Lincoln’s Birthday: The Hardest Job Anybody Has Held

Abraham Lincoln was born in a one-room cabin in Kentucky on 12 February 1809 and had, by any reasonable count, about a year of formal schooling in his entire life.

He taught himself law by reading borrowed books, and to write by copying out sentences he admired until he understood how they worked. Everything he became, he assembled himself, from almost nothing, in a country that offered a boy in his circumstances almost no route upward.

And then he was handed the worst situation any American president has faced. I admire Lincoln about as much as anyone in American history, and the admiration grows the more I read about his circumstances. What moves me is the combination of a self-taught mind and a load that heavy, carried without him turning cruel or grandiose.

The Job Nobody Should Have Survived

Consider what was in front of him. He took office in March 1861 with states already leaving. Within weeks the country was at war with itself. Over the next four years something in the region of six hundred thousand Americans died, which as a share of the population would be many millions today.

He was stuck with generals who wouldn’t fight, generals who lost, and one who openly ran against him for his own job. His cabinet was full of men who thought they should be president instead of him, and several of them said so in writing. The northern press attacked him constantly, frequently in terms no editor would publish now.

His son died in the White House during the war. His wife’s grief became something close to unmanageable. He was, by the account of nearly everyone who worked with him, exhausted to the point of illness for most of his presidency.

He kept going anyway, and he kept the country together. It’s very difficult to name anybody who could have done it. That stretch is the part of his life I find hardest to read about. He buried a son in the middle of a war that was killing hundreds of thousands and still kept doing the job, and I don’t know where a person finds that.

The Part That Impresses Me Most

Plenty of leaders endure hard circumstances. What separates Lincoln is what he did with the power the emergency handed him.

A war that large gives a leader enormous latitude, and history is full of men who used exactly that latitude to make themselves permanent. Lincoln held an election in 1864, in the middle of the war, when he fully expected to lose it. He wrote a private memorandum acknowledging that he’d probably be defeated and committing himself to cooperating with his successor.

Think about how rare that is. A wartime leader with armies at his disposal, facing likely defeat at the ballot box, preparing to hand over anyway. Most men in that position across most of history did the other thing. That memorandum moves me more than any speech he gave, because nobody was ever meant to see it. A private promise to help the man who beats you is character with no audience, and that’s the only kind I fully trust.

He also grew. The Lincoln of 1861 and the Lincoln of 1865 didn’t hold identical views on slavery or on the country’s obligations to Black Americans, and the movement was in the right direction. A man capable of changing his mind under that much pressure is a considerably better man than one who simply started out correct.

He Was a Writer, and It Mattered

This is my particular interest and it’s not a small point.

Lincoln wrote his own speeches. Not as a formality, as a working method. He drafted, revised, cut and rewrote, and he did it with an ear that almost no professional writer of his century could match.

The Gettysburg Address runs to under three hundred words. The main speaker that day went on for two hours and almost nobody now can tell you his name. Lincoln spoke for a couple of minutes and produced something that people still recite from memory more than a century and a half later.

That’s not luck. Brevity that works is the most expensive kind of writing there is, and it comes from knowing exactly what you mean before you open your mouth. He’d thought his way to the center of the thing, and the shortness was the evidence.

Read the second inaugural sometime, especially the closing. A man with every justification for a triumphant speech chose instead to be merciful toward people who had spent four years trying to destroy his country. That’s a moral position expressed as a stylistic one, and the two are the same choice.

The second inaugural is the piece I’d hand to any writer who thinks restraint is weakness. He had every justification for triumph and wrote mercy, and that closing moves me every time I read it.

The Faults Worth Naming

He wasn’t a plaster saint and it does him no favors to pretend otherwise. He suspended habeas corpus. He held views about race in his earlier career that were of his time and are indefensible in ours. He was politically calculating in ways that frustrated abolitionists who wanted him to move faster, and their frustration wasn’t unreasonable.

All of that is true and none of it changes the assessment. Judging a man of 1860 by whether he arrived pre-equipped with the moral consensus of 2026 is a way of dodging the analysis and the harder question. That’s what he did with the situation he was standing in. That kind of presentism is a cheap shot, because it costs the critic nothing and teaches nothing about how a real person made hard calls with bad options. What he did was hold a fracturing country together, end the largest injustice in its history, and decline to become a tyrant when the door was open. He was, by a considerable margin, well ahead of the men around him.

What a Writer Can Take From Him

Three things, and I’ve used all three.

He read everything he could get and copied out what worked. (See Readings for Writers) That’s how you learn prose, and it remains the only method that reliably works. Not courses. Reading closely enough to see the joinery. He wrote to clarify his own thinking, and not simply to persuade. Much of his best writing exists because he needed to work out what he believed before he could say it.

And he cut. Relentlessly. A man with unlimited authority to speak at length chose two minutes, and that decision is why we still have the words. Of the three, cutting is the one writers resist hardest, and I sympathize, because every paragraph cost something to write. Lincoln’s two minutes are still the best argument I know for letting most of it go.

How do you mark Lincoln’s birthday?

Some states observe it. The federal holiday nearest to it is Presidents Day, which covers everybody and therefore sharpens nobody. If you want to mark the day itself, read Lincoln’s own words. The Gettysburg Address takes two minutes. The second inaugural takes six. Both are freely available and both will do more for your sense of the man than any summary, including this one.

And if you write anything at all, read them as a craftsman would. Notice how few words he needed. Notice that the hardest thing on the page is the mercy. I’d take those two speeches over any biography on the shelf. A decent man under that much pressure wrote his way through it, and the words he chose are the clearest look at him we’ll ever get.

Lincoln’s Birthday FAQ