Lincoln, Euclid, and the Satisfaction of Success

After serving his one term in the U.S. House of Representatives (1847–1849), Abraham Lincoln returned to his law practice in Springfield, Illinois, and undertook a personal intellectual challenge. As he later explained in a brief autobiography he wrote for the 1860 presidential campaign, he had “studied and nearly mastered the Six-books of Euclid, since he was a member of Congress.”[1] Lincoln’s triumph over Euclid, coming as it did in his early forties, was noteworthy. In the opinion of John G. Nicolay and John Hay, two of his White House secretaries during the Civil War, Lincoln’s achievement proved “his unusual powers of mental discipline.” For Lincoln, though, he plowed through Euclid’s theorems and proofs in order to correct—at least in part—a shortcoming that haunted him all his life: “his want of education,” particularly his lack of an academy or college degree. His formal education had been limited to attending school in his childhood “by littles,” as he so charmingly put it. “What he has in the way of education,” he said with some embarrassment, he had “picked up.” Although Lincoln was humbled by his lack of formal education, he also was proud enough of his accomplishments as an autodidact to include in this autobiography a reference to his scant time in school and his boast of learning English grammar and nearly mastering six books of Euclid’s Elements on his own.[2]

That Lincoln placed a high value on his study of Euclid supplies a reasonable excuse to take a closer look at not only why he chose, as an adult, to undertake this intellectual challenge, but also what influence the father of geometry may have had on his occupations as attorney and politician. Among the many different influences that contributed to Lincoln’s desire to study Euclid’s classic geometric compendium The Elements were social and cultural forces affecting many Americans in the North and West, as well as private, more subtle reasons that rose to a crescendo during the first half of the 1850s. One Lincoln specialist, Michael Burlingame, argues that Lincoln experienced a “midlife crisis” during the early 1850s, but this modern terminology suffers seriously from anachronism, a fault found in a high number of scholarly works on Lincoln (as this essay will partly demonstrate). More significantly, Lincoln’s purpose in undertaking the challenge of Euclid’s first six books reflects, as do so many other chapters in his life, the complexities of his personality and a unique set of circumstances. These gave him a yearning—like that of many of his fellow Americans—to become something more than he already was.[3]

Something happened to Lincoln after his return from Congress in late March 1849. William H. Herndon, Lincoln’s law partner from 1844 to 1861, said that he noticed “a difference in Lincoln’s movement as a lawyer from this time forward.” According to Herndon, Lincoln began “to realize a certain lack of discipline—a want of mental training and method.” Herndon believed that his partner recognized that the courts had become “graver and more learned” than they had been a decade earlier, when Lincoln and Herndon established their firm. A lawyer could find success only if he was, in Herndon’s words, “a close reasoner” with a command “of the principles on which the statutory law” were based. Either Herndon saw for himself or Lincoln told him that recent political defeats, including the loss of his seat in Congress and his inability to receive a plum appointment from the Taylor administration, “wrought a marked effect on him.” As a result, Lincoln decided to leave politics and “devote himself entirely to the law.” He took up Euclid to improve his education, challenge himself intellectually, and increase his powers of reason—all to remake himself into a better lawyer.[4]

Yet, according to another source, Lincoln immersed himself in Euclid’s Elements for a different and very specific reason. In 1864 the Reverend John P. Gulliver published what he purported to be a conversation with Lincoln in which the subjects of the president’s legal education and his study of Euclid came up. Gulliver said his talk with Lincoln occurred in 1860, as the rising politician was on a swing through the New England states following his powerful, and highly regarded, speech at Cooper Institute in New York on February 27. After delivering a version of the speech in Norwich, Connecticut, on the evening of March 9, Lincoln invited Gulliver to sit with him the next morning on a train to Bridgeport. In a discussion of the previous evening’s speech, Gulliver asked if Lincoln had prepared himself for his profession (an odd question to ask an extremely accomplished attorney). If Gulliver is to be believed, Lincoln replied:

