Abraham Lincoln
Presented on: Thursday, April 25, 1985
Presented by: Roger Weir
Hermetic America Our Critical Heritage:
James Fenimore Cooper, Abraham Lincoln, Henry Adams, Mark Twain
Presentation 4 of 13
Abraham Lincoln: The Wilderness Hero and His Spiritual Path to the White House
Presented by Roger Weir
Thursday, April 25, 1985
Transcript:
The date is April 25th, 1985. This is the fourth lecture in a series of lectures by Roger Weir on Our Critical Heritage. Tonight's lecture is on Abraham Lincoln: The Wilderness Hero and His Spiritual Path to the White House.
Smith's novels, some author that was famous in the twenties where have we got to
Lincoln. So, we're about
I know that it's difficult to come in out of the wind and come into the realm of ideas, but at least there should be one place where we can come into the realm of ideas and not even ideas so much. What we're attempting to do, patiently, week after week is to remind ourselves because all of us know this remind ourselves that it is not the phenomenal world that we need to struggle to understand. We know the phenomenal world from running into it all the time, but we have all lived long enough and conscientiously enough to realize that there are other shapes that exist also. And these are shapes of meaning and they are not what we run into, but what we discover that we have been had by too often. And so, these shapes of meaning are what we are addressing ourselves to here on Thursday nights. And we have discovered over the last five years that we've been lecturing in this particular mode, and this is a mode, this is a style. Rather than to speak upon a subject on a given evening, we are attempting to extend out over a duration, over a succession of dates, a linking together of aspects of individuals who were important and who continue to be important because those aspects of their lives link up with other aspects of their lives, and other aspects of others' lives. Schooling us in the meantime if we're patient about it, if we have continuity schooling us to a shape of meaning that seems to travel from generation to generation and from person to person, it's remarkable that it should be so.
We are convinced in low moments of our lives that we're absolutely insular. How could anyone understand us and how can we understand anyone else? But the reoccurring awareness is that we do in fact, understand other people. And they do understand us and something passes from one to another and not only within a given generation, but a trans-temporality from generation to generation and sometimes leaping over generation so that the grandparent generation are close to us. And there are times when images of meaning and symbols of integration occur to us that have not made their appearance for sometimes hundreds of years or in some cases, even several thousand years. These shapes of understanding, these meaningful configurations have many names throughout history. We call some of the larger ones archetypes today, and we call some of the more continuous types reincarnation modes, or we call the amperage behind such a movement, such a dynamic karma, or perhaps an élan vital. At any rate we recognize, in ourselves and together, that there are shapes of meaning that require of us a little bit of continuity and attentiveness to just to discern and discover. And we have on this particular Thursday night series this year, been addressing ourselves to what is the shape of meaning of this country. Not in the sense of a political doctrine and not in the sense of something that one would get from textbook summations in the bankrupt universities. We are attempting to discern is there in fact an overriding shape of meaning to the largest context that we normally respond to in our everyday life. And we're discovering now, we've gone far enough to realize that there is in fact, a mysterious quality to the United States and that this quality has not crept in unbeknownst to individuals, but has been placed there conscientiously, time and again, patiently. We reviewed the life of Franklin and we saw with what incredible arcane suavity Franklin brought in the notion of the development of the person, that a given human being has the capacity to grow, to educate oneself. And we need not stay in any condition that we find ourselves. We can in a word better ourselves, not in some sophomoric way, but in a very deep, profound way, transform ourselves. And that in this transformation, we bring into the circulation of our personality, qualities that were not there before, and sometimes evoke qualities that were there, but we're nascent, were not at all active. And we saw the development from Franklin through Jefferson, through Thoreau, through James Fenimore Cooper. And tonight, we come to Abraham Lincoln.
And of Lincoln, perhaps the best statement that could have ever been made about him made by one of his early biographers, Miss Ida Tarbell. She writes,
Lincoln's greatness of mind, as well as the profundity of his understanding of the democratic scheme, come out finally in his attitude towards these efforts to hinder his policies. He of course had had political experience which made him expect the average man in the opposition to feel free to ridicule, thwart, and ruin his efforts. He was not their man. But I doubt if Lincoln could have realized how the silliness, obstinacy, selfishness, and vindictiveness which the party system arouses and justifies even in first-rate minds, would show themselves in men who were committed to him in the effort to save the Union.
