A History of the American People

their own cause and moral detestation of the attitudes of their opponents. And the leaders on both
sides were righteous men. Let us look more closely at these two paladins, Abraham Lincoln and
Jefferson Davis. Lincoln was a case of American exceptionalism because, in his humble,
untaught way, he was a kind of moral genius, such as is seldom seen in life and hardly ever at the
summit of politics. By comparison, Davis was a mere mortal. But, according to his lights, he was
a just man, unusually so, and we can be confident that, had he and Lincoln been joined in moral
discussion, with the topic of slavery alone banned, they would have found much common
ground.
Both men were also characteristic human products of mid-i9thcentury America, though their
backgrounds were different in important respects. Lincoln insisted he came from nowhere. He
told his campaign biographer, John Locke Scripps of the Chicago Tribune, that his early life
could be condensed into a single sentence from Gray's Elegy, "The short and simple annals of the poor." ' He said both his parents were born in Virginia and he believed one of his grandfathers wasa Southern gentleman.' He also believed his mother was illegitimate, probably
rightly. He was born in a log cabin in the Kentucky backwoods and grew up on frontier farms as
his family moved westwards. His father was barely literate; his mother taught him to read, but
she died when he was nine. Thereafter he was self-taught. His father remarried, then took to
hiring out his tall lanky (six feet four and 170 pounds) son, for 25 cents a day. He said of his son:
He looked as he had been rough-hewn with an axe and needed smoothing down with a jackplane.' Lincoln acquired, in the backwoods of Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois, and on the Ohio and the Mississippi, an immense range of skills: rafting, boating, carpentry, butchering, forestry, store- keeping, brewing, distilling, plowing. He did not smoke, chew tobacco, or drink. He acquired an English grammar, and taught it to himself. He read Gibbon, Robinson Crusoe, Aesop, The Pilgrim's Progress, and Parson Weems' lives of Washington and Franklin. He learned the Statutes o f Illinois by heart. He rafted down to New Orleans and worked his way back on a steamer. He visited the South several times and knew it, unlike most Northerners." He listened often to Southerners defend thePeculiar Institution' and knew their arguments
backwards; what he had personally witnessed made him reject them, utterly, though he never
made the mistake of thinking them insincere or superficial. He loved Jefferson, Clay, and
Webster, in that order. He was a born storyteller, a real genius when it came to telling a tale,
short or long. He knew when to pause, when to hurry, when to stop. He was the greatest coiner
of one-liners in American history, until Ronald Reagan emerged to cap him. He was awkward-he
always put his whole foot flat down when walking, and lifted it up the same way-but could
suddenly appear as if transfigured, full of elegance. With one hand he could lift a barrel of
whiskey from floor to counter. He was hypochondriac, as he admitted. He wrote an essay on
suicide. He said: I may seem to enjoy life rapturously when I am in company. But when I am alone I am so often so overcome by mental depression that I never dare carry a penknife.' Lincoln was a self-taught lawyer but his instincts were not for the cause. He saidpersuade
your neighbors to compromise whenever you can ... As a peacemaker, the lawyer has a superior
opportunity of being a good man. There will still be business enough. A worse man can scarcely
be found than one who [creates litigation].' As a circuit lawyer, Lincoln fancied himself a Whig
and stood for the state legislature. His first elective post, however, was as captain of volunteers
in the Black Hawk War (1832), in which he came across five scalped corpses in the early
morning: `They lay heads towards us on the ground. Every man had a round red spot on the top
of his head about as big as a dollar where the redskins had taken his scalp. It was frightful. But it
was grotesque. And the red sunlight seemed to paint everything over.' But he held no grudge;