Ohio History Journal

Seemingly within moments after the nomination of Abraham Lincoln on

May 18, 1860, a representative of the Columbus publishing firm of Follett,

Foster and Company, from the Tremont House in Chicago telegraphed

the president-to-be in Springfield saying, "In connection with your debates

with Douglas we have announced your biography. Please designate your

pleasure if any as to who the writer shall be." The same day, the Chicago

Journal's twenty-year-old reporter Horace White, who knew Lincoln per-

sonally, also telegraphed the nominee to say that he would probably do

Follett and Foster's book; but the next day, the Ohio publishers let it be

known that they already had a campaign biography of Lincoln "in press."1

On May 28, they reported that W. D. Howells would be the author and

announced in their current printing of The Political Debates between Hon.

Abraham Lincoln and Hon. Stephen A. Douglas that the Lincoln "Life"

would be issued on June 12. Their earlier "in press" claim probably was

valid to the extent that the company could have had in its composing

room the ready-set texts of several miscellaneous Lincoln speeches which

had not been included in their best-selling Debates.²And on June 6, a

news item in the Ohio State Journal (Columbus) announced that the forth-

coming volume was to be an "authorized life." The publishers' advertise-

ment the next day explained that the book by "W. D. Howells, Esq." had

been "gathered from the lips" of Lincoln's "intimate friends" but would

not be ready until June 20.

Young Howells

Drafts a

"Life" for Lincoln

by ROBERT PRICE

Howells had been chosen for this project because of a fortuitous com-

bination of circumstances. When in March, just as he was turning twenty-

three, he had found the associate editorship on the Ohio State Journal,

that he had enjoyed since the fall of 1858, suddenly closed out, he had

turned to a variety of tempting hackwork offered by his friend Frank Fos-

ter.³By 1860, the vigorous young publishing house of Follett, Foster and

Company, in addition to their local job printing business, had begun an

ambitious book-publishing schedule aimed at a nationwide trade. They

were already sharing imprints with cooperating firms elsewhere, especially

in the East, and were also developing in the Middle West a promising

subscription-agent business along with the traditional bookseller distribu-

tion. By promoting what seems to have been a strong regional enthusiasm,

they were encouraging new local authors to submit manuscripts, and during

the past year had apparently done well with such Ohio-authored volumes

as, A Buckeye Abroad: or Wanderings in Europe and in the Orient by the

witty and oratorical Congressman Samuel S. Cox; Exiles of Florida, a stir-

ring abolitionist volume by Congressman Joshua Giddings from Howells'

hometown of Jefferson; Mabel or Heart Histories, a Tale of Truth, a novel

by Miss Rosella Rice of Perrysville (already in a third edition); and the

Life of Alfred Kelly by local jurist Gustavus Swan.

In line with this policy of encouraging young writers, the firm had given

Howells a volume of selections from Percy's Reliques to edit for them the

previous September. By spring he was reading and revising manuscripts.

One rather poorly composed text, Three Years in Chili [sic] by a "Lady

of Ohio," was so well rewritten that the book eventually warranted both

Columbus and New York issues. The publishers were willing also to sponsor

poetry from the new West, and though Howells' and John James Piatt's

Poems of Two Friends published in December had returned little if any

profit, the firm again ventured into the literary field -- this time with State

Librarian William T. Coggeshall's compilation of The Poets and Poetry

of the West, for which Howells was put to work writing some of the bio-

graphical sketches.

To date, the most spectacular of Follett and Foster's publishing successes

had been their volume of the Lincoln and Douglas Debates issued during

the early months of 1860.4 In fact, their acquisition of the sole rights to

the complete text of these much publicized debates must be considered

one of the notable publishing coups in the history of the American book

trade. As Lincoln rapidly gained nationwide attention, culminating with

his nomination in May, the Debates became a national best seller. The

sales reached 16,000 by June 7, and 20,416 by June 22, with the result

that the publishers chartered additional presses to keep up with demands

and assigned local imprint rights to houses in Boston, New York, and Phil-

adelphia. With a chance bonanza of further Lincoln materials already in

their files, the hustling proprietors hoped for still another scoop, this one

in the profitable line of campaign biographies.

