Abraham Lincoln
(Comments by H. L. Mencken,  PREJUDICES: THIRD SERIES)

THE  backwardness of the art of biography  in These States  is made  shiningly visible  by the fact that  we have yet to see a  first-rate  life of  either Lincoln or Whitman.  Of Lincolniana,  of course,  there is no end,  nor is there any end to the hospitality of those who collect it.  Some time ago  a publisher told me that  there are four kinds of books  that never,  under any circumstances,  lose money in the United States— first,  detective stories;  secondly,  novels in which the heroine is  forcibly debauched by the hero;  thirdly,  volumes on spiritualism,  occultism  and other such claptrap,  and fourthly,  books on Lincoln.  But despite all the vast mass of Lincolniana  and the constant discussion of old Abe  in other ways,  even so elemental a problem  as that of his religious faith— surely an important matter  in any competent biography— is yet  but half solved.  Here,  for example,  is the  Rev. William E. Barton,  grappling with it  for more than four hundred  large pages  in  “The Soul of Abraham Lincoln.”  It is a lengthy inquiry— the  rev. pastor,  in truth,  shows a good deal of the habitual garrulity of his order— but it is never tedious.  On the contrary,  it is curious and amusing,  and I have read it with steady interest,  including even the appendices.  Unluckily,  the author,  like his predecessors,  fails to finish the business before him.  Was Lincoln a Christian?  Did he believe in the Divinity of Christ?  I am left in doubt.  He was very polite about it,  and very cautious,  as befitted a politician  in need of Christian votes,  but how much genuine conviction  was in  that politeness?  And if  his occasional references to Christ  were thus open to question,  what of his rather vague  avowals of belief in  a personal God  and  in the immortality of the soul?  Herndon  and some of his other close friends  always maintained that  he was an atheist,  but Dr. Barton argues that  this atheism was simply  disbelief in the idiotic Methodist and Baptist dogmas of his time— that nine Christian churches out of ten,  if he were alive to-day,  would admit him to their high privileges and prerogatives  without anything worse than a few warning coughs.  As for me,  I still wonder.      The growth of the Lincoln legend  is truly amazing.  He becomes the American solar myth,  the chief butt  of American credulity and sentimentality.  Washington,  of late years,  has been perceptibly humanized;  every schoolboy  now knows that he used to swear a good deal,  and was a sharp trader,  and had a quick eye for a pretty ankle.  But meanwhile  the varnishers and veneerers  have been busily converting Abe  into a plaster saint,  thus making him fit for adoration  in the chautauquas and  Y. M. C. A.’s.  All the popular pictures of him  show him in his robes of state,  and wearing an expression  fit for a man about to be hanged.  There is,  so far as I know,  not a single portrait of him  showing him smiling— and yet he must have cackled a good deal,  first and last:  who ever heard of a storyteller who didn’t?  Worse,  there is an obvious effort  to pump all his human weaknesses out of him,  and so  leave him a mere moral apparition,  a sort of amalgam of  John Wesley  and the Holy Ghost.  What could be more absurd?  Lincoln,  in point of fact,  was a practical politician  of long experience and high talents,  and by no means  cursed with inconvenient ideals.  On the contrary,  his career in the Illinois Legislature  was that of a good organization man,  and he was more than once  denounced by reformers.  Even his handling of the slavery question  was that of a politician,  not that of a fanatic.  Nothing alarmed him more than  the suspicion that he was an Abolitionist.  Barton tells of an occasion when  he actually fled town  to avoid meeting the issue  squarely.  A genuine Abolitionist  would have published the Emancipation Proclamation  the day after the first battle  of Bull Run.  But Lincoln waited  until the time was more favorable— until Lee had been hurled out of Pennsylvania,  and,  more important still,  until the political currents were  safely running his way.  Always he was a wary fellow,  both in his dealings with measures  and in his dealings with men.  He knew how to keep his mouth shut.      Nevertheless,  it was his eloquence  that probably brought him to his great estate.  Like William Jennings Bryan,  he was a dark horse  made suddenly formidable  by fortunate rhetoric.  The Douglas debate launched him,  and the Cooper Union speech  got him the presidency.  This talent for emotional utterance,  this gift for making phrases that enchanted the plain people,  was an accomplishment of late growth.  His early speeches  were mere empty fireworks— the childish rhodomontades of the era.  But in middle life  he purged his style of ornament  and it became almost baldly simple— and  it is for that simplicity  that he is remembered to-day.  The Gettysburg speech  is at once  the shortest  and the most famous oration in American history.  Put beside it,  all the whoopings of the Websters,  Sumners  and Everetts  seem gaudy and silly.  It is eloquence  brought to a pellucid  and almost child-like perfection— the highest emotion reduced to one graceful and irresistible gesture.  Nothing else precisely like it  is to be found in the whole range of oratory.  Lincoln himself  never even remotely approached it.  It is genuinely stupendous.      But  let us not forget that  it is oratory,  not logic;  beauty,  not sense.  Think of the argument in it!  Put it into the cold words of everyday!  The doctrine is simply this:  that the Union soldiers  who died at Gettysburg  sacrificed their lives  to the cause of self-determination— “that government  of the people,  by the people,  for the people,”  should not perish from the earth.  It is difficult to imagine anything more untrue.  The Union soldiers in that battle  actually fought against self-determination;  it was the Confederates  who fought for  the right of their people  to govern themselves.  What was the practical effect of  the battle of Gettysburg?  What else  than  the destruction of the old sovereignty of the States,  i. e.,  of the people of the States?  The Confederates went into battle  an absolutely free people;  they came out  with their freedom  subject to the supervision and vote of  the rest of the country— and for nearly twenty years  that vote was so effective  that they enjoyed scarcely any freedom at all.  Am I the first American  to note the fundamental nonsensicality of  the Gettysburg address?  If so,  I plead my æsthetic joy in it  in amelioration of the sacrilege.