Part 28

Eclipses of our mental sun and moon betray us; so I beseech you, brain, do not regress as time shows time’s ending: old and reverend, think straight.

Eater of broken meats I seem to be: knave, rascal, ruffian. Reverence to self...

Perhaps this cold world will turn us all to fools and madmen...

Stratford

Why is it I grimace so much? Alone I mug, pull my beard, rub flat of hand over my eyes, crack knuckles, shrug, sigh. Is this my sane monologue with self? What’s its purpose? Perhaps I must convince myself that I am alive and battling: grimace at the window, grimace on the pot, grimace at bed. Grimace is my hornbook. For the best of self-conviction I prefer knuckle cracking—such skeletal speech.

Stratford

February 26, 1616

So I’ll never know who attacked Ellen?

Is it because I am sick that I care?

Could it be that someone stepped from his stage of bitterness and struck her that night the fog drowned her carriage? Did he resent my luck? The harder poverty knocked the keener he felt my good luck: was that how it was? Was hunger a knife in his belly? Did he run away from London afterward? His hungry, motherless kids asked him to kill for money? Was that how it was?

“Your brother Fred is here, bending over you...”

“Was that Ann, who said that yesterday? Or was it Hall, bending over me, who said that Fred had come by?”

Ellen, could you come? Or Hamlet? Othello? Marlowe?

Stratford

March 5, 1616

Years ago I wrote this:

Can honor set a leg? Or set an arm? Or take away the pain of a wound? What is honor? A word? What is that word? Air? What has it? The fellow who died on Wednesday, does he feel it? Does he hear it?

But I still hear it...honor lives for me, in my memories of my father, for all those who have worked before I came into being, for the cathedral spire, the ship, the cut gem, the book, the play, the figure standing in sun and snow...

13th

Very sick for three days. Dr. Hall. Others.

Pain.

Can’t get to the oriel.

Wouldn’t know a hawk from a handsaw.

15th

I go before my darling,

I go before...

Follow to the bower in the close alley,

There we will together sweetly kiss

And like two wantons, dally—dally—dally...

Sing it again—sing to me before I die—the candles are dying—the wind is dying—I suffocate in my room—I want to be with you—sing our song—oh, to dally once more—sing—

March 18, 1616

Judith married early because I felt I could not last much longer... Judith, will a hundred and fifty pounds help you, with that husband who doesn’t want to work? A fine son-in-law...but...ah, the trouble I have caused. She could have waited...but, at that time...she thought... My will is insufficient...

Illness is such folly

I still remember names

Alleyn was here to see me...

Burbage won’t come...the man you care most to see, cares less for thee.

March 19

My affection remains, blazes as it were: there were winnings: good things strive to help us: come unto the yellow sands for their beneficence: hark: a pox against pain: who has pain! No. Defy the monsters, prod the phoenix, bury pignuts, come forward magical, fecundate freedom, build, levy songs.

I need Raleigh’s elixir! If men concoct an elixir of youth it is too late for me.

Then, that elixir of elixir of elixirs, hebenon!

Sprinkle it.

March 21, 1616

Now that I am sick, it seems so rare a thing I once climbed elms for rook’s nest and slashed all afternoon, in the August sun, to scythe the timothy in rows. I was fifteen, I think it was. Larks flew and sang. I liked the click-a-click of my scythe as it bladed. Crickets chirped. Magpies and jackdaws took the air. There was a kingfisher diving.

I long to dive where I used to swim, at Gray’s pool, alongside the burned mill; I used to strip and plunge off the sluice, after working in the field. Or we used to swim there—five or six of us—and test who could stay under longest, test—what was it I wanted to test?

Cowslips grew cap-a-pie on two sides of that pool and their cinque-spotted faces got trampled underfoot as we dashed nakedly about, lewdly knuckling each other’s penis. Banks of violets were thick on the shady side of the mill, thickest among heaps of smashed and rotting shingles...her favorite flower! Hers!

