Reputation and character of Abraham Lincoln

“Now he belongs to the ages,” Stanton is supposed to have said as Lincoln took his last breath. Many thought of Lincoln as a martyr. The assassination had occurred on Good Friday, and on the following Sunday, memorable as “Black Easter,” hundreds of speakers found a sermon in the event. Some of them saw more than mere chance in the fact that assassination day was also crucifixion day. One declared, “Jesus Christ died for the world; Abraham Lincoln died for his country.” Thus the posthumous growth of his reputation was influenced by the timing and circumstances of his death, which won for him a kind of sainthood.

Among the many who remembered Lincoln from personal acquaintance, one was sure he had known him more intimately than any of the rest and influenced the world’s conception of him more than all the others put together. That one was his former law partner William Herndon. When Lincoln died, Herndon began a new career as Lincoln authority, collecting reminiscences wherever he could find them and adding his own store of memories. Although admiring Lincoln, he objected to the trend toward sanctifying him. He saw, as the main feature of Lincoln’s life, the far more than ordinary rise of a self-made man, a rise from the lowest depths to the greatest heights—“from a stagnant, putrid pool, like the gas which, set on fire by its own energy and self-combustible nature, rises in jets, blazing, clear, and bright.” To emphasize this point, Herndon gave his most eager attention to evidences of the dismal and sordid in Lincoln’s background. An extremely significant event in Lincoln’s development, as Herndon viewed it, was a “romance of much reality” with Ann Rutledge. Lincoln loved no one but Rutledge and, after her death, never ceased to grieve for her. His memory of her both saddened and inspired him. As for his wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, she married him out of spite, then devoted herself to making him miserable. So Herndon would have it, and after him countless biographers, novelists, and playwrights elaborated upon his views, which persist as accepted knowledge about Lincoln despite their refutation by historical scholarship.

Lincoln has become a myth as well as a man. The Lincoln of legend has grown into a protean god who can assume a shape to please almost anyone. He is Old Abe and at the same time a natural gentleman. He is Honest Abe and yet a being of superhuman shrewdness and cunning. He is also Father Abraham, the wielder of authority, the support of the weak; and he is an equal, a neighbor, and a friend. But there is a malevolent Lincoln as well, and to many Southerners from the time of the Civil War and to some conservative critics today, Lincoln is the wicked slayer of liberty and states’ rights and the father of the all-controlling national state.

Lincoln’s reputation began to grow while he was still alive. In the midst of the Civil War, for instance, the Washington Chronicle found a resemblance between him and George Washington in their “sure judgment,” “perfect balance of thoroughly sound faculties,” and “great calmness of temper, great firmness of purpose, supreme moral principle, and intense patriotism.” The Buffalo Express referred to his “remarkable moderation and freedom from passionate bitterness,” and then added, “We do not believe that Washington himself was less indifferent to the exercise of power for power’s sake.” An English newspaper, the Liverpool Post, suggested that “no leader in a great contest ever stood so little chance of being the subject of hero worship as Abraham Lincoln,” if one were to judge only by the way he looked. His long arms and legs, his grotesque figure, made him too easy to caricature and ridicule. “Yet,” this newspaper concluded, “a worshiper of human heroes might possibly travel a great deal farther and fare much worse for an idol than selecting this same lanky American.” His inner qualities—his faithfulness, honesty, resolution, insight, humor, and courage—would “go a long way to make up a hero,” whatever the man’s personal appearance.

Lincoln’s best ideas and finest phrases were considered and written and rewritten with meticulous revisions. Some resulted from a slow gestation of thought and phrase through many years. One of his recurring themes—probably his central theme—was the promise and the problem of self-government. As early as 1838, speaking to the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield on “The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions,” he recalled the devotion of his Revolutionary forefathers to the cause and went on to say:

Their ambition 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.

Again and again he returned to this idea, especially after the coming of the Civil War, and he steadily improved his phrasing. In his first message to Congress after the fall of Fort Sumter, he declared that the issue between North and South involved more than the future of the United States.

It presents to the whole family of man, the question, whether a constitutional republic, or a democracy—a government of the people, by the same people—can, or cannot, maintain its territorial integrity, against its own domestic foes.

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And finally at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, he made the culminating, supreme statement, concluding with the words:

…that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Cabinet of President Abraham Lincoln

The table provides a list of cabinet members in the administration of President Abraham Lincoln.