As it turned out, although Howells got the writing assignment, the

field work was given to an acquaintance, James Quay Howard, three years

NOTES ON PAGE 275

234 OHIO HISTORY

younger, just out of Marietta College and at the time in Columbus studying

law. In May 1860, he seems to have been bound for Illinois anyhow and

so accepted Follett and Foster's data-gathering commission. Lincoln's sec-

retary John E. Nicolay recalled that Howard arrived in Springfield for an

interview about May 25. He did a conscientious job of locating Lincoln's

law associates and old neighbors, friends and acquaintances in Springfield,

New Salem and elsewhere, taking down their reminiscences and comments

in frank, homely detail. And from the files of the Sangamo Journal and the

Journal of the general assembly of Illinois, he abstracted the story of Lincoln's

record in local politics. The bundle of handwritten memoranda that he

brought back for Howells to work on would be saved, fortunately, much

of it at least, and would turn up years later in the papers collected by

Robert Todd Lincoln.5

Several other basic sources were available to Howells. Nicolay provided

a copy of the 3,000-word autobiography Lincoln had recently written for

public distribution, and The Congressional Globe gave the Congressman's

record from 1846 to 1848 in the House of Representatives. The Ohio State

Journal had reported the Chicago convention in notable detail and had fol-

lowed on May 22 with a long "Biographical Sketch of Abram [sic] Lincoln"

reprinted from the Chicago Press and Tribune, a piece built on a short

first-person sketch sent by Lincoln to Jesse W. Fell on December 20, pub-

lished first with various additions in the Chester County (Pennsylvania)

Times, and thereafter copied extensively. Also, Howells had his employers'

volume of the complete Debates and other Lincoln speeches including the

address at Cooper Institute in New York on February 27. It seems very

probable, too, that some of the eight or more other campaign "Lives" that

preceded Follett and Foster's onto the market in the next few weeks reached

Howells before he concluded his manuscript. Certainly, one of his own most

glaring errors (to be noted below), which he could easily have avoided by

more careful scrutiny of the Debates, was committed first in Thayer and

Eldridge's anonymous so-called "Wide Awake" life of Lincoln published in

Boston early in June.⁶

Howells seems to have sat down to these gatherings with much the same

casualness of mind and spirit as that with which he was accustomed to face

a weekly heap of papers and magazines on exchange in the Journal office.

Perhaps he had even less direct interest, for in gleaning filler for his "News

and Humors of the Mail" and "Literary Gossip" columns there was always

a chance that he could slip in a bit of original comment or an occasional,

self-satisfying "We translate" as he introduced a snippet from the Courrier

des Etats Unis or La Cronica. But the Lincoln materials were definitely

not literary, and the young man had decided that he just did not care for

materials pertaining to practical politics. Though he had lived in the midst

of political news almost from childhood, he could honestly say some fifty-

odd years later that he had never in his life really attended a party meet-

ing, rally or convention. Even at the end of his career he could not recall

that he had ever heard any political speech to the end.⁷

YOUNG HOWELLS 235

It was true that on various issues he had deeply engrained convictions.

He was thoroughly opposed to slavery. His earnest Quaker and Sweden-

borgian rearing had allied his sympathies for life with any movement that

could lead to humanitarian reform. The John Brown tragedy at Harper's

Ferry the past autumn had for many weeks stirred his emotions intensely.

But organized political maneuverings were something else, and for him they

could never be more than superficially engrossing. Like most normal young

Americans of the 1850's he turned away from the possibilities of war.

Actually, he declared long after, most of the younger generation in Co-

lumbus had been inclined to feel that the Union could not be dissolved.

But if it should be, they wondered whether dissolution was the worst

thing that could happen. Young men of twenty-three do not usually have

long sights on great issues -- even after extended associations with news-

paper offices. Howells would admit some day that his political vision in

1860 was much limited both from within and from without.⁸

Besides, Senator Salmon P. Chase had been Howells' man for the Re-

publican nomination. Lincoln had interested him little, either politically

or personally. When Lincoln had followed Douglas to Columbus the Sep-

tember before, Howells had merely slipped for a few minutes into the edge

of the late afternoon crowd on the State House grounds and could remember

listening only dimly to the man whose figure was "a blur against the pale

stone." He remembered nothing of Lincoln's discourse. In fact, his memory

was so confused that years later he transferred the event from the east

to the west portico of the Capitol and imagined that Lincoln had been re-

turning from his Cooper Union triumph in New York!⁹

Now in May, the fact that Salmon P. Chase had not been given the Re-

publican bid was a deep-driving disappointment to most of his followers

in Columbus. This was especially true for Howells because the rejection

was like a personal blow, since Governor Chase seemed to him to be a model

of the kind of man whose scholarship and integrity, striking good looks

and mastery of every social grace, along with an established reputation

and widely recognized strength of personality, fitted him especially for the

prime place of national leadership. As a Journal editor, Howells had even

shared the gracious hospitality of the Chases' dinner table and drawing

room. In fact, the Governor and his charming hostess daughter, Miss Kate,

had come to symbolize something very important in his own highly self-

conscious efforts to find a successful social and professional adjustment.

On the other hand, the Lincoln data that he now spread out on his work-

table seemed to be overburdened, more than commonly, with a kind of

unassimilable homeliness that his pen must either evade, transmute, or

at best skirt gingerly. The "sheaf of admirable notes" contained largely

primal jottings, often of the very rawest sort. Taken down in the idiom

of Lincoln's friends and neighbors, they made blatantly apparent Lincoln's

background of frontier crudity and cultural deprivation.

