Three of my favorite
American poets were all from Illinois and were roughly contemporary. It is more than simple parochialism—Illinoisans do not have
the breast beating pride of place of
Virginians or Texans or the sometimes snooty
Pilgrim pride of Bay Staters. Indeed, Illinois folk are often embarrassed to admit that they come from a state best known nationally for political corruption and convict governors. No, it’s because the
three poets—Sandburg, Lindsay, and Masters—brought fresh ideas
and forms to poetry which had long
been the seen as the exclusive provenance
of the Eastern Elite and which was choked on convention and
the long, inescapable shadow of Romanticism. They saw things through iconoclastic eyes, wrote in simple, straight-from-the-shoulder verse liberated from ten dollar words and classic allusions. Each was, in his own way, a Poet of the People. Yet each had a unique style and particular
concerns. They did not represent a school or movement. They were simply
themselves.
Naturally each was drawn in particularly personal ways to the topic of Lincoln
who was not only close to them geographically
but was personally known by
people close to each of them.
Of course no writer is more identified with Abraham
Lincoln than Carl Sandburg whose
magnificent multi-volume biographies are the most beautiful and moving, if not the most academically
useful, of all of the many accounts of his life. This poem was written in 1925 but not
published in Sandburg’s life time. He—or
more likely his editors felt that
the blunt description of Lincoln’s death
and the preparation of his body for the famous long train ride back to Springfield was still too traumatizing for tender readers of
verse. I find it sobering and powerful
and then lifted by a kind of defiance to an unjust world. Very Sandburg.
Journey and Oath
When Abraham
Lincoln received a bullet in the head and was taken to the Peterson house
across the street,
He passed on and was swathed in emulsions and prepared for a journey to New
York, Niagara, across Ohio, Indiana, back to Illinois-
As he lay
looking life-like yet not saying a word,
Lay portentous and silent under a glass cover,
Lay with oracular lips still as a winter leaf,
Lay deaf to the drums of regiments coming and going,
Lay blind to the weaving causes of work or war or peace,
Lay as an inextinguishable symbol of toil, thought, sacrifice-
There was
an oath in the heart of this man and that:
By God, I’ll go as a Man;
When my time comes I’ll be ready.
I shall keep the faith that nothing
is impossible with man, that one
or two illusions are good as money.
By God,
I’ll be true to Man
As against hog, louse, fox, snake, wolf,
As against these and their counterparts
in the breast of Man.
By God, I’ll fight for Man
As against famine, flood, storm,
As against crop gambling, job gambling,
As against bootlickers on the left hand,
As against bloodsuckers on the right hand,
As against the cannibalism of the exploitation
of man by man,
As against insecurity of the sanctities of human life.
—Carl Sandburg
Vachel Lindsay was born in Lincoln’s adopted home town of Springfield and raised in a big old house the next block over from the Governor’s mansion. Unlike some poets who rebel against their roots and try to distance themselves from what they may consider their mundane or plebian roots, Lindsay loved—nay adored—his hometown. He reveled in its lore, it tree shaded streets, its people great and common, White and Black. He knew well Lincoln’s haunts on the Square across from the old sandstone Capital, the frame house far simpler than his own, the Depot from which he departed alive for the last time and to which he returned amid pomp in an ornate box. He knew the old men, bent, broken, bearded, and gray who as lads had marched smartly away to fight in Mr. Lincoln’s War. And, of course, he knew the grand mausoleum the city and its citizens had built for him, fit for a pharaoh of old the local said, on hill at the cemetery on the edge of town.
It was no wonder that when Lindsay
thought of Springfield, he thought of Lincoln —and thought of him as a specter risen from his tomb, especially as he wrote during the
fresh carnage of a World War.
Abraham
Lincoln Walks at Midnight
(In Springfield, Illinois)
It is portentous, and a thing of state
That here at midnight, in our little town
A mourning figure walks, and will not rest,
Near the old court-house pacing up and down.
Or by his homestead, or in shadowed yards
He lingers where his children used to play,
Or through the market, on the well-worn stones
He stalks until the dawn-stars burn away.
A bronzed, lank man! His suit of ancient black,
A famous high top-hat and plain worn shawl
Make him the quaint great figure that men love,
The prairie-lawyer, master of us all.
He cannot sleep upon his hillside now.
