Lincoln: The Nature of the Man

Delivered by Congressman Don Manzullo

Each of us is individually and uniquely created. No two persons have the same DNA; no two snowflakes, fingerprints, voice patterns or stars are the same. The Psalmist in the 139 Psalm says the Creator knows each person's formation long before being fashioned in the womb and the life that will be set forth for each.

We are obviously, each of us, very unique, some more unique than others, if that is possible.

Lincoln describes himself in 1832 when he first ran for the state legislature:

"I am young and unknown to many of you. I was born in the most humble walks of life. I have no wealth or popular relations or friends to recommend me. My case is thrown exclusively upon the independent voters of the county; and, if elected, they will have conferred a favor upon me for which I shall be unremitting in my labors to compensate. But, if the good people in their wisdom shall see fit to keep me in the background, I have been too familiar with disappointments to be very much chagrined."

His former law partner, Stephen Logan, said this about Lincoln's appearance in that 1832 run for the Illinois General Assembly (which he lost):

"He was a very tall and gawky and rough looking fellow. His pantaloons did not meet his shoes by six inches. But after he began speaking, I became very much interested in him. He made a very sensible speech...He then had the same individuality that he kept all through his life....We very soon learned that he was immensely popular."

What a remarkable statement: "He then had the same individuality that he kept all through his life." Some people never change. Thank God.

He had a total of about one year of formal education. In Holland's Life of Abraham Lincoln, written and published in 1866, just one year after Lincoln's death, the author makes some rather terse comments about Lincoln in his emerging manhood:

He could not read a sentence in any tongue but his own; but all that he knew, he knew thoroughly. It had all been assimilated, and was a part not only of his inalienable possessions but of himself. While acquiring, he had learned to construct, organize, express. There was no part of his knowledge that was not an element of his practical power. He had not been made by any artificial process; he had grown. Holding within himself the germ of a great life, he had reached out his roots like the trees among which he was reared, and drawn into himself such nutriment as the soil afforded. His individuality was developed and nurtured by the process. He had become a man after God's pattern, and not a machine after man's pattern; he was a child of Nature and not a thing of art. And this was the secret of all his subsequent intellectual successes. He succeeded because he had himself and all his resources completely in hand; for he was not, and never became an educated man, in the common meaning of that phrase. He could train all his force upon any point, and it mattered little whether the direction was an accustomed one or otherwise.

It was a happy thing for the young man that, living among the roughest of rough men, many of whom were addicted to coarse vices, he never acquired a vice. There was no taint upon his moral character. No stimulant ever entered his lips, no profanity ever came from them, which defiled man. Loving and telling a story better than any one around him, except for his father, from whom he inherited the taste and talent, a great talker... good-natured under all circumstances, his honesty and truthfulness was well known and thoroughly believed in, he was as popular throughout all the region where he lived as he became afterward throughout the nation. (J.G. Holland, "The Life of Abraham Lincoln," Gurdon Bill, Springfield, Mass., 1866, pp 36, 37, emphasis supplied).

Much has been written about many so called "failures" in Lincoln's life, but we judge success and failure in terms of our own finite knowledge. In 1832 Lincoln entered into a general store partnership with William F. Berry, whose father was a preacher. Lincoln signed notes to purchase one half of the business. Berry was a heavy drinker and obtained a liquor license for the store. Lincoln did not drink liquor, and it appears his name was forged on the application for the liquor license. Within a week of the obtaining of the liquor license, the two dissolved their partnership and sold the store in 1833 to William and Alexander Trent. The brothers subsequently defaulted on their notes to Berry and Lincoln, and in the end Lincoln had to assume the entire Berry-Lincoln debt of over $1,100. Lincoln called it his "national debt," but he asked his creditors to be patient. They were, and over seventeen years of periodic payments, he paid off this debt, the last payment coming the year after he had served one term in Congress.

But Lincoln looked upon his failed business in a unique way. He said:

"One day a man who was migrating to the West drove up in front of my store with a wagon which contained his family and household plunder. He asked me if I would buy an old barrel for which he had no room in his wagon, and which he said contained nothing of special value. I did not want it, but to oblige him I bought and paid him. I think, half a dollar for it. Without further examination I put it away in the store, and forgot all about it. Some time after, in overhauling things, I came upon the barrel, and emptying it upon the floor to see what it contained, I found at the bottom of the rubbish a complete edition of Blackstone's Commentaries. I began to read those famous works, and I had plenty of time; for during the long summer days, when the farmers were busy with their crops, my customers were few and far between.

"The more I read the more intensely interested I became. Never in my whole life was my mind so thoroughly absorbed. I read until I devoured them. (Quoted in Ross F. Lockridge's A. Lincoln, World Book Co. New York, 1930, p. 110)."

Blackstone's Commentaries were the recognized law books of the day. His works served as the core for those who were in a law school and for those like Lincoln who simply "read the law." Blackstone was a jurist and lecturer at Oxford, and began his study by a careful analysis of the law of God as revealed in Scripture. He stated that God is the source of all laws and believed there exists a personal and powerful God who works in and governs the affairs of man. Therefore, man is bound by those laws.

Blackstone's works were published around the time Jefferson was a student at William and Mary Law School in Williamsburg. Blackstone's examination became known as the doctrine of "natural law," and was firmly embodied into our founding documents, which state in no uncertain terms that all rights come from God, that God delegates these rights to the people to enjoy, that the people establish a government to protect those rights, and that responsibility follows violation of those rights. This is the moral basis of our government, because it is based on Scripture as the fixed, immutable standard by which to judge all truth.

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