There are some thorny problems with Gulliver’s account. Around 1885 or 1886, Herndon, who considered himself a Horatius at the bridge when it came to decreeing who was right and who was wrong about Lincoln (he, of course, was always right), wrote several manuscript pages questioning the reliability of Gulliver’s story. In the first place, said Herndon, Lincoln never served as a law clerk in Springfield and never copied “tedious documents” (that was Herndon’s job during his partnership with Lincoln). In the second place, the word demonstrate was rarely used in law books; instead, Herndon pointed out, the commonly used word was prove. Nor did Lincoln return to his father’s house for any reason before Thomas Lincoln’s death in 1851. But Herndon did not completely dismiss the Gulliver anecdote as a fraud. After all, Gulliver was a man of the cloth. “What part of this conversation ever took place,” mused Herndon, “no one will ever know, excepting Mr. Gulliver, unless he will truthfully re-write the piece.”[6]

As Herndon sensed, there seemed to be at least a kernel of truth to Gulliver’s anecdote. No doubt Gulliver had put words in Lincoln’s mouth (most tellingly, Lincoln’s formality in a casual conversation is totally out of character), but that did not necessarily mean the story was untrue or wrong. What Gulliver himself realized was that he may have taken too many liberties with his account, and he wrote Lincoln on two separate occasions to have the president look over the story and make any necessary corrections.[7] In the second letter, he told Lincoln that he believed his account of the conversation adhered to the “main facts.” He also explained that after being pressed by Theodore Tilton, the editor of the Independent, he gave permission for the article to go to press. Gulliver hoped that Lincoln would confirm that the conversation did take place because some people believed the story to be “a hoax.”[8] As far as we know, Lincoln never answered Gulliver’s two appeals. Yet the fact that the minister tried his best to get corrections and a confirmation from Lincoln does lend credence to his story. Why would Gulliver write to the president, enclosing a proof page of the article in his first letter, if the episode was fabricated? For all its recognizable faults, Gulliver’s conversation with Lincoln must have taken place. What cannot be known, however, is whether the reverend’s telling of the story was accurate, even if we can conclude that it is probably authentic.

Historians lack certainty about how to deal with Gulliver’s less-than-authoritative account, given that it is riddled with errors and was put on paper four years after the author’s encounter with Lincoln. In their compendium of quotations attributed to Lincoln, Recollected Words of Abraham Lincoln, Don E. Fehrenbacher and Virginia Fehrenbacher give the Gulliver story an “E,” a ranking that indicates “a quotation that is probably not authentic.” Despite the compilers’ usual distrust of Herndon’s opinions and the testimonies of his informants, they rely solely on his unpublished critique of the Gulliver story to punch holes in it.[9] Another scholar, Drew McCoy, accepts the thrust of Gulliver’s reminiscence, or so he says, but he then postulates that the real reason Lincoln read Euclid was because he wished to be tied “squarely to the secular heart of the Enlightenment, to the eighteenth-century world of nature, science, and reason that Jefferson took such retrospective delight in as he savored Euclid and Newton during his declining years.” From this postulation, McCoy also asserts—with, one assumes, unwitting anachronism—that “Lincoln . . . always remained a citizen of his hero Jefferson’s eighteenth-century ‘enlightened’ world.”[10] In so saying, McCoy attempts to reveal how Euclid concatenated Lincoln to the classical tradition of the Founders. Despite mentioning Gulliver’s account in his article, he ignores its assertion that Lincoln worked on The Elements to find out what the word demonstrate meant and thus improve his skills as a lawyer. McCoy’s conclusion does not logically follow from what Lincoln told Gulliver.

If McCoy is right about the authenticity, if not the complete accuracy, of Gulliver’s account, he has made his case badly. If Lincoln went consciously seeking an intellectual, political, or emotional connection with the Founders through Euclid, as McCoy says he did, the Rail-Splitter was on the wrong track. Reading any of the classical authors in English translation, which was the way most Founders (despite their grounding in Greek and Latin) read those writers, would have been far more profitable to him. As a matter of fact, Lincoln could have acquired, and probably did acquire, a more direct knowledge of the Founders by reading their own writings, many of which had been published by 1850 and could have been easily obtained.[11] Instead, McCoy has Lincoln follow an extremely circuitous route to connect himself with the classical tradition of the Founders’ Enlightenment.