Yet there was a charm of familiar wild poetry, he confessed in reminis-

cence, that grew as he studied the realities in his material. "I was at home

with it," he said, "for I have known the belated backwoods of a certain region

236 OHIO HISTORY

in Ohio; I had almost lived the pioneer life; and I wrote the little book with

none of the reluctance I felt from studying its sources. I will not pretend

that I had any prescience of the greatness, the tragical immortality, that

underlay the few simple, mostly humble, facts brought to my hand."10

The Howells family had indeed spent one year in a log cabin, although

Ohio was already far removed from anything like the primitive harshness

of the first settlements. And as for the poetry, Howells was quite frank

long afterward in admitting that his eyes in May 1860 were conditioned

largely to a concept of a frontier America derived from long hours with the

verse of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and the narratives of James Feni-

more Cooper and Washington Irving.11

All evidence suggests that Howells settled down to the actual writing

of the Lincoln work on June 7 or immediately thereafter. About ten days

later, Follett, Foster and Company's fanfares for their forthcoming "author-

ized" biography grew a bit embarrassing when some Ohio State Republican

committeemen queried the nominee about it and got a sharp disavowal of

his having committed himself at all to any publisher. Follett and Foster's

advertising promptly dropped the claim.¹²The manuscript for the ninety-

four-page Life appears to have been finished in scarcely more than a week.

It was in type and printed in time to rush out a preliminary paperbound

issue on June 25. The hardbound edition, with six added speeches (includ-

ing the Cooper Institute address of February 27), together with some

memorabilia of the Chicago convention and a life of the vice-presidential

candidate, Hannibal Hamlin by John L. Hayes, would be ready to appear

on July 5 under the collective title of Lives and Speeches of Abraham Lincoln

and Hannibal Hamlin.¹³

Even if William Dean Howells had never pushed on to the long literary

career that established his fame, he would have been remembered for his

campaign publication of the Life of Abraham Lincoln, because it was eventu-

ally to become the most famous of the thirteen or more such hastily con-

ceived Lincoln biographies that were rushed onto the market in the summer

of 1860. Not that it was the best of them -- it was the only one that

Lincoln, during those burdened months, chanced to read and annotate.

The reason for his concern was that the young writer had inexcusably let

a very serious deviation from fact creep into the political side of the story.

Because of Lincoln's marginal corrections and comments, an annotated copy

preserved by Samuel C. Parks of Springfield would become in time a basic

autobiographical record.¹⁴

Lincoln seems not to have been unfavorably impressed by his Ohio

biographer's account, however, and for whatever reason was looking at the

Library of Congress copy of it four years later. He borrowed it again in

March 1865, and it was still at the White House at the time of his assassina-

tion.¹⁵Perhaps he liked the quiet air of frankness that the unawed biographer

had managed to achieve. "When one has written a hurried book," Howells

began the Preface, "one likes to dwell upon the fact, that if the time had

not been wanting one could have made it a great deal better. This fact is

YOUNG HOWELLS 237

of the greatest comfort to the author, and not of the slightest consequence

to anybody else."¹⁶ Simplicity and frankness went well with the homely,

friendly recollections and folk rationalizations from old neighbors and ac-

quaintances that made up much of the book, many of these being trans-

mitted into printed statement here for the first time. Though the author

indulged himself with a florid passage now and then, he kept mostly to a

graceful natural idiom that was casual in tone and, more frequently than

not, empowered by understatement and a cautious smile. "A work which

seeks only to acquaint people with the personal history of a man for whom

they are asked to cast their votes . . . will not be numbered with those im-

mortal books which survive the year of their publication," his Preface con-

tinued! The account would be found "reliable," for it had been derived

mainly from the remembrances of Mr. Lincoln's old friends and might,

therefore, "be considered authentic"!

This tone of quiet irony carried over immediately into opening para-

graphs on family, which Howells refined from Lincoln's two sparse auto-

biographical releases. "It is necessary that every American should have an

indisputable grandfather, in order to be represented in the Revolutionary

period by an actual ancestral service, or connected with it by ancestral

reminiscence." But farther back than a grandfather few could go with satis-

faction because the colonial period lies wrapt in obscurity and confusion.

So one has to claim "that the Smiths came over in the Mayflower, or that

the Joneses were originally a Huguenot family of vast wealth and the

gentlest blood; or that the Browns are descended from the race of Pow-

hattan [sic] in the direct line; or you are left in an extremely embarrassing

uncertainty as to the fact of great-grandparents."17

In the case of Lincoln, he said, there was little profit in the search. The

earliest ancestors known seemed to have been Quakers and there was a

dim possibility of even Plymouth blood, but "the noble science of heraldry

is almost obsolete in this country, and none of Mr. Lincoln's family seems

to have been aware of the preciousness of long pedigrees, so that the records

are meager."

