Abraham Lincoln His hand and his pen

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This transcript was run through an automated transcription service and then lightly edited for clarity. There may be typos or small discrepancies from the podcast audio.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: This morning I went to the Lincoln Memorial before dawn. I got there, and I climbed up the huge marble steps to his statue. And I looked east across the National Mall, past the Washington Monument, past the Capitol building.

I had actually planned for the opening of this episode to go there before the day started, before the thousands of visitors showed up, while it was still quiet -- and to read part of the Gettysburg Address or the Second Inaugural, which are both carved into the stone on the inner walls of the monument.

But when I got there, it was just so peaceful. I changed my mind and I decided to just stand quietly by this huge statue and to look out -- just the same way his eyes look out from between the pillars -- to watch the pink spring sunrise.

I had words of his that were just running over and over through my head, but they weren't the soaring prose of either of those famous speeches. They were just these simple four lines of a tiny poem that he wrote when he was a little boy. And the poem goes: 'Abraham Lincoln. His hand and his pen. He will be good, but God knows when.'

This episode is about Lincoln's hand and his pen, and just how good he was. I'm Lillian Cunningham with The Washington Post. And I can't believe it's here, but it is: This is the 16th episode of 'Presidential.'

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LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: How do I even begin to do a podcast about Lincoln? There are so many rich, important topics that I'm just going to have to skip over entirely. Even if I were just going to read a timeline of facts that happened during Lincoln's presidency…even that would take longer than the time I've got. So, my apologies in advance for everything that's not going to be covered in this episode.

I'm going to let Lincoln's writings be our guide, and I have two amazing guests.

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DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN: Hello, I'm Doris Kearns Goodwin, author of “Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln.”

MICHELLE KROWL: And my name is Michelle Krowl, and I'm the Civil War and Reconstruction specialist here at the Library of Congress.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: What we're going to focus on for this episode is Lincoln and language -- his love for it, the way that things like writing and poetry and theater would come to offer him a personal outlet for his emotions, and then also his mastery of language and the way that he would come to use it as perhaps his greatest presidential leadership tool.

So my first step in exploring Lincoln's language took me across the National Mall from the Lincoln Memorial all the way to the Library of Congress, where I haven't been for a few episodes now -- but I'm back, and so many of Lincoln's original letters and speeches are kept here.

Now Michelle Krowl is not just the Library of Congress's expert on the Civil War, and she's not just the person who oversees Lincoln's documents, though even that would be pretty amazing. She's also the person that historians and biographers like Doris Kearns Goodwin turn to when they want to understand more about Lincoln. So, she's like the secret source of all Lincoln knowledge. For this episode, I asked her to take us on a journey through some of Lincoln's most revealing writings. Some of them are rarely seen; and others are among the most valuable documents in American history.

So, one of the earliest documents that exists of Lincoln's is that first little poem that Lincoln scribbled.

MICHELLE KROWL: Lincoln essentially had to make his own arithmetic book. And you can see there's a lot of numbers of land measure and of dry measure. But, down at the very lower left- hand corner of this particular page -- and it sort of faded now, but I'll read it to you -- it's 'Abraham Lincoln. His hand and pen. He will be good, but God knows when.'

You know, it's a little early poetry.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Do you have a sense of where his love for language came from? His love of poetry and Shakespeare and then also obviously his great speech-writing skills?

MICHELLE KROWL: His appreciation of language, it was there early -- and partially because he did have to really teach himself. He estimated that when you put all of his formal education together it probably didn't amount to a year, because he lived out on the frontier areas. Often there weren't school houses. There weren't necessarily always teachers. Even if there were, he couldn't always be spared from labor on behalf of his family.

So, I think he had to read a lot on his own -- the books that he was able to either have in the house or borrow from other people. Just learning language through the Bible.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Now's a good moment to back up and briefly explain more about Lincoln's childhood. He was born in 1809 in a one-room log cabin on the Kentucky frontier.

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 2 Though his family does end up moving around quite a bit to Indiana and then to Illinois, his father had never learned to read. And so his mother, before she died from one of the bajillion horrible diseases killing everyone at the time, she didn't know too much either -- but she knew enough to teach young Lincoln the basics of reading and writing.

MICHELLE KROWL: His mother died when he was very young, and so his father was essentially a single father for a while with Abraham and his older sister, Sarah. And at some point Thomas Lincoln decided to get a stepmother -- get another wife for these children. And he left them, just left them to fend for themselves. And, by the time he came back with his new wife, Sarah Johnston Lincoln, she describes that they were almost wild children.