Home

Suppertime

Getting ready to die is looking across a stage through semi-darkness; it is muffing one’s lines; it is listening to incomprehensible promptings; it is taking the wrong exit. It is tampering with the plot, eliminating the star from the best scenes, substituting a beginner. Getting ready to die is watching the candle gutter, hearing the rooster before dawn, saying love’s good-bye; it is the footstep on the stair, the reveled, sleeved and broken sword.

Getting ready to die is no man’s business!

O, that this too, too solid flesh...

Home – Evening

March 27, 1616

For several days my eyesight has failed and I have been unable to write. I have less pain but I can not eat. They talk to me and I lie here, restless, hearing, hearing... I want to hear something like a promise, an echo of things hoped for.

That knocking at the door!

Rain over the house.

To sleep, to sleep...

March 28, 1616

When I was twenty, splendid, strong, I thought it would be noble to die in the Spring: ah, noble death I praised you childishly. This is springtime, and I see no signs of nobility.

Tired with all these, for restful death I cry—

how like a poem those lines read, and lie! At that time, when I wrote that sonnet, I was never more in love with life.

For days the rain has been falling over the town, fine rain, grey rain that is determined to shatter the last of my courage...for days.

Ann stands by my bedside, a plate of food in her hands, urging me to eat: “Take something...it will help you, Will.”

Susanna sits by my side and sighs, “Papa, Papa.”

Alleyn visits me, his voice warming my room, in the beaten way of friendship.

March 30, ’16

Again I am reminded I must complete my will—and so I must.

Tomorrow I’ll dictate...how will it go?

In the name of God, I, William Shakespeare, gentleman, in perfect health and memory, make and ordain this last will and testament...

How can I say perfect health and memory?

I commend my soul into the hands of God, hoping and believing to be made a partaker of life everlasting, and my body to the earth thereof it is made... Custom...

Item: I bequeath to my daughter, Judith, a hundred and fifty pounds (shall I make it more?); in addition, I grant her my estate in Warr County—I like that place...

To Joan—I leave my clothes. Why?

To Elizabeth Hall, I leave my silverware...

To Thomas Combe, my sword. (I liked that sword...its inlaid hilt!)

To Richard Burbage (good friend), money for a ring.

For daughter, Susanna Hall, my home, barns, stables, orchards, gardens, lands, tenements...my new house in Blackfriars.

To Ben Jonson—fifty pounds and this journal. Short- changed again, Ben.

Item: to my wife, my second best bed and our furniture. (It should be more. What shall it be?)

To Dr. John Hall, all settlements after the payment of debts...there is no more...

I must remember to speak in a clear voice.

In two sepia rectangles, the renowned Droeshout portrait of Shakespeare and the famous Gerard bust...

The bust revolves slowly as a voice intones Shakespeare’s last will.

The talking portrait speaks from the Stratford church wall: through the open door of the church a blue cloak half conceals the Non Sanz Droict coat-of-arms.

LINCOLN’S JOURNAL

For Freedom

All of the quotations of Abraham Lincoln’s writings are in the public domain:

Pages

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579 line 3

585 lines 18-25

586 lines 1-6 587 588 lines 22-29: Diary quotation, Doneway & Evans, A Treasury of the World’s Great Diaries

589 lines 1-2: ibid.

591 lines 5-16: quotation from Ohn Quincy, President of

Harvard, Harvard Record

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598 line 26: song, “Tenting Tonight”

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610 lines 15-19: Shiloh quotation, Doneway & Evans

1

Executive Mansion

May 4, 1863

N

ot long after my inauguration I made a resolution to write something about my life. Writing, late at night, I hoped to escape the pressures of the war and go back into time.

April 12, 1861 — at 4:30 a.m., the war began.

Thirty-nine days after my inauguration!

When I called for 75,000 volunteers, I thought hostilities would end soon. I thought of many things in those trying days. There was the terrible summer of ’82, when wheat fields were swept by gunfire, 20,000 Confederates died, the Union lost 16,000. Boys, mostly boys. Which General woke me during the night? Dark days, dark nights. The Army of the Potomac had 100,000 soldiers. Their losses and gains are part of me. Deserters, absentees, spies—each is part of me. The wounded, the sick, the dying, the dead—they are part of me.

Oh, Traveler, why did you bring this war?

