Chapter 2 The Campaign of 1860: “A Real Representative Man”

Abstract

When asked by John Locke Scripps, a campaign biographer, about his childhood, Lincoln replied that it could be summed up in one line from Thomas Gray’s “Elegy in a Country Churchyard”—namely “‘the short and simple annals of the poor.’ That’s my life, and that’s all you or anyone else can make of it.” In the same doleful vein, Lincoln loved Poe’s “The Raven,” which he had memorized and recited often to companions during the years when he was riding the Eighth Court circuit in Illinois. These poems, along with Bryant’s “Thanatopsis” and a core of lyrics dealing with death, appealed to Lincoln’s dark, morbid streak, his vulnerability to depression. As Lincoln’s junior law partner William Herndon observed, “[M]elancholy dripped from him as he walked….His apparent gloom impressed his friends, and created sympathy for him—one means of his great success.