Ode to Abe

By Jurek Martin, former FT Washington bureau chief

Writing in 1922, the great American curmudgeon, HL Mencken, reported that a publishing friend had told him only four types of books ever make money: detective novels; bodice-rippers; those about "spiritualism, occultism and other claptrap"; and volumes on Abraham Lincoln. Certainly no American president and few, if any, historical figures, have ever attracted so much serious scholarly attention.

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Obviously he is worth it. Only George Washington and Franklin D Roosevelt, also forged in crises, are in his league as US presidents. In 1860 he won the election for the new anti-slavery Republican party. He freed the slaves and saved the Union by fighting a civil war that, at times, looked unwinnable. He told his country what he was doing with magnificent clarity, approached only by Winston Churchill and Martin Luther King, which was remarkable for a man with only one year's formal education. He was also the funniest and pithiest resident of the White House. Historian James McPherson writes that after devoting 50 years to Lincoln, he is forever discovering something new or acquiring fresh perspectives.

His life story, from childhood through to his assassination in 1865 by John Wilkes Booth, is etched in the collective American memory. He taught himself to read and write and was little more than a farm labourer and occasional storekeeper, postman and surveyor before he fell in love with the law and politics. His home state of Illinois was "free" and Lincoln detested slavery but he was pragmatic - he was, after all, a politician seeking election.

It was his oratory that earned his reputation. Two speeches, among the many, stand out: the Gettysburg address in 1863 after the war's decisive, but not climactic, battle, and the second inaugural address as the war wound down in 1865, just five weeks before his death.

Because I write for a living, I have long been fascinated by Lincoln's way with words. How could anybody say so much in the Gettysburg address in just 272 words or in his second inaugural, 701 pearls of prose?

The Lincoln Anthology is a treasure trove of what other wordsmiths thought of him. British writer HG Wells rated him one of the six greatest men of all time, along with Jesus, Buddha, Aristotle, Asoka（阿育王） and Roger Bacon: "He seems to me to embody the essential characteristics of America." Leo Tolstoy tells a wonderful story about chiefs and bandits in the remote Caucuses plugging the author for all he knew about this far away American. He writes: "The greatness of Napoleon, Caesar and Washington was only moonlight by the sun of Lincoln . . . He was great through his simplicity and was noble through his charity."

Even Mencken, never charitable, thought the Gettysburg address sublime: "Eloquence brought to a pellucid and almost child-like perfection." He could not, of course, resist adding that it was a one-off and based on a false premise. Ibsen（易卜生） and Whitman wrote odes to Lincoln. But none of them addressed the quality of his writing.

Jacques Barzun, a French-born Columbia University professor, did so, however, in a marvellous 1959 essay. Even in his early political pamphlets and court cases, Lincoln showed control over words, says Barzun. A parallel emerged between the shortness of an Aesop fable "and the mania Lincoln had for condensing any matter into the fewest words".

According to legend, Lincoln scribbled down the Gettysburg address on a train to the event. He did not write fast but he did write a lot. He stuffed his notes in his desk, his pockets and his stove-pipe hat, to be retrieved when needed. When called to speak, all had already been thought through.

Barzun praises Lincoln's literary art: "[His] precision, vernacular ease, rhythmical virtuosity and elegance may at a century's remove seem alien to our tastes," he writes. But out of Lincoln came Mark Twain, and out of Twain came Sherwood Anderson, Mencken and Ernest Hemingway. His legacy endures.

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Lincoln's homes began with the humble log cabin in Kentucky 200 years ago and ended 56 years later, with an assassin's bullet, in a theatre half a mile from the most important home in the land. Writing on the 100th anniversary, Tolstoy hoped his birthday "will create an impulse towards righteousness among nations". This remains our hope today.

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Gettysburg Address, 1863/11/19

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 battle-field 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 that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

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