Founders’ Son — Book Review & Quotes

Review

When you read a biography of a U.S. president they’re often framed as a ‘larger than life’ character, often with limited relateability. There are certainly the exceptions where U.S. presidents have felt closer to the bottom of the barrel. What struck me about Lincoln was how human he feels — he liked working, but hated being his Dad’s unpaid labor, ran for office but often lost — but all the sudden he became the face of the biggest conflict that would test the republic all those Foundational Titans had put together starting in 1776.

Lincoln crafted a persona over the course of years that people referred to as his “rube / boob” routine. His humor was self-deprecating to disarm people. But he was never stupid, and you could never say he wasn’t ambitious.

“It was ‘absurd,’ Hay would write after Lincoln’s death, to call him ‘a modest man.’ Beneath the self-mocking stories and the rube/boob persona, Lincoln knew he had reached the White House as a result of six concentrated years of thinking and speaking, persuading and working.”

Quotes

“[Carroll] feared even more changes. ‘A mere Democracy,’ he warned Tocqueville as the visit ended, ‘is but a mob’ — willful, possibly violent. Fortunately, America had a safety valve: ‘Every year we can push our innovators out West.’ This was Carroll’s vision of the frontier: as a dumping ground for democrats.”

“If the dying founders were anxious about their legacy, their heirs were no less troubled to see them go. Fathers should die before their children; it is the order of nature. But then responsibility and anxiety shift to new shoulders.”

“History would tell the story of the founding fathers’ great deeds, but now they had died and it could no longer be living history. ‘They were the pillars of the temple of liberty; and now, that they have crumbled away, that temple must fall, unless we, their descendants, supply their places with other pillars.’”

“This book is not a full-dress biography of Lincoln, or a history of his times. It is not about Lincoln’s marriage, or how the Battle of Gettysburg was won, though it will touch on these and many other points. It is the history of a career, and the unfolding of the ideas that animated it.”

“This book, finally, is training — in thinking, feeling, and acting. The founding fathers were world-historical figures; so was Abraham Lincoln. If we study how Lincoln engaged with them, we can learn how to engage with them, and him, ourselves.”

“She noticed, as an exceptional woman would, that her stepson was exceptional. Her reminiscences of him as a boy were both observant and admiring. ‘He didn’t like physical labor — was diligent for knowledge — wished to know, and if pains and labor would get it he was sure to get it.’ He learned by listening: ‘When old folks were at our house,’ he was ‘silent and attentive…never speaking or asking questions till they were gone, and then he must understand everything, even to the smallest thing, minutely and exactly. He would then repeat it over to himself again and again, sometimes in one form and then in another, and when it was fixed in his mind to suit him he became easy.’ He learned, most of all, by reading. ‘Abe read all the books he could lay his hands on, and when he came across a passage that struck him he would write it down on boards if he had no paper and keep it there till he did get paper. Then he would re-write it, look at it, repeat it.’”

“Reading was the skill that first gave him the power to stretch himself, to go into himself, and to get away from his surroundings.”

“Lincoln told one of these neighbor/employers that his father had taught him how to work, but never learned him to love it. He failed to love it because he was not working for himself. Working for your father on the family farm was one thing; working elsewhere, as a hired tool or draft animal, like a plow or a horse, was something else. It is true that using family members as contract laborers was a common practice, but common practices take different people different ways. Lincoln took it badly. He would make a political philosophy, almost a theology, out of a man’s right to own the fruits of his own labor; the seeds of it may have been planted while he was planting or chopping as Thomas Lincoln’s unpaid work crew.”

“Paine is half right. The world is a good place — except when it’s not. What of the many coughs and rattles in the machinery of the universe — floods, famines, droughts, plagues, eruptions, earthquakes? What of the one-on-one disasters and retail catastrophes that fill every life — the death of Paine’s first wife? The deaths of Nancy Lincoln, Sarah Grigsby, and Ann Rutledge? Paine, from conviction or temperament, heroism or stupidity, looked the other way. Lincoln could not.” — The world changes when there is someone who can no longer look away

“His venue was the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield. Lyceums were discussion groups that met in American towns to hear edifying talks, either by locals or by traveling speakers. The highfalutin name (the original Lyceum was Aristotle’s school in ancient Athens) showed the young country’s ambition for self-improvement.”

“America’s institutions, however, faced a threat from within: mob violence. ‘Accounts of outrages committed by mobs,’ said Lincoln, ‘form the every day news of the times’: ‘They have pervaded the country’ and ‘have grown too familiar to attract anything more than an idle remark.’”

