincoln from sun-up to sundown, thought there was something “peculiarsome in Abe.” John Hanks, said, “When Abe and I came back to the house from work, he’d go to the cupboard, snatch a piece of corn bread, sit down, take a book, stick his legs up as high as his head, and read in front of a fireplace till midnight.”
As a young man, Abraham Lincoln steeped himself in the rhetoric of the classical authors, the wisdom of Aesop, the music of the King James Bible, and the expansive humanity of William Shakespeare, John Bunyan, Daniel Defoe, and Robert Burns. By the time he became president, he had developed a luminous prose style of his own — simple, clear, precise, forceful, rhythmic, poetic, and, at times, majestic. John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Ulysses S. Grant, and some presidents since possessed surpassing verbal skills, but, at his best, Lincoln towered above them all. The critic Jacques Barzun called him a “literary genius.”
On November 19, 1863, Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address, the most memorable and memorized speech in American history. With but 272 words, President Lincoln transformed a gruesome battle into the raison d’être of a truly United States that for the first time in its history became a union. Before Lincoln, people said and wrote, “The United States are . . .” Ever after, it would be “The United States is . . .”
That same day at Gettysburg, Edward Everett, famed for his oratory, spoke for close to two hours, while Lincoln took scarcely more than two minutes. Afterwards, Everett took Lincoln aside and told him, “My speech will soon be forgotten; yours never will. How gladly would I exchange my hundred pages for your 20 lines!”
A year later, on November 21, 1864, even while a sundered nation was slaughtering itself on the battlefields of the Civil War, Lincoln could still find time to write this letter to Lydia Parker Bixby. Hear how Lincoln’s message gains stateliness through the simplicity of its word choice and the rolling thunder of its cadence:
“Dear Madam: I have been shown in the files of the War Department a statement of the Adjutant-General of Massachusetts that you are the mother of five sons who have died gloriously on the field of battle. I feel how weak and fruitless must be any words of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming. But I cannot refrain from tendering to you the consolation that may be found in the thanks of the Republic they died to save. I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement, and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom. Yours very sincerely and respectfully, A. Lincoln”
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On Sunday, June 12, starting at 2pm, I’ll be performing “An Afternoon of Language and Laughter” at The Flower Fields at Carlsbad Ranch, 5704 Paseo del Norte. I’d love to meet you there. My show will entirely benefit the New Village Arts Theater. For information, please call the box office at 760 433 3245 or visit the website https://newvillagearts.org/event/richard-lederer/.