It is well known how much Lincoln admired the Founders, including Jefferson and Washington, and how he regarded the Declaration of Independence as not only the nation’s founding document but also as an enunciation of America’s fundamental values—life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and equality under the law. In fact, McCoy is one of many historians who have helped draw attention to Lincoln’s close relationship with the Founders.[12] Yet for all of Lincoln’s secular faith in the Fathers of America, expressed publicly as early as 1838 in his famous Lyceum Address, his knowledge of them and of their achievements was necessarily limited by what he read or what was known about them during his own lifetime.[13] If Lincoln did know about the Founders’ affinity for classical antiquity, as he must have, then he might have learned that they read Euclid as a matter of course. Yet the extant and most accessible papers of the Founders failed to mention Euclid as frequently as they did other classical sources (such as the Roman writers Cicero, Sallust, Cato, Livy, Virgil, and Tacitus, and the Greek author Plutarch), perhaps because the father of geometry’s influence on their logical, Enlightenment, and republican thoughts was more implicit than explicit, for reason itself formed the boundaries of their worldview.[14]

More often than not, the Founders used Euclid as a reference point, a name every educated man would know and understand, as George Washington did in 1784 when he wrote about the future of the United States:

Jefferson referred to Euclid in an insidious passage about slaves found in the only book he ever published, Notes on the State of Virginia (1785): “Comparing them by their faculties of memory, reason, and imagination, it appears to me, that in memory they are equal to the whites; in reason much inferior, as I think one could scarcely be found capable of tracing and comprehending the investigations of Euclid; and that in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous.”[15]

In whatever manner Euclid’s lessons were used by the Founders, and later by Lincoln, The Elements provided the foundation for applying reason to various fields of thought, including, as mathematician Morris Kline points out, “philosophy, economics, political theory, art, and religion.” One might add that Euclid’s axiomatic system also heavily influenced the study of science, logic and ethics, rhetoric, linguistics, architecture, and law, as well as every other field of knowledge that relies on deductive reasoning as a method of discerning truth. In the Western world, rational inquiry and certainty depended on the Euclidean axiomatic method, although modern non-Euclidean geometry, such as Albert Einstein used to prove his theory of relativity, creates doubt about the certainty of Euclid’s reasoning because his axioms (common notions) were assumed rather than truly known or proven.[16] Be that as it may, when the Founders cut their ties to the British Empire, and when they established the new United States, they relied on the logic of Euclid’s axiomatic system to justify their actions. Thomas Jefferson, it has been said, structured the Declaration of Independence as if it were a manifesto of Euclidean logic. According to some writers, the document’s text reads like a social and political version of a Euclidean demonstration.[17]

At the center of Herndon’s concern over Gulliver’s conversation with Lincoln was the minister’s insistence that Lincoln said he had studied Euclid to find out what the word demonstrate really meant and that, according to Herndon, the word was rarely found in law books. He may have been right, but Lincoln used the word as he found it employed in the particular edition of Euclid’s Elements that he read. Most likely he purchased (or borrowed) the latest American edition of Euclid: John Playfair’s The Elements of Geometry: Containing the First Six Books of Euclid, published in 1849, but first put into print in 1795.[18] Tellingly, Playfair often substitutes the word demonstrate for proof in the book.

Nevertheless, it is less than believable that Lincoln, in undertaking his Euclid project, simply wanted to parse the word demonstrate to increase his effectiveness as an attorney. Nothing in Gulliver’s account sounds like Lincoln. Not only is the tone wrong, but Lincoln’s comments to the minister are overly contrived and jejune. Gulliver’s rendition of the story portrays Lincoln as something of a crank who spent several years going through Euclid’s first six books of The Elements simply to learn a clearer, more definitive meaning of the word demonstrate than he could find in Webster’s dictionary. Improbably, Gulliver says he made two remarks to Lincoln: he asks the inane question as to whether Lincoln prepared himself for his profession, and then, after learning that Lincoln at one time had not known the true meaning of the word demonstrate, he blurts out: “Lincoln, you can never make a lawyer if you do not understand what demonstrate means.” Gulliver, by saying this, may have been simply agreeing with Lincoln, yet his abrupt assertion also appears to have been avuncular, as if Lincoln had not already learned this, even though he had just finished explaining to the reverend the whole purpose behind his studying of Euclid. What’s more, as the two of them sat next to one another on the train in 1860, Lincoln had already achieved formidable success as an attorney in the practice of law for more than twenty years, even having argued a case before the U.S. Supreme Court, and had extolled the virtues of reason in his Lyceum Address. So, while Gulliver’s conversation with Lincoln might have taken place, the dialogue itself, as remembered, is almost absurd. It’s easy to suspect, as Herndon did, that the good reverend mangled whatever conversation he did have with Lincoln on the train.[19]