And Wall Street remembers this war! Fears it!

There seemed to be panic in rooms of this building.

The two years I have been here have taught me a great deal about men and self.

Yet, now, now I will record my life though life surges around Washington, though each one of us is sorely tried; we have read anew life’s “great tragic volume,” as John Adams called it. The pages lie open as drums thud along the Potomac.

Executive Mansion

May 7, 1863

North versus South, we have a population of 18 million fighting a population of 5 million, folly vs. folly, brother vs. brother, Commander Lee vs. General Lee, Major Crittenden vs. General Crittenden.

Europeans assure me that my cause is a lost cause. They say I will never eradicate slavery. The South says I will never end slavery because it is an honorable way of life. Our Indian brothers have sided with the South. But it is the cause of the Union that gives us strength, gives us right.

Union forever...flags...they wave yet do not heal...they acclaim patriotism. But patriotism can blind us. It is a “whirlwind,” as Emerson reminds us. For my part, it is my oath to preserve and protect this government of freedom for all men.

My convictions do not wane as cabinet members fail me. I am firmly convinced that tact can win against men who oppose, who are selfish or temporarily deaf. I believe the citizenry understands me as I understand them, as they pour into my office and talk with me.

May 19, 1863

I reaffirm myself.

I wish to tell that I was a man of the wilderness; I wish to write about my mother, about my village of New Salem, my home in Springfield with its maple trees. I see the sunlight in my office windows and it is also the sunlight of my boyhood and youth.

Tomorrow night, with my lamps lit and candles on my desk, I will begin to find out who I am.

I will begin to go back twenty years, thirty years, forty years. Snow storms will batter our log cabin. I will recall what it was to go hungry. I will try to fit together hours, days, nights. I’ll open the prairie schooner of my brain.

I had requested the telegraph office: NO TELEGRAMS between one and 5 a.m.

To commence my diary I will use lines I wrote a few years ago for an Illinois newspaper.

May 20, 1863

I am six feet four inches tall and weigh one hundred and eighty pounds. I am lean, muscular, have dark skin, coarse black hair and grey eyes. My legs and arms are long; my hands are large; I wear a size 12 shoe.

I was put to work when I was about eight or nine—farmed out for 13 cents a day. I cut wood, mended fences, herded cattle, dug ditches. At home, I milked our cow, lugged pails of water, cleaned slop, fed the stove. Weather meant almost nothing to my family; we lived exactly like Indians in our 3-sided cabin. We ate like Indians—when we could. At times we said nothing to each other for days on end that could be in any way construed as interesting.

Executive Mansion

May 22, 1863

I was born February 12, 1809, in Hardin County, Kentucky. My parents were born in Virginia, of undistinguished families—second families, perhaps I should say. My mother, who died in my tenth year, was of a family of the name of Hanks...

My paternal grandfather, Abraham Lincoln, emigrated from Virginia to Kentucky about 1781, where a year or two later he was killed by Indians, not in battle, but by stealth, when he was laboring to open a farm in the forest.

My father, at the death of his father, was but six years of age, and he grew up literally without education. When I was eight he removed from Kentucky to Indiana; we reached our new home about the time the state came into the Union. It was a wild region, with many bears and other wild animals still in the woods...

My father settled in an unbroken forest, and the clearing away of surplus wood was the great task ahead. Though very young I had an ax put in my hands...and from that, till within my twenty-third year, I was constantly handling that useful instrument.

...A few days before the completion of my eighth year, in my father’s absence, a flock of wild turkey approached our new log cabin. Standing inside, I shot through a crack and killed one of them. I have never since pulled a trigger on larger game.

I think that the aggregate of all my schooling did not amount to one year. I was never in a college or academy as a student, and never inside of a college or academy building till I had a law license. After I was twenty- three and had separated from my father, I studied English grammar. I have studied and nearly mastered the six books of Euclid since I became a member of Congress.

