February 15, 1998

Not-So-Honest Abe

Lincoln's road to success was a lot swampier than legend would have it.

Read the First Chapter

By GABOR BORITT

HONOR'S VOICE

The Transformation

of Abraham Lincoln.

By Douglas L. Wilson.

383 pp. New York:

Alfred A. Knopf. $30.



e think we know him. But what do we really know, especially about the private man whom we all suspect to be somehow crucially tied to the public one? ''Historians are forever doomed to ignorance about the early life of Abraham Lincoln,'' began ''The Last Best Hope of Earth'' (1993), a brief volume that summed up more than 20 years of learning about Lincoln by the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Mark E. Neely Jr. Now comes Douglas L. Wilson with ''Honor's Voice,'' a solid new portrait of the private Lincoln between the ages of 22 and 33, during the years 1831-42, that puts him in a strikingly fresh light.

The book starts not from the President's legendary greatness but from his actual beginnings. Wilson, the Saunders Director of the International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello, focuses with careful intensity on otherwise antiquarian oral reminiscences that help illuminate Lincoln's rise. Wilson tells a story about a search for identity and self-definition, and follows Lincoln's very exacting road of self-education, his finding of a vocation in law and politics, and the partial resolution of his painfully difficult relations with women.

The evolution of his religious outlook might illustrate his education. Raised a Baptist, Lincoln never outgrew a sense of fatalism, even ''a nameless sense of . . . doom.'' But he had the strength to go against the grain, and he quickly found the skeptics. He read in Thomas Paine about ''a young woman engaged to be married, and while under this engagement she is, to speak plain language, debauched by a ghost'': it is the story of the Virgin Mary.

The law student, while teaching himself the rules of evidence, wrote two manuscripts of religious skepticism, long lost but also long remembered by his contemporaries. According to John T. Stuart, his first law partner, Lincoln ''went further against Christian beliefs . . . than any man I ever heard.'' As he advanced in politics, Lincoln muted his heathenish talk, but even during this early period he learned to present himself, when necessary, ''as an unfortunate victim of unbelief.'' A hypocrite? Wilson's readers can decide; but Lincoln was certainly someone with a sense of self-preservation. And someone at this time a very long way from the Second Inaugural.

In politics and law Lincoln rose from successful frontier fighter to peacemaker who fought with words. At times the words were not honest, and relied on smear and innuendo. Yet Lincoln carried a ''compulsion'' to help the helpless, and learned, to quote the Shakespeare he had come to love, that the best of men ''have pow'r to hurt and will do none.''

His most troublesome problem was women. The young man who had lost his mother at the age of 9 always felt awkward around them -- except for older women. He loved Ann Rutledge, she died and he fell apart. Friends and, in time, work helped Lincoln back from a perhaps suicidal mental breakdown. The depth of his grief suggests to Wilson that Ann's death challenged the core of his being. His central goal in life, his wish to rise, ''to shape and even to control events,'' now seemed ''nothing but foolish vanity.''

Ambivalence characterized his later courtships and various marriage proposals. A possible reason for this, at least for a period of time, may have been a fear of syphilis -- not an unknown disease in his world. Wilson does not credit stories of Lincoln's possible love children but notes two episodes with prostitutes. If once or twice, why not more often? His longtime law partner, William H. Herndon, thought that ''Lincoln had a strong if not a terrible passion for women: he could hardly keep his hands off.'' Nor would he get married until he was 33.

As Lincoln the outsider learned to be an insider, deep anxieties beset him about his ability to make a living, about success in law, about polite society. His journey led him from country to village to town, where he found the exciting, highborn Mary Todd. A superficial courtship was followed by a commitment to marry. In a brief diversion, he became smitten by another woman, but Mary did not let go. As his brother-in-law put it, ''Lincoln in his conflicts of duty-honor and his love went as crazy as a Loon.'' In time he recovered the ability to rule himself, strengthening his self-respect by getting married. Love, Wilson suggests, seems to have had ''very little to do with it.''

Lincoln's road, therefore, was both harder and ''swampier'' than legend -- or scholars -- have allowed: the difficulties and temptations wider, the fears and depressions deeper. By 34 he appeared to have overcome his troubles, but not many signs of future greatness had yet turned up.

After 130-some years of Lincoln appraisals, how can a scholar, especially one as extraordinarily careful and fair as Wilson, create a startlingly new Lincoln? Wilson's achievement stems in part from the respect the culture has acquired for oral history (which often gives voice to the voiceless) and from his having put together, with his colleague Rodney O. Davis, the Szold Professor of History at Knox College, the definitive edition of the reminiscences of about 250 people who knew Lincoln: ''Herndon's Informants: Letters, Interviews, and Statements About Abraham Lincoln'' (1998). The two men have also been assembling, but have not yet published, the similarly massive recollections of Herndon himself -- the person who knew Lincoln better than anyone but Mary Todd. Historians have long used these oft-conflicting, difficult-to-read manuscripts, but Wilson's familiarity with them is unsurpassed.

The bulk of the reminiscences collected by Herndon were from 1865-66 and, as Wilson explains, emphasize the ''honorable, or at least unobjectionable.'' But ''Honor's voice,'' as Wilson calls them, ''can tell us a great deal, and sometimes tells us much more than it intended.''

This book establishes Wilson as the leading historian of the young and private Lincoln. Still, others sifting through the same sources may reach somewhat different conclusions, or take matters further. Consider the story about Lincoln's visiting a prostitute and, after undressing, realizing that he is $2 short of the needed $5 fee. He is offered credit but he departs, leaving the woman astonished at his integrity. Wilson knows that this sounds like ''a deliberate parody of the Honest Abe Lincoln legend,'' yet he accepts it. But might not a less cautious biographer venture an additional step, teasing out of this story and other evidence the possibility of a homosexual young man, even if observers and participants failed to speak of such?

Focusing on the private Lincoln while mostly ignoring the public one can obscure the private, too. For example, to prevent a quorum at a session of the Illinois State Legislature in 1840, Representative Lincoln jumped out of a window of the building where the members were meeting. Wilson sees this as a sign of private distress. That the leap was intended to influence important financial legislation during a debilitating economic depression is largely lost. Biographers, then, will have to use ''Honor's Voice'' with both admiration and a critical eye.

IT is profitable to divide the Lincoln literature roughly into two schools: ''Lincoln the man'' and ''Lincoln the god.'' Both have their uses. Wilson's book, with its understated, even prose, falls plainly into the first camp, and it makes a fine counterpoint to Garry Wills's ''Lincoln at Gettysburg,'' with its portrait of a President who ''remade America'' with a brief speech. Had Wilson claimed to be showing all of Lincoln, he might be criticized for missing some of the elements that make his subject great. As it is, he makes a very important start toward a new understanding of the greatest of Americans.

Writing about Lincoln is not something to be brushed off as simply a scholarly exercise. In our multicultural age, he remains a man of world-historic significance, the very symbol of what is best about the United States. During the Iranian revolution, a reporter saw a big painted slogan in Teheran: ''Government of the people, by the people, for the people.'' During Jiang Zemin's recent visit to the United States, the Chinese President conjured up Lincoln's memory. So has Pope John Paul II. When Colin Powell announced his refusal to run for the Presidency, he held up but one name. The Lincoln scholar's responsibilities are large. ''Honor's Voice'' gives Americans reason to be grateful that the field continues to attract students of ability and integrity.