Lincoln’s Crucible
I’ve never had a mentor.
And I don’t feel I’ve missed out. I’ve had plenty of heroes, men and women that I’ve looked up to and tried to emulate.
As Seth Godin has written, mentorship is customised, rare, and expensive. Whereas heroes live their lives in public, broadcasting their model to anyone who cares to look.
Thanks to the internet and books, today heroes are but a Google search away.
Someone that I have been drawn to since my early twenties was Abraham Lincoln. In my twenties, it was the myth, in my forties it is the man.
And especially now, I find myself reaching for the man. Having found myself fired, burnt out, cast adrift and at the age of 43 to start from scratch.
It’s precisely where Lincoln was in his early forties.
There is a danger and hubris in direct comparison. There aren’t going to be marble statues of me and I don’t expect my mug to be on currency anytime soon. But there is something to say about admiration and recognition for your heroes. Admiration for the dent they put in the world and recognition of their humanity and that the spectre of human life is not linear. And through absorbing their stories patterns emerge. Patterns that you can relate to. Patterns that if followed could perhaps lead to a similar trajectory. That trajectory is not necessarily being President or achieving outwardly success..but living a life of purpose.
This essay argues that the Abraham Lincoln of common mythology was far from a given. There were times in his adult life where he felt he was an abject failure. But his relentless pursuit of self improvement and moral integrity especially when things got really tough sets a paradigm of how personal tribulations can forge a person and a leader.
I hold a personal reverence for Lincoln and a profound connection to his story. This essay traces his path and tribulations beginning with his origins
Origin Story
Kentucky in the early 1800’s. Almost pre-civilisation, pre-industry, the birthplace of Lincoln was mostly agrarian. It was an environment where existence depended on what you could produce with your own hands. People dressed themselves in deerskins. The landscape was rugged, sparse, dotted with a few log cabins amongst untamed forest. You lived by what you shot or grew. Life danced to the rhythms of nature. Life for most of the settlers was lonely and hard. Populations eventually got thick enough for occasional gatherings, usually convivial or religious.
This is the environment that Lincoln was born in. He was born in a log cabin on a small farm in the backwoods of Kentucky. His father was a carpenter and a farmer, most likely illiterate. His mother, a figure of warmth and resilience, died when Lincoln was 8. His primary carer was his older sister (just 4 years older) until his father remarried. A remarkable aspect of Lincoln’s early life was his almost unquenchable love of learning. Lincoln’s total formal schooling was intermittent, summing to less than a year over his lifetime. Outside of that he was entirely self taught, including his qualifications as a lawyer in later years.
Ambition
There are many flavours to ambition. It has been equally celebrated and reviled. Lincoln’s personal ambition, when seen in the light of his early years, challenges, failures, and ultimate achievements, paints a portrait of a man driven by a deep sense of purpose and resilience. It was an ambition not divorced from people’s interests. Though ambition burned deep in Lincoln from an early age, his ambition was not for personal glorification.
The question given Lincoln’s origin is, in what seemed to be perpetual poverty, how did this ambition develop? From a young age, Lincoln saw himself as different. In the paltry schooling he did receive, he was without peer. He had a voraciousness to learn that was unbounded. Even when his father beat him for reading (this at a time when work meant hard physical labour, he was seen as lazy) he would sneak in a passage whenever he could. His biographer David Herbert Donald observed “He carried away from his brief schooling the self-confidence of a man who has never met his intellectual equal”. He read voraciously, sometimes going to extraordinary lengths to acquire a book. He was particularly enamoured with the lives of great men, the founding fathers etc whose lives and adventures he lived through vicariously yearning to become one of them. He also read Shakespeare and the fictional myths of the time. Later he understood that myth and storytelling would count even more than facts in what drove people to action.
But as historian Doris Kearns-Goodwin has written: While Lincoln’s ambition was as central to his makeup as his backbone, it was almost from the start, twofold. It was not singly for himself; it was for the people he hoped to lead. He wanted to distinguish himself in their eyes. The sense of community was central to the master dream of this life — the desire to accomplish deeds that would gain the respect of his fellow men.
His tough childhood and early setbacks formed his character. Rather than turning his heart to stone they forged in him a deep sense of empathy and justice that would later become the cornerstone of his political aspirations.
Politics
Politics attracted Lincoln from a very young age.
He was only 23 when he decided to run for a seat in the Illinois state legislature. Political machinery was still nascent in Illinois at the time. People desiring to run had to simply register their names and express their views on local affairs. This is how he expressed his intention:
“Every man is said to have his peculiar ambition. I have no other so great as that of being truly esteemed by my fellow men, by rendering myself worthy of their esteem. How far I shall succeed in gratifying this ambition is yet to be developed. I am young and unknown to many of you.”