But Sarah Johnston was a really devoted stepmother to him, and the two of them got on famously. His father didn't see the point in letting Lincoln sit and read and learn and do all of the things that Lincoln wanted to do. He wanted to hire Lincoln out as a laborer. He wanted them to do work around the homestead. Sarah, on the other hand, his stepmother, encouraged him to read and she brought books with her. And so she was a lot more nurturing of Lincoln and his talents and his interests than his own father was.

So, on that score, the death of his mother, while tragic, from an early age made him understand that death and tragedy was part of life. And then, of course, his sister died relatively young, too. So, ultimately out of that nuclear family that he started with, only his father really survived into Lincoln's adulthood. And it was the father that he got along with the least.

When Thomas Lincoln was dying, his stepbrother contacted [Lincoln] and said, you know, 'Don't you want to come see your father again?' And he said, 'No, I really do not, because there's nothing that could be said between the two of us that wouldn't be painful.'

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: There was one thing, though, that Thomas Lincoln passed down to his son in the way of language. If it was his stepmother who nurtured his love of literature and the written word, it was his father who -- though perhaps unknowingly -- helped Lincoln master the art of the spoken word.

When Lincoln was little, he would listen to the stories his father told friends in the evening, and he would pay attention to where the people laughed and how his father would build up to a punchline. And then Lincoln would replay those stories over and over in his head at night, and the next day he would call all his own little friends around him and climb up on the log outside and he'd practice re-telling the same jokes and tales that he had heard his father tell.

MICHELLE KROWL: One thing that he did seem to have shared with his father was a love of storytelling. Often the stories were humorous, and sometimes they were a little -- they could be a little crude. But most of the time, Lincoln's stories had a point to them, too, particularly when he got older.

Sometimes he was using humor as his own self-defense mechanism. Some people will complain about the storytelling and the jokes, and sometimes they feel it's at an inappropriate time. But Lincoln explains that if I didn't laugh, I would die.

When he was younger, there are stories that in the 1840s, his friends were concerned about him -- to the extent that they would put away the knives and the razors, because they were concerned

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 3 that he would ‘do a mischief to himself.’ So, there was that sort of dark and brooding side to him. But there was also the side that always appreciated a good story.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: So, part of what we see, even from early on in Lincoln's life, is this dual use and appreciation for language.

On the one hand, he could use it to lift himself out of moods and as a way of performance -- that was the humorous storytelling aspect of it.

And then on the other hand, he would use reading and writing as a way to dive deeper within himself, and to connect with the lyrical and the profound. Growing up, he would borrow any book he could find. We know that books like “Aesop's Fables” and “Pilgrim's Progress” and then eventually many of the plays of Shakespeare were among the ones that he would read over and over and over.

He'd read them so many times that he committed large parts of them to memory. He also continued composing every so often his own poetry, and one of those poems from a bit later in his life is called, 'My Childhood Home I See Again.' Lincoln wrote it when he was in his 30s. It's another one that Michelle showed me -- the Library of Congress has the original handwritten version of it.

“My childhood's home I see again, and sadden with the view. And still, as memory crowds my brain, there's pleasure in it too. Oh, memory, thou midway world twixt earth and paradise, where things decayed and loved ones lost and dreamy shadows rise.”

MICHELLE KROWL: And this remained in the Lincoln family. It was given to us by Abraham Lincoln's granddaughter. Back in the 1840s, he had gone back to Indiana on a political trip. He was going where his sister and his mother had been buried, and he says, “That part of the country is as un- poetical as any spot of the earth.”

But having been back there -- and this is part of his own history -- it at least aroused in him a certain amount of interest. And so he recorded that in verse.

So the verse is -- and I think this says a lot about the poem and Lincoln, and that duality of him – “My childhood's home I see again, and gladden with the view, and still as memory crowds my brain, there's sadness in it too.”

Now, that’s actually the one that we have. There's another edition that says “there’s pleasure in it, too.” Ours has “there’s sadness in it, too.”

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: And he's writing something like this just for himself as a way of crystallizing his reflections, or it's something he's sharing with everyone?