Executive Mansion

June 1, 1863

In the wilderness there were some schools, so called, but no qualification was ever required of a teacher beyond “readin’, writin’ and cipherin’ ” to the rule of three. If a straggler, supposed to understand Latin, happened to sojourn in the neighborhood, he was looked upon as a wizard. There was absolutely nothing to excite ambition for education. Of course, when I came of age I did not know much. Still, somehow, I could read, write, and cipher to the rule of three... The little advance I now have upon this store of education I have picked up from time to time under the pressure of necessity.

My father lived in Knob Creek, Kentucky; from this place he removed to Spencer County, Indiana, in the autumn of 1816; I was eight. The removal was partly on account of his resentment of slavery, but chiefly on account of the difficulty in acquiring legal land titles.

I became a sort of clerk in New Salem; I served as postmaster; then came the Black Hawk War; I was elected a Captain of volunteers, a success which gave me more freedom than any I have had since.

I went on the campaign, a campaign that led nowhere, except to the dead, that row of eleven men, lying in the sun, each head neatly scalped. I ran for legislature the same year (1832), and was beaten. It is the only time I ever have been beaten by the people. The next and three succeeding biennial elections I was elected to the state legislature.

As I rode horseback along the county roads something rode with me, an inner person. Beside the road, my horse browsing, I read a book. I remember sitting by a creek, listening to the frogs in the chill spring air; there was that person, that inner force.

I knew that there was little or no chance for advancement in this rural community unless it came through politics. So, politics had to shine my shoes and buy my trousers. I would prove that honesty was appreciated here. I would fit it into the crown of my hat.

June 5, 1863

It is a great piece of folly to attempt to make anything out of my early life. It can be all condensed into a simple sentence, and that sentence you will find in Grey’s Elegy: “The short and simple annals of the poor.”

And I add Grey’s lines for myself :

Far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife

Their sober wishes never learned to stray;

Along the cool sequestered vale of life

They kept the noiseless tenor of their way.

One more thought:

My mother was the illegitimate daughter of Lucy Hawks, and a well-bred Virginia farmer. God bless her; all that I am or ever hope to be I owe to her. I believe that I inherited extra drive from her unfortunate background. That drive stands me in good stead.

Executive Mansion

June 10, 1863

I have experienced death many times. My aunt, my uncle, my brother’s death. Then my mother’s death of milk sickness. Such suffering. I whittled the pegs for her coffin. I can see her grave outside our cabin. I could see it each time we opened the door. In the spring and often during the summer I placed flowers on her grave. She loved lilacs and roses. Her kindness lingers on. Friends called her a woodland madonna.

Later, when my step-mother came, her love was felt by each one of us.

“Let me help you, Abe. Let me strain the milk tonight...you’re tired. What a big stack of wood you’ve cut for us, son. That should last a while!”

She could handle an ax. She could lug a sack of flour. When wolves howled, she’d lean over me and say a few words or kiss my forehead. When my shoulders ached she rubbed them with bear grease.

“If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take,” is a prayer she taught me.

Sometimes we planted pumpkin seeds together, on a nearby slope. She was faster than I. Again and again, she urged me to attend school. Each time we moved, she located the nearest schoolhouse. “You’ve got to go, Abe.” I used to read to her.

She liked Aesop’s Fables best. We’d sit in the evening sun and lean against the side of the cabin and I would read. We learned the fables quickly. Her favorite fable was “The Wolf and the Crane.” In those days, my favorite was “The Snake and a File.”

The White House

June 12, 1863

Often, when I am alone and tired, I remember the hot sun of the prairie summer, how it seems to hold down everything as far as the eye can see. I remember how it climbed almost every morning—like a wheel.

I remember the squeaking of leather as my horse pulled his plow; there was small corn growing nearby, in field after field. There were birds.

There is a biting sense of loss, looking into the past: we know this is something that can never take place again. We know, too, that we can resurrect ourselves, sometimes pleasurably. Today, I esteem those glimpses that reassure me, in spite of their passing. Without them I think life would be so overcome by the present it would be difficult to continue living.

The better life should be everyman’s goal, a life that is not eaten up by toil, a life where there is freedom for thought, freedom for action. Men should be able to draw from the past; men should be able to construct for the present, a plan. Man should have time to evolve for himself and posterity—a heritage evoking pride leading to achievement that makes life worth living.

