The Lincoln Enigma by Boritt Gabor;

Author:Boritt, Gabor;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press USA - OSO
Published: 2001-09-14T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 8

The Riddle of Death

Robert V. Bruce

The earliest surviving fragments of Abraham Lincoln’s writing are two copybook verses inscribed during his middle teens. One, though often quoted, was no more than commonplace doggerel among boys of that day. The other, though it has been almost ignored, struck a note that would reverberate throughout Lincoln’s life:

Time what an emty vapor tis and days how swift they are swift as an indian arrow fly on like a shooting star the present moment Just is here then slides away in haste that we can never say they’re ours but only say they’re past.1

Lincoln may have composed those lines; he was known as a versifier in those days, and the spelling and grammar are certainly original. In any case, he chose to write them down, and that fact alone ought to have interested his biographers. Considering that his lifelong favorite poem bore the title “Mortality,” that he was noted as much for deep melancholy as for high humor, and that over the years his self-reported dreams, visions, and premonitions centered on death, the indifference of his biographers to that adolescent keynote seems stranger still. True, Lincoln’s brooding over death has not escaped the notice of his biographers. Two of them, George Forgie and Dwight Anderson, have seized on that turn of mind, and from it have spun out far-fetched surmises about his political objectives. But the tendency itself has been simply accepted as given. This essay proposes to analyze its elements.

The first of those elements is the uncommon intensity and independence of Lincoln’s response to the mystery of death. The word “independence” requires some understanding of what was conventional wisdom in Lincoln’s day. An appropriate specimen of that is a letter written on February 8, 1842, by one Luke Bemis of Newmarket, New Hampshire, to Miss Elizabeth Lincoln of Hingham, Massachusetts, hometown of Abraham’s ancestors. It exemplifies both the unpredictability of death in that day and the commonly held article of faith that made its familiar visitations bearable:

Even while we were talking of that dear little girl on Sunday afternoon she was an angel in Heaven. On Thursday she was apparently as well as usual ... on Friday morning she complained of being sick. ... She has gone to join her Mother, Brother, and Sisters. Of five dear children but one is left on earth. ... How soon we shall all be gathered together again God only knows.2

Five days before, Elizabeth’s western namesake Abraham had written his closest friend, Joshua Speed, who was uneasy about the health of his bride-to-be, “The death scenes of those we love, are surely painful enough; but these we are prepared to, and expect to see. They happen to all, and all know they must happen.”3 And on the very day of Bemis’s letter, Lincoln delivered a formal eulogy on the victim of a brief illness. Both occasions invited—indeed, almost demanded—conventional homilies. Yet in neither of those commentaries on death did Lincoln hold up the prospect of a reunion in heaven, something that Luke Bemis did as a matter of course.

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