Op-edding

This posting does double duty. It originated as an op-ed piece on Lincoln for the esteemed History News Network on the web. You can't escape it. In case you avoid it there (requested by HNN's editor, it was just submitted today), duck, for here it is again.


Lincoln’s Political Sabbatical

When his one term in Congress ended in 1849, Abraham Lincoln was at a dead end in politics. His record in Congress was unexceptional, indeed counterproductive. He was in trouble at home in Illinois for his opposition to the U.S.-Mexican War. And he had been ill treated in the patronage game by the new Whig president Zachary Taylor, whom he had labored vigorously to help elect.

No longer seeing a place for himself either in national or Illinois politics, he returned full time to his law practice and to traveling the Eighth Judicial Circuit, where he found some solace. He basically believed then that his career in politics was over. And it hurt. He was an ambitious man and this perceived failure to make an enduring mark grieved him.

In an outburst of despair, he told his law partner, Billy Herndon, “How hard—oh, how more than hard—it is to die and leave one’s country no better for the life of him that lived and died her child!”

His reading of the newspapers of the day didn’t ease his despair. The lethal issue of slavery was tearing at the unity of the Union.
“The world is dead to hope,” he told Herndon, “deaf to its own death struggle made known by a universal cry. What is to be done? Is nothing to be done? Who can do anything and how can it be done? Did you ever think on these things?”

What Lincoln did not know then was that something could be done and would be done--by him. There began, unknown to anybody-- unknown to him--five years in which he would be preparing himself for future greatness.

For those five years, practicing law, traveling the circuit, Lincoln read intently and thought deeply. John Stuart, a former law partner and fellow lawyer on the circuit, remembers how evenings after court Lincoln would strip off his coat and lie down on the bed and read and reflect and digest what he was reading. After supper he would slip into his nightshirt, light a candle, draw up a chair or table, and read late into the night.

Lincoln boned the issue of Union-threatening slavery in the territories. He read widely in the newspapers, driving Billy Herndon nearly out of his mind by insisting on reading them aloud in the law office, so as to ”catch the idea by two senses”—simultaneously hearing and seeing it. That way Lincoln told Herndon, “I remember it better, if I do not understand it better.”

Lincoln also read the works of great writers. He carried Shakespeare on the circuit with him. He loved and read Robert Burns and could quote the poetry of Edgar Allan Poe. He was reputedly introduced to the powerful writing of the poet Walt Whitman. And to hone his power of reasoning he mastered the six books of Euclid. He was, perhaps unconsciously, honing his eloquence and his reasoning to razor sharpness.

By the end of this five years of political eclipse Lincoln probably had a better grip on the divisive issue of slavery than any man in the country, including his long time great Democratic rival, Senator Stephen A. Douglas. As Lincoln languished in the political shadows, Douglas’s brilliant star had soared. It was generally conceded that the stumpy “Little Giant,” whom Lincoln had known so well in Illinois, and had crossed his political sword with so often in the past, was destined for the presidency.

Douglas had been the chief architect of the Compromise of 1850, which had put a temporary lid on the simmering controversy over slavery in the territories. Douglas believed that the answer, the cure-all, to slavery agitation in America was “popular sovereignty”--letting every territory decide for itself whether it would enter the Union a free state or a slave state. Douglas claimed not to care if slavery was voted up or voted down, as long as the decision accurately mirrored the will of the people of the territory.

Lincoln’s five years of reading and his lifetime of thinking slavery wrong, rebelled at this proposed solution to the problem. In his eyes Douglas’s “popular sovereignty” ignored the moral issue—the immorality of slavery--and therefore it was wrong, as slavery itself was wrong.

In 1854, to clear the way for the widespread implementation of his popular sovereignty solution in the territories, Douglas rammed through Congress—and strong armed President Franklin Pierce into signing--the Kansas-Nebraska Act. That act, which stirred outrage in the North, abolished the dividing line between North and South that had kept slavery from expanding into free territory since 1820. Under this new law, slavery would not continue to be contained in the South alone, but could expand into all the territories, North as well as South.

This, Lincoln believed, would never do. It must be vigorously resisted. When the law passed, all of Lincoln’s five years of silent preparation flowered. Armed by all the thinking and reading of those past five years, he stormed out of eclipse to meet Douglas and his popular sovereignty solution head on. He immediately became the Little Giant’s most eloquent, most devastatingly effective antagonist, and the weapon that all anti-Kansas-Nebraska men in Illinois, and eventually in the Union, would wield against him.