One of the outstanding qualities that Lincoln brings back into human history again, is the ability to grow in spiritual profundity while seeming to participate in what we call the external mundane world. Without taking himself out of the mundane world, Lincoln was able to offer an ever deepening pool of inner quietude, which was able to resonate increasingly and to bridge and amplify this spiritual resonance back out into the actual world, into those people who surrounded him, who ostensibly on the surface did not want to learn, did not want to be bridged to, did not want to change in the way that they found themselves changing. But Lincoln becomes an enigma in history. In fact, if we could characterize him, in my estimation, I think he's an American Saint Francis of Assisi. And of course, 800 years in a different country would make a lot of changes. But he has the qualities that St. Francis had. The ability to make present before someone that mysterious certainty that there are purposes worth adhering to; that unity is a quality that belongs to the largest shape of meaning that human beings are capable of comprehending; and that human efforts, social structures, societies, governments, communities, families must in some way, echo or parallel this sense of unity in order to give themselves a sense of sureness and accuracy so that the good life is not only in terms of what one has, but in terms of the architectural orientation of what one is. And it is this capacity that Lincoln manifests in this country in the moment in which it fell apart and the incredible accuracy with which Lincoln comes out of nowhere to the prominent center stage in the world at that time, is almost beyond what we would call normal circumstances. It's almost a synchronicity of epic proportions.
And we should remind ourselves here that the Civil War was not a small war. There were more deaths in the Civil War than there were in the Second World War for Americans. More than 500,000 Americans died in the Civil War. There were more than 400,000 wounded as compares to about 400,000 killed in the Second World War and about 600,000 wounded. So, the Civil War is the first great modern war. It's the first industrial-based, technologically-oriented war in human history. It is also the arcane result of the tremendous dynamic strength of the United States shifting from its initial unity to a polarity. And it is this movement towards a polarity that characterizes the American mind after the death of Jefferson to the election of Abraham Lincoln. From the mid 1820s until 1860, there was an increasing sense in the United States that everything could be changed. Everything could be reformed. Everything could be improved. And on the other side, everything could be a source of making money. Everything could be developed. Everything could be expanded. And so, the entire world was thrown open for grabs. It is in this time period, this 35 years from 1825 to 1860s, that the United States suffered an inflation, which if you would find an individual, you would recognize as an illness, not based on a neurotic, dis-recognition of themselves, but upon a psychotic for version of themselves. And the United States by 1860 had completely come apart in this polarity, that the sense of reality, the shapes of meaning had all constellated themselves on two sides of a central issue. And the issue was one of power power for man. The large manifestation of it was slavery, but the central issue should not be mistaken for it is of spiritual concern to identify that it was a question of power, and it was this grabbing onto sources of increasing and almost unlimited at least de-limited power that polarized the United States from the 1820s until the Civil War. And of course, during the Civil War, it all came out. We will find tonight, towards the end of the lecture, that the trigger of the Civil War, of this polarity, was the admission of California to the Union in 1850. And that California finally broke open the delicate eggshell balance of power that had been set up. And saying, this our ears perk up and our sense of history becomes attenuated because the Civil War is the first time that we see visibly in modern history that a balance of power does not work. And we today are told that in our lives, we must live in a balance of power. In fact, since most of us had been born and grown up, we have been told that the only way to live is in a balance of power.
American history in the 19th century shows that this is the most skittish of all worlds and leads to a perversion of all the shapes of meaning. So that instead of human right, it is human might that becomes the arbitrary of structure and of achievement and of purpose. And we live in a world today that is being electrocuted by the sense of power.
Lincoln gives us an insight into how to deal with this. For he better than anyone in recent world history dealt with it accurately. And we will see this coming to the fore in his personality. Lincoln was born as most of you realize in Kentucky, South of Louisville. And he was born in 1809. It seems that his father, Thomas, was a neer-do-well. From time to time he would own a few pieces of property and, from time to time, he would lose them. Lincoln never felt very close to his father. He always felt a responsibility as a young man until he was 21 years of age to help out in the family, especially since his mother had died when he was still fairly young, about nine years old. In fact, the second wife of Thomas Lincoln was a real angel for the two Lincoln children, Abraham and his sister, Sarah, who was about two years older than he.