The truth is that the route Lincoln followed to begin his study of Euclid was even more complex—as most things concerning Lincoln usually are—than Gulliver’s account indicated. After Lincoln’s return to Springfield on March 31, 1849, from his term in Congress, Herndon noticed that his partner seemed quiet and listless. Before actively resuming his business relationship with Herndon, Lincoln offered to resign and leave the business to Herndon. For a while Herndon believed, incorrectly, that Lincoln had lost “all interest in the law,” but his partner’s weak proposal to resign was not necessarily an indication of any lost interest in the law, but more likely another sign of his glumness with his overall prospects, or lack of them, in the field of Illinois politics. At Herndon’s urging, Lincoln remained in the firm. In 1885 Herndon wrote to Jesse Weik, a coauthor of Herndon’s Lincoln, that Lincoln “knew that he was politically dead and so he went most heartily toward knowledge: he took Euclid around with him on the Circuit and of nights and odd times he would learn Euclid’s problems.”[20]

Herndon described Lincoln’s decision to take on Euclid as a cause-and-effect proposition: his partner felt politically lost and he turned to the acquisition of knowledge as a distraction that would prove useful in his never-ending quest to educate himself. But Herndon only assumed a cause-and-effect relationship, and he made no mention of Lincoln’s working on Euclid to sharpen his mind, to improve his ability to reason, or to find out what the word demonstrate really meant. At first Lincoln seemed to confirm Herndon’s observation that he returned to his law practice with something less than enthusiasm. In 1850, as he wrote down notes for an intended law lecture, Lincoln confessed his doleful state of mind by beginning his notes with these two forlorn sentences: “I am not an accomplished lawyer. I find quite as much material for a lecture in those points wherein I have failed, as in those wherein I have been moderately successful.”[21] Maybe he wanted to sound humble, which was typical of him, but his opening words inadvertently revealed a bit of what was buried inside him. With Lincoln spending the entire workday in their office or attending the courts in Springfield, Herndon claimed to have noticed “a difference in Lincoln’s movement as a lawyer from this time forward. He had begun to realize a certain lack of discipline—a want of mental training and method.”[22]

Lincoln’s disappointment over becoming politically marginalized in his own state affected him more deeply than even his closest associates knew or could fathom, except for Herndon. The junior partner believed he knew what was going on with Lincoln, and he was probably right: “Political defeat had wrought a marked effect on him. It went below the skin and made a changed man of him.” Melancholy, of course, ran through Lincoln’s veins during his entire life. It is not surprising that his dark political future threw him into a period of despondency. But unlike other episodes of melancholy in Lincoln’s life, including some that led him to contemplate suicide, he bounced back rather quickly in 1850. Lincoln, wrote Herndon, “determined to eschew politics from that time forward and devote himself entirely to the law.” Lincoln threw himself into the practice. In a brief autobiography prepared for fellow lawyer and Republican Jesse Fell in 1859, Lincoln wrote proudly that “from 1849 to 1854, both inclusive, [I] practiced law more assiduously than ever before.” About six months later, in the autobiography written for John L. Scripps, he stated with some self-satisfaction that “upon his return from Congress he went to the practice of the law with greater earnestness than ever before.”[23]