MICHELLE KROWL: He's not really sharing. I mean, I think there may be a couple of poems that he published anonymously, and he did appreciate other people's poetry. He was a very fan of Robert Burns's poetry. But in terms of his own writing, that's something he does a little bit more when he's younger.

What's lovely about Lincoln is, even though he didn't continue his poetic aspirations or continue writing poetry that he had done younger, you really do see a poetic sensibility to his writing.

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LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: We'll soon look at the way that, as president, Lincoln infused his speeches and his letters with the poetry and the theatricality and the storytelling that he appreciated so much in childhood. But first we're going to look just a little bit more at Lincoln the person.

If, somehow, I managed to not know who Abraham Lincoln was and -- put me back 150 years – I am meeting him for the first time…what would it be like to walk into a room and meet him?

MICHELLE KROWL: If you had seen him -- well, even in his presidential years too, but particularly as a young man -- he didn't dress well. He wasn't fashionable. He still had a little bit of that kind of back-country way about him. He was very awkward around females. He wasn't particularly comfortable with them in social situations. He was more someone who was comfortable being one of the guys.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Was that out of a certain shyness or awkwardness?

MICHELLE KROWL: I think in some ways it was a kind of shyness. He wasn't a good dancer, for example. Mary Lincoln once told a story that when Lincoln came up to her when they were courting in Springfield, he said, 'I want to dance with you in the worst way.' And she said, 'And he did. In the worst way.' He wasn't graceful. That just wasn't really his milieu.

You know, Lincoln came from a very humble upbringing. He didn't come from money. He didn't learn the social graces there. Mary, on the other hand, came from one of the most aristocratic families in Lexington, Kentucky. She had been well educated, and she spoke French and she knew all the social graces. You'd think, 'How on earth did these two end up together?'

And part of it was that they had a shared commonality in their past. They both had lost their mothers at young ages. Mary was incredibly interested in politics, which was more unusual for a woman of that time. Her father knew Henry Clay. Henry Clay was Lincoln's beau ideal of a statesman.

So, they were both very political figures in that way. They also enjoyed poetry and literature, and so she saw something in him that many other people in Springfield didn't -- in terms of eventually becoming president or really making something of himself.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Not too long after he met Mary Todd, they got engaged. Lincoln broke off their engagement at one point, but they eventually mended things, and they got married in 1842.

Lincoln was 33-years old at the time and a struggling lawyer in Springfield, Illinois. And Mary was 23. A few years later, Lincoln ended up a U.S. congressman for just one term -- and this is while the Mexican War was under way and Polk was president. But then he went more than a decade without holding national political office.

As the question of slavery in territories like Kansas became a more and more violent and tense issue, though, Lincoln got reimmersed in politics, and he started giving numerous persuasive speeches against slavery that started to lift his profile.

In 1860, while still relatively anonymous and with the country on the brink of Civil War, Lincoln became the first Republican Party candidate to win the presidency.

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LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: “In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of Civil War. The government will not assail you. You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors. You have no oath registered in heaven to destroy the government, while I shall have the most solemn one to ‘preserve, protect and defend it.’ I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

Those are the final words of Lincoln's first inaugural address, which he delivered on March 4, 1861, when he assumed the presidency.

MICHELLE KROWL: One thing about Lincoln and his language is that, whereas some of his contemporaries who had more classical education -- their speeches are studded with language that the common person might not appreciate or understand, lot of classical allusions -- Lincoln's writing not only tended to be beautiful, but also to be at a level where ordinary people would understand it. And I think that's one thing why Lincoln's speeches and much of his writing still stands up today.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: It was, of course, important for Lincoln to compose such a powerful and accessible speech not just because it was his first as president but because, by the time Lincoln took office, seven Southern states had already left the Union.

They had formed the Confederate States of America and they had already begun organizing their own army. It's at this moment that I think back to the many presidents we've seen before who have had extensive resumes. You know, the ones who by all accounts seemed really prepared for executive leadership. And yet, in most cases, as we saw, those men struggled to do very much in office.

And now here comes Lincoln and he has very little experience. And as the Civil War is erupting, we see him draw on the things he knows. He turns to writing as a leadership tool, and to books for his own self-education.

The Library of Congress actually still has its old borrowing ledgers from the time, and they found that Lincoln had checked out a war manual early on while he was president in 1862.

MICHELLE KROWL: And you can just see that he's thinking, 'I need a Do-It-Yourself manual on how to run this war because clearly my generals aren't doing it. So, I'm going to need to educate myself at least in the principles of military theory.'