And when the stepmother came in a big wagon full of her furnishings and three children that she had had from a previous marriage her first husband had died the first thing that young Abraham did was rest his head on her chest and she taking his head in her hands prayed for him. And Lincoln remembered this all the rest of his life the saving grace of kindliness of love, the resolution that comes from the deepest companionship of all, the sympathy of the human heart. This impressed him enormously. And from that age on the cheerfulness of the stepmother tended to balance out the trauma of having lost his first mother. Lincoln always carried with him a tone of melancholia, very deep, profound melancholia. There were times in his life when friends were almost afraid to talk to him, almost afraid to touch him, they would write that melancholy seemed to drip from him from time to time and he was almost unapproachable. And then there would be a slight change and Lincoln's satirical, playful personality would come into play and change in a flash in a moment, the situation into one of frontier humor and delight. This quality of Lincoln's personality made him inscrutable to almost everyone at the time. Lincoln becomes in fact more and more mysterious as we trace his life and we will see some of the reasons for this.
Lincoln grew tremendously, physically. He eventually would be six foot four, but would only weigh 180 pounds. So, hed be tremendously stringing and wiring. And from the time that he was about nine years old, he got very good at swinging an axe. The axe was the best tool of the American frontier. After the rifles were put down, it was the axe that was really the central tool and Lincoln's work with the axe was one of a great artistry and stamina. He is known in Lincoln Country as the rail splitter. And he really was that he split enough rails and made enough fence to probably string several counties total. He got so good at this with his wiry form that he would often be left alone as a teenager to work out in the woods by himself. He could always be counted upon to bring his material home and to do his work. And while the young adolescent Lincoln was out in the forest, working with his axe, he would stop from time to time and just listen to the wind or just be with the forest.
The family had moved up into southern Indiana. They had gotten a little homestead there about 16 miles up from the Ohio River Spencer County. They had lived in the lean-to the first winter there and then Abe and several neighbors had built a small log cabin.
Lincoln's listening to the forest has a harmony to it that we'll find later on in American history. It's a little bit different from Thoreau. It's more like John Muir. For Lincoln, what came out of him was a feeling of untrammeled vastness. Not so much of the cosmos, but of life itself, of the potential of life. He could never go into a church service without feeling somehow cramped. He never joined the church, although most of the family that he grew up with were members of various churches and various communities. But for Lincoln, there was a commitment in this he is very close to Thoreau there was a commitment to the ineffable and it was something that he did not dare tamper with. Even as a teenager, he realized that there was something real, alive, and loose in the world. And from time to time, he would experience a whole series of setbacks and thinking it over in his frontier roughened way, he would realize that something was keeping him from doing certain acts. And again, he would realize that something was helping him to go in certain other directions. And Lincoln had an antenna out for this all of his life. And he always reserved within himself, the quality of wonderment. What could this be? Not so much who is this, but how does this come to touch me in this specific way again and again and again. And from time to time Lincoln would puzzle out daring little adventures for himself to see what would happen.
For instance, when he was in his late teens 19, 20 it was decided that he and another friend would take this large river boat full of goods down the Ohio to the Mississippi and down the Mississippi, all the way to New Orleans. And of course, Lincoln being a very tough, mature youngster of about 20 years of age, it didn't seem too out of the way to trust this load to him. And the reason he wanted to go is to see what was going to happen to himself. He wanted to see if you put me on these rivers and out there for three or four months, what's going to come out.
Of course, there were some brigands who tried to take over the load from them. But Lincoln used all 6 feet 4 of him to convince them that they'd be better off in the river then on his barge. He was one of the best wrestlers around let's face it about the only time he was ever defeated was once during the Blackhawk Indian War, some champion wrestler from some other platoon beat him two straight throws. But that was about the only time that Lincoln ever lost a wrestling match.
When he got down to New Orleans after having been on the rivers on the barge. Sold the goods, sold the barge, made a handsome little profit for the owner of the barge and made good wages for himself. He stood there in New Orleans and the feelings came back to him and he realized that he was standing in front of the slave auction. And it was the first time that Lincoln had ever seen human beings sold. And he felt an eery twinge of evil intent around the action. And Lincoln would tuck that in to his personality and he would carry that with him, from thence forward.
This riverboat or flatboat as you might call it, had been done for one of the richer men in the community, James Gentry. And he was able to get back. They finally made their way back by horseback and on April 30th of 1827, Thomas Lincoln was able to finally finish paying for the 80 acres of the farm that he had set out to buy and no sooner had they gotten that paid off then they decided that they would move further North. The movement in the Western, Midwestern part of the America went from the South to the North. It wasn't a migration so much from East to West. That was true in Kentucky. And it was true in Pennsylvania. But, the movement in the American Midwest was from the South, North, so that there were Southern people constantly moving North. And about every five or six years, families would move another step further. And there would be families coming from the South, displacing them.
