On Feb. 12, 1809, Abraham Lincoln was born into poverty, the
son of a mother who would die before he turned 10 and an illiterate father from
whom he would become estranged. Despite Lincoln's starting out life under such foreboding
circumstances, his country, 200 years later, is celebrating the man historians
generally recognize as the greatest president in the U.S. history. The State
Bar of Texas is joining in the Lincoln bicentennial festivities, preparing this
special issue of the Texas Bar Journal; co-sponsoring a luncheon in Dallas on
Lincoln’s birthday featuring Pulitzer Prize-winning historian James
McPherson[1] ; and lining up another Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Doris
Kearns Goodwin, to speak at the State Bar Annual Meeting in Dallas on June 26.
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For non-“Lincolnphiles” who have a hard time remembering the
basics of our 16th president’s life, this essay provides an overview of the
lawyer-turned-statesman and builds the case that Lincoln is the ultimate role
model for our profession. From reading and synthesizing six acclaimed recent
biographies of Lincoln,[2] four essential characteristics stand out.
1. BRILLIANCE: Lincoln had astounding powers of
concentration, comprehension, open-mindedness, discernment, and communication.
As a boy, Lincoln read every book he could get his hands on.
Although the quantity of books available to him in rural Kentucky and Indiana
was limited, the quality was high - the King James Bible, Aesop’s Fables,
Shakespeare’s plays, the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, and Bunyan’s The
Pilgrim’s Progress. Lincoln read these timeless masterpieces over and over,
memorizing long passages that would form the foundation of his eloquence.
Lincoln’s desire to learn and master arcane material was not
a boyhood phenomenon; it lasted throughout his life. Over the course of his
adult years, he mastered topics ranging from law to Euclidean geometry to
military strategy to foreign policy to the verses of leading poets.
Consistent with his lifelong obsession with reading, Lincoln,
as a lawyer and politician, earned a reputation for thoroughly researching and
considering all sides of an issue before forming a final opinion. Moreover, he
developed that opinion only after extended time in solitude. He didn’t delegate
his critical thinking to advisers. Doris Kearns Goodwin quotes Lincoln’s
secretary, John Nicolay, on how the president would “resort to the process of
cumulative thought, reducing complex ideas to paragraphs and sentences, and
then days or weeks later would return to the same passage and polish it further
to elaborate or to conclude his point or argument.” This approach is best
evidenced by the Gettysburg Address, which reflected Lincoln’s “intense focus
on his chosen theme for nearly a decade.”
Because of the deep thinking that went into reaching a
conclusion, Lincoln held fast into his convictions. Biographer William Lee
Miller relates an exchange between Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, who had
described the president’s position on slavery as “slow and vacillating”:
I make no objection to slow, but vacillating is another
matter. Mr. Douglass, that charge cannot be sustained. I think t cannot be
shown that when I have once taken a position, I have ever retreated from it.
The political theorist Hans Morgenthau observed:
Lincoln’s sheer brainpower must have exceeded that of all
other presidents, Jefferson included. The manifestations are the more
astounding, as Lincoln’s mind was virtually untrained by his sporadic formal
elementary schooling that amounted altogether to about one year. His
extraordinary intelligence revealed itself in philosophic under-standing of
public issues, in a judicious concern with politically relevant detail, in a
mastery of political manipulation, and in military judgment.
2. SELF-CONTROL: Lincoln
maintained clean living habits and high integrity.
Although most of his contemporaries used tobacco, imbibed
alcohol, conversed with profanity, and gambled, Lincoln never engaged in such
vices. According to biographer Fred Kaplan, Lincoln refused to take part in
these activities because they reflected “those aspects of human nature that
prevent the triumph of reason and moral vision.” Lincoln also declined to
participate in the most popular recreational activities of his era — hunting
and fishing. Aside from time spent socializing with friends, Lincoln used his
free time for one thing and one thing only: to read. According to Kaplan,
“Learning gave Lincoln an intellectual high, to such an extent that he often
read aloud, enunciating words in the theater of his own head.”
