The Greatness of Abraham Lincoln

This week is the anniversary of Abraham Lincolns birth, February 12, He was an improbable president who achieved a greatness that is so palpable it.
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They must die soon or they outlive their fame. Some of them, fortunately caught, by death in the brief hour of their publicity, are suddenly enrolled among the notable men of their generation ; but even so, they lengthen but little the period in which they are accounted notable. Die they soon or die they late, their fame fades, and they pass in due time to their own place in oblivion. But they who, being great, match their quality against the chal- lenging front of opportunity, achieve a distinction which grows toward immortality.

Like a snow-capped mountain, hidden at close view by its own foot-hills and emerging to seem at first only a possibly higher elevation in the range, they tower higher as the years recede, dwarfing all lesser hills of their contemporaries, until they stand as if in solitary grandeur; and while the plain is yet dark, they greet with radiant crest the dawn of succeeding gen- erations. Of these men, greatest of all men of his generation, was Abraham Lincoln.

It is nothing less than colossal. But while his figure bulks vast, his personality grows dim in out- line as seen through the mists of the years. The memory of the men who knew him is not yet obliterated, but the halo about him refracts the light of calm judgment; and a clear vision of his qualities is lost in indiscriminate eulogy.

Those who knew him constitute now a small and diminishing group, and these for the most part have added to the dim outline of their actual experiences of Lincoln the color of later reflection or tradition. Abraham Lincoln is already in good part a mythical character. To him are attributed many utterances which have no certain place in his authentic speeches or writings.

Concerning him are current past any hope of eradication incidents which prob- ably never occurred. Poetry and song and dramatic art and the myth-making tendency of the human mind are all at work, and have been active for a half century. He must have been a great man who could inspire such inventions; but can we discover the hiding of his power? Can we find at this late date the real Abraham Lincoln?

And when we find him, will he still seem to us a truly great man? The Greatness of His Stature Lincoln was a tall man. In any company his height alone made him conspicuous. This feature he accentuated by the long black coat and tall stiff hat which he habitually wore. He recognized the value of his own physical stature. He liked to measure him- self, back to back, against other tall men, and was pleased if by a fraction of an inch he over-topped them. Some notable men who called upon him on matters of importance were surprised to have him open the conversation by an invitation to measure height with the President ; but that method at least prepared the way for a conversation face to face.

Of Lincoln's stature, Herndon says: Although quick-witted and ready with an answer, he began to exhibit deep thoughtfulness, and was so often lost in studied reflection we could not help noticing the strange turn in his actions. He disclosed rare timidity and sensitiveness, especially 4 in the presence of men and women, and, although cheerful enough in the presence of the boys, he did not appear to seek our com pany as earnestly as before. Nature was a little abrupt in the case of Abraham Lincoln..

She tossed him from the nimbleness of boyhood to the gravity of manhood in a single night. Before he finished his brief schooling in Indiana, Lincoln had attained his full height. He weighed in the region of a hundred and sixty pounds, was wiry, vigorous and strong. His feet and hands were large; arms and legs long and in striking contrast with his slender trunk and small head. Allen Gentry, a school- mate: His shoes, when he had any, were low.

Abraham Lincoln's Greatness

He wore buckskin breeches, linsey-woolsey shirt, and a cap made of the skin of a squirrel or a coon. His breeches were baggy, and lacked by several inches meeting the tops of his shoes, thereby exposing his shin-bone, sharp, blue and nar- row. Lincoln's sudden attainment of manhood stature, and its cor- responding mental effect, were marked at the time and commented upon afterward.

It was almost the last thing he ever did sud- denly. He grew so fast that he reached the stature of manhood tired. We shall not go far wrong if we accept without attempt to qualify it the frank affirmation of his neighbors and employers that he was lazy. He inherited little energy either from Thomas Lincoln or the Hanks family — and what he inherited he used up in his rapid growth. Thereafter he moved and thought slowly. Herndon 's description of Lincoln's personal appearance in mature life is classic.

Of few other men have we so clear and discriminating a portrayal: Lincoln was six feet four inches high, and when he left the city of Springfield for Washington was fifty-one years old, having good health and no gray hairs, or few, if any, on his head. He was thin, wiry, sinewy, raw-boned; thin through the breast to the back, and narrow across the shoulders; standing, he leaned 5 forward — was what may be called stoop-shouldered, inclined to the consumptive build.

His usual weight was one hundred and eighty pounds. His organization — rather his structure and func- tions — worked slowly. His blood had to run a long distance from his heart to the extremities of his frame, and his nerve force had to travel through dry ground a long distance before the muscles were obedient to his will. His structure was loose and leathery; his body was shrunk and shrivelled; he had dark skin, dark hair, and looked woe-struck.