And the thing that's so interesting about that war manual -- very few people looked to see when he returned it. He didn't have a particular due date on it, but at one point I looked and he returned it two weeks after Ulysses S. Grant took command. And you think: OK, now he doesn't need it anymore, because he had finally found the general who understood the same strategic goals that Lincoln understood.

And I think that's one of Lincoln's talents in leadership as well: He seems to have a good idea

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 6 about people.

Another thing that I wanted to show you that really says to me a lot about Lincoln's leadership and how he dealt with some of his subordinates is this -- it's a fairly famous letter that Lincoln never sent. Sometimes what you don't send is just as important as what you do send.

So, what's striking to me is that it's summer -- well, it's actually July of 1863. The battle of July of 1863 that most people are going to remember is the Battle of Gettysburg. But Lincoln sat down to write a very different letter to his commander General Meade, who was in charge of the Army of the Potomac.

The first day had not gone necessarily well for the Union, but ultimately, it triumphs and Lee starts to retreat back down to Virginia. But when Lee gets to the Potomac River, it's been raining, the Potomac is swollen, he can't get across immediately. So, in Lincoln's mind, Meade should have gone after Lee immediately, and he could have ended the war.

So, he sits down, and he writes this letter because he's so frustrated and he starts off, and he says, “I am very, very grateful to you for the magnificent success you gave the cause of the country at Gettysburg. And I'm sorry now to be the author of the slightest pain to you. But I was in such a deep distress myself that I could not restrain some expression of it.”

And he goes on and explains a little bit, and he says, “And yet, you stood and let the flood run down, bridges be built and the enemy move away at his leisure without attacking him.” And here's the greatest line: “Your golden opportunity is gone and I am distressed immeasurably because of it.”

If you get this letter from your boss, you resign immediately.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Which he didn't, right? Because Lincoln didn't send it.

MICHELLE KROWL: So what we have here is the manuscript, and you'll notice on the last page there is no signature. It's still in Lincoln's papers because then -- when we turn the page again -- there's the envelope. In Lincoln's handwriting, it says, “To General Meade, never sent or signed.”

Because Lincoln understands that if he sends this letter to Meade, as any of us would do getting something like that, Meade's going to resign -- because he will have felt that he's lost the respect and the trust of his commander-in-chief and he can't go on. And Lincoln understands: ‘I just put Meade at the head of the Army of the Potomac. I don't have anybody else I can put there.’

So, Lincoln vents his frustrations in this document. He folds it up and keeps it among his own papers.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Lincoln didn't keep a diary, so during his presidency he composed several of these venting letters that he never sends and which seemed to be his way of using writing as an emotional outlet.

Lincoln would also send letters -- you know, like actually mail them -- as a way of testing the waters of public opinion. He'd do this especially on the issue of emancipation. He would send out these trial balloons to newspapers and newspaper editors. He'd write letters laying out his logic

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 7 about freeing the slaves and then he'd gauge their reaction to the construction of his arguments.

He was very clever about using this writing as a sort of semi-public way to get feedback on whether the timing was right to issue an official proclamation about ending slavery; and also on whether the wording and the arguments he was planning to use later in his official speeches was going to resonate the way that he wanted it to.

MICHELLE KROWL: And that actually leads to another Lincoln document -- what we call ‘the Conkling letter’. And again, this is where Lincoln can use his words as a way of reaching a larger public. He doesn't leave Washington very often during the war, but he's asked to attend a Union meeting in his hometown of Springfield in August of 1863. And he thought about going but ultimately concluded not to. So, instead he sends a letter to James Conkling, who is a friend and Republican, to read -- because the people in Springfield will hear his words and then the words will get into the newspapers.

Part of the reason that this meeting is happening is that a lot of Northerners are not happy about emancipation. That's maybe a myth that still lingers on about the war. For many Northerners, they did not want to fight to end slavery. Emancipation is tremendously unpopular in some areas, including Lincoln's own Illinois.

So, he writes this letter. And this is where you can see Lincoln -- we're used to thinking about Lincoln as a beautiful writer of the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural, where it's very stirring words and beautiful language -- but here he's sort of writing almost like a geometric proof. And there have been people who have looked at Lincoln's language in terms of Lincoln writing in a lawyerly way but also Lincoln, who had taught himself Euclidian geometry, writing like a proof: ‘If this, then that.’