Just why Howells bore down so hard on this point of family inconse-

quentiality is not clear. He may have been merely flicking a bit of good-

natured satire at the mid-century's growing penchant for deriving an Ameri-

can elite from chosen seed and "Minute Men." But there appears to have

been something more. James Quay Howard in his own Life of Lincoln that

followed shortly afterward showed the same skittishness toward the prob-

lem. In fact, Howard merely by-passed the matter of meager genealogy

by saying that Lincoln had come in a direct line from Adam and Eve, and

his awkward rhetoric at this point turned the Garden of Eden forebears

inadvertently into the first Quakers in the Lincoln line!¹⁸

At twenty-three, W. D. Howells himself had probably grown a trifle

self-conscious about family. The Howellses had no hundred-percent deriva-

tion from either founding colonies or religious establishment. The Quaker-

born Swedenborgian father was a direct migrant from Wales. His Irish-

238 OHIO HISTORY

Pennsylvania German mother, with her mixed Catholic, Methodist, and

Lutheran traditions, could claim only a generation or two farther back on

New World soil. In time, the myth of an American purity would both amuse

and annoy the writer and he would turn to it often in his reporting of the

comedy of native manners.

Whatever the cause, there was something akin to embarrassed hurry

in Howells' account of the Lincolns. In his haste he even miscopied a couple

of names, and Lincoln later had to correct them. It was not a great-uncle

"Thomas" but an Isaac Lincoln who had settled in the Cumberlands near

the adjunction of North Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia.19 And the name

of Lincoln's mother was Nancy, not "Lucy"!20 As for this Nancy Hanks

Lincoln, nearly everything Lincoln said in his autobiography about her

origins was omitted, except that like the father she was a Virginian; "beyond

this, little or nothing is known of her."²¹ Howells toned down Lincoln's

own forthrightness. Instead of saying that the Lincolns had "fallen away

from the peculiar habits" of the Quakers, he tactfully observed that "whether

they have fallen away from the calm faith of their ancestors is not a matter

of history."²² Abe had said of his father that he "never did more in the

way of writing than to bunglingly sign his own name."²³Tom Lincoln

sounded many degrees less primitive in the Howells version that permitted

him merely to grow up poor and uneducated, "his sole accomplishment in

chirography being his own clumsy signature."24

As for Abe's own schooling, how could a campaign biographer dare relay

the admissions of his candidate, especially to the book-worshiping East,

that he had merely gone "to A.B.C. schools by littles"? Or that he had

never attended a college or academy and had never been "inside of a Col-

lege or Academy building till since he had a law license"? Or that his teachers

had known only the rudiments of "readin', writin', cypherin' . . . as far as

the rule of three"? Or that if a straggler supposed to understand Latin

happened to sojourn in the neighborhood, he was looked upon as "a wizard"?

Or that he had studied English grammar imperfectly only after separating

from his father at twenty-three and had "studied and nearly mastered the

Six books of Euclid" only since he was a member of Congress? Or that as

a boy "he had but little ambition to know more of what was to be found

in books"? And certainly not that in his tenth year he had been "kicked

by a horse and apparently killed for a time"!25

Howells, even though he could claim probably not more than a total

of eighteen months of formal school attendance himself and had become

one of the most eager of self-disciplined searchers for books and a cultural

tradition, seemingly felt strong need to sum up Lincoln's education mostly

in diplomatic generalizations. He wrote, "he has ripened into a hardy physical

manhood, and acquired a wide and thorough intelligence, without the aid

of schools or preceptors."²⁶

When the young biographer came to Lincoln's notes on the family wan-

derings and Abe's own sturdy youthful adventures, however, he found his

creative imagination released from an encumbrance of too much embarras-

YOUNG HOWELLS 239

sing fact. Besides, he could invoke the aid of Longfellow to help cast golden

light on the Lincolns' wilderness years. After abandoning the old home

in Kentucky and striking through the forests in a northwesterly direction,

Howells wrote, Abe's father had finally "fixed his new dwellingplace in the

heart of the 'forest primeval' of what is now Spencer county, Indiana. The

dumb solitude there had never echoed to the ax, and the whole land was

wilderness.^"27 Howells had been rereading Evangeline the past winter and

knew much of the poem line by line. He had even tried a long narrative

of his own in the same mood and meter and was sending it to the Atlantic

Monthly.²⁸Of Abe Lincoln's first flat-boat trip to New Orleans at nineteen,

he even let Longfellow say that Abe and a son of the owner of the boat

voyaged

Down the beautiful river,

Past the Ohio shore, and past the mouth of the Wabash,

Into the golden stream of the broad and swift Mississippi.