The whole man, body and mind, worked slowly, as if it needed oiling. Physically he was a very power- ful man, lifting with ease four hundred pounds, and in one case six hundred pounds. His mind was like his body, and worked slowly and strongly. Hence there was very little bodily or mental wear and tear in him. This peculiarity gave him a great advan- tage over other men in public life. No man in America — scarcely a man in the world — could have stood what Lincoln did in Washington and survived more than one term of the Presidency.

He walked with even tread, the inner sides of his feet being parallel. He put his whole foot down on the ground at once, not landing on his heel; he likewise lifted his foot all at once, not rising from the toe, and hence he had no spring to his walk. His walk was undulatory — catching and pocketing tire, weariness and pain, all up and down his person, and thus keeping them from locating. The first impression of a stranger, or a man who did not observe closely, was that his walk implied shrewdness or cunning — that he was a 'tricky man,' but in reality, it was the walk of caution and firmness.

His legs and arms were abnormally, unnaturally long, and in undue proportion to the remainder of his body. It was only when he stood up that he loomed above other men. Lincoln's head was long, and tall from the base of the brain and from the eyebrows. His head ran backwards, his forehead rising as it ran back at a low angle, like Clay's, and unlike Webster's, which was almost perpendicular.

The size of his hat, measured at the hatter's block, was seven and one-eighth, his head being, from ear to ear, six and one-half inches, and from the front to the back of the brain, eight inches. Thus measured it was not below the medium size. His forehead was narrow but high; his hair dark, almost black, and lay floating 6 when his fingers or the wind left it, piled up at random. His cheek bones were high, sharp and prominent; his jaws were long and up-curved; his nose was long, blunt, and a little awry toward the right eye; his chin was sharp and up-curved; his eyebrows cropped out like a large rock in the brow of a hill; his long, sallow face was wrinkled and dry, with a hair here and there on the surface; his cheeks were leathery; his ears were large and ran out almost at right angles from his head, caused partly by heavy hats and partly by nature; his lower lip was thick, hang- ing, and under-curved, while his chin reached for the lip up- curved; his neck was neat and trim, his head being well balanced on it; there was the loose mole on the right cheek, and Adam's apple on his throat.

He was not a pretty man by any means, nor was he an ugly one; he was a homely man, careless of his looks, plain-looking and plain-acting. He had no pomp, display or dignity, so-called. He appeared simple in his carriage and bearing. He was a sad- looking man; his melancholy dripped from him as he walked. We possess a very large body of material that enables us to judge of the personal appearance of Lincoln. He emerged into prominence as the daguerreotype Avas coming into common use.

Many photographers desired to make pictures of him, and Lincoln was not averse to having his picture taken.

More than a hundred authentic and original photographs exist, showing his appearance from early in his career in Springfield to a few days before his death. We have also oil portraits in considerable number. Soon after Lincoln's election artists flocked to Springfield. They set up their easels in the vacant legislative hall of the old Capitol and Lincoln was accustomed to sit for perhaps an hour each morning as they worked, reading his mail as he posed for them.

Most, if not all, of these portraits are preserved. Some of them have merit and all of them have historic interest. Of portraits after he became President, we have one in some respects the most notable of all, and surrounded most by re- markable associations, that of Prank B.

The likeness is preserved in the detail portrait and in the notable painting of the Signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, and the events which accompanied it are recorded in Carpenter's book, "Six Months in the White House. Volk was not a gTeat sculptor, and he valued these casts for the sake of a statue which he made and which possessed no great merit. But he was a remarkably good workman in plastic material, and the casts were well made, and they preserve to all coming time not simply the bony structure of hands and head, but the living lineaments of Abraham Lincoln.

To this undoubtedly accurate record of his features and his hands must every sculptor and artist refer. Down to the time of his election to the Presidency, Mr.

Dr. Cornel West on Abolitionist movement and President Abraham Lincoln

Lincoln wore no beard. A letter received from a little girl, Grace Bedell, suggested the wearing of a beard, and Lincoln accepted the sug- gestion. This decision has caused widespread regret, for the beard added little that was decorative, and did not conceal the lower lip, which was Lincoln's least attractive feature, but hid the well-modeled chin and a jaw that was at once kind and firm. To say that Lincoln was tall, gaunt and awkward does not ac- curately describe him.

There was in his ungainliness a certain symmetry. He said of himself that for a clumsy fellow he was rather sure-footed. On election night in , when the White House was almost deserted because so many Washington residents had gone home to vote, he told his secretaries and a little group who were rejoicing with him over the election returns, how on a dark night after his defeat by Douglas he had slipped on a muddy path but caught himself before he went down, and how he went on with a kind of gleeful application of the incident to his defeat—' ' It 's a slip, but not a fall!