He was a clerk at a general store at the time. This was New Salem’s only store and it was the first town he settled in after being released from his near indentured lot of his father’s home. Within a few short months of him settling in New Salem, the residents encouraged him to run for state legislature. He was seen as kind, considerate, easy to learn and highly attuned to the issues of the day. He was a candidate for the Whig party (precursor to the Republican Party) and he campaigned on what he saw from first hand experience would benefit the community i.e improving roads, waterways and public education. In describing his relationship with his constituents historian Kearns-Goodwin uses an interesting turn of phrase, to him it was a ‘covenant’ — a promise of almost religious significance — a promise of unremitting labour for their support.
He lost that election but won 277 of the 300 votes cast in his town of New Salem. Rather than dampen his spirits this gave him confidence. After working several jobs to keep body and soul together he decided to run again a couple of years later. This time his reputation for storytelling and political astuteness spread. People would travel miles to hear the 25 year old speak. This time he won easily.
As a young assemblyman in the state legislature Lincoln was precocious. He almost immediately seemed to grasp parliamentary procedure and was heralded for his language skills. Between sessions Lincoln would study law as a way to sharpen his instincts and embellish his political career. His oratory was steeped in storytelling, humour and the vernacular of common people. His speeches and political debates drew crowds. So memorable were they that crowds would recite them after.
However in those early years, his political instincts were still blunt, his idealism got the better of him. Seeing government aid for infrastructure projects as a key promise he made to his constituents, he continued to defend those projects in the face of rising state debt and shifting public sentiment to those projects. His stubbornness proved self destructive. A recession hit and the improvements system collapsed. Lincoln copped the lion’s share of the blame. He resolved to retire from the legislature after his term was completed.
Failure
The failure of Lincoln’s political ambition coincided with a series of crises in his personal life. A woman he was in love with and courting died. His courtship with Mary Todd (his future wife and first lady) was also fraught. At a time when societal hierarchy mattered when it came to marriage, Mary’s was above Lincoln. As the relationship got more serious many thought she would be marrying below her station. Once they were engaged Lincoln grew more anxious. He was apprehensive about his ability to support a wife, especially one of Mary’s stature. He felt he would fall short of providing happiness to a woman who was accustomed to wealth and luxury. He also feared a wife would undermine his focus and purpose. Lincoln broke off the engagement and that devastated him
At that time Lincoln succumbed to a depression so serious that his friends feared for his life. They removed all knives and razors from his room. He remained bedridden unable to eat or sleep. He took the failure of his programs while he was in the legislature as a lapse of public honour and integrity. He felt his reputation had been compromised. He made a promise that he couldn’t fulfil. Added to the perception of his public disgrace, him breaking off his engagement to Mary Todd was a blow to his personal sense of honour.
A few years later Lincoln got a second chance at congress, but this too was a failure. He was vocal and strongly against the President at the time’s foray into the Mexican war. A war that unfortunately for Lincoln was popular among the populace. He lost his congressional seat. He then campaigned hard for the next president Zachary Taylor in the hope of gaining a coveted position of commissioner of land office, a powerful post that would have seen him oversee all federated lands in the western states and thus perhaps make good on his initial promise to promote economic development in the poorer communities. He was overlooked for this position and withdrew from public office and decided to focus on his legal career.
One of the more unique aspects of Lincoln was how unremarkable his political career was before he became President.
The Way Up
If Lincoln’s biography ended while he was in his mid forties he would be lost to us. By then he was a failed congressman, a lacklustre politician who had worked himself up to be an averagely successful prairie lawyer. It’s what happened next that counts. Lincoln, to use the parlance of the day, was a ‘melancholic’. And the setbacks that he suffered worsened his condition.In the absence of modern treatments Lincoln had to dig deep to find a way out. While he lived in his depths, there was a part of him that knew he needed to get better. He wrote to a friend, “I must get better or die.” But in that same refrain, he added, “How hard — Oh how hard it is to die and leave one’s country no better than if one had never lived.” From the time he was a young man, he had a burning ambition to “link his name with something that would redound to the interest of his fellow man.” This need to engrave his name in history was part of his makeup — and would prove to be his salvation.
The first step was he had to recover what he had lost. In a way, he had to reconstruct his life. He focused on his legal career, forming a new partnership. This partnership began to bear fruit. He began to make a decent living. He re-committed to the engagement he had broken off, and in doing so, he began to restore his sense of honour. He had to prove to himself that integrity meant something, that he could keep his word, what he called the “chief gem” of his character.