And by the time the Lincoln family moved to Illinois, they had moved to a community called New Salem and Lincoln sort of not knowing what to do with himself decided to apprentice himself out to another flatboat that was going down the river the Sangamon river runs into the Illinois and the Illinois runs into the Mississippi eventually. And the man who watched him work saw Lincoln solve a very large problem. The flatboat had gotten caught about halfway over this dam and it couldn't go all the way over and they couldn't get it back.
And so, Lincoln engineered getting some of the load taken on shore and the rest of the load put in the back of the boat so that the boat went out over the dam. Then he drilled holes in the bottom of the boat. And, a lot of the water that had gotten into it, leaked down and after plugging the holes, they moved the load to the front of the boat and it finally made it over the dam. And for this ingenuity, the man hired Lincoln to run a general store, decided to open the general store there in New Salem. This is North of
It was North of Springfield. New Salem disappeared in the late 1830s. There's a village there now, reconstructed of log cabins, which you could visit. And Lincoln's a home is there, and a few other things.
Lincoln was immediately accepted into the town when he beat the town bully in a wrestling match. And in fact, all the other town bullies took a liking to Lincoln because not only was he tougher, but he knew more humorous stories, he'd been places like New Orleans. And so, Lincoln's humor began to come out and began to compose poetry. I don't have very many samples here. Here's the kind of a little quatrain that Lincoln would write though.
When first my father settled here
Twas then the frontier line
The Panther scream filled night with fear
And bears preyed on the swine.
So not very poetic, but it had a little bit of a character to it. Here's another little couplet from Lincolns pen,
Abraham Lincoln, his hand and pen
He will be good but God knows when.
He was just the most regular sort of lanky homely fellow. He didn't drink and that was about the only thing that distinguishes him from the rest of the rough frontier boys and young men, but at everything else, he pretty well held his own.
But as he was making his way, Lincoln, for some reason, took out the papers and ran for an election for the state of Illinois and in the election, it was the first and only election that he ever lost on popular vote. But the political bug bit him, and the next time an election opportunity came around two years later, he ran and he won out of the capital of Illinois at this time was in Vandalia. It's a little tiny community today. And it was a very rough and rugged place. And Vandalia had probably about five or six thousand people at that time. And the legislators were all very much like Lincoln himself they were a rugged bunch. In fact, Lincoln would begin to use his tremendous empathy with people. And the next election that came up, Lincoln managed to get a good many of his friends from Sangamon County elected along with them. In fact, all together there were nine congressmen from that part, Illinois, and all of them were over six feet tall and they were called The Long Nine and they stuck together. They probably all stood in a line and leaned about the same way against the door jams and spat about the same way. I don't think Lincoln spat. But The Long Nine in a very casual way took over the Illinois state legislature. In fact, they took it over to the tune of wanting to move the state capitol from Vandalia to Springfield because Springfield was the big up and coming town in their part of Illinois, north about 50 or 60 miles from Vandalia. And they realize that in trying to get this move to Springfield, they would have to have other people voting with them from other parts of the state. And the only way that you could get that done was the promise to do something for them.
So, Lincoln, who was the mastermind in this whole scheme, figured out that if we're going to try to get people from all over the state to vote, to move to our town, we're going to have to get a public works going for the whole state of Illinois. Well, they made promise after promise and they designed to get roads and bridges and railroads. And when they got through it was going to cost the state of Illinois $10 million, which was a lot of money in the 1830s, but Lincoln proudly held up his trump card. He said, you know, the Erie canal has paid for itself already and it cost much more than this. And he said, I think Illinois will grow. And of course, when they passed this appropriation bill newspapers all over Illinois, claimed that property values had doubled overnight. And then this is going to be a boomtown. Every time was going to be a boom town so that the whole state of Illinois started to look very attractive for investors. And I think, you know, the rest of the story. Illinois bloomed like very few places did in the United States. The first time that Lincoln went to Chicago in 1847, it had 16,000 people. It would be less than half a lifetime and Chicago would have a million people.
