"My Childhood's Home"
by Richard Kigel

EXCERPT

INTRODUCTION:
“I SAW HIM THIS MORNING ABOUT 8:30”

Walt Whitman went to Washington during the Civil War. He spent long days in field hospitals tending to wounded soldiers – Union and Rebel, black and white – moving from stretcher to stretcher to hand out sweets, read to them, listen to their sorrows, anything to comfort devastated and dying young men.

He was constantly scribbling in his notebook, sights, sounds, scenes, impressions. His keen observations vividly called to life the moment in all its fullness.

At my feet more distinctly, a soldier, a mere lad, in danger of bleeding to death, (he is shot in the abdomen).
I stanch the blood temporarily, (the youngster’s face is white as a lily)…
Then before I depart I sweep my eyes o’er the scene fain to absorb it all,
Faces, varieties, postures, beyond description, most in obscurity, some of them dead,
Surgeons operating, attendants holding lights, the smell of ether, the odor of blood…
An occasional scream or cry, the doctor’s shouted orders or calls…
But first I bend to the dying lad, his eyes open, a half-smile gives he me,
Then the eyes close, calmly close… (1)

Walking near the White House, Whitman often saw President Lincoln in passing. He wrote of those occasions in his notebook:

I see the President almost every day as I happen to live where he passes to and from his lodgings out of town…I saw him this morning about 8:30 coming in to business, riding on Vermont Avenue near L Street. He always has a company of twenty-five or thirty cavalry with sabers drawn and held upright over their shoulders…Mr. Lincoln on the saddle generally rides a good sized, easy going gray horse; is dressed in plain black, somewhat rusty and dusty; wears a stiff black hat and looks about as ordinary in attire, etc. as the commonest man. (2)

The President noticed the stranger standing alone by the side of the road. Perhaps it was the penetrating gaze of the poet that caught his attention. For a fleeting moment, their eyes met, two great Americans sharing silent recognition of their common humanity.

They passed me once very close and I saw the President in the face fully as they were moving slowly; and his look, though abstracted, happened to be directed steadily in my eye. He bowed and smiled…We have got so that we exchange bows and very cordial ones. (3)

The eyes of a poet see deeply. They penetrate the surface of things to find the essence. Poets reach for what’s real. Whitman wrote what he saw, without analysis or explanation. In one glance Whitman looked at the face of one of the most familiar Americans of his time and saw mystery in his soul.

I see very plainly Abraham Lincoln’s dark brown face, with the deep cut lines, the eyes always to me, with a deep latent sadness in the expression....None of the artists or pictures have caught the deep though subtle and indirect expression of this man’s face. There is something else there. (4)

Poets can’t help themselves. The gift of imagination graces their view of the world. They see what others don’t, extraordinary in the plain, beauty in ugliness and from a deep sense of presence they glimpse the future. Whitman knew even then Americans would celebrate the greatness of this President one day.

I have fancied, I say, some such venerable relic of this time of ours, preserved to the next or still the next generation of America. I have fancied, on such occasion, the young men gathering around; the awe, the eager questions: “What! Have you seen Abraham Lincoln—and heard him speak—and touched his hand? (5)

Any account of Lincoln’s formative years has serious problems with historical accuracy. Reliable evidence—documents written or printed at the time——is largely absent. The story of young Lincoln can be told only in the recollections, anecdotes and observations of those who knew him and gave their reports sometimes forty years later.

Reminiscence makes historians cringe. “Not only is it often vague and ambiguous, it is notoriously subject to the aberrations of memory, the prejudices of the informant, the selective character of the reporting and the subtle transformations that occur when a story is either resurrected from the depths of the past or recalled repeatedly over time,” writes contemporary historian Douglas L. Wilson. (6)

In the field of Lincoln biography, when it comes to studying his early life, memories of old men and women are all we have. “The historian must use reminiscence,” wrote Lincoln scholar James G. Randall, “but he must do so critically.” (7)

In his own history of young Lincoln, Honor’s Voice (Random House, 1998), Wilson lists criteria for judging whether informant testimony has value.

