Lincoln’s Favorite Quote

In 1889, the Massachusetts biographer, politician, and early Atlantic contributor Edward L. Pierce wrote down a little-known story he had heard about President Abraham Lincoln. It told of a time when Lincoln, long admired for his way with words, had shared the words that he admired most, at a moment when his future and the nation’s future seemed especially dark.

Pierce’s story went like this. One day, the Pennsylvania abolitionist James Miller McKim was at a meeting with the president when Lincoln suddenly reached into “his pocket book.” He pulled from it a speech by John Bright, the British liberal reformer, member of Parliament, and staunch advocate for the Union abroad. Then he “proceeded to read” aloud Bright’s “final passage.”

Lincoln said it was “the most eloquent passage he had ever seen.”

Miller McKim, who described the scene to Pierce not long after, responded by telling Lincoln that he knew an even more eloquent passage: the final words of the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863, the part that invoked “the considerate judgment of mankind” and “the favor of Almighty God.” But Lincoln deflected the praise, explaining truthfully that most of that coda had been written by his then Secretary of the Treasury, Salmon P. Chase. The meeting then moved on, its memory soon-to-be lost in a sea of recollections about the soon-to-be martyred president.¹

Writing more than two decades later, Pierce did not record the words that Lincoln liked so much at the undated meeting; maybe he never even learned what they were. But the president’s admiration for Bright himself was no mystery. At crucial moments during the American Civil War, Bright’s support for the Union had helped keep British public opinion from swinging decisively to the Confederacy. As a parliamentary reformer who favored expanding suffrage, Bright believed the success of the American democratic experiment was crucial to the fate of democracy worldwide. Lincoln even kept a photograph of him in his office at the White House. But which particular words of Bright’s had the president reportedly described as “the most eloquent passage he had ever seen”?²

Pierce speculated that Lincoln’s favorite passage must have come from a speech that Bright had given in Birmingham, England, in December 1862, “in which he predicted a grand future for our country.” In a 1947 chapter comparing Lincoln and Bright, historian James G. Randall, one of the very few scholars to comment on Pierce’s story, agreed with Pierce and wrote that Lincoln had probably read from the Birmingham speech, whose final passage Randall reproduced in a footnote.³

In that 1862 speech, Bright denounced the Confederacy’s “odious” attempt to divide the Union into two nations. “I have another and a far brighter vision before my gaze,” Bright concluded. “It may be but a vision, but I will cherish it. I see one vast confederation stretching from the frozen North in unbroken line to the glowing South, and from the wild billows of the Atlantic westward to the calmer waters of the Pacific main,—and I see one people, and one language, and one law, and one faith, and, over all that wide continent, the home of freedom, and a refuge for the oppressed of every race and of every clime.”

Pierce and Randall may be right that this was the passage Lincoln liked. But I doubt it. Some of its overtones of ethnocentric nationalism—the references to “one language” and “one faith”—sit uneasily with Lincoln’s consistent rejections of the nativism that still lurked in many corners of his Republican coalition. The long, prosaic passage also hardly seems like it would have appealed to the discerning ear of Lincoln, whose Second Inaugural Address, at fewer than 700 words, wasted no breaths. Bright’s 1862 speech sounds more like the work of a typical nineteenth-century orator like Edward Everett, whose two-hour stemwinder on a Pennsylvania battlefield in November 1863 was thrown in the shade by the speech that followed it: Lincoln’s 272-word Gettysburg Address.

But if it was not Bright’s speech at Birmingham that Lincoln read to McKim, what passage could it have been?

For more than a century, one guess might have been as good as any other. But in 1976, Daniel J. Boorstin, the recently appointed Librarian of Congress, assembled a group of journalists for a dramatic press conference. Shortly after taking his new job, Boorstin had discovered a mysterious box in his office safe with a label that read, “To Be Opened Only By the Librarian of Congress.” Inside was another box, which he arranged to open before rapt reporters on Lincoln’s birthday in the nation’s bicentennial year. And that box was labeled “Contents of the President’s pockets on the night of April 14, 1865.”⁴

Boorstin had found the slain president’s last effects. And they contained a passage by John Bright.

The relics Boorstin unboxed in 1976 had apparently been given to the president’s grieving son shortly after Lincoln’s death. They were then donated by a descendant to the library in 1937, but they had never been made public before. They included two pairs of eyeglasses, a watch fob, a monogrammed handkerchief, a cuff link, and, finally, a leather wallet, which contained a single piece of Confederate currency—along with nine yellowed newspaper clippings.

One of them, carefully sliced from the October 18, 1864, edition of the Washington, D.C., Evening Star, was a cherished passage by John Bright.⁵

Writing in 1889, without access to Lincoln’s last effects or to James Miller McKim (who was dead by then), Edward L. Pierce had only been able to guess at the passage that Lincoln had kept in his pockets and read aloud to the abolitionist. But Boorstin’s discovery raises an intriguing possibility. If the clipping that Lincoln had on his person at Ford’s Theater was the same one he had read to McKim, then the passage in question was not from the English statesman’s 1862 speech.