And he replaced Lincoln's own succinct and sharply realistic thirty-nine-

word account in the autobiographical release with a 174-word paraphrase

in the romantic manner.²⁹

Pushing through the memoranda too fast, even though he had the exact

date in his subject's own words, Howells put the family's move on to Illinois

four years after the flat-boat episode. This mistake necessitated Lincoln's

later correcting the time back to two years. And though Lincoln also had

said the new home was "ten miles westerly from Decatur," it was recorded

"northwest" in the book -- it was actually southwest!30 Of this attempt

to establish a home, Howells reported merely that "father and son built

a log-cabin, and split rails enough to fence in their land," and that was

all.³¹ Not a word from Lincoln's careful additional details -- so revealing of

harsh realities -- to the effect that father and son had "made sufficient rails

to fence ten acres of ground, fenced and broke the ground, and raised

a crop of sown corn upon it the same year." And that "in the autumn all

hands were afflicted with Ague and fever, to which they had not been

used, and by which they were greatly discouraged -- so much so that they

determined on leaving the County -- They remained, however, through the

succeeding winter, which was the winter of the very celebrated 'deep snow'

of Illinois.^"32

Toil and endurance were commonplace in the early pioneer settlements,

but, except for the fever and chills of malaria, young Howells had never

experienced such hardships personally and just then seemed not to be

in the mood to record the implications of agonizing physical effort, long

frustration and heartache that later biographers would read into Lincoln's

simple words.

As Howells turned to Lincoln's New Salem years and to the notes that

Howard had picked up from old neighbors and acquaintances, he found

that he had to choose with even greater caution. There was much in these

homely materials that could be sympathetically understood only by per-

sons who had grown up inside the hard shell of frontier realities. For the

240 OHIO HISTORY

outsider, there were excesses that could be distorted and prejudiced. The

biographer, however, found he could use a story Howard got from George

Close of Abe's helping split about a thousand rails for James Hanks and

William Miller in Macon county, but either Howells or the typesetter

changed "Hanks" to "Hawks.^"33He also kept Close's story of Abe's bargain-

ing with Mrs. Nancy Miller "to maul 400 rails for each yard of brown

Jeans dyed with white walnut bark, until he got enough to make a pair

of pants" (Howard notes). But Howells' woodlore was never very firm

and he let "white walnut" shorten to "walnut," which, as any Macon county

housewife might have pointed out, was a dye of another hue.³⁴

Many of the folk stories in Howard's memoranda were far too crude to

touch at all. How could a campaign biography possibly relay Close's harsh-

seeming description of young Lincoln to the effect that "His pants were

made of flax and tow, cut tight at the ankle -- his knees were both out.

Was the roughest looking man I ever saw -- poor boy, but welcomed to

everybody's house"?³⁵ Or use the yarn that once while visiting friends in

Macon county Lincoln had found that the table, hewn from a log, was lack-

ing a fourth leg -- so he made use of his own long legs to hold up his

corner!36

With the appearance of Denton Offutt in the story, on the other hand,

Howells could let his heroic tendency come on full flood again. This time

Tennyson supplied the handy phrasing. Offutt was the hard-headed Missis-

sippi Valley promoter who had been Abe's employer on a second Mississippi

expedition and later in the New Salem store. His wandering adventures

up and down the Mississippi Valley stirred the biographer to give him the

most vivid thumb-nail portrait in the book, calling him "a backwoods

Ulysses, wise beyond the home-keeping pioneers about him" (and like Ten-

nyson's hero) "'Forever roaming with a hungry heart.'" Howells pictured

him as "fitting out frequent flat-boat expeditions to that cosmopolitan port

[New Orleans], where the French voyageur and the rude hunter that trap-

ped the beaver on the Osage and Missouri, met the polished old-world

exile, and the tongues of France, Spain, and England made babel in the

streets... [He pictured Offutt as] learning the life of the wild Mississippi

towns, with their lawless frolics, deep potations, and reckless gambling; . . .

ruling the boatman who managed his craft, and defying the steamboat

captain that swept by the slow broad-horn with his stately palace of paint

and gilding ..."³⁷ [for Denton Offutt had seen]

Cities of men,

And manners, climates, councils, governments.

How Sam Clemens, piloting on the Mississippi in the summer of 1860,

would have guffawed at this Tennysonian pictorializing. Howells knew

better, for he had sailed the river under the realistic guidance of steam-

boating uncles. But his natural story-telling instinct was making him play

up Offutt as the man of worldly discernment who had quickly perceived

"the sterling qualities of honesty and fidelity, and the higher qualities of

intellect which lay hid under the young Kentuckian's awkward exterior."³⁸

He had been Abe's discoverer.