The White House

June 20, 1863

Some of my happy days were passed in East Salem, when I was an Illinois postmaster. Since the mail arrived only twice a week, I could peruse the Louisville Journal and the Intelligencer. I think there were about twenty-five families living in Salem in those days. I enjoyed delivering the mail personally; there was ample time to be friendly. So, I stuffed the letters inside my hat and walked from house to house. I got to know everybody that way. Summers were easy times. Remembering those summers they seem to stretch in a long line, with groves and fishing spots here and there.

I remember a huge boulder where I used to sit. Probably I had delivered my last letter. A rabbit liked to sit near me. I would shut my eyes and appreciate the greatness of life in the rabbit, in the trees around me, in the wind—the greatness that existed in my mother’s life.

June 24, 1863

At the Burkes’ home, not far from the post office, I rented a room. The Burkes, who are Quakers, a family of two, put themselves out for me, and gave me an upstairs room with a lamp. At night I got out needle and thread and mended my clothes, or, sitting in a leather chair, I read. Charles Burke and I fashioned that chair.

He lent me pen and ink, and I was able to practice penmanship—copying from a spelling book; it seemed great fun to me to spell out words, so much easier than working with an ax. Mrs. Burke’s tabby, grey and fat, liked to keep me company, flipping a paw at the M’s and L’s.

In Salem I fell into debt.

When my partner died, my partner in the grocery business, I assumed his indebtedness—$1,000. It took me years to wipe out that sum, as huge as the national debt. I shucked corn, cradled wheat, chopped wood, ferryboated, clerked...$2.00 here, $5.00 here, $7.00 here. My debit column required all of my scheming. While I struggled to pay that thousand dollars I resolved to lay aside something as a cushion, but it was many years before I could carry out that resolution. Those were pinching times.

Executive Mansion

June 25, 1863

At Number 4, Hoffman’s Row, we had our law office, second floor, a narrow room with a pair of elegant brass spittoons, a Pennsylvania wood burning stove. High on the wall, above my desk, hung an engraving of Benjamin Franklin. Our rough center table was usually overloaded with documents—like some outlandish mule. Legal books and newspapers filled shelves. A narrow window faced the street; another window let in sunlight. The elements washed them. The floor was bare oak but we had a fine assortment of chairs. There was a lounge near the sunny window and I liked to stretch out there, on the shaggy buffalo hide.

Billy Herndon and I had that shingle, good natured Billy. Here we talked business, cockfights, women, and horse races. For sixteen years we kept at it, learning, unlearning. For every stick of wood we burned in that Pennsylvania stove we had an ardent opinion.

Billy and I earned about $3,000 or $4,000, good for a town that already had eleven lawyers. Springfield, in those days, offered better legal services than sidewalks. Pigs in the streets, mud on our boots—so it went. We offered our services at all hours of the day. Often I never walked home for lunch. When I rode circuit, Billy kept house. The wren that lived in a box outside our door had a neater establishment than ours, but, she was not a member of the state legislature.

The White House

July 3rd, 1863

During my political career, I have striven to be astute where slavery is concerned. The issue of slavery has been a sensitive one, always difficult. Anti-slavery sentiment has been in existence no matter where I lived, usually undercover. The Baptist preacher I listened to as a boy was anti-slavery. I believed him. I saw blacks in chains, men and women. I soon learned about the cruelty that menaced their lives, destroyed their lives; I felt that I could, if I lived long enough, thwart slavery, perhaps abolish it, make our great nation a free nation. Patience, I repeated again and again to myself. I knew about Linda Mae. She was bound to William Wison for ninety-nine years. She was nineteen when that legal document was signed. When she reached 118 years she would be free. Patience?

Slavery was an old institution in Illinois, winked at in the 30’s and 40’s. The first governor of the state possessed slaves. I have seen human beings herded and treated like animals. Our family moved from Kentucky, troubled by the ways of slavery. My black clients sometimes confided in me, described, underlined, the devious trickeries of the whites. Billy, my Springfield barber, had tales to tell. I have heard them as he shaved me or trimmed my hair.