So, as a way of trying to explain emancipation and what's happening, he says, for example in this passage, “You dislike the Emancipation Proclamation, and perhaps would have it retracted. You say it is unconstitutional. I think differently. I think that the Constitution invests its Commander-in- Chief with the law of war in time of war. The most that can be said, if so much, is that slaves are property. Is there, has there ever been, any question that by the law of war, property, both of enemies and friends, may be taken when needed?”

And then he goes down a little bit… “You say you will not fight to free negroes. Some of them seem willing to fight for you -- but no matter.”

So it's very much of a laying-out of an argument. You know: ‘If A, then B. If B, then C.’ To get down to the opinion of emancipation as a war aim.

So then he says, “But Negroes, like other people, act upon motives. Why should they do anything for us if we will do nothing for them? If they stake their their lives for us, they must be prompted by the strongest motive, even the promise of freedom. And the promise being made, must be kept.”

I think that's another thing with Lincoln and his leadership -- that he could adapt, he could change his mind. He evolves. You hear that word a lot with Lincoln. But once he's made a firm decision, that's what he's going to go through.

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 8 But then, he ends on a rather beautiful note, along those same lines. So he's been very logical up to that point and then he says, “Peace does not appear so distant as it did. …And then there will be some black men who can remember that, with silent tongue, and clenched teeth, and steady eye, and well noised bayonet, they have helped mankind on to this great consummation, while I fear there will be some white men unable to forget that, with malignant heart and deceitful speech, they have striven to hinder it.'

So, very stirring words.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: During his presidency, even in the darkest times of war -- or perhaps because of the very dark times of war -- Lincoln would occasionally write letters about art and literature and drama as a sort of personal catharsis.

Michelle showed me this one exchange he had with a Shakespearean actor. Lincoln writes to him about how Macbeth is his favorite play. He also wrote that he doesn't think the soliloquy “To be or not to be” is the best one in ‘Hamlet.’ He actually loved a lesser known soliloquy, which has the lines, “What if this cursed hand were thicker than itself with brother's blood? Is there not rain enough in the sweet heavens to wash it white as snow?”

That actually sounds a lot like the famous scene in Macbeth -- the “out, out, damned spot” line. So, maybe there's something about this image of being unable to wash blood off your hands that really speaks to Lincoln. By the end of his first term, it wouldn't be a surprise if Lincoln feels like he does have blood on his hands that he can't wash off, because, personally and politically, he's in a horrible place.

His 11-year-old son Willie has died, most likely from diseases carried through the White House water supply. And his wife Mary is just absolutely tormented by the son's death. And then, outside of this family tragedy, the Civil War is still raging on. Lincoln has signed the Emancipation Proclamation and he's given the Gettysburg Address. But by this point, as his first term is concluding, the outlook for the war and the country is very bleak.

MICHELLE KROWL: People forget Lincoln was not popular as president. Lincoln was not the Lincoln of myth during the Civil War. When Lincoln was looking towards reelection as president, he wasn't sure he was going to win. The war had been going on for at least three years at that point, and everything seemed to be bogged down.Grant had bogged down in Virginia. Things just didn't look very good.

So, he actually sat down and wrote a memo about what he would do when he wasn't reelected. And this is another document where you can see Lincoln putting the cause above himself. So, he writes this memo and essentially says: I am pledging myself to work with whoever is going to succeed me to try to save the Union between November of 1864, when the election happens, and March 4th when he's inaugurated.

What he then does is he folds the document up -- you can still see the fold lines -- and he seals it. And he folded it in such a way that the middle part of one page creates a flap so that, when it's all sealed, you can't see anything.

And he takes it to a cabinet meeting and he says, 'Sign this.' And so, on the flap are all the signatures of his cabinet members -- Seward, Fessenden, Stanton, Welles, Bates, Blair and Usher.

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 9 And then he writes: “August 23, 1864.”

And what's so stunning to me is no one in their diaries says, 'By the way, the president had us do this really wacky thing today at the cabinet meeting.'

We call it the Blind Memo because they had no idea what they were signing, because it had already been all sealed up and glued together. But, he is essentially pledging himself and his cabinet to working with the president elect -- because the Union is more important.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: It also seems to show a certain amount of faith that his cabinet has in him, right? They signed their name to something and didn’t ask to know what they’d just signed. They have the trust in him to put their name there.

