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Abraham Lincoln His Hand and His Pen

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Abraham Lincoln His Hand and His Pen Abraham Lincoln His hand and his pen EPISODE TRANSCRIPT Listen to Presidential at http://wapo.st/presidential 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.' PRESIDENTIAL THEME MUSIC 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. Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 1 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.
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