Lincoln’s Way of Words

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John Harpham, He Campaigned in Prose and governed in Poetry. Wall Street Journal, Oct 18, 2014
online.wsj.com/articles/book-review-lincolns-selected-writings-edited-by-david-s-reynolds-1413581788
(book review on David S Reynolds (ed), Lincoln’s Selected Writings. Norton, 2014)

Note:
(1) In the weekly Book section of yesterday’s WSJ, two book reviews were under the same heading: The Supreme Politician. The other review is not shown here.

(2) “I now leave, not knowing when, or whether ever, I may return, with a task before me greater than that which rested upon [George] Washington.”
(a) Lincoln's Farewell. American Treasures of the Library of Congress, undated
www.loc.gov/exhibits/treasures/trm059.html
(b) Three Versions of Abraham Lincoln's Farewell Address; Lincoln’s literary genius found admirers in Walt Whitman and Leo Tolstoy. Abraham Lincoln Online, undated.
www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/farewell3.htm

(3) “Harriet Beecher Stowe once wrote that passages of Lincoln’s prose were ‘worthy to be inscribed in letters of gold.’”
(a) Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896; wrote a 1852 novel Uncle Tom's Cabin)
(b) The English surname Stowe is name of places: “from Old English stow, a word akin to stoc (see Stoke), with the specialized meaning ‘meeting place,’ frequently referring to a holy place or church.”

(4) “His 1860 speech at Cooper Union in New York on the Founders’ efforts to restrict the spread of slavery took him most of four months to compose.”

Cooper Union Address. February 27, 1860.
www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/cooper.htm

(5) Lincoln “studied books on elocution and rhetoric. As the legal scholar and literary critic Robert A Ferguson notes in an essay that Mr. Reynolds has included in this volume, Lincoln’s most memorable speeches are tightly structured and thoroughly formal. The Gettysburg Address, for example, conforms to the six-part structure recommended by Hugh Blair’s then widely read lectures on rhetoric.”
(a) elocution (n; from Latin ēlocūtiō a speaking out, from ēloquī, from loquī to speak)
www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/elocution

The adjective “eloquent” shares exactly the same root.
(b) Robert A Ferguson, George Edward Woodberry Professor in Law, Literature, and Criticism, Columbia Law School, undated.
www.law.columbia.edu/law_school/ ... nter2003/r_ferguson
(c) Hugh Blair
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh_Blair
(1718 – 1800; Scottish; section 3 Major works: Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1787))

(6) “Lincoln specialized in antithesis. * * * His prediction in the 1858 ‘House Divided’ speech that, with regard to slavery, the nation would become ‘all one thing, or all the other’ drew on a characteristic rhetorical trope as much as on Lincoln’s sense of an irrepressible conflict between the states.”

House Divided Speech. Springfield, Illinois, June 16, 1858.
www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/house.htm

(7) “Although Lincoln’s early speeches were long discursive lectures typical of the period, by the time he became president he had developed the art of compression. The Gettysburg Address was 272 words; his second inaugural address, at 701 words, is the third shortest in American history, behind Washington’s second [135 words] and Roosevelt’s fourth [559 words]. In line with custom at the time, Lincoln never campaigned for the presidency. But reversing the order of Mario Cuomo ’s famous formula, he governed in poetry. * * * Lincoln was, as Jacques Barzun observed in 1959, a ‘literary genius.’ * * * As the historian Sean Wilentz has commented wryly of Lincoln: ‘Now he belongs to the English Department.’”
(a) Mario Cuomo. Wikiquote.
en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mario_Cuomo
(You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose. The New Republic (Apr 4, 1985))
(b) Jacques Barzun
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Barzun
(1907-2012; a French-born American historian)
(c) Sean Wilentz
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sean_Wilentz
(1951- ; a professor of History at Princeton University since 1979)

(8) “Studies of Lincoln as a man of words tend to focus on a handful of speeches that he gave as president and on a small set of radiant phrases—’the mystic chords of memory,’ ‘a new birth of freedom,’ ‘and the war came,’ ‘with malice toward none.’”
(i) First Inaugural Address. Mar 4, 1861
www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/1inaug.htm
(the last sentence: “The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearth-stone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature”)
(ii) The Gettysburg Address. Nov 19, 1853
www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/gettysburg.htm
(the penultimate clause: “that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom”)
(iii) Second Inaugural Address. Mar 4, 1865
www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/inaug2.htm
(in paragraph 2: “Both parties deprecated war; but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive; and the other would accept war rather than let it perish. And the war came”)

(9) “The first passage in the Norton volume is a speech Lincoln gave in his unsuccessful first run for the Illinois legislature in 1832.”
(i) Lincoln's New Salem
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln's_New_Salem
(1828- ~1840, "was recreated as a historic village in the 1930s";  located 15 mi (24 km) northwest of Springfield; Lincoln lived here 1831- ~1837, from here moved to Springfield--”also in his election district”)
(ii) Abraham Lincoln
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Lincoln
(A) “Admitted to the bar in 1836.”
(B) Member of the Illinois House of Representatives 1834-1842; Member of the US House of Representatives 1847-1849

(10) “As Eric Foner has shown in ‘The Fiery Trial,’ * * * this mid-19th-century political world was the setting for everything that Lincoln did. It was the context from which he emerged. But Lincoln’s words still move us in a way that the words of Clay and Douglas do not. Perhaps this is because he had a unique ability to project the specific events of his time onto a vast national and even cosmic canvas.”

Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial; Abraham Lincoln and American slavery. Norton, 2011.