In his mid-forties, Lincoln took stock… and he found himself wanting. To fulfil what he perceived as his destiny, he had to confront his weaknesses, reflect and learn from his failures, and examine what kind of leader he wanted to be. His real self-improvement began. Starting with a fresh dedication to learn, to which he applied himself with force, he studied philosophy, astronomy, science, political science, history, literature, poetry and drama. To sharpen his logical acumen, he studied geometry into the night. He mastered the six books of Euclid. Although he has taken a break from politics his study was anything but random. It was directed towards understanding the role and purpose of leadership.
In his book, Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl says that a search for meaning may arouse inner tension rather than inner equilibrium. He gives an analogy of an architect who wants to strengthen a decrepit arch. They increase the load laid upon it and by doing so the parts are more firmly joined together. So mental health according to Frank is based on a certain degree of tension, the tension between what one has already achieved and what one still has to accomplish..or the gap between what one is and what one ought to become. According to Frankl, such a tension is inherent to human beings and therefore indispensable to mental well being.
Lincoln followed the essence of this advice — looking in his hours of pain not to lighten his load but to increase it. Having flirted with the desire to die, he asked himself what he needed to live for. By his early to mid forties he did not have an answer.. But, in Frankl’s terms, he ‘increased the tension’ by acknowledging his duty as a husband and father, focusing on his chosen profession and his relentless study. His life’s purpose was soon to reveal itself. And when it did he was ready..
“If Slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong”
By the mid-1850s, the skies had turned dark over the political landscape. Slavery being the burning issue.
Pro-slavery & anti-slavery forces by the 1850s had dug in their heels in their respective camps and refused to compromise.
Slavery was well entrenched in the South. The Southern economy was wholly dependent on it. At the time, the U.S was expanding west. As a result of the Mexican wars new territories came under its sway. What became a political ‘tinder-box’ was whether slavery should spread to these new territories. Up until that point, slavery was protected from spreading by what was known as the Missouri Compromise which held until 1854. With the acquisition of the new territories’ a canny U.S. Senator (Stephen Douglas) introduced a bill that would repeal the Missouri Compromise in the new territories and replace it with ‘popular sovereignty’, i.e., let the populations of those territories decide by popular vote. This was the seismic moment. Not just for the country, but for Lincoln…
Up until this point, Lincoln had said very little publicly on the issue of slavery. Although in private he had always lamented its evil. A coalition was assembled to speak against the new bill aka the “Nebraska Act” among whom was the circuit lawyer from Illinois…
Lincoln delivered his first great anti-slavery speech at a state fair to a crowd of thousands, mainly consisting of farmers and their families. He was chosen to deliver the rebuttal to Douglas’s defence of the controversial ‘Nebraska bill’. Delivering this speech, he came into his own. For the first time in his public life, he spoke with true conviction and combined all his acquired self-discipline, history, storytelling and logic. His language, rather than ornate, was of the vernacular of the time replete with homespun imagery. A reporter who was there recounted that he had witnessed “One of the world’s masterpieces of argumentative power and moral grandeur!” When he finished, the enthusiastic audience broke out with deafening applause. Even opposition newspapers felt compelled to say that they had never heard a stronger anti-Nebraska speech.
From that speech on Lincoln was propelled with a fiery sense of purpose. For the rest of the 1850s, Lincoln devoted himself with a singular tenacity to the anti-slavery movement. Lincoln’s intrinsic ambition, coupled with his genuine emotional depth and conviction, merged to carve out not only a political destiny for him in an era that demanded such fervour but also a cause that was equally deserving of the passion that had ignited within him from his youth. His political and national prominence rose with the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates, where over the course of seven meetings he took on the senator. He delivered his speeches and rebukes with clear, logical and rational arguments, often delivered with humour, stories and a folksy charm that made complex issues accessible to the day’s audience.
During this time Lincoln’s political ambitions still suffered a couple of major disappointments. Because of his hard earned clout he had good reason to believe that he would be rewarded with what he prized above all else, US Senator. But he fell short of a winning margin. Worse, he realised if he stayed in the race, the antislavery vote would be split and the key senate seat would fall to a pro slavery candidate. To his supporters’ dismay, he told them to fall behind the anti slavery candidate who had a sure chance of winning.