YOUNG HOWELLS 241

Simple facts were somewhat harder for the time-pressed biographer to

record accurately. Lincoln had said that he made the trip to New Orleans

for Offutt during the winter of 1830-31 with his "step-mother's son, John

D. Johnston, and John Hanks." Howells made Johnston "the husband

of one of Lincoln's step-sisters." Lincoln finally set the record straight with

a marginal correction.39

Another error, genuinely amusing, crept into a footnote that was added

on John Hanks. At the Illinois State Republican Convention in Decatur

May 9, Hanks had appeared bearing two rails which were said to have

been from a lot of 3,000 he and Lincoln had made in 1830. Lincoln, who

knew the wide publicity the rails were bringing, had said whimsically in

his notes: "He is the same John Hanks who now engineers the 'rail en-

terprize' at Decatur; and is a first cousin of A's mother." Somehow either

Howells or a compositor misinterpreted Lincoln's sly fun and recorded Hanks

as "the well known railroad man in Illinois"! Lincoln must have chuckled

heartily as he gently curtailed "railroad" back to "rail.^"40

Howells' best chapters are those in which he recreated the New Salem

period showing Lincoln's heroic struggles to educate himself and win a

foothold in a profession. Here the biographer had to depend almost wholly

upon Howard's interview jottings. The earthy variety and abundant de-

tail gave him enough freedom of choice that he could relax from the severe

guidelines of Lincoln's own words. Although the folktalk that Howard had

caught was full of over-simplifications, exaggerations and idealizations, the

author was content to give the popular image its own way. He could not

know that in letting this larger Lincoln shape itself out of the recollections

and half-memories which Howard had caught from the words of Dr. John

Allen, Dr. Stevenson, Mentor Graham, Henry McHenry, William G. Green,

L. M. Green, Royal Clary, John T. Stewart, William Butler and others,

he was exercising one of the most momentous privileges that has ever been

accorded a biographer. He was helping perpetuate a large segment of the

Lincoln myth-to-be by putting it for the first time into printed statement.

Howells' Abe Lincoln emerged from New Salem looking much like a

young Hercules before whom Fate had set endless labors that were some-

times annoying, often well-nigh insuperable, but always easily disposed

of by the steadily advancing Lincoln.

In oratory? Abe had quickly shown himself the best public speaker in

the New Salem region. Though he had enjoyed no training save that of

local yarn-spinning and semi-illiterate debating societies, he had unexpectedly

stepped forward for an extemporaneous speech at Decatur in 1830 and

had so excelled that ever since his friends and neighbors had not let him

stay very far away from a convenient stump.⁴¹

In self-improvement? It had been nothing for Lincoln to walk eight miles

to borrow a book. With very little earlier schooling, he had mastered Kirk-

ham's grammar in two or three weeks. He became conversant with Shake-

speare, knew all of Burns by heart, and maintained a routine of mathematical

and metaphysical refreshment in which he never let a year pass without re-

YOUNG HOWELLS 243

reading the tales and sketches of Poe. He bought a copy of Blackstone at

an auction and prepared himself for admission to the practice of law. He

taught himself surveying, even though his first professional measuring had

to be done "with a grape-vine instead of a chain."42

In physical prowess? He had been pitted early against the most lawless

gang of strong-arm "Regulators" in the region, the "Clary's Grove Boys,"

whom Howells, prompted by Irving, romanticized into "a band of jolly,

roystering blades ... some such company as that of Brom Bones, in Sleepy

Hollow." Abe had to wrestle Jack Armstrong, but when he had shown his

superiority, Jack had worsted him with a leg foul. Whereupon Lincoln

won the day by such a convincing show of good humor that the men im-

mediately accepted him into their group.43

As a military leader? When the Black Hawk War broke upon the region,

Abe was elected captain against stiff competition, and at the end of the

war (in which Lincoln "was in no battle"), he had achieved "a warmer

place in the hearts of those who had followed his fortunes during the war,

by his bravery, social qualities, and uprightness." He had out-yarned, out-

raced and out-wrestled all his fellows in camp. He was the "favorite officer

of the battalion."44

In moral qualities? Abe's honesty had already become proverbial, both

in business and in politics. As a beginning merchant in New Salem, he

had struggled against insuperable odds, such as a dearth of capital, shift-

less associates, foreclosure and longtime debts. But he had shouldered all

obligations, both his own and others', and had paid back every cent. As

a lawyer, he refused to prosecute any case that he did not think right.

