More from Talmage on the Lincoln Bicentennial

For non-“Lincolnphiles” who have a hard time remembering the basics of our 16th president’s life, this essay provides an overview of the lawyer-turned-statesman and builds the case that Lincoln is the ultimate role model for our profession. From reading and synthesizing six acclaimed recent biographies of Lincoln,[2] four essential characteristics stand out.

1. BRILLIANCE: Lincoln had astounding powers of concentration, comprehension, open-mindedness, discernment, and communication.

As a boy, Lincoln read every book he could get his hands on. Although the quantity of books available to him in rural Kentucky and Indiana was limited, the quality was high - the King James Bible, Aesop’s Fables, Shakespeare’s plays, the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, and Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress. Lincoln read these timeless masterpieces over and over, memorizing long passages that would form the foundation of his eloquence.

Lincoln’s desire to learn and master arcane material was not a boyhood phenomenon; it lasted throughout his life. Over the course of his adult years, he mastered topics ranging from law to Euclidean geometry to military strategy to foreign policy to the verses of leading poets.

Consistent with his lifelong obsession with reading, Lincoln, as a lawyer and politician, earned a reputation for thoroughly researching and considering all sides of an issue before forming a final opinion. Moreover, he developed that opinion only after extended time in solitude. He didn’t delegate his critical thinking to advisers. Doris Kearns Goodwin quotes Lincoln’s secretary, John Nicolay, on how the president would “resort to the process of cumulative thought, reducing complex ideas to paragraphs and sentences, and then days or weeks later would return to the same passage and polish it further to elaborate or to conclude his point or argument.” This approach is best evidenced by the Gettysburg Address, which reflected Lincoln’s “intense focus on his chosen theme for nearly a decade.”

Because of the deep thinking that went into reaching a conclusion, Lincoln held fast into his convictions. Biographer William Lee Miller relates an exchange between Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, who had described the president’s position on slavery as “slow and vacillating”:

I make no objection to slow, but vacillating is another matter. Mr. Douglass, that charge cannot be sustained. I think t cannot be shown that when I have once taken a position, I have ever retreated from it. 

The political theorist Hans Morgenthau observed:

Lincoln’s sheer brainpower must have exceeded that of all other presidents, Jefferson included. The manifestations are the more astounding, as Lincoln’s mind was virtually untrained by his sporadic formal elementary schooling that amounted altogether to about one year. His extraordinary intelligence revealed itself in philosophic under-standing of public issues, in a judicious concern with politically relevant detail, in a mastery of political manipulation, and in military judgment.

 

2. SELF-CONTROL:  Lincoln maintained clean living habits and high integrity.

Although most of his contemporaries used tobacco, imbibed alcohol, conversed with profanity, and gambled, Lincoln never engaged in such vices. According to biographer Fred Kaplan, Lincoln refused to take part in these activities because they reflected “those aspects of human nature that prevent the triumph of reason and moral vision.” Lincoln also declined to participate in the most popular recreational activities of his era — hunting and fishing. Aside from time spent socializing with friends, Lincoln used his free time for one thing and one thing only: to read. According to Kaplan, “Learning gave Lincoln an intellectual high, to such an extent that he often read aloud, enunciating words in the theater of his own head.”

Lincoln maintained integrity throughout his lifetime, receiving his nickname, “Honest Abe,” the old-fashioned way — he earned it. As a 23-year-old in Indiana, Lincoln became the part-owner of a small-town country store that went out of business, leaving him with creditors and no apparent way to repay them. Over the next decade, as Lincoln pursued a new career as a lawyer, he scrimped and made personal sacrifices to ensure that he could repay his creditors 100 cents on the dollar, even though they had not pressed him to make them whole. As lawyer and a politician, Lincoln’s integrity continued to prevail. He insisted on presenting only intellectually honest arguments, knowing that shading the truth would prove counter-productive to establishing his position.

 

3. EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE:  Lincoln had an aptitude for dealing with peers effectively.

Lincoln’s surge toward greatness was fueled, in part, by what modern psychologists call “emotional intelligence.” Daniel Goleman defines the term as the capacity to maintain 1) self-awareness; 2) control of one’s emotions and impulses amidst changing circumstances; 3) self-motivation; 4) empathy toward others’ emotions; and 5) harmonious relationships, even when peers are in conflict. To maintain emotional intelligence on a daily basis requires bona fide self-control and tact. To maintain it while serving as commander-in-chief during a civil war, attending to an increasingly unstable wife and grieving over the death of one’s child required astounding self-awareness, emotional control, and the capacity to harmonize disparate factions. Lincoln’s ability to remain steady while leading the country through turbulence is evidenced by the following:

• Regardless of blunders that set back the Union cause during the Civil War, Lincoln did not engage in blaming, denigrating, or fault-finding. Occasionally, he would write letters venting his feelings about generals who had let him down, but he did not mail them.
• At the outset of Lincoln’s presidency, those with more education and political experience would level insults at him, perceiving that someone so unsophisticated and inexperienced could not possibly be up to the job. Lincoln refused to take the bait and retaliate, or even hold a grudge, because “the issues we face are too vast for malicious dealings.”
• In the face of constant criticism and genuine fear of losing the American republic, Lincoln remained stoic and did not panic. Aware of the power of words, the president insisted that his public and private messages were concise, clear, apt, logical, and carefully edited. Misunderstandings from ambiguous communications had to be avoided during such a critical time.
• Despite holding the powerful office of president, Lincoln’s ego remained in check. Only lesser men acted arrogantly or self-righteously.