Especially was this true when he grew animated in discourse. His features lit up ; his eyes glowed ; he forgot what he was doing with his great hands; he towered aloft and moved forward in his argument with a power of personality that caused men to forget that he was otherwise than graceful. Choate, when a young man, heard Lincoln in his Cooper Union address.

Years afterward he wrote out his impressions of the evening: At first sight there was nothing impressive or imposing about him; his clothes hung awkwardly on his giant form; his face was of a dark pallor without the slightest tinge of color; his seamed and rugged fea- tures bore the furrows of hardship and struggle; his deep-set eyes looked sad and anxious; his countenance in repose gave little evidence of the brilliant power which raised him from fhe lowest to the highest station among his countrymen; as he talked to me before the meeting he seemed ill at ease.

Choate continued his description: For an hour and a half he held his audience in the hollow of his hand. It was high and thin — almost grotesquely so. In his debates with Douglas, the feature which almost every surviving listener seems to have preserved is the contrast between the two men as to stature and sound. Douglas was a little man with a big voice — Lincoln a big man with a little voice. But Douglas abused his deep, rich baritone, and his voice wore out, and toward the end of the campaign could not be heard by a large portion of his audience; but Lincoln's thin, high voice carried well, and after he lost his self -consciousness was sufficiently flexible to be effective and persuasive.

People misjudged Lincoln who set him down as a clown or a simple rustic. A second and more careful look at him showed elements of dignity and nobility. Lincoln was great and capable of looking great. His portrait as we have become familiar with it is the portrait of a great man. Of him we could almost say, as the Duke of Wellington said after he had seen Webster: Familiar as he was, there was about, him a certain dignity that protected him from too free approach. The man who now declares that he habitually addressed Lincoln 9 by his first name, whether in full or with abbreviation, probably draws upon his imagination rather than his memory.

Lincoln 'a neighbors did not address him as "Abraham" or "Abe. Born in the midst of penury and destitution, not only of educational advantages but of incentive to study, he obtained by force of will and strength of mental power a mind disciplined and of commanding ability. He had a logical mind. He wanted, as he said, to be able to bound his subject, North, South, East and West. He had a fondness for mechanics which he transferred to his mental proc- esses; he insisted on knowing the connections of truths, their causes and effects. He would be content with nothing short of truth.

Where he inherited this power and aptitude has given rise to much discussion. He appears to have inherited from his father a certain imperturbability and good nature; a slowness of mental and physical movement, and an ability to discern a humorous quality in men and events. From his mother, as he believed, he inherited his power of analysis, his intellectual alertness, his gift of logic.

In his earlier environment there was, as he said, "absolutely nothing" to stimulate within him the love of learning; yet the love of learning was strong within him. Much did he owe to solitude and the power of reflection. Yet his was a nature strongly social, and under that was in- herent in him a great human love which could not have been evoked except in association and competition with men. Of his mental development in youth, Herndon wrote: Although denied the requisite training of the school- room, he was none the less competent to cope with those who had undergone that discipline.

No one had a more retentive memory. If he read or heard a good thing it never escaped him. His powers of concentration were intense, and in the ability to strip bare a proposition he was unexcelled. His thoughtful and investigating mind dug down after ideas and never stopped till bottom facts were reached. With such a mental equipment the day was destined to come when the world would need the services of his intellect and heart. That he was equal to the great task when the demand came is but another striking proof 10 of the grandeur of his character. Rutledge wrote to William II.

Herndon a paper which Herndon used in part and which the nephew of Robert Rutledge has fur- nished me in full. I have frequently seen him reading while walking along the streets. Occasionally he would become absorbed with his book ; would stop and stand for a few moments, then walk on, or pass from one house to another, or from one squad or crowd of men to another.

He was apparently seeking amusement; and with his thoughtful face and ill-fitting clothes was the last man we would have singled out for a student. In that he was wholly engrossed, and began for the first time to avoid the society of men, in order that he might have more time for study. He was not what is usually termed a quick-witted man, although he would usually arrive at his conclusions very readily. He seemed invariably to reflect and deliberate, and never acted from impulse so far as to force a wrong conclusion on a subject of any moment.

Lawrence Weldon, at a bar-meeting held in the U. Court in Springfield in June, Tasteful composition, either of prose or poetry, which faithfully contrasted the realities of eternity with the unstable and fickle fortunes of time, made a strong impression on his mind. In the indulgence of this taste it is related of him that the poem "Immortality" he knew by rote and appreciated very highly. He had a strange liking for the verses, and they bear a just resemblance to his fortune. Horace Greeley, in one of his brutally frank letters to Lincoln, told him plainly that he was not considered a really great man.

