This is the place they brought him,

This is Abraham Lincoln’s home town.

The People, Yes

57

Lincoln?

He was a mystery in smoke and flags

saying yes to the smoke, yes to the flags,

yes to the paradoxes of democracy,

yes to the hopes of government

of the people by the people for the people,

no to debauchery of the public mind,

no to personal malice nursed and fed,

yes to the Constitution when a help,

no to the Constitution when a hindrance,

yes to man as a struggler amid illusions,

each man fated to answer for himself:

Which of the faiths and illusions of mankind

must I choose for my own sustaining light

to bring me beyond the present wilderness?

Lincoln? was he a poet?

and did he write verses?

“I have not willingly planted a thorn

in any man’s bosom.”

“I shall do nothing through malice; what

I deal with is too vast for malice.”

Death was in the air.

So was birth.

What was dying few could say.

What was being born none could know.

He took the wheel in a lashing roaring

hurricane.

And by what compass did he steer the course

of the ship?

“My policy is to have no policy,” he said in

the early months,

And three years later, “I have been controlled

by events.”

He could play with the wayward human mind, saying at Charleston, Illinois, September 18, 1858, it was no answer to an argument to call a man a liar.

“I assert that you [pointing a finger in the face of a man in the crowd] are here today, and you undertake to prove me a liar by showing that you were in Mattoon yesterday.

“I say that you took your hat off your head and you prove me a liar by putting it on your head.”

He saw personal liberty across wide horizons.

“Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid,” he wrote Joshua F. Speed, August 24, 1855. “As a nation we began by declaring that ‘all men are created equal, except negroes.’ When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read ‘all men are created equal except negroes and foreigners and Catholics.’ When it comes to this, I shall prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty.”

Did he look deep into a crazy pool

and see the strife and wrangling

with a clear eye, writing the military

head of a stormswept area:

“If both factions, or neither, shall abuse

you, you will probably be about right.

Beware of being assailed by one and

praised by the other”?

Lincoln? was he a historian?

did he know mass chaos?

did he have an answer for those

who asked him to organize chaos?

“Actual war coming, blood grows hot, and blood is spilled. Thought is forced from old channels into confusion. Deception breeds and thrives. Confidence dies and universal suspicion reigns.

“Each man feels an impulse to kill his neighbor, lest he be first killed by him. Revenge and retaliation follow. And all this, as before said, may be among honest men only; but this is not all.