If, as Lincoln supposedly told Gulliver, he turned to The Elements to learn what demonstrate meant and that he hoped to become, in the process, a better lawyer, why didn’t he set about reading the countless law books that Herndon said his partner never bothered to read? Herndon passed harsh judgment on Lincoln by saying that his partner “was very deficient in the technical rules of the law.” Adding insult to injury, he also declared, rather dubiously, “I can truthfully say that I never knew him to read through and through any law book of any kind. He knew nothing of the laws of evidence—in pleading or of practice, and did not care about them.” In this instance, however, Herndon’s statements must be taken with a grain of salt. As he grew older, Herndon’s memories of his partner increasingly became cloudy, brusque, and at times unkind. He resented that Lincoln’s reputation as an attorney had risen after the assassination to that of a “great lawyer.” Herndon insisted that “a great lawyer . . . he was not.” On occasion, Herndon acknowledged, Lincoln could be a “first rate lawyer under conditions,” especially when he was given a long time to prepare a case. But if pressed by time, he was a “weak brother in the law.” In exasperation, Herndon observed that “a man who never read law much” could not, by rights, be a “great lawyer.” He did admit, however, that Lincoln was great whenever he appeared before the Illinois Supreme Court, a majority of those cases having occurred before 1847. Grudgingly he also confessed that his partner was the best lawyer on Illinois’s Eighth Circuit. Naturally, Herndon regarded himself as the better lawyer, although the extant records of the Lincoln-Herndon partnership prove otherwise.[24]

Others noticed Lincoln’s deficits as a lawyer. Judge David Davis, elected to the Eighth Circuit in 1848, agreed that Lincoln “was not a well read Man.” Yet Davis, who later acted as Lincoln’s campaign manager in the presidential election of 1860, did observe that his friend eagerly studied Euclid, “Latin Grammar,” and “the Exact Sciences” on the circuit, apparently hoping to gain a more solid understanding of “Mathematical demonstration,” a statement that resembled, at least in some small way, Rev. Gulliver’s contentions. At any rate, Davis believed that Lincoln’s “unsurpassed reasoning powers” were among his greatest strengths as an attorney. But he didn’t say if those powers came from studying Euclid.[25]

In fact, many people recognized Lincoln’s use of reason long before he ever undertook his personal and very deliberate campaign to conquer the first six books of The Elements. Robert B. Rutledge, a younger brother of Ann Rutledge and a teenager when Lincoln lived in New Salem, Illinois, recalled seeing Lincoln make one of his first speeches during a meeting of the village’s debating society. Although awkward and unpolished, Lincoln “pursued the question with reason and argument so pithy and forcible that all were amazed.”[26] In an ode to Reason, Lincoln’s first notable speech, delivered to the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, asseverated that the pillars upon which American liberty should rest should be made not of passion but of “sober reason.” It was “Reason, cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason . . . [that] must furnish all the materials for our future support and defence.”[27] He chose law as his profession because, as he told Herndon, “it was the grandest science of man: it was the best profession to develop the logical faculty; and the highest platform on which man could exhibit his powers in a well trained manhood.”[28] Studying Euclid in the early 1850s may have helped sharpen his logic, but his skill in using reason to draw conclusions from premises happened earlier as he gained experience in the law and politics after 1837.

Rather than being attracted to Euclid for the purpose of learning what the word demonstrate really meant, or for wanting his achievement to transform him into a better lawyer, Lincoln’s desire to master the first six books of The Elements came from several different catalysts, some of them the outcomes of social and cultural forces of his time, others stemming from his personal crusade to better himself, and still others coming from the man he already was, as opposed to the man he wished to become. Surviving pages from his childhood copybook, for example, reveal that even as a boy he had an aptitude for mathematics.[29] As a surveyor living in New Salem, he encountered Euclid’s plane geometry out of necessity. During those years he is known to have “studied . . . a little” two surveying manuals, one by Abel Flint and the other by Robert Gibson, both of which contained geometric elements drawn from Euclid.[30] It was also in New Salem that Lincoln read—and became profoundly influenced by—Thomas Paine’s revolutionary disquisition The Age of Reason, originally published in 1794 and 1795. Besides challenging organized religion and the legitimacy of the Bible, Paine described Euclid’s Elements as “a book of self-evident demonstration, entirely independent of its author, and of every thing relating to time, place, and circumstance.” If, said Paine, one dismissed as absurd the incredible happenings described in ancient writings, such as the parting of the Pamphilia Sea to enable Alexander the Great and his army to pass through it, then it must be “self-evident like Euclid” that the miracles of the Bible were not to be believed, either. The Elements, wrote Paine, was the one “ancient book that authoritatively challenges universal consent and belief.”[31]

