Law Life: Lincoln's compassion

By Eric S. Giroux The Daily Record Newswire Need any more be said about Abraham Lincoln? Even to us lawyers, who feel that we know him? After all, this is a golden age for Lincoln books: * There are the major academic biographies. Foremost among them the two-volume Abraham Lincoln: A Life, by Michael Burlingame (Johns Hopkins University Press 2008), a comprehensive portrait. The leading one-volume biography is David Herbert Donald's Lincoln (Simon and Schuster 1994). * There are the compelling narratives. Most notably, Doris Kearns Goodwin's superb Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (Simon and Schuster 2005). * There are the specialty books focusing on particular aspects such as Lincoln's close reading of William Shakesepeare, Robert Burns, and the Bible (see Fred Kaplan's Abraham Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer [Harper 2008]) or his chronic depression and how it sharpened his political judgment. (See Joshua Wolf Shenk's Lincoln's Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness [Mariner Books 2005]). * Other works perform exegeses of Lincoln's greatest speeches. See Lincoln's Greatest Speech: The Second Inaugural, by Ronald C. White Jr. (Simon and Schuster 2002). * For those who like their Lincoln straight-up, there are documentary compilations. See Don E. Fehrenbacher, ed., Abraham Lincoln: A Documentary Portrait Through His Speeches and Writings (Stanford University Press 1964). * And for children, there is A.O. Scott's Abraham Lincoln Coloring Book (Dover 1987). At least one classic film, Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), focuses on Lincoln. John Ford's film embellishes greatly the details of Lincoln's legal triumph in the "Duff" Armstrong trial but Henry Fonda, as Lincoln, captures the essence of the man as he comes across in the major biographies, his modesty, humor, kindness, and strength, as well as a quality of separateness from other people. Another major film in the works, Steven Spielberg's Lincoln (2012), comes with the happy news that the remarkable Daniel Day Lewis has replaced the essentially humorless Liam Neeson in the title role. All of this, not to mention the internet. Or the Lincoln Library and Museum. Or the Lincoln Memorial, or Gettysburg, or Heaven (where we will all meet Lincoln), or your pennies. But full submersion in these works, while exhilarating, is a time-consuming task. As a modest introduction for the busy lawyer, this three-part series lightly sketches a few themes of Lincoln's life. Two great themes were suffering and compassion. Lincoln's childhood was one of emotional and economic poverty. Abe's father, like Huck Finn's, resented the place of books in his son's life and may have beaten him. His mother died when he was nine years old, his beloved sister when he was a teenager. Lincoln's first and perhaps greatest love, Ann Rutledge, died too. His grief on that occasion was profound. The villagers of New Salem, Illinois kept ward over Lincoln constantly for fear of an "accident." They were particularly watchful during storms. Lincoln said that he could "never be reconciled to have the snow -- rains and storms to beat on [Ann's] grave." He walked alone in the woods with a rifle. In a series of careers, from storekeeper to surveyor, Lincoln failed. Upon moving to town to commence his legal career, Lincoln needed to borrow credit from Joshua Speed so he could afford to split a bed with him. Lincoln confessed to his newfound friend, "If I fail in this, I do not know that I can ever pay you." Though there is scholarly disagreement on the subject he endured what appears from the outset to have been a miserable marriage ("It would just kill me to marry Mary Todd.") to a spouse troubled by mental illness, perhaps bi-polar disorder, and her own painful childhood. He lost two young children, including as president his adored son Willie, who was said to be Lincoln's twin in every way. Lincoln lost election to major office several times, including two runs for the United States Senate. He was an object of pity as a perennial loser among some political observers even into the late 1850s. His election to the presidency in 1860 precipitated secession and civil war, and years of failure on the battlefield and struggles with recalcitrant generals followed. Yet Lincoln, naturally disposed to empathy for his fellow living beings, seemed to learn from suffering, both his own and that of others. As exemplified by his approaches to poverty, slavery, and the Civil War itself, Lincoln responded to suffering by expanding the sphere of his compassion. Lincoln was a hardy man who detested physical labor. He resented the yoke of his father's subsistence farm and yearned to lift himself above the piecemeal manual work, like rail-splitting, that was available in backwoods Indiana and Illinois. His experiences led him to identify with the working poor and to favor internal improvements designed to increase economic opportunity. In part for the same reason he also was concerned, for all of his adult life, with the lot of the enslaved. He never understood and could never sanction those who would "wring their bread from the sweat of other men's faces." "If slavery is not wrong," he wrote, "nothing is wrong." As president, Lincoln connected viscerally to the unprecedented national calamity of the Civil War. In the Second Inaugural he astutely identified slavery, not states' rights, as the underlying cause of the war, but declined to assign blame for slavery on a partisan basis. To the contrary, in a passage that would be unthinkable coming from a presidential podium today, he graphically implicated the country as a whole. Unlike most Americans, North and South, Lincoln did not suppose that God was on his side. He suggested the possibility that the war's toll was God's punishment to both regions of the country for having allowed slavery to flourish. He concluded that the country must persevere in submitting to the just punishment of the war "if God will that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword." Nevertheless, he called for "malice toward none" and "charity for all" in order to "bind up the nation's wounds" and "achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting peace." Lincoln's compassion was not abstract. He reached out, in the midst of the war's demands, to temper individual suffering. Michael Burlingame has demonstrated that John Hay, Lincoln's private secretary, not Lincoln himself, probably wrote the celebrated Bixby letter to a war widow offering condolences on her reported loss of five children in the war. But Lincoln wrote an equally moving letter to a girl who had lost her father in the war. William McCullough's death had plunged his daughter Fanny into a serious depression, which Lincoln addressed head-on in words that, as an expression of Lincoln's compassion, are both representative and timeless: Executive Mansion, Washington, December 23, 1862. Dear Fanny: It is with deep grief that I learn of the death of your kind and brave Father; and, especially, that it is affecting your young heart beyond what is common in such cases. In this sad world of ours, sorrow comes to all; and, to the young, it comes with bitterest agony, because it takes them unawares. The older have learned to ever expect it. I am anxious to afford some alleviation of your present distress. Perfect relief is not possible, except with time. You can not now realize that you will ever feel better. Is not this so? And yet it is a mistake. You are sure to be happy again. To know this, which is certainly true, will make you some less miserable now. I have had experience enough to know what I say; and you need only to believe it, to feel better at once. The memory of your dear Father, instead of an agony, will yet be a sad sweet feeling in your heart, of a purer and holier sort than you have known before. Please present my kind regards to your afflicted mother. Your sincere friend, A. Lincoln ---------- Eric S. Giroux is an Associate with Robins, Kaplan, Miller & Ciresi L.L.P. He can be reached at esgiroux@rkmc.com. This is the first of a three-part series on Abraham Lincoln. The second and third articles in this series will focus on Lincoln's humor and how he abolished slavery. Published: Thu, Jul 21, 2011