I've always been interested in Lincoln. Just now I’m translating a Korean children’s book about him. And I recently saw the documentary Lincoln’s Dilemma about how the abolition of slavery came about. It seems like everything in his life contributed to the eventual legend, like his meeting his future wife Mary Todd at a ball and dancing badly with her. (Our image of Lincoln is a country boy not gifted with social graces…)
When I was little I read a children’s book about him, in English. I learned about all the difficulties in his life, how his store went broke and left him in debt, and one of his sons took sick and died while he was President. He often suffered from depression, and they’d be afraid to nominate him for the Presidency now, but it arguably made him a better leader.
My mother was interested in Lincoln too. She felt sorry for his unstable wife. Back in Illinois she’d been a big fish in a small pond, but when they came to Washington the capital’s social elite viewed them as hillbillies. She was a shopaholic and wore lots of fancy clothes during wartime, which many thought inappropriate. (She wore jewelled rings over her kid gloves, which the elite considered low-class.) After being widowed, she actually spent some time in a mental asylum!
He had an unusual talent for succinctness: he said the sort of things that would cause my mother to say “Nobody could have said it better.” Like in his Gettysburg Address, where he said “We’re here to dedicate a cemetery to the war dead, yet they’ve already dedicated it with their actions in a way our words can’t match. All we can do is draw inspiration from them and continue their fight.”
The more I read about Lincoln, the more I admire his shrewdness. He famously wrote in an open letter, “If I could save the Union by freeing all the slaves, I would; if I could save it by freeing none, I would; if I could save it by freeing some and not others, I would.” This may seem indecisive, but in fact he’d already decided to issue the Emancipation Proclamation and was waiting for the right time, which came the following month.
There have been some good movies about Lincoln. There was the one with Daniel Day-Lewis a few years ago. And there’s an old one, Young Mr. Lincoln, with Henry Fonda as Lincoln arguing a legal case in his early years. There’s a great moment at the end where he says “I’m going to the top of the hill!” and walks off into a storm…