When Lincoln began his study of Euclid, he did so in earnest. According to Herndon, Lincoln’s most concerted effort took place between 1849 and 1854, when “he carried it around with him when on circuit as [a] lawyer,” sometimes in his saddlebags or in the back of a buggy.[32] This recollection confirms Lincoln’s statement in the short autobiography he sent to Scripps. Herndon also remembered reliable details of how Lincoln went about his studies, particularly of The Elements. He had seen Lincoln at work firsthand. On one occasion, Herndon arrived at their law office to find Lincoln “sitting at the table and spread out before him lay a quantity of blank paper, large heavy sheets, a compass, a rule, numerous pencils, several bottles of ink of various colors, and a profusion of stationery and writing appliances generally. . . . He was so deeply absorbed in study he scarcely looked up when I entered.”[33]

More evocatively, Herndon described how Lincoln studied Euclid while riding the Eighth Circuit across much of central Illinois. Lincoln, he said, would often stay up reading and studying, sometimes into the early morning hours, so that over time “he could with ease demonstrate all the propositions of the six books.” It was something that Herndon found remarkable and mystifying, given that the judges and lawyers riding the same circuit often stayed overnight in a single tavern room. How Lincoln, wrote Herndon, “could maintain his mental equilibrium or concentrate his thoughts on an abstract mathematical proposition, while [David] Davis, [Stephen] Logan, [Leonard] Swett, [Ninian] Edwards, and I so industriously and volubly filled the air with our interminable snoring[,] was a problem none of us could ever solve.”[34]

Given Lincoln’s lack of formal education, his decision to study The Elements, at first glance, seems an odd choice. His fellow Westerners and a growing number of Americans in general turned away from the ancient classics—the Greek and Roman works so cherished by Enlightenment figures in Europe and the United States and, indeed, by the nation’s Founders—and let democracy whittle away at the old aristocratic and elite conventions by favoring the kind of education that better fit the culture of common, ordinary people (and the ascendant middle class), especially men, like Lincoln, who used a plain language, a simple style, whenever they spoke or wrote. The advent of romanticism early in the nineteenth century sounded the death knell for classicism in American culture, except in architecture and oratory; both classical forms could be found in abundance in Washington, D.C. On the prairie, though, it was a rare pioneer who had ever heard of Euclid, Cicero, Tacitus, and Herodotus.[35] In another sense, though, Euclid was the perfect choice for Lincoln. He knew something of the subject already, even if his understanding of geometry, beyond the basics required to be a competent surveyor, did not probe very deeply or give him a formal, systematic comprehension of Euclid.[36]

Like the efforts of so many of his contemporaries, Lincoln’s attempts to educate himself also became the path toward improving himself. Here was an important goal that easily could have ignited his ambition to undertake an intellectual challenge of almost epic proportions: working his way successfully through the first six books of Euclid. By the late 1840s, when he returned from Congress, he, wife Mary, and their two sons Robert and Edward, had achieved social status as members of the middle class, working, as Lincoln did, in a successful law practice, living in a small but tidy one-story clapboarded cottage at the corner of Eighth and Jackson Streets in Springfield, and employing hired help to assist Mrs. Lincoln with domestic chores. The nation was experiencing a market revolution that expanded the economy, brought prosperity to a population of educated aspiring men and women, and instilled a desire in the new, rising middle class for happiness by means of self-improvement and achieving civic virtue. As a result, a cult of self-improvement spread throughout middle-class communities in the North and West, making Americans, including Lincoln, more self-aware of their place in society and of their role in fostering changes that would transform the nation’s citizens into meritorious inheritors of the republican values that had been so vigorously espoused by the Founders. As a man of his time, Lincoln could not avoid being swept up into a social movement that accentuated what he had been pursuing since his childhood: self-improvement through self-education. Euclid was the perfect fit for Lincoln and the personal initiative that the cult of self-improvement so enthusiastically encouraged.[37]