Lincoln dogged Douglas as he stumped for support of his new act in Illinois in 1854, speaking after Douglas spoke, refuting his pro-Kansas-Nebraska arguments on every possible platform. Newly joined to the newly formed Republican Party, Lincoln became the obvious choice to run against Douglas for his senate in Illinois in 1858. Together those two “giants” from Illinois waged the great debates over the slavery issue that immortalized them in American political history. Lincoln lost to Douglas in that campaign. But two years later, now an acknowledged political power in his own right, a man who could stand toe-to-toe to Douglas, it would be he, not Douglas, who would be elected president.

In his five years of political hibernation, when he believed himself dead in politics, Lincoln had, unwittingly perhaps, deeply prepared himself to play out his destiny—the man who had to do what had to be done.

The Gap Thing

Luckily all of us today, living today, have more or less figured our times out. We have all been born into either this century or the last one, folded into modern times gradually, with a chance to gear up to what it is all about, acclimatize ourselves, and to exist in it.

But imagine how a 19th century person, or an 18th or 17th or 16th--or any other long past century you want to think of---would feel if suddenly jerked out of his or her time and plopped down in ours—in a horse and buggy in the middle of going home traffic on I-Something Or Other. Talk about terrifying.

And that would be just the start of traumatic disorientation. There are all of the other wonders of modern times waiting to flummox and amaze our time traveler—television with its hundreds of channels, computers, the world wide web, and all of the other unimaginables of the electronic age. I would think even something so commonplace as a refrigerator would give them chills in more ways than one. I imagine the likely emotion, until they were forced to stay and get used to it, would be, “how do I get the hell out of here?”

This would be true of any time traveler whipped from their century suddenly into some distant future one. But I doubt if the shock of change was ever as abrupt and disorienting as it would be now coming from any other past distant century suddenly into this one. The changes have just been so rapid, revolutionary, and astounding. And it is bound to get worse at the rate progress is progressing. The most far-fetched landscape of the most far-out science fiction depiction of the world or worlds of tomorrow may not be so far fetched as we now think they are.

Even though I have lived through much of the past century and into the early years of this one, I have a hard time adjusting to the speed of change. There are times I empathize with something Orlando said in Shakespeare’s As You Like It, that I am “not for the fashion of these times.”

Besides, there is the generational gap thing. It is a gap that is demonstrated no more vividly for me than in the comparative reflex action I have and somebody far younger than I has when confronted with the need for information. When I need to know something I don’t know—too often the case--my first impulse is to go to a library to get it. The first impulse of my many-years-junior is to get up on the internet and find it, while perhaps wondering what this “library” thing the old man is talking about has to do with information.

Oh, well, I can’t rightly feel superior about it all. The youngster will probably have the answer before I can get into the car and to the library. Such are the times we live in.

History & Herstory

I have been on the road for a couple of weeks, hence the long hiatus between blog posts. Being on the road happens to you when you write a book. You have to leave home for one reason or another having to do with the baby you have just birthed. And out on the road I was thinking a good deal about history, the thing I allegedly write about.

Some time ago I figured out that there are basically two kinds of history—studies and stories. Studies are what serious historians with academic credentials tend to write—deep-thought stuff dripping with perspective and interpretation. Stories are what some of them also--and the rest of us--write, and they are called narratives. Narrative history also has perspective and interpretation folded in, but its main function is to tell a story. And believe me, history is, above everything else, a great story, a dramatic story. Put yourself down anywhere, anytime, in the past and something worth writiing about is going on. Somebody is doing something fascinating and probably doing it to somebody else.

Many great minds over the centuries have taken a turn at defining history. Henry Ford, the Model-T man, called history “bunk.” (He later said he didn’t say it quite that way, or that he had been misquoted – a distinct possibility.)

Voltaire, the great French philosopher and author, evidently thought seriously about history, for he called it “a pack of tricks we played upon the dead,” and “just fables that have been agreed upon.” He also called us historians “gossips who tease the dead.” A number of other thinkers have also called history gossip. “Merely gossip,” growled Oscar Wilde, the British iconoclastic playwright; “Broad-guage gossip,” grumped Ambrose Bierce, the equally iconoclastic and eccdentric American journalist-short story writer.