In politics he turned down all aid that hinted in the slightest way of

chicanery. That his old neighbors and friends "should regard him with

an affection and faith little short of man-worship" was "the logical result

of a life singularly pure, and an integrity without flaw."45

Such was the wild poetry that had now begun to take over Howells'

imagination and too-rapid composition. Obviously there were forces in this

Lincoln that stood wholly independent of mere popular favor and the whims

of electorates. Though campaign biographies have ever been notorious for

the casualness with which the subjects have been portrayed as archetypal

heroes, there is a firm sincerity in the cadences of the seven-paragraph

encomium with which Howells brought his emerging portrait into full

stature in the opening of Chapter V. To accomplish his ideal, however, as

has been mentioned, Howells had been forced to set aside a good many

pieces of very coarse material that would not fit, especially some of the

rougher anecdotal pieces:

There was Lincoln's recollection from the Offutt years, for example,

that he had once helped sew up the eyes of "thirty odd large fat live hogs,"

in an effort to drive them better -- an experiment that failed.46

And the Hon. William Butler's testimony (in Howard's notes) that he

had paid off a $400 debt for Lincoln and taken him into his family for

three years.

244 OHIO HISTORY

And Butler's description of the young man: "... as ruff a specimen of

humanity as could be found. His legs were bare for six inches between bottom

of pants and top of socks."⁴⁷

And Mentor Graham's "When I first saw Lincoln he was lying on a

trundle bed rocking a cradle with his foot -- was almost covered with papers

and books -- There was one half foot between bottom of pants and top of

sock."⁴8

And William G. Green's student recollection of taking some Illinois col-

lege boys, including Dick Yates, up to New Salem to see a "talented and in-

teresting young man," but of being mortified to find Abe lying stretched

out most unprepossessingly flat on his back on a cellar door reading a paper.

"I introduced him and he appeared so awkward and ruff that I was afraid

my college friends would be ashamed of him -- We made him go down to

dinner with us -- At the table he upset his large bowl of milk and when

my mother was trying to apologize for the accident L[incoln] remarked

that he would try and not let it trouble him hereafter."⁴⁹

Howells also passed over Lincoln's humble note about himself after the

Black Hawk War to the effect that he was now "without means and out of

business, but was anxious to remain with friends who had treated him with

so much generosity, expecially [sic] as he had nothing elsewhere to go to."

He thought of learning the blacksmith trade, then of trying to study law,

but knew he could not succeed at the latter without a better education.⁵⁰

The remainder of the Life was much firmer in factual outline but in-

creasingly thinner in treatment. It was much less a creative accomplish-

ment. After Lincoln's election to the Illinois legislature in 1834, there was

a continuous record in official journals and newspapers to fall back upon,

but Howells was finishing his book under printers' pressure and did not

study his data very thoroughly. He merely followed Lincoln's simple nar-

rative in the autobiography, adding a summary of legislative record, com-

menting generally on Lincoln's law practice, and enlivening the whole with

an anecdote or two from Howard's interviews.

One of these stories Lincoln later genially corrected. Dr. Stevenson of

Menard County had told Howard that a friend once met a party of "The

Long-Nine" and other members of the legislature coming from Vandalia

at the end of a session. All were on horseback except Abe who "kept up

with them on foot, being too poor to keep a horse." When Lincoln com-

plained of the cold, as Stevenson told it, one of the "Nine" had said "it

was no wonder for there was so much of him on the ground."⁵¹Howells

described the group of six-footers from Sangamon County, omitted the

joke about the big feet, but commented that Lincoln "used to perform his

journeys between New Salem and the seat of government on foot, though the

remaining eight of the Long-Nine traveled on horseback." Lincoln crossed

out this comment with the marginal note: "No harm, if true, but, in fact,

not true." Lincoln had long since learned the virtue of bypassing erroneous

trivia with, "no harm," whether in campaign biographies or elsewhere.52

After discussing Lincoln's experience as a state legislator in detail, Howells,

in large part, covered his two terms as a United States congressman with

YOUNG HOWELLS 245

perfunctory patchwork. Lincoln's autobiographical notes were expanded

with some background on the Mexican War, a summary of the record in

the House drawn from The Congressional Globe and Globe Appendix, an

abstract of a speech of June 20, 1848, on "Internal Improvements," a brief

history of the Republican party, and a short tie-in with the campaign of

1848-49.53 "The position which he maintained in the House of Representa-

tives was eminently respectable," Howells said. "His name appears oftener

in the ayes and noes, than in the debates; he spoke therefore with the more

force and effect when he felt called upon to express his opinion. The impression

that his Congressional speeches give you, is the same left by all others that

he has made. You feel that he has not argued to gain a point, but to show

the truth; that it is not Lincoln he wishes to sustain, but Lincoln's prin-

ciples."⁵⁴Following a clue in Lincoln's memoranda, he also quoted verbatim

a long Chicago Press and Tribune news story on the rebuttal to Stephen

Douglas in Peoria, October 4, 1854, in regard to the Nebraska bill favored

by Douglas.⁵⁵

Howells was weakest in his handling of the Lincoln and Douglas debates.