His triumph over Euclid, which he completed in his off hours over a period of roughly five years, meant a great deal to him, and one can imagine what the process of working out the problems in The Elements afforded him. Permitting nothing else to intrude while he labored on solving Euclid’s geographic problems, he mustered his tightest concentration and carefully proved them, one by one, until nearly finishing the sixth book. This intensive work, often lasting into the small hours of the morning in a tavern room filled to the rafters with his sleeping, musty colleagues, shut out other concerns in his life, including, if only temporarily, the cases he handled as an attorney, troubles he may have had at home in Springfield, and a wide range of quotidian concerns that he could now, with Euclid before him, exile out of his consciousness. He craved solitude in his life, which he found in his abstractness, as Herndon called it, or on the circuit with his deep focus set on Euclid (or sometimes on Shakespeare and Latin grammar), which he read “by tallow candle light.” Attorney Henry Clay Whitney perceived that Lincoln favored being alone, even to the point of shunning parties and balls that his fellow circuit riders found delightful. When Lincoln rarely agreed to attend one of these “entertainments,” wrote Whitney, he “really preferred going alone, and ensconcing himself in some nook or corner where he could see without being, himself, seen.”[38]

In fact, Lincoln appears to have spent more time on his Euclidean education than he did on preparing his cases, or so Herndon and other contemporaries implied. Lincoln lived in his own, interior world. “He lived in the mind,” explained Herndon, “and he thought in his life and lived in his thought.”[39] As a result, his victory over Euclid probably gave him even greater satisfaction than winning a court case—he named not a single case, significant or otherwise, in his autobiography prepared for Scripps, but he prominently made plain his Euclidean attainment with exultation. The intellectual challenge of Euclid, in so many respects, stood above his vocation as a lawyer. Digesting the lessons of The Elements brought a sense of structure to his life, just as his law practice did, both offsetting the terrible fury that sometimes erupted inside his home or that overwhelmed him when he periodically experienced bouts of melancholia. Euclid taught him not only the elements of geometry but also the corollary facets of form, function, precision, certitude, and success. Conquering Euclid was his own solitary achievement. Undertaking the intellectual challenge of proving the five axioms and the five postulates found in The Elements, he also proved something to himself: that his mind was as good as the Founders’ minds and as good as or better than those of any of his peers who worked the courthouses of central Illinois or who stumped the prairie hustings; it was as sound and tight as a bass drum. “My mind,” Lincoln said proudly of himself, “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.”[40]

If nothing else, Lincoln found out for certain what demonstrate or proof meant by the time he put Euclid aside. But it is strikingly odd that Lincoln’s fellow attorneys, friend and foe alike, never once mentioned that he became a much better lawyer, a more astute and sharp-witted counselor, after he began studying Euclid’s Elements or after he had finished the first six books contained in Playfair’s edition. Only Herndon seems to have noticed a difference, but he never offered any explanation as to why he saw a distinction in how Lincoln practiced law before going to Congress and after his return. He gave what he thought were the reasons for Lincoln’s desire to undertake the challenge of Euclid; he never mentioned, however, whether or not his partner’s near mastery of the six books sharpened his power of reason, made him a better attorney, or helped him gain insight into the workings of the world, beyond the relative geometrical confines of Euclid’s five axioms and five postulates. Judging from the statistics compiled by the Lincoln Legal Papers project, Lincoln’s accomplishments as an attorney between 1849 and 1854 were uncannily like his previous experience as a younger attorney, before his election to the House of Representatives and before his self-immersion into Euclid’s sea. By all appearances, after nearly completing the six books, Lincoln and Herndon’s law partnership carried on just as it had in the past. They won some cases, lost some cases, settled others out of court, took on more or fewer cases depending on the year or county court, and earned fees just as good in the 1850s as they had in the 1840s. After 1850 they did more business with railroads, including the Illinois Central, but Lincoln appeared before the Illinois Supreme Court less often than he had during the previous decade. No sources exist, in other words, to indicate that Lincoln improved his performance as a lawyer after having nearly completed the first six books of The Elements by 1854.[41] Nor did Lincoln make any such claim after finishing his work on Euclid.