 

4. SENSE OF PURPOSE:  Lincoln wanted to make a difference in the world.

Lincoln, unlike his father, had no desire to work with his hands. Rather, he aspired to make a living and gain distinction by utilizing his mind. Kaplan frequently describes Lincoln as an autodidact, a person who is self-taught and self-educated. A clever lexicographer might place a photograph of Lincoln next to that word. It is difficult to imagine anyone teaching himself more than our 16th president did.

Imagine learning the law with no instructor and to reach a level of proficiency to not only be admitted to the bar, but to try major lawsuits and argue appeals all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Imagine mastering military history and battle tactics in a quiet room at the Library of Congress so that you remain several steps ahead of generals who graduated from West Point. Imagine having such command of the Bible and Shakespeare that you can quote the most appropriate passages at the most opportune times, in court or on the political stage. Abraham Lincoln pushed himself and rose to do all of these things, on his own, without mentoring from parents, teachers, colleagues, or superiors.

Lincoln’s self-education provided the foundation for his continual rise. Miller explains:

Lincoln developed rare powers of concentration and he would use them all his life. He developed a confidence that he could dig in books for what he wanted … and that confidence in his powers of understanding what was written on the page seems to have encouraged a broader self-confidence, in his judgment and his critical powers— let us call it a moral self-confidence.

Then Lincoln learned of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, he was thunderstruck by its divisive, pro-slavery effect and refused to rest until he had done everything in his power to nullify it. Lincoln’s debates with Stephen A. Douglas, in which Lincoln crusaded against the expansion of slavery, provided Lincoln with a national platform that helped him to emerge as the most persuasive and eloquent spokesperson on the era’s most controversial issue.

When Lincoln was elected president, Southern states started to secede from the Union. After the Confederate Army attacked Fort Sumter, Lincoln’s highest purpose became to restore the United States to an indivisible nation, governed as are public, by majority rule. Lincoln’s resolve became such a personal crusade that if bringing about his desired, constitutionally mandated result required suspending the right to habeas corpus for a short time to prevent border state Maryland from having its infrastructure destroyed, then the president would do what it took, rationalizing the temporary infringement of constitutional rights: “A part can’t control the whole, to the destruction of the whole. … I will amputate a limb to save a life.”

As the war continued to rage, with no end in sight, Lincoln combined his two driving purposes — restoring the Union and ending slavery — by issuing the Emancipation Proclamation of Jan. 1, 1863. The proclamation motivated and transformed the Union Army into a force fighting for liberation and facilitated the recruitment of African-American men into the Union Army.

In his most recent book on Lincoln, Tried by War, McPherson addresses the significance of the Emancipation Proclamation on the country and its president:

The proclamation completed the transformation of Lincoln’s policy and national strategy from a war for restoration of the old Union into a war to give the nation a new birth of freedom. … Upon executing the historic document, Lincoln told those in his inner circle, “I never in my life felt more certain that I was doing right than I do in signing this paper. If my name ever goes into history it will be for this act, and my whole soul is in it.”

Lincoln achieved the sense of purpose he had set for himself as a child and reiterated over the course of his life. McPherson then puts the significance of the incident into perspective:

More than any other American, Lincoln’s name has gone into history. He gave all Americans, indeed all people everywhere, reason to remember that he had lived.

 

CONCLUSION

Doris Kearns Goodwin, in the final paragraph of her introduction to Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, provides an answer for why Lincoln should matter to us today:

After living with the subject of Abraham Lincoln for a decade, reading what he himself wrote and what hundreds of others have written about him, following the arc of his ambition, and assessing the inevitable mixture of human foibles and strengths that made up his temperament, after watching him deal with the terrible deprivations of his childhood, the deaths of his children, and the horror that engulfed the entire nation, I find that after nearly two centuries, the uniquely American story of Abraham Lincoln has unequalled power to captivate the imagination and to inspire emotion.

Happy 200th birthday, Abraham Lincoln! As lawyers, we are inspired by the brilliance, self-control, emotional intelligence, and sense of purpose you demonstrated throughout your life. You carried our nation through its most difficult challenge. We lift you up as the ultimate role model for our profession.

NOTES

[1] The State Bar of Texas is sponsoring the Lincoln bicentennial luncheon with the World Affairs Council of Dallas/Forth Worth, the SMU Maguire Center for Ethics and Public Responsibility, the Dallas Public Library, Winstead P.C., and PricewaterhouseCoopers.

[2] 1) Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief by James McPherson (Penguin Press 2008); 2) Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin (Simon & Schuster 2005); 3) Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer by Fred Kaplan (HarperCollins 2008); 4) Lincoln’s Virtues: An Ethical Biography by William Lee Miller (Knopf 2002);5) President Lincoln: The Duty of a Statesman by William Lee Miller (Knopf2008); and 6) Lincoln’s Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness by Joshua Wolf Shenk (Houghton Mifflin 2005).