2009 Lincoln Legacy Lecture
October 15, 2009 “Land of Lincoln: Environmental History and the 16th President”
Dr. Mark Fiege, Associate Professor of History, Colorado State University, Ft. Collins
Synopsis Nearly twenty-five years ago, the noted Civil War scholar James McPherson observed that Abraham Lincoln’s use of metaphors—many of them derived from his experience of nature— strengthened his rhetoric and thus his political leadership. “Lincoln grew up close to the rhythms of nature,” McPherson observed, “of wild beasts and farm animals, of forest and running water, of seasons and crops and of people who got their meager living from the land. These things, more than books, furnished his earliest education. They infused his speech with images of nature.”i Although numerous scholars and writers have explored myriad themes in Lincoln’s life, and although environmental historians have extended their reach far beyond subjects such as pioneer settlement, wilderness, wolves, and national parks, none have followed the line of inquiry and analysis to which McPherson pointed. Drawn from the introduction of a book on American environmental history that I am now completing, my presentation will demonstrate that Lincoln’s experience of the biophysical world was as important to his thought and his politics as anything that he read—if not more so. I will develop my point by narrating important features of Lincoln’s life story. Here are three examples. Bodily labor in nature—splitting trees into rails, guiding flatboats down rivers, plowing fields, and other forms of work—powerfully influenced Lincoln’s understanding of natural rights, which lay at the core of the “free labor” ideology that he shared with many other people. His experience of work and nature also influenced his advocacy of internal improvement, which to him included both the physical modification of the natural environment and the simultaneous modification of human nature—mind and body—through education, training, and temperance. Reading was crucial to Lincoln’s personal and political program, but as I argue, his reading was not simply an exercise in abstraction. Rather, it was a material act grounded in his experience of nature—of his brain, of the alienating labor that he endured, and of the very stuff that composed the books on which he laid his hands. I base my interpretation of Lincoln on my knowledge of environmental history and my reading of many of the standard Lincoln sources—Don Fehrenbacher’s two volume collection of Lincoln’s speeches and writings, Roy Basler’s nine-volume collected works, and works by such respected Lincoln scholars as Gabor Boritt, Michael Burlingame, David Donald, Eric Foner, George Fredrickson, James McPherson, James Oakes, and Benjamin Thomas.
i James M. McPherson, Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution (New York: Oxford, 1991), 94-95. McPherson originally made the point in a lecture that he delivered in 1985.