“Whigs in Lincoln’s audience would believe, without him having to argue the point, that an uncontrollable president had somehow given an impetus to lawless mobs.”

“The spectacle of lawlessness would give such rebels their opportunity, but their incentive would be the chance of making a mark in history. Lincoln returned to the founders as a parallel. They had made their mark in history by establishing free government: ‘If they succeeded, they were to be immortalized.’ They had succeeded, and they had their reward: ‘This field of glory is harvested, and the crop is already appropriated.’ ‘But,’ Lincoln went on, ‘new reapers will arise, and they too will seek a field.’ Would those new reapers find glory in maintaining the institutions that other men had created — even men as glorious as the founding fathers? Lincoln scoffed: ‘Such [ambitions] belong not to the family of the lion, or the tribe of the eagle….Towering genius disdains a beaten path. It seeks regions hitherto unexplored.’” — Build vs. maintain

“Napoleon’s career was recent history — he had died in 1821 — and everyone admired him for his abilities and against-all-odds boldness. But he was the archetype of the restless political adventurer; and any republican — like Byron, like Lincoln — deplored him for destroying the French republic and replacing it with his own personal empire.”

“Now that the founders had died, neither they nor our fading loyalty to them could stop the next Napoleon. What could Americans turn to instead? Lincoln’s answer was reason: ‘Passion has helped us but can do so no more. Reason, cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason, must furnish all…our future support.’”

“‘Let reverence for the laws be breathed by every American mother to the lisping babe that prattles on her lap.’ The American institutions would be safe from mobs, from alienation and from towering geniuses alike.”

“The beaten path can be a busy and distracting place.”

“‘[God] renders the worst of human conditions tolerable, while He permits the best to be nothing better than tolerable.’ Depression can seem absurdly self-aggrandizing to those who do not experience it themselves; that does not make it any less painful to those who do.”

“Public achievements are not always compensations for personal deprivation; there have been great men whose private lives were filled with blessings — wonderful parents, happy marriages, splendid children. Lincoln, however, was a wanderer in his own life, looking for something he never quite had. He chose issues in public life for sufficient political and moral reasons, but he came to them with passion to spare.”

“The heroes of ’76 are dead, but they can be summoned; we, their beneficiaries, have an obligation to summon them, especially when there are wrongs to be righted. Even in death they help us (we enjoy the privileges they achieved); so we must help others (with sympathetic and manly protection); the heroic dead can inspire us to do it. Reason is powerful, but so is memory.”

“Lincoln did not believe in compromise for its own sake, or in surrendering essential goals.”

“Lincoln believed emancipation had to come via voter approval. This was an obligation of republican government; a ‘duty,’ as he put it, ‘due…to liberty itself (paradox though it may seem).’ Free men had to choose to free their slaves.”

“But the purpose of the American System was not just to make infrastructure or make money; it was to make men — to develop the talents of individual Americans and the national character. Clay wanted an economy that was diversified and progressive, which would give his countrymen the chance to move beyond hardscrabble farming.”

“But a sense of premature age can also arise from a fear (or a conviction) of futility. Lincoln was still ambitious; he was always ambitious. ‘His ambition,’ as Herndon wrote, ‘was a little engine that knew no rest.’ Yet what did he have to show for it?”

“By the time Lincoln reached his early forties he had not done one important thing. He had led an interesting life, yet he would have had to be a great memoirist, or be imagined by a great novelist, for anyone to recognize it. He was a self-made man of no consequence.”

“‘When the white man governs himself that is self-government; but when he governs himself, and also governs another man, that is more than self-government — that is despotism.’”

“In one of his references to the Constitution, he noted that the words ‘slave’ and ‘slavery’ never appear in it. Fugitive slaves are referred to as ‘Person[s] held to service or labour’; the slave trade as the ‘importation’ of ‘Persons.’ ‘Thus,’ said Lincoln, ‘the thing is hid away in the constitution, just as an afflicted man hides away a wen or a cancer, which he dares not cut out at once, lest he bleed to death.’”

“Taney, said Lincoln, ‘insists at great length that negroes were no part of the people who made, or for whom was made,’ the Constitution or the Declaration. To prove that at least some Negroes were citizens under the Constitution, Lincoln relied on one of the dissenting opinions in Dred Scott, written by Justice Benjamin Curtis. Curtis noted that in 1787–1788, when the Constitution was ratified, five states (New Hampshire, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, and North Carolina) had allowed free Negroes to vote. White men in those states, far from respecting the rights of free black men, as Taney claimed, had respected their right to vote; free black men had voted, along with white men, on the Constitution itself.”

