More than one clue must be unravelled to reach an understanding of
Abraham Lincoln. Among them there surely must be reckoned his capacity
for companionship. None more catholic in his selections ever lived.
All men were his fellows. He went unerringly and unconsciously for the
most part, to the meeting place that awaited him in each man’s nature.
There might be a wall, often there was; but he knew, no one better,
that there is always a secret door in human walls. Sooner or later he
discovered it, put his finger on its spring, passed through and settled
into the place behind that was his.
His life was rich in companionships with unlikely people, often people
who began by contempt or semi-contempt of him. There was the town bully
of his youth, whom he soundly thrashed for trying a foul in a wrestling
match, and who rose from the dust to proclaim Lincoln the best man who
ever broke into camp; thirty years later there was his own Secretary of
State, with his self-complacent assumption of the President’s unfitness
for leadership and of his own call to direct the nation, put gently but
firmly in his place and soon frankly and nobly declaring, “He’s the
best of us all.”
He had many pass-keys--wrath, magnanimity, shrewdness, patience,
clarity of judgment, humor, resolve; and in the end, one or the other
or all together opened every closed door, and he sat down at home
with men of the most divergent view and experience: the bully, the
scholarly, the cunning, the pious, the ambitious, the selfish, the
great, the weak, the boy, the man.
Particularly was Lincoln at home with men like the Billy Brown of
these pages, men whose native grain had not been obscured by polish
and oil. There were many of them in his time in Illinois, plying their
trades or professions more or less busily, but never allowing industry
to interfere with opportunities for companionship. They were men of
shrewdness, humor, usually modest, not over-weighted with ambition.
Their appetite for talk, for politics, for reports on human exhibits of
all sorts, never dulled. Their love of companionship outstripped even
their naturally intolerant partisanship.
These men, unconsciously for the most part, resisted the social
veneering that, beginning in Illinois in Lincoln’s day, rapidly
overlaid the state. In his first contact with Springfield in the ’30’s
he remarked the “flourishing about in carriages,” the separation of
people into groups according to money, antecedents, social etiquette.
He never allowed convention, address, ceremony, however foreign to him,
to interfere with his human relations--he went over or around them.
But, natural man that he was, he found a special freedom with those in
whom the essence of human nature remained unmixed and uncorked.
The original of Billy Brown was such a man. He was still keeping his
drug store in Springfield in the ’90’s when the writer made studies
there for a “Life of Lincoln.” She passed many an hour in Lincoln’s
chair, while Billy, tipped back in something less precious, talked.
There were Billy Browns in other towns--Bloomington, Princeton, Quincy,
Chicago. Their memory of Mr. Lincoln was among the most precious and
satisfying things in their lives. When business was dull or the day
rainy and consequently there were few or no interruptions, the talk you
started by questions soon became a soliloquy. Head against the wall,
feet on desk, eyes far away, voice softened, they re-lived the old
friendship. Their memories were tender, reverent but singularly devoid
of the thing that we call hero-worship. Mr. Lincoln remained too real
to them, too interesting and companionable.
The sense of intimacy with him which they treasured, their conviction
that he recognized them as his friends, had little or no trace of
familiarity. He was always “Mr. Lincoln” to them, never “Abe,” nor
would they tolerate the use of that word. I never saw my Springfield
Billy Brown so angrily indignant as in talking of a townsman who
affected the name. True, he and Billy were rivals in reminiscence, but
that was not the basis of his resentment. “He never called Mr. Lincoln
that to his face” was Billy’s complaint. That is, the use of the name
gave a false color to the recollections and only truth was tolerable
where Mr. Lincoln was concerned.
If Mr. Lincoln’s fellowship with the Billy Browns of Illinois was based
on his love of sheer human nature, he found in them, too, something
very precious to him, and that was a humor that answered his own. The
spring from which his humor flowed was strong with native salts and
so was theirs. It was naked but clean, devoid of evil insinuation. It
was always out-with-it--strong, pungent words; strong, pungent facts.
The humor was not in words or facts, it was in what they pointed--the
illumination they gave of life and men. Lincoln’s humor was part of his
passion for reality, truthfulness, freedom. The Billy Browns answered
him and gave him more of a particular kind of salt he craved, in a life
in many ways starved, starved for love and hope and gaiety, for all of
which he had great natural capacity.
The youthfulness of their spirit endeared them to him. They were
usually some fifteen or twenty years his junior; but in feeling the
difference was greater. Lincoln early looked on himself and spoke of
himself as an old man. It was not years--it was burdens, defeats, the
failure to find a satisfying purpose in life. He was old, and he craved
youth. These men had it. They were perennial children. Youth seemed to
warm him, and he sought it wherever it was to be found--in children,
boys, young men. They in turn instinctively came to him. A succession
of youth in all its forms follows him through his goings and comings in
the streets of Springfield, along the route of the old Eighth Circuit
of Illinois, through the streets of Washington, into the White House.
His own children stirred the deepest passion his unsatisfied heart
ever knew. Tad, whose stuttering tongue and restless, valiant spirit
brought out all Mr. Lincoln’s tenderness, sat beside him every free
evening, going over the pictures and text of the shoals of books which
publishers send to a President; he helping the boy’s stumbling tongue
to frame his comments--a perfection of fellowship between them. When
the nights were not free--and that was often, for there were long
conferences running into the small hours, the lad slept beside him on
the floor of the conference room. And when it was over, he gathered him
up in his arms and himself put him to bed, consoled in the harrowing
muddle of affairs by the perfect love between them.
One can never be too thankful that he had John Hay, then a youth in his
early twenties--and such a youth! The joy and fun and understanding
between them as it crops out in Hay’s letters is a streak of pure
sunshine across the almost soddenly tragic life of the White House in
the Civil War.
This capacity for companionship which so linked men of all types to
Lincoln in his lifetime and so held them to him in death is one clue to
his final success in bringing out of the struggle over slavery in this
country certain solid and definite results--results that have enlarged
the boundaries of human freedom and given a convincing demonstration of
the need and the preciousness of more and more unionism if we are to
secure our final better world. He could not have done what he did had
he been less understanding of men and their limitations as well as of
their powers, less experienced in passing behind human walls, finding
what there was there and using it, not asking of a man what he could
not give, not forcing on him what he could not receive.
Who can estimate what it was to the nation to have as a leader through
the Civil War a man “born with a pass-key to hearts.”