There was one practical outcome to the knowledge Lincoln gained from studying Euclid, small though it turned out be. In 1858 he began using Euclid in his political speeches to make a point, just as Washington and Jefferson had referred to the mathematician. But in his surviving papers, he mentioned Euclid only seven times, including his rodomontade in the autobiography prepared for Scripps. In his fourth debate with Stephen A. Douglas, Lincoln brought up Euclid to accuse his opponent of attacking self-evident truths: “If you have ever studied geometry, you remember that by a course of reasoning Euclid proves that all the angles in a triangle are equal to two right angles. Euclid has shown you how to work it out. Now, if you undertake to disprove that proposition, and to show that it is erroneous, would you prove it to be false by calling Euclid a liar? [Roars of laughter and enthusiastic cheers.]” About six months later, Lincoln turned down an invitation from a Boston group to celebrate the birth of Jefferson. In reply, he praised Jefferson (“All honor to Jefferson”) and wrote with lament that

Later that year, he told an audience in Columbus, Ohio, that it should beware of Douglas’s assertion that the Founders favored the idea of popular sovereignty. “There are two ways of establishing a proposition,” he instructed the Ohioans. “One is by trying to demonstrate it upon reason; and the other is, to show that great men in former times have thought so and so, and thus to pass it by the weight of pure authority.” If Douglas could demonstrate his statement “as Euclid demonstrated propositions,” Lincoln would have no objection. But Douglas instead tried to make the Founders sound like they supported the peculiar institution when, in fact, they hoped it would die a natural death.[42] Beyond Lincoln’s own direct references to Euclid, some modern writers have seen Euclid’s influence revealed in particular Lincoln letters and speeches—the House Divided Speech, the Cooper Institute speech, the Gettysburg Address, and the Second Inaugural, and many others.[43] If they are correct, why do some of Lincoln’s speeches and writings, usually the most famous ones written and spoken after the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, follow a Euclidean pattern of demonstration while others do not? Undoubtedly Euclidean logic influenced Lincoln. But just as we cannot know what Lincoln’s feelings were, we cannot know precisely how Euclid ran through his thinking and his writing.[44]

“The happiness of life,” wrote Coleridge, “. . . is made up of minute fractions.”[45] Apart from Lincoln’s private moments with wife and sons in their family nest, and apart from the pleasure he found in telling stories and making other people laugh, Lincoln’s own happiness could only be detected in brief, fleeting moments, and the historical record suggests that he experienced his greatest cheer when he was alone, exploring the inner caverns of his heart and mind.

His study of Euclid did not transform him into an eighteenth-century Enlightenment thinker. His understanding of Euclid was shaped by his own time and place in the nineteenth century. While successfully conquering Euclid’s first six books, he achieved personal satisfaction by means of intellectual achievement. If nothing else, Euclid let Lincoln see the world differently, beyond the confines of his own Western upbringing and his experiences in Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois. One of the most significant aspects of his Euclidean education was his commitment to study The Elements and not to stop until he had proved to himself that he could do it successfully. By conquering the problems contained in an ancient textbook, Lincoln gained a confidence in himself that enabled him to reenter politics in 1854 and turn his attention toward the divisiveness of the sectional conflict. By so doing, he satisfied his strong political ambitions and his own personal desire to be always growing, always thinking, always analyzing. In other words, Lincoln’s accomplishment revealed his intellectual curiosity and the power of his analytical mind. After having finished what he had set out to do, he wrote these words of advice to a young student of the law: “Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed, is more important than any other one thing.”[46] Here was the real secret behind Lincoln’s Euclidean success. He had done it on his own.

1. Autobiography Written for John L. Scripps, ca. June 1860, in Roy P. Basler et al., eds., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 9 vols. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, for the ALA, 1953), 4:62. The entire autobiography was written in the third person, with Lincoln sometimes referring to himself as “A” or “Mr. L.” Euclid’s The Elements consists of thirteen separate “books.” Modern editions, including the one used by Lincoln (see note 17, below), are based on a manuscript, generally known as the Heiberg manuscript, discovered in the Vatican by François Peyrard in 1808. See N. M. Swerlow, “The Recovery of the Exact Sciences of Antiquity: Mathematics, Astronomy, Geography,” in Anthony Grafton, ed., