Abraham Lincoln Read Online Free

Lincoln, like Herndon’s, is stricken with a lover’s grief: he wanders absently in the forest; he makes his way to the burying ground outside New Salem and lies with an arm across Ann’s grave. “In the evenings it was useless to try to talk with him,” Sandburg writes. “He sat by the fire one night as the flames licked up the cordwood and swept up the chimney to pass out into a driving storm-wind. The blowing weather woke some sort of lights in him and he went to the door and looked out into a night of fierce stumbling wind and black horizons. And he came back saying, ‘I can’t bear to think of her out there alone.’ And he clenched his hands, mumbling, ‘The rain and the storm shan’t beat on her grave.’”
    Though he eventually recovers from Ann’s death, Sandburg’s Lincoln never forgets the love he felt for her. *
    As he grows to maturity, Sandburg’s Lincoln is indigenously American, utterly shaped by the sprawling, unruly, pungent democracy of his day. He is simple, honest and ambitious, practical and wise. Professionally he is a homespun village lawyer and politician, always dressed in a rumpled suit and an old stovepipe hat. It is noticed among men that he has “two shifting moods,” one when he lapses into “a gravity beyond any bystander to penetrate,” the other when he recounts a “rollicking, droll story,” usually to illustrate some point about people or politics. In the company of his male friends, he can tell off-color jokes, too, andindulge in an expletive like “son-of-a-bitch.” He is a colorful and yet mystic man, a kind of prairie Socrates brimming with wilderness wit and prairie sagacity. Above all, his heart beats with the pulse of rural, working-class America, and he loves the common folk and revels in daily contact with them.
    But behind his bucolic plainness is a profound and mystical spirit awaiting its call to greatness. And that call comes in the grim and terrible years that follow the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. Now Sandburg’s Lincoln is a ghost on the platform, explaining to the people that the Revolution and freedom really mean something and reminding them of forgotten oaths and wasted sacrifices. In his great debates with Stephen A. Douglas, Sandburg’s Lincoln is always one with the people, thrilling them with his “stubby, homely words.” For the folk masses, he is both “the Strange Friend and Friendly Stranger.” He is “something out of a picture book for children”—tall, bony, comical, haunted-looking, and sad. Already stories about him are spreading among the plain folk, and many sit brooding and talking about this “fabulous human figure of their own time.” By 1861, history has called him to his tragic destiny: his is “a mind, a spirit, a tongue, and a voice” for an American democracy caught in its greatest trial. As he leaves Illinois for Washington, the presidency, and the war years, voices cry out on the wind, “Good-bye, Abe.”
    When he wrote The War Years , Sandburg abandoned poetical imaginings and produced a kind of symphonic documentary of the war and the man at its center. Though marred by a plethora of unauthenticated scenes and stories, the four volumes are full of the blood and stench—the sound and fury—of Civil War. And they capture all the immense tumult and confusion through which Lincoln day by day had to make his way. When we see the President, in between extensive passages on military and political developments in North and South alike, he is entirely an external Lincoln, an observed hero filtered to us through the vision and sensibilities of hundreds of witnesses who called at his White House office, from generals and politicians and office seekers tothe infirm, the destitute, and the ordinary. By revealing Lincoln through the observations of others and relating him to almost everything that