And most of that design was due to the vision of Lincoln of seeing that the common frontiersman lacked only self-confidence. He saw it in himself that almost anything could be done. Why here it was a man with less than the years of schooling. And he found himself the minority leader and the state legislature of Illinois at 25 years of age. Why he was just filled with incredulity. Shucks an American could do almost anything if you just give him opportunity, that's all he needed. And he needed competence. And so, the development of the state of Illinois was the first visionary program of, of Lincoln. And they did get the capitol moved. And in 1839 it opened its doors in Springfield. Springfield in those days was not anything to crow at. In fact, it was something to crow at. Statements that we have from the time complain about the mud, there were no paved streets. Remember in Springfield has good rich farmland, which one, well-watered by the spring rains, which come every year, why it turns into mud, if you don't plant something there. And I think the Springfield newspaper said, you know, wed do better by planting rice since the streets are underwater most of the year, we could grow a nice crop here and sell it and make money. Except for the pigs because the pigs were let loose and they roamed around the streets of Springfield grubbing up for things. Lincoln one day was standing at the window and he muttered something as he saw this one fall in the mud with their big flume tat. And he said rather like a duck feathers on top and down on the bottom. Springfield had 2,500 people at that time.
But the wonderful quality of Lincoln was that he was able in his everyday homely way to plod through the hour after hour, the person after person, that it took to get a deal done. He knew how to lay back. He knew how to move forward. He knew how to hear what people really were after he had an uncanny sense of what they were trying to say and what they would say, given half a chance and Lincoln found that he had an ability to create an opportunity for the other fellow to have us say exactly like he wanted. And this was the secret of Lincoln's great charisma. You could always go and tell Lincoln exactly what you thought of him. You could criticize him. In fact, Lincoln took more criticism than almost any person I can think of, but he thrived on it because he was able finally to show, well, now all of you are and criticizing me. So, let's get together and work this thing out. And since I'm the butt of all these mis-affections, why don't we just plan to find some way to make this situation, right? So, I don't have to complain about it. He would work in that way. He had that kind of a quality rather than a leader, as someone who took charge, Lincoln evolved a frontier mode of getting other people to agree to work together so that they wouldn't have to put up with Lincoln anymore.
The romantic escapades in Lincoln's life are legendary because there are so few. Now it's a, it said in all the early biographies and it's alluded to this day and legends and, uh, Illinois that, uh, the love of Lincoln's life was a young woman who died young, named Ann Rutledge, blue eyes and red hair, and kind of feisty and real pretty. But she had died at the age of 22 and that Abe was heartbroken ever after. But investigation patiently into this as shown that Lincoln really didn't care too much about marriage. That is to say he was afraid of marriage and really didn't have too close an association with Ann Rutledge after all. In fact, one of the closest associations he had was with a woman named Mary Owen. And he wrote her several letters from the legislature. And finally, when the deal fell through, as he told a friend of his, he felt pretty good about it since he said she really is too short for me and to plump for me and too loud. And, you know, he married a woman just like that frankly. He married Mary Todd and Mary Todd Lincoln was a little bitty woman. And she was feisty. She was the Belle of the ball she liked to well now she had been to finishing school. She had grown up near Lexington, Kentucky. She was used to fine things, dances and clothes and more clothes and jewelry things that cost a little bit. In fact, later on, it would become a cause celebre in the White House when Lincoln would publish a disclaimer saying, I no longer am responsible for this woman's debt on clothes.
President.
He finally wrote her a letter just like he had written Mary Owen saying, I suppose that you won't have me. And I'm used to disappointment. So, you can tell me right now. And she said, well, the fact is, is I will have you ornery as you are. And it sort of got through to Lincoln and he had what we would call a halfway nervous breakdown. He's going to have to go through with this thing. And on the 1st of January, 1843, Lincoln felt so sick that he couldn't go into the legislature battles. He finally wrote Mary Todd and said, I just, I have to stand you up at the altar. I can't, I can't be there. And he said, I wanted to let you know, I didn't, it was nothing personal against you. I just couldn't show up at the altar. Well, it took another 11 months before they finally did get married, but Lincoln never again had such an attack of melancholia as on the 1st of January, 1843.
In fact, Mary Todd Lincoln was very good for him. He did love her and he couldn't stand her constant yakking. And so, Lincoln began to figure out ways not to quite pay attention to what she was saying, but to pay attention enough so that if asked, he could say what she had said last. And so, Lincoln developed this fine tune, split eared it's like a split fingered fastball, you know, you can strike a lot of people out with it. And Lincoln like Benjamin Franklin beforehand finally mastered the art of standing real still and calm while they lambasted. And after four or five hours, they'll get tired of this and they'll go on to other things and then you can go and do what you want. And he mastered that with Mary Todd. In fact, Lincoln, when he ran for Congress in 1846 and was elected was surprised. And when he went to Washington first time out, the first session of Congress was 18 months after the election. . .