The clipping from the Evening Star later found in his pocketbook instead came from a letter Bright had written to the Republican editor Horace Greeley in the fall of 1864. In this letter, Bright was commenting on the upcoming American presidential campaign. He heartily endorsed Lincoln’s re-election. And he ended with a much briefer peroration than the one that Randall and Pierce identified as candidates for Lincoln’s favorite passage.

A second term for Lincoln, Bright concluded in 1864, would “convince all men that the integrity of your great country will be preserved, and it will show that Republican institutions, with an instructed and patriotic people, can bear a nation safely and steadily through the most desperate perils.”

Now that is a passage that Lincoln might have loved, and not just for its concision. It ably pointed to his two pole stars: preserving the nation’s integrity, on the one hand, and popular government, on the other hand. Indeed, these two stars were so close in Lincoln’s vision they appeared as one. Allowing the Union to disintegrate, as Lincoln implied at Gettysburg, risked a future in which “government of the people, by the people, for the people,” would “perish from the earth.” But Bright’s 1864 letter expressed a related conviction that Lincoln also shared: republican institutions, though mightily tested by civil war, could carry the United States through its current crisis.

There are other reasons for thinking that Bright’s letter to Greeley was the one McKim heard the president read at that meeting, aside from the circumstantial evidence that it was found in his pocketbook. (Recall that, according to Pierce, the abolitionist had remembered Lincoln pulling the passage from there.) McKim had come to see the president because he was an activist in the freedmen’s aid movement, which supported early education efforts for the formerly enslaved during the war and Reconstruction. That may be what prompted Lincoln to think of Bright’s line about an “instructed” people. Conversely, Bright’s belief that Lincoln’s success would “convince all men” might have prompted McKim to think of the Emancipation Proclamation’s last lines, with their appeal to the “considerate judgment of mankind.”⁶

At the very least, the idea that the clipping Lincoln had in his pocket at Ford’s Theater was the same one he read aloud offers us a new way of thinking about Lincoln’s last effects. Since 1976, most commentators who have written about the contents of the president’s pocketbook have speculated that Lincoln saved the clippings by Bright and others because they were so complimentary of him, as if Lincoln had liked to save puff pieces designed to pick him up when he was feeling down. One frustrated Lincoln scholar wrote in 1977 that he had to write to the Library of Congress even to learn what the clippings in Boorstin’s box were, because they had mostly been “dismissed in the news releases with little comment beyond saying that President could perhaps be forgiven for the minor vanity of carrying old adulatory news items in his pockets.”⁷

To be sure, Lincoln might have needed some compliments when he first came across Bright’s letter in October 1864. Bright wrote to Greeley only a few weeks before the presidential election that many believed would determine the outcome of the war. Exploiting weariness with the fighting in some quarters of the north, Democrats had nominated George McClellan on a platform that all but committed their candidate to settle quickly for peace with the insurrectionists in Richmond, even if it meant accepting southern independence and restoring slavery. Knowing that Lincoln still had support in the army, Democratic state legislatures in three states had also blocked the ability of soldiers to vote absentee in the presidential election, delivering a possibly fatal blow to his chances.

Other states had instead eased the ability of soldiers to vote from the battlefield, but Republicans were internally divided about Lincoln and his chances, too. Early in 1864, his old cabinet member Salmon Chase floated the idea of challenging the president for the party’s nomination.⁸ Some abolitionists, led by Wendell Phillips, actually did nominate John C. Frémont as a third-party candidate in May. And even after Lincoln’s nomination by the Republican Party in June, the president knew they were some party leaders still talking about calling a new convention and replacing Lincoln on the ticket.

“I am going to be beaten,” a dejected Lincoln had concluded by August, “and unless some great change takes place badly beaten.” If that occurred, he believed, the operation of one of his loves—republican institutions—would spell the doom of his other—the national union.⁹

The campaign weighed heavily on Lincoln throughout the last year of his life, imparting what historian James McPherson described as a noticeable “sadness of countenance” to portraits of him in this period. Another of the clippings found in his pocketbook after he died was a printed copy of the two party’s platforms that year. It is easy to imagine Lincoln occasionally turning for moral support to Bright’s letter from October—which said that, whatever his political fortunes were in the United States, all the best minds of Europe had seen in his work a “brightness of personal honor on which no adversary has yet been able to fix a stain.”

And yet the date of the clipping—October 18—means that Lincoln could only have brooded over it for a few weeks before his sweeping electoral victory in November, which was boosted by major battlefield victories in the late summer and early fall. And when Lincoln pulled it out of his pocketbook to read to Miller McKim, if this was the same clipping, then it was not the personal compliments to him which he flagged, but its “final passage,” the one that imagined the nation being carried, by republican institutions, through its present perils. If the meeting was after the election, perhaps he now pointed to the outcome as proof that Bright’s eloquent passage was right.

Either way, the scene that Pierce remembers suggests that the Bright passage appealed to more than Lincoln’s personal vanity. It expressed his political faith, battered though it was by 1864, that the nation would survive—could only survive, intact, through the operation of its republican institutions. And it underlined something that was equally clear to him and many others in 1864.

While Americans were absorbed in a divisive contest over the nation’s future, the rest of the world was watching.

Notes