Carl Sandburg’s Lincoln

By Steve Polston

Having spent the best part of January and February reading Lincoln, with intent to write for the newsletter, I was loathe to begin for fear I would spend the better part of another two months in the throes of review.

Better to let this book percolate for a while.

I now am convinced as one who is a late convert to Lincolniana that this is a book that every Indiana child should begin reading in fourth grade and carry through high school, dog-earing as I did the many, many, many references to Indiana politicians and politics. The research is impeccable and the writing is simple.

This perhaps is a book that can inspire any Hoosier child to lead the better life of moral turpitude and avoid a life of politics.

Along the way, said young boy or girl should visit the Lincoln Boyhood Home national memorial in Lincoln City, Ind., probably as part of a visit to Lincoln State Park and Santa Claus, Ind., and the Splashin’ Safari. The family that owns and runs the theme park is known and well respected for its attention to “visitor experience,” and clean family fun.

The state park across from Thomas Lincoln’s farm provides camping, fishing and limited hiking experience; the national memorial includes walking and driving trails around the modest farm where Lincoln’s mother and sister acquired the milk sickness, died and were buried.

Down the road a mile is Gentryville and site of the Gentry home and a general store. Lincoln may have been employed here, as he generally was throughout the neighborhood when he was a young teenager. Indeed, Lincoln says of the area, “here I grew up.”

The whole area is a tourism and entertainment complex that can provide days of education. It qualifies, nominally as a tourist trap — so be it; but when the matter is about pride in a son of the Hoosier soil, the expense of energy is worth it.

But if your thoughts run a little darkly as do mine, you may be best to steel yourself and any young folks with you for quite a bit of sadness as you study Lincoln and his family.

Ultimately, I think, Lincoln is a tragic figure in world history, and was not fated, per se, to become a tragic hero, though he did grow into the role.

Sandburg was a Pulitzer Prize winning poet and author from the Illinois prairie, growing up hearing the old timers’ tales of Lincoln mythology, and perhaps owing to his brilliance grew into a fate of writing the Lincoln saga, initially in six volumes. The Prairie Years and War Years volumes were condensed into a single volume, but at 750-plus pages including notes, it is difficult to see how an author of epic research could condense any more. Surprising to me was to realize that much, much more was written about Lincoln locally by Illinois historians and modern writers than ever was written by Sandburg.

Sandburg spent a short piece of his life writing what would take mere writers entire lives, and with this work places himself at the top on a scale with all the world’s writers.

Obviously, hyperbole was inspired in me as I read the book.

The first half of the book covers Lincoln’s boyhood — largely situated in Kentucky and southern Indiana, and his young adulthood in Illinois, learning the merchant trades, racking up debt and generally proving himself to be a true American man. He was the rail-splitter, known for kindness to his neighbors and as a nascent politician. In Illinois he studied law alone and did not pursue education in the way that many of our friends might at night school at IUPUI; he borrowed books and befriended lawyers.

Making friends in politics was an early Lincoln avocation, but making friends of politicians was his vocation. Making and keeping friends of politicians and with politics was his passionate calling.

By the time Lincoln had served a term in Congress — then sat out to allow friends in the party to pursue office for a while per the agreements — the future president had married Mary Todd, who is a minor figure in Sandburg’s work.

But the impact and magnitude of Mary Todd Lincoln, the wife, on Abraham Lincoln, the politician, was enormous. She was rather jealous, protective and a social climber — that this picture emerges is not a surprise, owing to the mythology of the dame, no doubt handed down through Sandburg’s brief treatments. Together the Lincolns resemble a Martha Stewart Living couple, a Bonfire of the Vanities pair, who set up house and household budget clearly for the purpose of polite and political entertainment.

The period of the war years covered by Sandburg shows a pair of politicians brooding about each and every detail of governance and government in a fractured and fractious economic and political environment. Weekly open houses at the executive residence showed the press of people on the couple’s entertainment nerves to be overwhelming, physically. Often, the sheer volume of hand shaking swelled Abraham’s hands and he would shed his initially white gloves after they were covered by the oil and sweat of hundreds of visitors.

Daily, Lincoln would grasp the details of government and his two private secretaries recorded a blur of faces and details, the press of information given and received by cabinet secretaries, bankers, old friends and mothers of soldiers. America not only was engaged in a great civil war, but in the business of nation building… moving not only materiel and money from treasury to battlefield, but people and goods from coast to coast; land offices were doing a land-office business and the squires of courts and factories were vying for favors and favoritism.

Lincoln toiled day and night, hieing himself from bed to office with a dizzying attention to telegraph communications from the war front and the intricate, infinite detail of pouting speeches from Congressmen, generals and, sadly, the in-person pleas of mothers wanting safe passage from Northern neighborhoods to Southern battle lines to retrieve their sole surviving sons to come home and run hardscrabble, modest farms.

All the while, Abraham had developed and stuck to his idea that all men are created equal — no compromise of war with the South could ignore that credo; and the country fell farther and deeper into its re-birth.

Lincoln reported a few times to intimates that on his way to Washington for his first term he looked in the mirror — no daydream, this — and saw two images of himself, the disturbing half of the scene was himself as an apparition. He interpreted this to mean that he would be elected for a second term, but not live to serve.

If a dream can be interpreted by anybody not the dreamer but accurately, maybe the apparition is fore-image of the melancholy and holy savior of a nation.

Since my march through Sandburg’s great tome, I have moved on to Kitty Kelly’s unauthorized biography of the Bush dynasty, The Family. A striking similarity emerges of a political family and of people wanting to do the right thing; other striking thoughts emerge of purpose.