Although this time the disappointment was strong, he was sure it was the end of his political career, it landed differently. This time Lincoln had built the resolve and the inner strength to bounce back and he would draw on his feelings to strengthen his commitment to a cause. Also dropping out says something about his ambition. He put the success of the cause over his personal ambitions and success. He wrote to a friend “I could not let the whole political result go to ruin on a point merely personal to myself”. These were not the false promises of a politician but something Lincoln believed and acted upon. As author Joshua Shenk has written, “When he tumbled momentarily backward, he rubbed his eyes and saw more clearly than before just how fantastic a peak he had engaged to climb — with that, every step forward was imbued with a new significance, for every bit of honest energy he contributed would be drawn upon by others. The altitude he himself reached seemed increasingly insignificant”
Lincoln would continue his organising, his campaigning for the antislavery movement. He was at the centre of a new political party that was formed because of this issue. The admiration and respect that others had for him began to compound. Key political operatives would remember his magnanimity when it was needed. Come 1860, with a volcanic nation about to erupt, he was encouraged to throw his hat into the ring for President. Which he did…
Conclusion
What initially drew me to Lincoln were snippets that I read or heard about. Those of him being self taught, his rise to the presidency, the emancipation proclamation etc i.e the Lincoln of the marble statues, someone almost other-human. But the more I read and delved into his life,his stark humanity became evident. He came alive for me when I first learned about how he suffered and how he dealt with it. He was a human being that dealt with enormous struggle throughout his life. But that struggle both softened him and hardened him. He softened in the sense that it made him more empathetic to personal struggles around him. This empathy was one of the hallmarks of his leadership style. His struggles also hardened his resolve to be somebody, to let his life not slip by without accomplishing something of consequence for his fellow humans.
Exploring Lincoln’s challenges and his resilience in overcoming them sheds light on the traits I aspire to embody in my own journey.
The author Joshua Wolf Shenk in his book, structures Lincoln’s life in 3 stages; fear, engagement and transcendence. He takes his definition of fear from the age-old definition of melancholia i.e ‘fear and sadness without apparent cause or disproportionate to apparent cause’. This is where Lincoln asked himself whether he could live, whether he could face life’s misery and this stage ended with him deciding that he must.
The second stage engagement has Lincoln turning to the world around him. From focusing on self to building a bridge to others. The question that drove him during this stage turned from whether he could live, to how he would live. Because of the trials of his first phase he knew what he wanted to live for, but still for years he suffered without any clear prospect of how to achieve it. During this phase he made himself emotionally and mentally. Reason became his bulwark, poetry and humour his relief. He went about his work dutifully and continued forward with designation and defiance, fear and hope. He developed diligence and discipline, worked for the sake of doing good work and learnt to genuinely engage. Without the discipline and the emotional resilience gained in this phase he likely would not have had the fortitude to endure the many pitfalls that his great work entailed. A key factor during this phase was faith. Faith that his life meant something.
It is only in the third stage, transcendence, that the ‘mythical’ Lincoln emerges. Now he was living for a vital purpose, doing the work he felt he was born to do. He still faced enormous challenges (i.e the civil war). He faced paralysing fear and doubt, but thanks to his selfless leadership and in some ways his ego dissolution he assembled a stellar team around him (what Kearns Goodwin calls a Team of Rivals) to share the burden. He was able to put his head down and get the job done. And when he glanced up it was to his north star, the chance to affect something meaningful and lasting.
From a young age, Lincoln experienced psychological pain, sometimes to the point of incapacitation. He learned however to articulate his suffering, put it into context of his life and larger ambition, endure and adapt. From that crucible of self doubt, rather than passiveness came a hungry striving and a self willed intellectual, metaphysical and personal growth. His ability to lead with empathy, determination, and integrity was honed in that crucible of personal loss and political defeat. These experiences, which might have deterred a lesser person, instead deepened his commitment to his principles and his cause. His greatest contributions were not in spite of his tribulations but because of them. He forged a meaning from his affliction, a meaning so great that it remained a constant during his life.
His life encapsulates the essence of transformational leadership, where the mentorship one seeks from within can be as impactful as the guidance of external heroes. As Kearns-Goodwin writes “People observed that something large and lasting had happened during this introspective crucible period, something that could be gauged in his appearance and demeanour, his manner of delivery and his profundity of thought”
In my own journey, Lincoln’s resilience and moral fortitude serve as a beacon, reminding me that a life of purpose often emerges not from easy victories but from how we navigate our darkest moments and emerge, though not unscathed, but unbroken and more determined to make our mark.
References:
This essay borrows heavily from the below sources:
- Lincoln’s Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness by Joshua Wolf Shenk
- Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin
- Leadership: In Turbulent Times by Doris Kearns Goodwin
- Lincoln’s Mentors: The Education of a Leader by Michael J. Gerhardt
- Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl
“In the anti slavery struggle he had found a great purpose that would thrust back into public life, and that purpose, larger by far than his large personal ambition, would hold him fast until he died”