MICHELLE KROWL: Well, and that's often what people remark on when we show this document. The first thing they say is, 'You can never imagine that happening today.'

But yeah, I think that does show that, to a certain level, there is that trust in Lincoln -- that if he asks you to do something kind of weird or if he asks you to sign something, they're not questioning it. It's one of these lovely little documents that's not part of the public record, but gives you a little insight into Lincoln.

And then you put all the other pieces together about conversations he was having with other people at the same time -- because some of the Republicans were even encouraging him to backtrack on emancipation or maybe to reach out to the Confederacy about peace terms, saying, ‘Can we may be resolve the war and we'll deal with this whole emancipation thing later?’

And ultimately, he says, 'I can't. I can't go back on that promise.'

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: As Michelle had said earlier, there were those even in the North who didn't like how Lincoln had seemed to turn the aim of the war from being just about saving the Union into being about freeing slaves. But Lincoln won reelection anyway. And so those words he pledged in the Blind Memo to work with a successor -- they end up being unnecessary.

In March of 1865, Lincoln begins his second term. The tide of war seems to be shifting finally toward a Union victory, and he delivers his Second Inaugural address, which goes down in history as one of his most famous speeches.

“Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's 250 years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said 3,000 years ago, so still it must be said: ‘The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’ With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

MICHELLE KROWL: What I have here is is actually Lincoln's Second Inaugural address, which with the Gettysburg Address, as you know, are the two most famous speeches and they're what's

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 10 engraved in stone down at the Lincoln Memorial.

With the Second Inaugural, the Library of Congress has both the handwritten manuscript that Lincoln sent off to be printed and what we also have is what we think is the reading copy of it. So, once Lincoln had sent this to the Government Printing Office to be set in type, he got a proof back. He actually took some sort of straight edge and the glue pot, and he cut out sections of it and then re-glued it all together on this sheet of paper, so it's essentially a script.

And so, for him, he would know where to stop, where to take a breath. And my favorite of all of this -- and, of course, there's many, many little strips and you can see where they would've fit together -- is “both parties deprecated war, but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive and the other would accept war rather than let it perish. And the war came.”

When you look at the document, you can see where those last four words – “And the war came” -- have been physically cut out of the paragraph above and put on its own separate line. So, you can see that that's where Lincoln wanted to make his emphasis.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: That's actually made me feel much better, because this is actually how I do the podcasts! I type out transcripts of everything and cut it all up into little strips and rearrange all of it on different lines where I need breaks. And, so, just like Lincoln.

MICHELLE KROWL: You are being very Lincolnian in your arrangement.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: To me, what this shows is something that we haven't seen at all yet with other presidents. Lincoln's not just paying close attention to the words themselves, but also to his performance of them -- to the delivery and the rhythm and the cadence -- and how important those aspects are, too, in helping him get his point across.

MICHELLE KROWL: Another thing that this particular document shows is that Lincoln would write for how someone would hear a speech.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: This must have been very useful for Daniel Day-Lewis playing Lincoln in the film -- to know exactly how to deliver certain speeches.

MICHELLE KROWL: Well, I don't know whether he had looked at that particular one or not; but yes, I have said that if you want to play Lincoln giving the Second Inaugural address, that reading copy will at least give you a sense of how Lincoln would have paced it, because it is essentially his script for it.

But actually, what Daniel Day-Lewis did get absolutely right is Lincoln's voice. I suppose that's another misconception that I can I can pop for you. So many of the actors in the early movies -- you know, Raymond Massey and others -- had these very deep, resonant voices because that's how people expected Lincoln to sound. There were no recordings back in the Civil War, so you don't exactly know what Lincoln sounded like, but enough people talked about his voice and the inflections and his sort of Indiana way of pronouncing things. The one that you see the most often is, most people say “Mr. Chairman.” And he would have said “Mr. Chairman,” and they talk about it being a higher voice than you would anticipate.

So when the 'Lincoln' movie came out, I know a few critics said, 'Oh that voice is terrible.'

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But no, actually, that was Lincoln's voice.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: For as many documents of Lincoln's as we have, and as many books as have been written and movies as have been made, there's still so much about Lincoln that even historians like Michelle Krowl – and, as we'll see in a minute, Doris Kearns Goodwin -- still feel like we don't quite know about him.

