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.2 And 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.3 By 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.12
The 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.15 Perhaps 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."23 Tom 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.28 Of 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."33 He 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."51 Howells
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."54 Following 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.58 He 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.62 In 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.
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.2 And 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 |