END OF SIDE 1
. . . set everything back for about a year. We, uh, we had quite a travail there and in December of 1847, when the Congress met, Lincoln right away, discovered that he was a very good backroom dealer, that he could talk that talk. He could make the arrangements. And as a freshman Congressman, he was in great demand for going around and getting the boys together. And we call that today being a party whip. But after two years in Washington, Lincoln felt somehow that he had had to stand up for the inhumanity of the United States against the Mexicans for having trumped up the war. And he spoke out about it. And of course, all the veterans of the Mexican War in Illinois wrote letters to the papers and they decided they didn't want to support this kind of a fellow representing them in Congress and Lincoln didn't want to represent them.
And so when the term was over, he went back to practice as a lawyer, went back to Springfield and he would spend five years, from 1849 to 1854, practicing his law and deepening his particular talent at listening, not so much to the forest now, but to the country, to the people in the country, he had tuned himself to the vast vision of the United States. Hed been to Washington, hed been to Boston, to New York, to New Orleans, and he had seen something and he didn't know quite what it was. And he was going to let that set in. Well, let's take a break and let that, set in for us, and then we'll come back for a little bit more.
BREAK
I'm having to skip over as usual, I outline about 40 or 50 things. And I realize that our time doesn't allow for that kind of detail. And it's a shame because Lincoln looks better on detail, the more detail, the better he looks. Um, he had a peculiar personality, as you must realize. One that was, um, difficult to understand without the background that we've had so far, the openness of the American frontier was not an accident. It was not just a happenstance. It was planned for, it was made. It had been made conscientiously as early as the 1740s.
The personality of Benjamin Franklin was the first time that there's any kind of a mystical sense of the opening horizons. The wilderness before that had been seen as a problem, a source of terror. And from that moment on, there was an unrelenting desire in Franklin to kindle, this sense of life into flame. And it was Jefferson's genius to take that flame of the individuality of Franklin and amplify it, make it into a country. And it was the American character of the openness toward the world, toward possibility, toward what can happen that was in the air. And that individuals like Thoreau or Lincoln could tap into someone like Thoreau, never became conscious of that aspect. But we have seen that someone like James Fenimore Cooper became conscious of it when he went to Europe because he contacted there in long friendship, the Marquis de Lafayette who told him who said this age of revolution, wasn't a revolution based so much on ideas, but upon vision and not on a vision of politics, but on a vision of man's nature, that Liberty in the form of Columbia, the goddess of open spaces, was a new way to worship the divine instead of huddling religion into closed spaces it was now going to be able to move dynamically in open spaces, going to become Homeric again, going to go for blue sky and sunshine, and this is going to be a new kind of a temple. And the temple will be the mobility of the people who are living lives in that reality. And so the vision is to disclose that, and Cooper finally understood, began going back and reading his Jefferson was amazed at what was there. And then of course, when Cooper came back to the U.S. after seven years, he was astounded and how it was being maltreated. But the maltreatment of it is not all on the negative side. Frank Lloyd Wright once in a great sagacity said the American way is to finally accept ideas by way of abuse, that when they kick it around long enough and it's still there, then they decide it must be pretty good. And they adopt it. And he says, democracy will finally be accepted after all the abuses are heaped on it. And it still survives. Then the mob will quiet down and get to work. And then we'll get something done. Lincoln had that kind of a confidence in the largest sense, and in the particular sentence. That is to say he was confident in the details and he was confident in the large vision. What he saw was that the problem was in the obstacles in the in-between scale of events, larger than the person is somewhat smaller than the universe. That it's that level, that's the obstacle. And that from time to time, it seemed downright demonic that it would get in the way. And that man had to learn to either overcome this obstacle course, this obstacle level through force or power, or realizing that trying to overcome it through force or power was just feeding energy into the obstacles. That the way to overcome it was to maneuver patiently in the detail, keeping the guiding star of the unity of the whole in vision. And that by this combination man could navigate himself free of the obstacles.
So that Lincoln trained himself increasingly in his life, not to pay attention to the problems, not to pay attention to the group levels where all the problems come up, but to look towards the individual, that human being and this human being, that they were the workable mobility in the world. It was the individual person who was free to change, who was free finally to act. And that only by bringing individuals as themselves into play in a new way, could there be any kind of a collection called community, called a state, called a nation that could offer it. He wouldn't have used the term, but he would have said, the problem is that the mass mind is against man and also against the universe. It doesn't want either to win or to obtain it doesn't want the individual, and it doesn't want the unity of all.