Lincoln maintained integrity throughout his lifetime,
receiving his nickname, “Honest Abe,” the old-fashioned way — he earned it. As
a 23-year-old in Indiana, Lincoln became the part-owner of a small-town country
store that went out of business, leaving him with creditors and no apparent way
to repay them. Over the next decade, as Lincoln pursued a new career as a
lawyer, he scrimped and made personal sacrifices to ensure that he could repay
his creditors 100 cents on the dollar, even though they had not pressed him to
make them whole. As lawyer and a politician, Lincoln’s integrity continued to
prevail. He insisted on presenting only intellectually honest arguments,
knowing that shading the truth would prove counter-productive to establishing
his position.
3. EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE:
Lincoln had an aptitude for dealing with peers effectively.
Lincoln’s surge toward greatness was fueled, in part, by
what modern psychologists call “emotional intelligence.” Daniel Goleman defines
the term as the capacity to maintain 1) self-awareness; 2) control of one’s
emotions and impulses amidst changing circumstances; 3) self-motivation; 4)
empathy toward others’ emotions; and 5) harmonious relationships, even when
peers are in conflict. To maintain emotional intelligence on a daily basis
requires bona fide self-control and tact. To maintain it while serving as
commander-in-chief during a civil war, attending to an increasingly unstable
wife and grieving over the death of one’s child required astounding
self-awareness, emotional control, and the capacity to harmonize disparate
factions. Lincoln’s ability to remain steady while leading the country through
turbulence is evidenced by the following:
- Regardless of blunders that set back the Union cause during
the Civil War, Lincoln did not engage in blaming, denigrating, or
fault-finding. Occasionally, he would write letters venting his feelings about
generals who had let him down, but he did not mail them.
- At the outset of
Lincoln’s presidency, those with more education and political experience would
level insults at him, perceiving that someone so unsophisticated and
inexperienced could not possibly be up to the job. Lincoln refused to take the
bait and retaliate, or even hold a grudge, because “the issues we face are too
vast for malicious dealings.”
- In the face of constant criticism and genuine fear of losing
the American republic, Lincoln remained stoic and did not panic. Aware of the
power of words, the president insisted that his public and private messages
were concise, clear, apt, logical, and carefully edited. Misunderstandings from
ambiguous communications had to be avoided during such a critical time.
- Despite holding the powerful office of president, Lincoln’s
ego remained in check. Only lesser men acted arrogantly or self-righteously.
4. SENSE OF PURPOSE:
Lincoln wanted to make a difference in the world.
Lincoln, unlike his father, had no desire to work with his
hands. Rather, he aspired to make a living and gain distinction by utilizing
his mind. Kaplan frequently describes Lincoln as an autodidact, a person who is
self-taught and self-educated. A clever lexicographer might place a photograph
of Lincoln next to that word. It is difficult to imagine anyone teaching
himself more than our 16th president did.
Imagine learning the law with no instructor and to reach a
level of proficiency to not only be admitted to the bar, but to try major
lawsuits and argue appeals all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Imagine
mastering military history and battle tactics in a quiet room at the Library of
Congress so that you remain several steps ahead of generals who graduated from
West Point. Imagine having such command of the Bible and Shakespeare that you
can quote the most appropriate passages at the most opportune times, in court
or on the political stage. Abraham Lincoln pushed himself and rose to do all of
these things, on his own, without mentoring from parents, teachers, colleagues,
or superiors.
Lincoln’s self-education provided the foundation for his
continual rise. Miller explains:
Lincoln developed rare powers of concentration and he would
use them all his life. He developed a confidence that he could dig in books for
what he wanted … and that confidence in his powers of understanding what was
written on the page seems to have encouraged a broader self-confidence, in his
judgment and his critical powers— let us call it a moral self-confidence.