He is among us:—as in times before!
And we who toss and lie awake for long
Breathe deep, and start, to see him pass the door.
His head is bowed. He thinks on men and kings.
Yea, when the sick world cries, how can he sleep?
Too many peasants fight, they know not why,
Too many homesteads in black terror weep.
The sins of all the war-lords burn his heart.
He sees the dreadnaughts scouring every main.
He carries on his shawl-wrapped shoulders now
The bitterness, the folly and the pain.
He cannot rest until a spirit-dawn
Shall come;—the shining hope of Europe free;
The league of sober folk, the Workers’ Earth,
Bringing long peace to Cornland, Alp and Sea.
It breaks his heart that kings must murder still,
That all his hours of travail here for men
Seem yet in vain. And who will bring white
peace
That he may sleep upon his hill again.
—Vachel
Lindsay
The odd man out here is Edgar Lee Masters, the classic freethinker and iconoclast who had once been Clarence Darrow’s law partner and was best known as the author of one of the single best volumes of American poetry ever, The Spoon River Anthology. As far as I know Masters never wrote a poem with Lincoln as the central subject. The closest he came was in references made by some of the denizens of the Spoon River graveyard who tell their stories in the two volumes he wrote about the mythical downstate community muddled on his own home town. The best known of these was Anne Rutledge.
Anne Rutledge
Out of me unworthy and unknown
The vibrations of deathless music;
“With malice toward none, with charity for all.”
Out of me the forgiveness of millions toward millions,
And the beneficent face of a nation
Shining with justice and truth.
I am Anne Rutledge who sleep beneath these weeds,
Beloved in life of Abraham Lincoln,
Wedded to him, not through union,
But through separation.
Bloom forever, O Republic,
From the dust of my bosom!
—Edgar Lee Masters
This is surprising. After all Masters was half a generation older then Sandburg and Lindsay. And he grew up in Petersburg—his Spoon River—in Menard County quite near Lincoln’s New Salem. His beloved grandfather Squire David Masters served with Lincoln in the Blackhawk War, owned a farm within half a day’s walk from New Salem, and at least once hired the young lawyer when he was just starting out. His father, Hardin Masters had once been a law partner of Lincoln’s last partner and biographer William Herndon. He knew many who had known Lincoln and told stories about his country wit. He was surrounded by the near cult-like worship of Lincoln that thrived in Illinois in the post-Civil War years.
Yet in 1931 Masters published the
most scathing biography of Lincoln
yet written by a Northerner. Lincoln: The Man was so venomous that it outdid the movement
led by un-reconstructed Confederates like
Lyon G. Tyler and Mildred Lewis Rutherford in their books of the previous
decade to cast Lincoln as the black
hearted villain of the Civil War who had loosed unnecessary devastation on the nation and crushed a freedom loving, agrarian
society. Sandburg, who had been
friendly with Masters when he first came to Chicago, wrote sadly on the flyleaf of his copy of the book, that
it was a “long sustained Copperhead hymn
of hate reversing the views of a
Masters I knew well 10 and 15 years before he wrote these sickly venomous
pages.” A New York Times reviewer compared the book to the “Indiana Knights of the Golden Circle”—the
Ku Klux Klan that had thrived in
that state in the ‘20’s.
How could this be? Masters was, after all, the friend and
associate of Darrow and a famous liberal. He was an admirer of Eugene V. Debs
and Illinois Governor John Peter
Altgeld, an admirer of the great liberal Freethinker statesman Robert Ingersoll, a friend of labor, and the ardent opponent of oligarchic monopolists
and their Trusts.
It turns out that although personally friendly to young Lincoln,
Masters’s Grandfather was, like many of the settlers of Downstate
Illinois, an ardent Democrat casting himself as an agrarian republican in the tradition of
Thomas Jefferson and the enemy of Lincoln’s Whigs and new Republicans as the inheritors of Alexander
Hamilton’s elite and moneyed Federalists, the champion of national state power over the states,
high tariffs, and the hated monopolistic
Bank. Squire Davis actively campaigned against Lincoln in his race
for State Legislature and later as a
member of the legislature himself in 1855 did not vote for Lincoln in the
election for U. S. Senator. He was a devoted support of Lincoln’s long-time rival Stephen A. Douglas, the Little
Giant.