It wants its own power plays, its own factions, which thrive on the fragmentation, which thrive on anesthetizing individuals so that they don't change their minds and so that they don't see the potential of the visionary unity of life. And the archetypal form that got in the way in his time of the American individual and the American dream was the political party system. And it was not so much the political party system, but an invention, a form, a shape of meaning that came out of the political party system called the political convention. And Lincoln put his finger mentally on the political convention as the focus and the author of all of the travail that was coming to pass in his time that the political convention took away the basis of grassroots democracy before then and Lincoln had run for office before the conventions came in to stop anybody who wanted to could put himself up for an office. There might be 13 to 24 to a hundred candidates for an office. Anybody who wanted to run would just post a notice and make some small payment for the forms. And they were in the race and whatever they could do, that was what they would do.
But the political convention changed all that. It meant that there were going to be fewer candidates and they were not going to be candidates for themselves on their own merits, but they're going to be candidates for the party because now the party was going to back candidates back them on the basis of a party platform. And it was this party platform that filtered out the individual or toned the individual down or tuned the individual up to party expectations. And it was the convention then that grabbed the jugular throat of the American dream. And Lincoln was dead set against this, but he realized that this was the practical turn of events that in fact had happened.
And we're going to go into it a little bit more next week to see that when Lincoln helps found the Republican Party. One of the things that will trouble him is the fact that it has to be done on a convention basis. And this will trouble Lincoln, no end. It will be a problem that in his writings, he will say, will have to be dealt with by the American people at some time in the future, that this is a real spiritual problem with the manifestation of Liberty, for individuals within a vision of unity and that political parties based on convention power are something that's going to stick in the craw of the American experience until it is gotten rid of. It's the same kind of problem that Franklin, toward the end of his life, and Jefferson at the beginning of his public career, both recognized in terms of slavery. The writings of Franklin towards the end of his life in the early 1780s are filled again and again, with the observation that the problem of human bondage is a chronic spiritual problem for man and Jefferson will concur. And both of them were realized we can't do anything about it in our own time. That it simply is too deep, too broad in its ramifications to be tackled in our time, but that it will have to be dealt with at some future time. And its in Lincoln's time when that problem finally was dealt with. The problem that Lincoln saw for a future time has not yet been dealt with. Although one individual will try, as we will see, and he will be politically crucified for it. And that man would be Woodrow Wilson. So, Lincoln in his perception of spiritual form realized that it is in the area of bargaining or cooperating between people where all the trouble comes. And that in fact, when you add power to it, the ability to make decisions or to commandeer those grounds upon which decisions are made, power becomes, then the negotiable reality for those forms, those middle forms. And the individual doesn't have a chance in that jungle and the vision gets lost in that jungle.
So, the problem increasingly for Lincoln was to find ways where he could operate as an individual himself within those forms. Still trying to maintain some basic contact with the reality of the vision of unity as a whole. And this is the poignant excellence of Lincoln as a human being that he never gave up this quest and that he never ceased growing in capacity towards realizing that. We can rarely profit from saying what ifs, but had Lincoln have lived the period after the Civil War would not have been as devastating as Reconstruction actually turned out to be. Lincoln was the only living person at that time who understood the intricacies of keeping the individual human being in touch with a universal vision. There was no one who understood that -no one in the office that is. We'll find that Whitman understood this. And well find that Melville understood this, but Lincoln was the only one who had any hope of realizing this.
Slavery becomes then one of these archetypal forums in between the individual and division that draws to itself increasingly like a whirlpool, all of the psychic energy, all of the economic concern and what had been a very delicate balance of power through the 1830s and the 1840s suddenly was triggered by the admission of California into the Union. This was a chronic problem at the time because it released the tender hold that both sides had upon seeing that they were still within the same ballpark, within the same country. When California came in, it snapped the dream, it woke the polarized parties up to the fact that they were irreconcilable with each other and slavery as an issue, not as an intellectual issue, but as a whole form of endeavor in between the individual and the universal had accrued to itself such massive power, mentally, psychically, economically, sociologically, that the South was convinced that it could not survive without it. And the North became convinced that it could not survive with it. These were the constellated precipitated polarities that came up.