Though he devoted seven pages to them, his summary report is quite un-

even, unknowing in places and even inaccurate. Follett and Foster had pub-

lished the complete text, but Howells had done none of the editing and

apparently did not have time to read and digest the contents carefully.

Howard's own biography, though weaker than Howells' in most respects,

was far superior in analyzing the issues and arguments.

Though Howells caught the main points in Lincoln's opening speech

at Springfield on June 17, 1858, that is, the relationship of the Nebraska

Act of 1854 and of the Dred Scott decision to popular sovereignty, as well

as to extension of slavery into new territory and to revival of the slave

trade, he seems to have been totally unaware of the towering "house divided"

theme that Lincoln had set in his opening words.56 This was the theme

that Douglas immediately challenged, that was reiterated in every exchange

thereafter, and that loomed with mounting ominousness not only through

the Illinois debates but in later statements in Ohio and New York. "I be-

lieve this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free,"

Lincoln had said. "I do not expect the Union to be dissolved -- I do not

expect the house to fall -- but I do expect it to cease to be divided."

Nor did Howells seem aware of the dominating moral emphasis that

emerged dramatically in the exchange at Galesburg on October 7 and slowly

gained transcendence over all other legal, political and economic values,

reaching a climax in the closing words of the Cooper Union address on

February 27: "Let us have faith that right makes might; and in faith let

us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it."

Instead, Howells was attracted by personal drama. He noted Douglas'

closing designation of Lincoln (at Springfield on July 17) as a "kind-hearted,

amiable, good-natured gentleman."⁵⁷ He also recorded the letters of July

24-31 showing the sharp exchange of words over a proposed calendar for

joint discussions. Though the need was subordinate, he copied five pages of

this correspondence bodily from the already published Debates.⁵⁸He men-

246 OHIO HISTORY

tioned Douglas' twitting of his opponent at Ottawa for having been a "gro-

cery keeper" (a dramshop operator) during his New Salem days.59 Lincoln

immediately protested that he had "never kept a grocery anywhere in the

world." But Howells either deleted or did not see Lincoln's chuckling ad-

dition that he had indeed worked "the latter part of one winter in a little

still-house up at the head of a hollow."60

It was too rapid scanning, doubtless, that led to the most serious lapse

in the book, a basic error that had first stirred Lincoln to examine Howells'

account in July 1860. At Ottawa, Douglas had read a set of resolutions

embodying an extreme abolitionist point of view. This Howells mistakenly

had declared to be the resolutions adopted by the state convention of the

Illinois pre-Republican, "Anti-Nebraska" party in October 1854.61 In his

speech Douglas had challenged Lincoln to say whether he still supported

the radical measures set forward in them. The campaign biographer ac-

cepted Douglas' attribution and completely overlooked the long wrangle

during the next several debates, in which Lincoln wholly absolved himself

and the Republican party of any responsibility for these resolutions adopted

by an independent group in Kane County -- not Springfield as stated by

Howells. The author probably took his miscue from the so-called "Wide

Awake Edition," a campaign "Life" rushed out by Thayer and Eldridge

of Boston.⁶²In their next printing, Follett and Foster had to insert an er-

rata slip to cover the bad oversight, and the mistake was among the fifteen

that Lincoln annotated in Samuel Parks' copy.⁶³

Howells' final chapter told the story of the nomination in Chicago, con-

cluding with a few paragraphs about Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln in Springfield.

Though he had never met Lincoln and had seen him but once in the dim

distance eight months before, he managed to close with an appealing imagina-

tive sketch of his candidate at work in his office at the State House in

Springfield:

A sturdy voice calls out, "Come in!" and you find yourself in the

presence of a man who rises to the hight [sic] of six feet three inches,

as you enter. He shakes you with earnest cordiality by the hand -- re-

ceiving you as in the old days he would have received a friend who called

upon him at his farm-work; for those who have always known him, say

that, though Lincoln is now more distinguished, he has always been a

great man, and his simple and hearty manners have undergone no

change. You find him, in physique, thin and wiry, and he has an ap-

pearance of standing infirmly upon his feet, which often deceived those

who contended with him in the wrestle, in his younger days.

The great feature of the man's face is his brilliant and piercing eye,

which has never been dimmed by any vice, great or small. His rude and

vigorous early life contributed to strengthen the robust constitution

which he inherited, and he is now, at fifty, in the prime of life, with

rugged health, though bearing, in the lines of his face, the trace of severe

and earnest thought.⁶⁴

Now the biographer's task was done, young Howells said in closing, and

he preferred not to make any conjectures; he would leave "the future of

Lincoln to Providence and to the people, who often make history without

the slightest respect to the arrangements of sagacious writers"!65

THE AUTHOR: Robert Price is Pro-

fessor of English at Otterbein College.