Guy de Maupassant, another Frenchman, called history “that excitable and unreliable old lady.” Henry Steele Commager, the fine American historian, called it “a jangle of accidents, blunders, surprises, and absurdities.”

An anonymous source has tried to set us all straight on the subject by reminding us that “history is herstory, too.”

But of all the definitions of history that I have heard, I like best what Winston Churchill, a great everything, said about it: “History with its flickering lamp stumbles along the trail of the past, trying to reconstruct its scenes, to revive its echoes, and kindle with pale gleams the passion of former days.”

Churchill’s words constitute my marching orders. What I try to do is what he said: stumble along the trail of the past with my flickering lamp, striving to reconstruct its scenes, to revive its echoes, and to rekindle its passion--with my regrettably too pale gleams.

I also try to do what Frank Buck said: “Bring ‘em back alive.” Bring ‘em (all those great characters of the past) back to life--so I can meet ‘em again and introduce ‘em to you.

Have Pen, Will Sign

When you write a book you lay yourself open to its handmaiden, book signings. In a dozen years of writing books I have suffered through, enjoyed, loved, hated, bounded through, stumbled through, signed and missigned books at any number and variety of bookstores in all parts of the country. I have signed anywhere from zero books to scores of them in one signing. I have signed them in Barnes and Nobles and Borders, and in the most unknown, struggling, and dusty bookstores in America. They are a trial and they are a joy. The joy is in the fact you meet a lot of nice bookstore people and on a good afternoon or evening actually sign a lot of books. The trial is when bookstore patrons stream past your desk, stare absently at you and your book, and nobody ever buys one.

In a big bookstore in Louisville one afternoon I signed upward of 45 books--a great day. The community relations person--what they call the always helpful bookstore employees who coordinate signings--thought so too.

"This has been a great signing," he said.

And I said, "What would you consider a really, really great signing," I asked.

"Well, he said, somewhat sheepishly, "recently we had Winona Judd in here with her book and 1,100 people showed up."

Jimmy Carter showed up In Dallas recently with his book of poetry and about 2,000 got in line. It makes me think that to get a really, really good turnout you need to be an ex-president, be famous or notorious, serve a term in prison before writing your book, be on TV regularly, or have Oprah endorse what you have written. It might also help if you wrote a bodice-ripper instead of a work of history.

At any rate, I have started doing signings for ONE MAN GREAT ENOUGH. The most successful one so far was at my high school reunion in Tucson, Arizona, two weekends ago. Since they knew me there somewhat and wondered how I ever managed to write a book, I sold out. I have had two other signings since, an evening in the Barnes & Noble on University Avenue in Fort Worth, Texas, where I didn't sell out but had a good time. They still have a pile of the books there, all pre-signed, if anybody is interested. And just this past weekend, November 3, I signed in the corner of a tent at the big Texas Book Festival. A few people managed to find us--I was signing with another Lincoln author, Orville Vernon Burton, who was there with his excellent book, THE AGE OF LINCOLN.

So it goes. In case anybody wants to know how I feel about it all, I say, "Have pen, will sign."

Getting Started

The title of this blog--historyspeak--may be slightly misleading because it will not only be talk about the past, but talk about the present--anything that might come into my head about history or anything else that is out-of-date, current, or yet to come. But since I basically live in the 19th century--in the Civil War era--it is likely to be a thought or comment about something going on back then. I return to the 21st century on a regular basis only for sustenance, paying bills, and playing a set or two of tennis. My wife, Kathleen, is never sure on any given day exactly when or whether I will be back in time for dinner. It is always difficult to pry myself loose from my friends in the 19th century, since they are so interesting.

All of those friends back there are technically dead, but that is also misleadiing, for they are vividly alive to me. The reason--the only reason--I write history, is for the opportunity the make them live vividly for you as well. My goal is to try to write non-fiction and make it read like fiction. Don't ask me how that is done. Because I don't really know. As Somerset Maugham, the great Brirish novelist, reputedly said: "There are three basic rules to writing a novel--unfortunately nobody knows what they are."

At any rate, consider that whether we know what we are doing or not we are in this thing--past, present, or future--together. I will greatly appreciate visiting with you, in any or all three venues.