Lincoln - Part 77
Library

Part 77

76 "not legally bound": CW, 1:144. (The body of this quotation is italicized in the source.)

76 "to do so": CW, 1:123.

76 "and great loss": CW, 1:135.

76 "will be well": CW, 1:135136.

76 "would go down": CW, 1:196.

76 "the present crisis": CW, 1:216.

76 "carry the elections": CW, 1:148.

76 "defraying its expense": CW, 1:201.

76 "in a lump": CW, 1:184.

77 "by country banks": CW, 1:194.

77 "to resuscitate it": CW, 1:159.

77 "that jumping sc.r.a.pe": CW, 1:226.

77 "to the ground!": The best account of this episode is in chap. 4 of Illinois' Fifth Capitol: The House That Lincoln Built and Caused to Be Rebuilt (18371865) (Springfield, Ill.: Phillips Brothers Printers, 1988), by Sunderine Wilson Temple and Wayne C. Temple. See also Paul Simon, Lincoln's Preparation for Greatness: The Illinois Legislative Years (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971), pp. 227230.

78 "end the better": Ibid., p. 264.

78 "shall be beaten": CW, 1:120.

78 required six months: CW, 1:151.

78 "be verry authentic": CW, 1:154.

78 "state, verry good": CW, 1:184.

78 "driven into it": CW, 1:205.

78 "coming presidential contest": CW, 1:180181, 201.

79 "our highest expectations": Hidden Lincoln, p. 289.

79 "not that much": CW, 1:159179. (Quotations are from pp. 177 and 163.) For a careful appraisal of this speech and its political significance, see Boritt, Lincoln and the Economics of the American Dream, chap. 6.

80 "Hero of Tippecanoe": CW, 1:210.

80 "Our Political Inst.i.tutions": The text of the address is in CW, 1:108115. For the circ.u.mstances in which it was delivered, see Thomas F. Schwartz, "The Springfield Lyceums and Lincoln's 1838 Speech," Illinois Historical Journal 83 (1990): 4549. This address has attracted more scholarly attention than anything else Lincoln wrote before 1858. Edmund Wilson first suggested that Lincoln's fiery warning against a future Caesar "seemed to derive as much from admiration as apprehension" and argued that Lincoln "projected himself into the role against which he is warning." Wilson, Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962), pp. 99130. George B. Forgie's Patricide in the House Divided: A Psychological Interpretation of Lincoln and His Age (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1979), chap. 2, essentially adopts the Wilson argument, noting, however, that Lincoln was unconsciously projecting himself as the towering genius who threatened republicanism. Dwight G. Anderson, in Abraham Lincoln: The Quest for Immortality (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982), carried Wilson's argument even further, to depict Lincoln as a "demonic" man, who "acted from motives of revenge" to strike down the Founding Fathers. In Crisis of the House Divided: An Interpretation of the Issues in the Lincoln-Douglas Debates (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Co., 1959), chap. 9, Harry V. Jaffa argued that in this address Lincoln was looking to the future, when the nation could be saved "by one who has all Caesar's talent for domination, one who could, if he would, govern the people without their consent, but who prefers the people's freedom to their domination" (p. 225). Other scholars, like George M. Fredrickson, "Lincoln and His Legend" (New York Review of Books, July 15, 1982, pp. 1316), have suggested that these interpretations are exaggerated, and Richard O. Curry, "Conscious or Subconscious Caesarism?" (JISHS, Apr. 1984, p. 71) stresses that Lincoln, "a devout Whig, was utilizing standard Whig rhetoric-which continually employed the imagery of Caesarism in attacking 'King Andrew I.'" For a critical review of this literature, see Mark Neely, "Lincoln's Lyceum Speech and the Origins of a Modern Myth," LL, nos. 17761777 (1987). The imagery Lincoln used was conventional. See Major L. Wilson, "Lincoln and Van Buren in the Steps of the Fathers: Another Look at the Lyceum Address," Civil War History 29 (1983): 197211.

80 "to our nature": CW, 1:114115.