It was understood at the time that this was going to happen. And so, everything that could be done in the United States Congress at the time was mooted together. There was a famous Proviso from David Wilmot of Pennsylvania in 1846 in the autumn before everything became apparent. Texas had come into the Union and it became apparent that one more large state like this and the whole balance was going to go haywire. And so the Wilmot Proviso has introduced a resolution, and this is a quotation from the resolution, that as an express and fundamental condition to the acquisition of any territory from the public of Mexico, by the United States, by virtue of any treaty, which may be negotiated between them, neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall ever exist in any part of said territory. Now, of course, the resolution was never passed. When California came into the Union, there was a need to make some kind of a compromise and the Compromise of 1850, balanced all of the demands and needs for the polarized sides. But the one quality that was left wild was called the fugitive slave law. And that was that slaves fleeing, trying to get free - and remember, now, this would not be seeing out in the open, there were underground paths, just like there are leading from charities to free nations now - there are ways to get out and these paths are the various families. Thoreaus family was one of these families had little links and underground stations all through the North helping Blacks to get up to Canada or helping them get new identities and get settled out in the countryside. The fugitive slave law said, if you help a slave, you are guilty of a crime that is punishable. You will be thrown into prison, you will be fined. And if you continue in this, you will be executed. The fugitive slave law struck down at the whole basis of the humanity of helping slaves to gain their freedom.
And it was the fugitive slave law that came into effect in 1850, that made it impossible for anyone ever again, to believe that there could be a reconciliation. Every time an incident came up, the families that would be caught I think we've seen the same thing in this country with the Salvadorians and with the people from Guatemala that if you help them know you're committing a crime, you're culpable for this. Well all this was within the United States itself, and it completely shattered the vision of the Union. There was no longer any such thing. There was increasingly a them and us attitude on both sides and because of the rise of economic power. Remember now the United States was industrializing at a tremendous pace. Look at the growth of Illinois itself. In the beginning of the 1830s, it was wilderness. By the 1860s, 30 years later, it was one of the most populous States and it was already in industrial power. By the 1880s, Chicago would become one of the industrial centers of the world, all within a period of a very short human life. This rising industrial might flowed into this polarity and it just energized and exacerbated this situation. And so that every year during the 1850s was more and more of this electrocuting tension in the American psyche and the Civil War is this nightmarish waking up to the intolerable conditions that had come to bear upon the mind of the time.
Lincoln was the only individual in a position to do something about this in terms of the massive unity of it all. There were individuals who could do something for themselves: Whitman during the Civil War, became an attendant in hospitals, nursing the sick and wounded. And well see when we get to Whitman in Drum-Taps, the incredible compassion that he finds, not from looking at the situation as a whole, but in tending person after person, after person, hundreds of people after hundreds of people, all on an individual basis, until it added up brick like brick to a structure of compassion that he could no longer deny was a unnecessary part of the universal self that compassion is as real as anything could possibly be, but it was on the individual basis. The only other individual at the time - and we'll see this - who tried to grasp the universal overall vision of it was Herman Melville. And what he came up with is that man is increasingly confronted with the possibility that at his core is evil. And progressively with Moby Dick, with Pierre; or, The Ambiguities, with the Confidence Man, Melville will become closer and closer to the contention that Job had only in a negative way. That God must be called to account to have allowed a universe like this to have come into being. And Melville himself will be driven finally, in the 1870s to go on a personal pilgrimage to Jerusalem, to try and resolve for himself, the situation.
Lincoln was the only individual who had a vision of the whole and knew how to get there personally, individually. And so, it is one of the most miraculous synchronicities in history that Lincoln decides to go back into politics in 1854, decides that he will go back into national politics and will take with him this sense of profundity that he found that he was able to work with. And Lincoln arriving in Washington in 1854 will be one of the most miraculous situations along. The second time that Lincoln ran for office as a youngster, his opponent was one of his opponents with Steven Douglas. And it'll be interesting to see that over a period of some twenty-some years, that when it would come down to the presidential election, Douglas would again be one of his opponents. It's one of those earmarks that hermetic questers get used to seeing again and again: that there are telltale signs of some universal flower unfolding because all the petals have this particular shape, this particular tone and color, and there they are again. And it's an indication that this situation is part of a whole blossoming. And Lincoln will be attentive to that.
Douglas incidentally was little, he was about five feet, but he had huge shoulders that could hardly get through a door and a mane of hair and he loved to argue and thrash his hair around. And one-time Lincoln's first law partner, a man named Stewart, got tired of Douglas ranting and raving, and grabbed him by the nape of this bull neck, and started carrying him off from the speakers platform and Douglas bit the man's finger and carried teeth marks for the rest of his life. And Lincoln, of course, just observing all this and made up some comments about Douglas reckless mouth.
We'll see some more of Lincoln next week.
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