• Is it likely that a reported event actually occurred?
• Is it supported by the weight of the evidence?
• Does it offer specific details?
• Does the informant have a reputation for reliability?
• Does the informant have any prejudices?
• Was the informant in a position to know what happened? (8)

By this standard, Whitman’s eyewitness accounts are indeed authentic. The art of a poet, his words rich in color and texture, living, moving, breathing, resurrects for us the actual presence of the man. Words spoken in truth carry the power of life. But it doesn’t take a poet to give vivid, real descriptions. Even the simplest, unsophisticated man or woman can rock us with high spirited accounts that bring us intensely into the moment when their words are true.

In many Lincoln biographies, the most interesting and believable quotes come from the subject himself. Lincoln produced volumes of words, more, according to historians, than the works of Shakespeare and the Bible combined. Yet, he left precious little writing on his childhood and growing up.

“I have no confidence in biographies,” Lincoln told law partner Billy Herndon in their Springfield office one day. “You don’t get a true understanding of the man.” (9)

“I know he thought poorly of the idea of attempting a biographical sketch,” said journalist John Scripps, who wrote the candidate’s life story for the 1860 Presidential campaign. “The chief difficulty I had to encounter,” recalled Scripps, “was to induce him to communicate the homely facts and incidents of his early life.” (10)

“Why Scripps,” Lincoln said, “It is a great piece of folly to attempt to make anything out of my early life. It can all be condensed into a single sentence and that sentence you will find in Gray’s Elegy: ‘The short and simple annals of the poor.’ That’s my life and that’s all you or anyone else can make of it.” (11)

Finally, Lincoln dashed off some background notes for Scripps.

“Herewith is a little sketch, as you requested,” wrote Lincoln. “There is not much of it, for the reason I suppose, that there is not much of me.” (12)

Lincoln wrote two brief autobiographical accounts totaling less than a dozen pages. It was the only autobiography he left the world.

Since Lincoln never really told his story, Herndon would. “If Mr. Lincoln could speak to me this day,” Herndon wrote, “he would say ‘Tell the truth. Don’t varnish me’”. (13)

This became Herndon’s mission.

“I think I knew Lincoln well,” he said. “Thousands of stories about the man I rejected because they were inconsistent with the nature of the man.” (14)

Wilson reminds us that Herndon “has long been in the doghouse of Lincoln scholarship.” Among his faults: “claiming credit for influencing Lincoln on important issues” and “for intuitive psychologizing.” (15)

“It was in this process of guessing, of analyzing and inferring from known facts that Herndon went astray,” wrote Lincoln scholar Paul Angle. (16)

Herndon was guilty of myth making and romanticizing his subject. He fancied that he understood Lincoln, knew the workings of his mind, believed he could fathom his inner mysteries.

“I know Lincoln better than I know myself,” declared Herndon. (17) “My opinions are formed from the evidence before you and in a thousand other things, some of which I heard from Lincoln, others are inferences springing from his acts, from what he said and from what he didn’t say.” (18)

Unfortunately, “opinions” and “inferences” based on what someone “said” and “didn’t say” are not history. It is mere speculation, more fantasy than fact. When Herndon avoids musing and supposition and offers what he actually saw and heard in the moment it happened, then he becomes a true biographer.

“When Herndon relates a fact as of his own observation, it may generally be accepted without question,” Angle wrote. (19)

In telling the story of the real Lincoln, no man gave us a more authentic portrait than Billy Herndon. His efforts brought together an extensive collection of letters and interviews, a chorus of real voices of people who knew Lincoln. Billy Herndon searched them out, prodded their memories, asked questions and preserved their words. They could tell the Lincoln story as they saw it, heard it, knew it and lived it.
In a sense, they are the real Lincoln biographers. It is their history, word for word, as it flowed from their lips and spilled from their pens. If these men and women who shared their own personal memories and moments with young Lincoln nearly 200 years ago could somehow come back today, sit among us and tell us what he was really like, this may be all they have to say.

“The basic source for Abraham Lincoln’s early years is the collection of letters and statements that his law partner, William H. Herndon, made shortly after the President’s death,” wrote two-time Pulitzer Prize winner David Donald. (20)
Herndon left an extraordinary record of raw, unedited, eyewitness testimony on young Lincoln.

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