Then Lincoln learned of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, he was
thunderstruck by its divisive, pro-slavery effect and refused to rest until he
had done everything in his power to nullify it. Lincoln’s debates with Stephen
A. Douglas, in which Lincoln crusaded against the expansion of slavery,
provided Lincoln with a national platform that helped him to emerge as the most
persuasive and eloquent spokesperson on the era’s most controversial issue.
When Lincoln was elected president, Southern states started
to secede from the Union. After the Confederate Army attacked Fort Sumter,
Lincoln’s highest purpose became to restore the United States to an indivisible
nation, governed as are public, by majority rule. Lincoln’s resolve became such
a personal crusade that if bringing about his desired, constitutionally mandated
result required suspending the right to habeas corpus for a short time to
prevent border state Maryland from having its infrastructure destroyed, then
the president would do what it took, rationalizing the temporary infringement
of constitutional rights: “A part can’t control the whole, to the destruction
of the whole. … I will amputate a limb to save a life.”
As the war continued to rage, with no end in sight, Lincoln
combined his two driving purposes — restoring the Union and ending slavery — by
issuing the Emancipation Proclamation of Jan. 1, 1863. The proclamation
motivated and transformed the Union Army into a force fighting for liberation
and facilitated the recruitment of African-American men into the Union Army.
In his most recent book on Lincoln, Tried by War, McPherson
addresses the significance of the Emancipation Proclamation on the country and
its president:
The proclamation completed the transformation of Lincoln’s
policy and national strategy from a war for restoration of the old Union into a
war to give the nation a new birth of freedom. … Upon executing the historic
document, Lincoln told those in his inner circle, “I never in my life felt more
certain that I was doing right than I do in signing this paper. If my name ever
goes into history it will be for this act, and my whole soul is in it.”
Lincoln achieved the sense of purpose he had set for himself
as a child and reiterated over the course of his life. McPherson then puts the
significance of the incident into perspective:
More than any other American, Lincoln’s name has gone into
history. He gave all Americans, indeed all people everywhere, reason to
remember that he had lived.
CONCLUSION
Doris Kearns Goodwin, in the final paragraph of her
introduction to Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln,
provides an answer for why Lincoln should matter to us today:
After living with the subject of Abraham Lincoln for a
decade, reading what he himself wrote and what hundreds of others have written
about him, following the arc of his ambition, and assessing the inevitable
mixture of human foibles and strengths that made up his temperament, after
watching him deal with the terrible deprivations of his childhood, the deaths
of his children, and the horror that engulfed the entire nation, I find that
after nearly two centuries, the uniquely American story of Abraham Lincoln has
unequalled power to captivate the imagination and to inspire emotion.
Happy 200th birthday, Abraham Lincoln! As lawyers, we are
inspired by the brilliance, self-control, emotional intelligence, and sense of
purpose you demonstrated throughout your life. You carried our nation through
its most difficult challenge. We lift you up as the ultimate role model for our
profession.
NOTES
[1] The State Bar of Texas is sponsoring the Lincoln
bicentennial luncheon with the World Affairs Council of Dallas/Forth Worth, the
SMU Maguire Center for Ethics and Public Responsibility, the Dallas Public
Library, Winstead P.C., and PricewaterhouseCoopers.
[2] 1) Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief
by James McPherson (Penguin Press 2008); 2) Team of Rivals: The Political
Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin (Simon & Schuster 2005);
3) Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer by Fred Kaplan (HarperCollins 2008);
4) Lincoln’s Virtues: An Ethical Biography by William Lee Miller (Knopf 2002);5)
President Lincoln: The Duty of a Statesman by William Lee Miller (Knopf2008);
and 6) Lincoln’s Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled
His Greatness by Joshua Wolf Shenk (Houghton Mifflin 2005).
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The publishers of TexasBarBooks are pleased to present Raising the Bar: The Crucial Role of the Lawyer in Society, written by Talmage Boston.