MICHELLE KROWL: So, he doesn't keep a diary where he lays everything out. Today, he wouldn't be on Facebook. He wouldn't be on Twitter, you know, we wouldn't know what he had for breakfast. (Although, you probably did, because he didn't eat a whole lot for breakfast.)

Because he kept so much of himself closed off -- his law partner called him the most shut-mouth man he'd ever met -- many people can interpret Lincoln how they want to, or how they see, because Lincoln may not tell them differently. And I think that's that's where Lincoln gets interesting. You know, right-wing Republicans can like him and the left-wing Democrats can. And people can think he's gay, and that he is melancholy, and…

Because there's so much about him that we don't know, everybody can take something different away from Lincoln -- and I think that's one thing that that Lincoln offers people who appreciate him.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: So after all my time at the Library of Congress with Michelle Krowl, I decided to call up on the phone -- since she travels so much and hard to reach her in person -- Doris Kearns Goodwin, the author of 'Team of Rivals.' And I spoke to her particularly about the legacy that Lincoln has left us.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Hello. Just let me know when you've caught your breath and you're seated. You're good?

DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN: I'm fine.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: So, the first question I'd love to ask you, Doris, is just what do you think are the key ways that Lincoln redefined the office of president – and changed our sense of how we define what it means to be presidential or to exhibit presidential leadership?

DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN: I think what's most important about Lincoln is not simply what he accomplished as president, which is, of course, his legacy -- that he saved the Union, won the war and ended slavery forever -- but rather, the kind of leader he was.

He possessed this unparalleled array of emotional strength, possessed an uncanny ability to empathize with other people's points of view. He somehow was able to repair injured feelings that might have escalated into permanent hostility. He shared credit with ease, and he learned from his mistakes and refused to submit to jealousy or brood over perceived slights.

All of those human qualities, those emotional qualities, I think, allow later leaders to look at him and say, 'Boy, I'd like to be like that guy.' And that's, you know, that's a separate dimension from the extraordinary accomplishments historically that he made.

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 12 LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: What role do you think that the beauty and power of his words has played in shaping his legacy? Beyond that history has obviously remembered him for his actions -- if we didn't have his beautiful speeches, do you think his legacy would be the same today?

DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN: The fact that Lincoln was able to express his deepest convictions in a language of beauty and power almost unparalleled in American history -- almost as if his beloved Shakespeare and poetry that he had studied when he was a child had worked their way into his very soul -- makes it more likely that later generations have remembered him. Students have somehow memorized the words of some of his great speeches. Ordinary people remember things that he had said. And the words, like the words in the Gettysburg Address or the Second Inaugural, have become emblazoned in our sense of who America is and what our country means to us.

So, I think there's no question that, in his time, his ability to speak with such beauty and also metaphors and funny stories, really allowed him to become the leader he was, because in that day, the written word was king. His entire speeches would be published in the newspapers. They would be pamphletized and sent to millions of homes and farms. So, unlike today, where you might just see a piece of somebody's speech or watch a segment of it on one of your cable networks, people were reading the speeches. And the written word became part of what they understood about Lincoln's leadership at the time. And certainly, it has lasted to us so many years later to revere the beauty and the power of those words.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Is there any question about Lincoln that's still unanswered for you, that still sort of nags at you that you could never quite find an answer to?

DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN: Well, you know what's interesting? People will often say, 'If you could be with Lincoln for dinner, what would you want to ask him? What would be the unanswered question?'

And I know I should be asking him, 'OK, suppose you had not been killed, how would you have dealt with the South? How would you have dealt with Reconstruction and all the controversies that arose?'

But I know that if I really had him for dinner one night, I would simply ask him, 'Tell me a story, Mr. Lincoln.' Because then I would see him coming alive.

He laughed so hard when he told one of his funny stories, his eyes would twinkle. And then I'd know that the Lincoln I knew -- who was somehow able in the worst days of the war to dispel the anxiety of his cabinet members by his humor and his life-affirming sense of storytelling -- then I’d know I would have seen him alive.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: - What are your favorite words of Lincoln's -- the ones that, even quite some time after writing about him, you find are still lodged in your head and your heart some way?

DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN: Well, I think there are a couple passages that will always stay in my heart and mind, and one is when he talked about what the purpose of the Civil War was. And he said it was “a people's contest” to maintain our form of government -- the leading object of which is “to lift artificial weights from all shoulders…and to afford all an unfettered start and a fair chance in the race of life.”

