LINCOLN AND MODERN AMERICA

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life of his mentor Jack Kelso in New Salem. He could have remained postmaster or storekeeper or a circuit-riding lawyer with Blackstone in his saddlebag, instead of running for office. But for all his unassuming qualities, he had a sense of destiny. Before the Young Men's Lyceum of Springfield, when he was 28, he made a speech in which he ostensibly warned against usurpers but actually sounded a note of personal longing: "Towering genius disdains a beaten path. It seeks regions hitherto unexplored . . . It denies that it is glory enough to serve under any chief."

Prairie Athens. He had the individuality of the self-disciplined and the self-taught. His was a natural taste (no less an authority than the French ambassador praised his esthetic judgment of women and literature) and a natural nobility of style, which more rigid education could only have tarnished. He had, of course, the individuality of the frontier—but the picture of the frontier as totally individualistic is false. To survive, people sorely needed one another. Again and again, in sickness or in debt, Lincoln leaned on others for help. In his first campaign for the state legislature, his platform contained the remarkably other-directed statement: "I have no [ambition] so great as that of being truly esteemed of my fellow men." After he was elected, in his second try, he discovered that self-reliance was not necessarily the ideal of frontier politics either. Lincoln fought for state funds to build roads, bridges and other "internal improvements," until the state of Illinois was saddled with a then staggering debt of $17 million.

The statehouse at Vandalia* boasted a Greek-columned portico, and this was not inappropriate. For the grass-roots democracy of the period constituted a kind of prairie Athens in which legislators were not remote and impersonal but known to all the voters and directly involved in their concerns. In that school he learned to be a politician first and last—and to respect organization. Later in the House of Representatives, he almost never missed a roll call. Whether or not he really grew his beard because some Republican politicians, plus an eleven-year-old girl, advised him to do so, Lincoln was conscious of his "image."

During the 1860 convention at the Chicago Wigwam, his supporters put through his nomination by crass maneuvering and packing the galleries with Lincoln men, including one stalwart, cued by the floor manager's waving handkerchief, who was reportedly able to shout across Lake Michigan. Deals were offered right and left, and Lincoln honored them later. But he always knew when to draw the line. During his second presidential campaign, at the height of the Civil War, he and his Administration again used every trick. But when politicians urged him to cut the draft to win popularity, he refused. He said: "What is the presidency to me if I have no country?"

Caught between extreme abolitionists and extreme Southerners, Lincoln had the individuality of a man who will not be pushed to extremes. That he personally detested slavery is beyond question. He recalled how in 1841 he had seen a cargo of shackled slaves on the Ohio River: "That sight was a continual torment to me." But "I bite my lips and keep quiet." Again and again he defined his lonely position between the