“Lincoln had some fun with Douglas’s charge of race-mixing. It was ‘counterfeit logic,’ he said, to argue ‘that, because I do not want a black woman for a slave I must necessarily want her for a wife. I need not have her for either, I can just leave her alone.’ This was a good line, and he would repeat it many times. It sprang from his own experience: he had left Mary Owens alone by dithering, and he left his wife alone by ignoring her whenever she bothered him; now he could use his difficulties with women in a higher cause.”

“Lincoln ended with a rousing appeal. ‘Two years ago,’ the Republican Party had been formed to resist ‘a common danger….Of strange, discordant, and even hostile elements, we gathered from the four winds….Did we brave all then, to falter now?…The result is not doubtful. We shall not fail — if we stand firm, we shall not fail.’”

“Douglas raised Lincoln up to national prominence. Coming from any other state, a one-term congressmen and local wheelhorse would have struggled in vain for national attention. As the gadfly of such an important Democrat, Lincoln became important himself.”

“Lincoln’s cure for the disease of self-government was self-government. A towering genius, like Napoleon, might fix a broken system by overturning it and imposing a new one, controlled by himself. Lincoln used the means of ordinary politics, making his case on the hustings to voters in Illinois and, as soon as his speeches were reported and reprinted, throughout the North.”

“When Lincoln was a baby, Henry Clay had called for a new race of heroes. Lincoln wanted a new race of heroes, too, so long as they would agree with the old race of heroes. As he put it at Cooper Union, ‘Let [us] speak as they spoke, and act as they acted.’”

“Rutledge had not quite said that slavery and the slave trade were good things, but he certainly thought they were good for business. He would not defend them on the grounds of religion and humanity; he simply put interest above religion and humanity.” — if you ever find yourself this position, repent. Now.

“Who that thought seriously about Jefferson did not hate him, at least a little?”

“Back in 1814 Coles had written a reply to Jefferson that was respectful, yet devastating. The old, he argued, were the best leaders in such a cause. ‘To effect so great and difficult an object great and extensive powers of both mind and influence are required….I looked to you, my dear sir, as the first of our aged worthies, to awaken our fellow Citizens.’ Then a quiet stinger: Benjamin Franklin was politically active past your age. (At the time of the Coles correspondence, Jefferson was seventy-one; when Franklin had been seventy-one, he had yet to negotiate the Treaty of Paris, sign the Constitution — or mock James Jackson.) Coles’s letters to Jefferson were not published in Lincoln’s lifetime, but his point was obvious from Jefferson’s own letter: Jefferson was not too weary for well-doing, he was simply unwilling to do any more good.”

“‘We have the wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him nor safely let him go.’”

“It was ‘absurd,’ Hay would write after Lincoln’s death, to call him ‘a modest man.’ Beneath the self-mocking stories and the rube/boob persona, Lincoln knew he had reached the White House as a result of six concentrated years of thinking and speaking, persuading and working.”

“Doris Kearns Goodwin analyzed Lincoln’s cabinet as a team of rivals, a phrase that has been picked up by political commentators and management texts as a recipe for success — a model to be emulated.”

“‘I go,’ he said in brief remarks, ‘to assume a task more difficult than that which devolved upon General Washington.’ No joking about back houses; this was serious — serious enough to invoke God. ‘Unless the great God who assisted him shall be with me and aid me, I must fail….Let us all pray that the God of our fathers may not forsake us now.’”

“In the most historic spots he recapitulated his many efforts to connect himself to the founding fathers. On February 21, in Trenton, New Jersey, he recalled what Parson Weems had taught him about Washington’s desperate battle there: ‘I recollect thinking then, boy even though I was, that there must have been something more than common that those men struggled for.’ This was his answer to the Washington idolaters, Robert Winthrop and Edward Everett, whose Washington fought merely for unity. Lincoln’s Washington fought for liberty.”

“Slavery, he said, ‘was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution.’ He invoked Jefferson, who had feared that slavery might break the country up (it would be ‘the knell of the union,’ as he wrote John Holmes in 1820). ‘He was right,’ Stephens said simply. ‘What was conjecture with him is now a realized fact.’”

“Was Stephens then the towering genius, the new Napoleon that Lincoln had imagined in 1838? John Brown had been outside politics, a crackpot and a terrorist. Stephens was a statesman who had risen to new eminence in a new cause. But Stephens was no Napoleon. He was hobbled, in the first place, by his office: a Confederate vice president, as it turned out, would be no more potent than an American vice president.”