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I mean, that's such an extraordinary understanding of what we believe democracy is -- that people come here, and with discipline and talent they can have a fair chance in the race of life.

And then, of course, my other big favorite, which is so many other people's, is the Second Inaugural. I mean, think of it. The North is finally on the eve of winning this huge war, but instead of a triumphal message, he argues that the sin of slavery was shared by both sides. Knowing he wants to bring the South back into the Union, he says that both sides had the same Bible, both prayed to the same God, neither's prayers were fully answered. And then the words we all know, “With malice toward none and charity for all, let us bind up the nation's wounds.”

Somehow, that understanding of what democracy is about and the desire to bind up the Union after the Civil War remain the ones for me that are most in my heart.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: How did your own study of Lincoln change the way that you now study and evaluate other presidents?

DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN: I think what I saw in Lincoln that becomes almost a trademark attribute that I look for in my other presidents is that sense of empathy and humanity. Somehow, he had this internal -- from the time he was a child, I think -- ability to feel other people's feelings.

Even as a kid, when his other friends would be putting hot coals on turtles to watch them wriggle, he told them it was wrong: 'Why would you want to hurt somebody else?'

And then he could feel what the people in the North and the South were feeling during the Civil War. And I think for a leader, especially at a time like ours now -- with the factual divides, religious divides and cultural divides -- the most important thing is to be able to see what other people are feeling and thinking, and that extends your humanity.

But it comes from that fundamental empathy, which I now think is one of the most important traits I'm looking for in any leader that I study.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Since you have such a window from your studies into Lincoln's inner world, what do you imagine that he would think of his near mythical status today? What's your sense of how he thought about legacy, and the extent to which he personally cared about being remembered as great?

DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN: I mean, the Lincoln that I think I know had a huge desire to be remembered by people who came after him. I think in some ways, when his mother died when he was nine -- and his only sister, Sarah, a few years later and his first love, Ann Rutledge, at the age of 22 -- he became obsessed with the thought: What happens to us after we die, what is remembered about us?

And he began to decide that, somehow, he wanted to accomplish something that could leave the world a better place for his having lived in it.

So, even from his first run for office at 23-years old, when he ran and lost, he said in his statement when he first ran -- he confessed -- that he had this peculiar ambition to earn the esteem of his fellow man.

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And then that ambition carried him through all the lowest points in his life. There was a moment when, in his 30s, he was in a near suicidal depression. His friends took all knives and razors and scissors from his room. His political career was on a downward slide. He wasn’t certain he should marry Mary Todd. And his best friend came to his side and said, 'Lincoln, you must rally or you will die.' And he said: ‘I know that, and I would just as soon die right now, but I have not yet accomplished anything to make any human being remember that I have lived.’

And so, when he finally signed the Emancipation Proclamation as president, he brought that best friend to the White House and he said to him, 'Perhaps in signing this Emancipation Proclamation, my fondest hopes will be realized. I will be remembered. If ever my soul were in an act, it is in this act.'

So, I think he would be so happy. This is what he led his life for -- not for celebrity, power or office, but rather to accomplish something so that his worthy deeds would be told in later generations. And, my God, he could never ever have realized how true that would be -- 14,000 books; movies; people knowing his words, remembering them in school.

It would be more than he could ever have dreamed in those early years when he labored over learning on his own; when he had to defy his father to become an educated person; the string of political failures in the darkest days of the war. What he really wanted was for his story to be told, and it surely has been told.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Abraham Lincoln was assassinated while he attended a play at Ford's Theatre in April of 1865. It's just a month into his second term as president, and it's only a few days after Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered, and the Union won the war.

Lincoln's body was taken back to Springfield, Illinois, on a long meandering route that let people throughout the country witness the funeral procession. From a window in Manhattan, a tiny Teddy Roosevelt peered out to watch the coffin go by. That June, Senator Charles Sumner gave a eulogy to Lincoln. In it, he said of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address:

"The world noted at once what he said, and will never cease to remember it."

Lincoln had delivered that speech a year and a half earlier, while the war raged on, at the dedication of a national cemetery near the site of the Battle of Gettysburg. That speech is now carved into stone at the Lincoln Memorial. I thought it seemed right to save these words of Lincoln's for last, and to read the Gettysburg Address in full to close our episode.

"Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

“Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that the nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

“But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate -- we cannot consecrate -- we cannot hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here have consecrated it far above our

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 15 poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.”

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