Masters grew up idolizing Douglas as
the clear inheritor of Jefferson’s mantle and a brilliant man with a clear
eyed, practical way to save the Union when fanatics North and
South were losing their minds. In his
view the heroic Douglas was betrayed
by faithless Democrats and overwhelmed with the money and power of northern merchants
and industrialists backing
Lincoln. Then after a stinging loss Douglas sacrificed
himself trying to save the Union
that Lincoln and the Republicans imperiled dying
of strain and overwork just months
later. Douglas was, in Masters’s eyes, a
martyr.
He watched with resentment as
Lincoln's cult grew and his lion seemed neglected and dishonored. In 1922 all of this came out in his novel Children of the Market Place
which was narrated by an Englishman who migrates to Illinois in
1833. He comes to admire Douglas, but
was unaware of the scruffy upstart Lincoln until attended one of the Lincoln
Douglas Debates at Alton
after returning from a trip home to England.
He finds Douglas’s arguments irrefutable
and Lincoln’s silly and fanatical. At first repelled by the bumpkin with
the high thin voice, in the course of the argument he begins to appreciate
Lincoln’s eloquence. But for him
it is all mere theater and lawyerly histrionics. Still later the narrator will hear Lincoln at
Gettysburg and admit that he has a “great soul” but a foolish
mind. At the end of the novel during
the labor turbulence of the 1890s, the old man sits at Douglas’s tomb
and weeps for what was lost.
In this view Lincoln was somewhat sympathetic, a misguided man with a good heart and natural gifts but the moral and intellectual inferior of a real
giant.
In less than a decade Masters’s view
of Lincoln would sour even more. The
intervening years were filled with personal and national disappointments
for him. After the heady triumph of The Spoon River Anthology, each
successive volume of his poetry sold fewer copies and the critics grew harsher
while rivals like Sandburg and Lindsay prospered. His novels were failures and his plays closed as fast as they opened.
Not only was he past his glory, he was dismissed as dated and passé.
Meanwhile in his view Lincoln’s
Republicans had become the private political
machine of the Trusts and malefactors
of great wealth. They had made
possible Prohibition which unleashed unheard of violent crime and
corruption. And then the bankers and speculators had driven the country to
the Crash and Great Depression for
which the common people—farmers and workers
paid the price. And it all, in his
mind started with Lincoln and the defeat of the last Jeffersonian knight. It was
a very bitter man who wrote the new supposedly idol toppling biography.
Of course outside of Confederate
die-hards and the coterie of historians and cultural manipulators—think Birth of a Nation and Gone With the Wind—busy
trying to snatch victory from defeat by recasting the
narrative of the central event in American history and its aftermath,
the book was roundly condemned in the northern and liberal circles that Masters
cared for the most. His reputation,
what was left of it, was essentially destroyed. He lived on until 1950 and wrote several more
books, including a biography of Lindsay.
There would even be occasional honors, but he had permanently
lost his place in the cultural sun.
For his part, Sandburg’s Abraham Lincoln: The War Years published in 1939, a follow-up to his Pulitzer
Prize winning two volume biography of the young man Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years, did much to undo any damage wrecked by Masters. Since then hundreds of books have been
written about the complex and somewhat mysterious Lincoln who has
been called “the most written about public figure since Jesus.”
Hagiographies have gone out of style, but most writers find much to
admire in the public and private man. In
recent years a half dozen major biographies have appeared along with
specialized analysis of parts of the Lincoln legacy like Doris Kerns Goodwin’s A Team of Rivals which
Barack Obama famously studied before naming Hillary Clinton his Secretary
of State. Novelists from Gore
Vidal on the left to William Safire on the right to Jerome Charyn in the realm
of the soul have plumbed his depths.
Of course the rise of the New Right
has been a battle between those who try to paint themselves as the true
inheritors of Lincoln and his party with the Southerners who have infiltrated and taken over the Republican Party making it over into the mirror
image of the Jim Crow Democrats.
In the north, libertarian neo-Confederates, alleged
intellectuals at places like the Heartland Institute have resurrected
Masters’s criticism pretty much intact and have launched a new attack on
Lincoln’s reputation.
My bet is their puny efforts will be
no more successful in the long run.
As for me, I will always love and revisit
Spoon River, but when it comes to
Lincoln, I will stand with Sandburg and Lindsay.
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