“He never imagined getting his way by impeachment or (Napoleon’s method) by a coup. He gave an inspired speech, and left it at that.”

“Their style of management — or anti-style — suited a nature that was self-directed, self-willed, solitary. Everything Lincoln had learned, and much of what he had done, he had learned and done by himself. So why submit to the schedules and structures of other men?”

“Lincoln was adept at sensing the mood of the country (at least that part of it that had not seceded.) He did this by attending to his correspondents and to his callers. He might ignore their suggestions and refuse their requests, but he noted what they said. The hordes of petitioners, favor-seekers, well-wishers, would-be counselors, old ladies, clergymen, and disgruntled military officers who wrote him or trekked to the White House to see him were a four-year immersion in popular sentiment. There was no pollsters then to ask people questions; people came straight to Lincoln, by mail or in person, and spoke their minds.”

“Words alone do not win wars or lead men, but what words could do, Lincoln’s would do.”

“Sometimes a leader must manipulate men in secret, sometimes he must manipulate them openly, to show his mastery.”

“The Declaration of Independence, he wrote to himself, expressed the ‘principle of Liberty to all.’ This was the principle that had animated the Revolution. ‘No oppressed people will fight and endure, as our fathers did, without the promise of something better than a mere change of masters.’”

“The Declaration was the end, the Constitution the means. Did that make the Declaration more important than the Constitution? Practically, there was no difference.”

“But, in the crush of politics and the approach of war, Lincoln also devoted a great deal of time to the Declaration and the Constitution. Doing so was not a formality, or a bit of historical decoration. He wanted to show that his course and the country’s destiny depended on the founding documents.”

“When it issued postage stamps, it put Jefferson on one (10 cents) and Washington on another (20 cents). Jefferson Davis, meanwhile, decorated the 5-cent stamp. Confederates, too, wanted to be founders’ sons. Lincoln would have deplored their hypocrisy. The Confederacy put the founders on its letters, but it did not read or heed their words. The Confederates were not just rebels, but vandals, effacing ideas as they destroyed the country.”

“The people had spoken, and Lincoln meant to do what he had told them he would do until they spoke differently.”

“Inspiring words are potent, sometimes dangerous things; they can inspire idiots and devils as well as good men. John Brown read the Bible.”

“But if dead men have lived with a purpose, it can live after them; they can live on in it. We the living can share their purpose, which has become ours.”

“But he made his mark as a politician mostly by communication. He would never have been able to do anything memorable and right if he had not said so many memorable, true words.”

“There are two wrong ways to write about war. One is to treat it as wholly glorious, noble, or purposeful. Propagandists embrace this error, and orators are tempted by it; even a text as chaste as the Gettysburg Address could be so misheard — not, presumably, by many in its first audience, in a newly made cemetery where coffins were still stacked, but by those removed from the event by time or lack of imagination. The other wrong way to write about war is to treat it as wholly meaningless — empty carnage.”

“Where could Lincoln turn for help? To himself, of course, and to his friends, allies, cronies, and instruments. The first is the resource of every man, the others are the resource of every politician.”

“Many people read carelessly or casually, like people grabbing a bit to eat; what they read stays with them as long as what they have eaten. But a storyteller, a displaced poet, a man stooped under his burdens, will absorb a book, even one that he is enjoying, in a different spirit.”

“He began with an extended statement of men’s ignorance and impotence, and God’s power. Neither rebels nor government had expected that the war would last so long or be so transformative. Both sides ‘read the same Bible, and pray to the same God.’ Yet ‘the prayers of both could not be answered; that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes.’ The axiom: God rules. The darkness: His purposes are not ours.”

“The Second Inaugural had a fourth movement, a last paragraph, seventy-five words long: ‘With malice toward none; with charity for all, with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan — to do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting peace, among ourselves and with all nations.’”

“Stephens then said, ‘Life is all a mist, and in the dark our fortunes meet us.’”

“Lincoln, of all men, wanted not to live in a mist. In his worst moods he believed he was damned; at all times his mind taught him (wrongly probably) that he was doomed, predetermined, caught in a mesh of causes. But he always wanted to see, know, and understand. Herndon noted the comprehensiveness of his curiosity, extending to clocks and omnibuses, but his greatest curiosity was about the great things. He wanted to know what America was, what men were, what God wanted. As he did when he was a boy, he would repeat the lessons of the founding fathers and God the Father until he knew them. What he learned was that all men are created free and equal, and that all men (the people) must understand and defend those truths. Then, because he was a politician, ambitious to lead, he did what he could to clear the mist.”