The nation counted him in a political accident. Of his Cab- inet, Seward, Chase and Stanton all let him know at one time or another that they considered him their inferior. But he was 11 great enough to compel their respect, not by the fiat of his political position above them, but by sheer force of an intellectual su- periority which compelled even Seward to write to his wife: One of them, derived from Buckle and his school, attempts to account for all men, both individually and racially, by their environment and the conditions of the times in which they live.

The other, of whose conviction Carlyle is the indignant spokesman, explains not the man by his times, but his times by the man. Emerson agreed with Carlyle, and went even farther. The Atlan- tic Ocean is there because nothing smaller would answer the pur- poses of Columbus; he needed a large world and a round world and a wide ocean to express what was inherent in himself. The world and all external conditions are to be explained by the man, and not the man by his world.

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Something of this latter theory must be held as to genius. It has its own laws. It produces its own exponents in manner and form which cannot be predicted. It is impossible to explain Robert Burns without Scotland, but Scotland alone does not explain Burns. Scotland has been on the map for a long time, and still there is but one Bobert Burns.

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Henry Ward Beecher stood at the foot of his class in Amherst College. Since his day many men in Amherst College have stood at the foot of the class, and it is not known that that environment has produced any more Beeehers. Socrates was the product of the life and spirit of Athens, but Athens has long since given up the expecta- tion of producing men of Socratic mind by the wholesale. No great man can be understood entirely apart from his en- vironment, and if he could, it would be unfair both to him and to his environment thus to interpret him; but that which enables a man to dominate and rise above his environment is in the man himself.

Lincoln would have been a great man in almost any environ- ment. Gray is not the only man who has had occasion to moralize concerning the "mute inglorious Miltons" or the Crom- wells guiltless of their country 's blood and of anything else good or bad enough to be mentioned. A few of them might have won fame and fortune in more favorable environment, but most of them in any other place would have continued mute and in- glorious. In statecraft, as in certain other of the nobler vocations, there are few absolute standards by which to measure greatness or 12 success.

A civil engineer erects a bridge; it stands or falls, and With it stands or falls his success in his profession. A manu- facturer establishes a business; it pays a profit or sustains a loss, and the balance-sheet shows it at the end of each year. A lawyer either wins his case or loses it, and he knows which as soon as the jury is polled, or the court reads its decision. The soldier either wins his battle or is defeated, and no end of official lying will permanently conceal the truth. But the teacher, the editor, the preacher and the statesman, however soon or keenly they may be made aware of failures in their respective fields, have not the same swift and sure credentials of success.

Abraham Lincoln: “Rise to Greatness”

The teacher must live long to see his pupils come to fame, and when they do so, he may have to divide his share of the glory with other influences which deserve it less. The editor may die before he knows that an editorial of his, pasted into a farm-house scrap-book, in- fluenced for power or righteousness a life. The preacher must measure his success by evidences far more intangible than the size either of his congregation or his salary.


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The politician also must wait long for lasting evidence of his greatness. He cannot measure it by the election returns, nor by the number of his re-elections. The profound lesson to be drawn from this book is that Lincoln led brilliantly, not just from his mind, but also his heart.

Abraham Lincoln's Greatness | Congressman Lamar Smith

At a time when employee happiness and engagement has reached an all-time low in the U. Born in a log cabin in rural Kentucky, Lincoln grew up in abject poverty. His father never learned to read or write, working as a hired hand with little ambition. Routinely lent out to farmers needing workers, Lincoln had virtually no formal schooling.

While still a boy, he witnessed the death of his infant younger brother and, later, his beloved older sister. Lincoln was an entirely self-taught man. Exercising incomparable drive and determination, he was a voracious reader who used literature to transcend his circumstances. Prior to being elected a U. Congressman in his thirties, he learned the trades of boatman, clerk, merchant, postmaster, surveyor and country lawyer. He pored over newspapers, and taught himself English grammar, geometry and trigonometry. Instead, he read and re-read borrowed law books until he understood them thoroughly.

From those hardships, Lincoln developed a deep self-confidence he fully leveraged throughout his entire adult life. But perhaps his greatest inspiration came from an intransigent belief that he had a purpose to fulfill. Rather than vilify people opposed to slave emancipation, Lincoln sought to comprehend their position through empathy. If it did now exist amongst us, we should not instantly give it up.

But, just as important, Lincoln was a masterful writer and speaker who consistently moved people through his humor and kind personal presence. Lincoln also had a wonderful gift for telling stories and, intentionally used his quick and benign wit to soften wounded feelings and dispel anxieties. He also was not afraid to display his own humanness. On more than one occasion, he traveled long distances to visit weary troops on the battlefield. Simply by demonstrating to them that their work mattered to him, he earned their unmitigated support.