LONG, BONY AND MUSCULAR

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and comic luck in their interplay in life, perhaps from pools of the wanting and crying and dancing of Nancy Hanks, the incessant lights of laughters. Where this special genius came from was a matter he had questioned his thoughts about.

He wanted to be known for a genius of accuracy. He was six feet, four inches tall, "nearly"; he wouldn't count the boot heel and sock as part of his height. He liked to test his memory for accuracy. Driving toward Springfield with his boy, Bob, he recalled he had surveyed the neighborhood they were driving through. He stopped the buggy several times, and each time, with a chuckle, asked Bob to go into the woods and at a certain distance find a blazed tree, which he had more than twenty years ago marked as a survey corner. "And he never made a mistake," said Bob. He had dug into Euclid and put himself through mental discipline because he had learned that a man can be so smart that without intending to he "comes out of the same hole he went in at."

He wouldn't believe everything he saw on a government map. Zimri Enos asked him for a legal opinion on certain rules in government surveys, the opinion to be read to a convention of surveyors. After telling what he believed to be the true rule in establishing strategic lines, he wrote: "Nearly, perhaps quite, all the original surveys are to some extent, erroneous, and in some of the Sections, greatly so. In each of the latter, it is obvious that a more equitable mode of division than the above, might be adopted; but as error is infinitely various, perhaps no better single rule can be prescribed."

A lawyer in Springfield, after ten years of courtroom acquaintance with Lincoln, tried to analyze Lincoln's mind, noting: "Physiologically and phrenologically, the man was a sort of monstrosity. His frame was long, large, bony, and muscular; his head small and disproportionately shaped. It is inconsistent with the laws of human organization for any such creature to possess a mind capable of anything called great." It was a case of where "passion or sentiment steadied and determined an otherwise indecisive mind." He would say Lincoln "had no mind not

possessed by the most ordinary of men." Such was the view of more than one of the men with offices on the public square in Springfield. He was honest, smart, clever, perhaps cunningso they said. They were annoyed about the Cooper Union speech, and comment by eastern editors that Lincoln had superb mental resources, a remarkable gift of analysis and statement. They told each other such was politics.

Lincoln read newspapers, "skirmished through them," as he said. He had learned how to pick his way among the articles and items so as to waste little time and get at the special facts he was mousing for. It was part of his system for getting at public opinion, the temper of the people, and the spirit of the times. But this wasn't enough; for such a purpose he couldn't trust newspapers; in some particulars nearly all of them were trying to fool part of the people all the time, all of the people part of the time, or all of the people all of the time. So Lincoln talked with people, listened in while others talked, trained himself as a listener-and, in fact, developed that gift of some dramatic artists of, in a manner, standing outside himself and hearing himself talk and watching himself act. It was since this development that he had been able to wear down Douglas, and hold his own with the star political platform performer of the country, in the drama of politics. And he was well started in competing with that other star performer, Senator William H. Seward of New York.

Behind prejudiced and one-sided newspaper items, he searched his way through to the essential facts confessed. His law practice and companionship with horse thieves, slanderers, and murderers, sharpened him in getting at the truth in partisan newspapers during a time of violence, of boxes of Sharpe's rifles marked "Beecher's Bibles," of disputes as to whether old John Brown was a child of Christ or a son of the Devil. The newspapers were full of "catchwords" and in his Lost Speech he mentioned the significance of catchwords; to know the times he lives in, a man must know its catchwords; he had even lived his fifty years to see "Honest Abe" and "Old Abe" become

Original photograph in the Barrett Collection

Lincoln in 1857 at the time he earned a $5,000 fee from the Illinois Central Railroad.

A. Lincoln, Esq., Attorney and Counselor at Law, Springfield, Illinois, 1860.

"SLOW TO LEARN AND SLOW TO FORGET" 251 catchwords. The art and science of plucking out the hidden motives or the probable designs of cunning men, from behind the spoken word screens and the verbal disguises, was one that challenged him.

"The language used becomes ambiguous, roundabout, and mystical," he noted of the framers of the Constitution and their alluding to slavery three times without mentioning it openly by name. He sought out in the current events the motives behind the proclaimed record. There could be such a thing as a "steady debauching of public opinion" by men with hidden motives, calling a chestnut horse a horse-chestnut; he chose to tell the farmers at Clinton, Illinois, "You can fool all the people part of the time and part of the people all the time, but you can't fool all the people all the time," but in Connecticut, in the shadow of Yale University, he urged, "Let us be diverted by none of those sophistical contrivances wherewith we are so industriously plied and belabored."

Two men who had watched at close hand the working of Lincoln's mind were Herndon and Whitney. Herndon said he might ask Lincoln a question and Lincoln would sit in a moody spell without replying. "Meanwhile, I would forget that I had asked him; but to my surprise a few moments later (once it was over fifteen minutes) he would break the silence and give me a satisfactory answer." Whitney noted a rare accuracy of memory. "Once we all, court and lawyers, except Lincoln, insisted that a witness had sworn so-and-so, and it turned out that Lincoln was correct, and that he recollected better than the united bench and bar." He had not changed since Josh Speed had said he had a quick mind and he answered: "No, you are mistaken; I am slow to learn and slow to forget. My mind is like a piece of steel-very hard to scratch anything on it, and almost impossible after you get it there to rub it out."

Lincoln often read out loud to Herndon in the office, explaining: "I catch the idea by two senses; for, when I hear what is said and also see it, I remember it better even if I do not understand it better." In one particular he was a brother in good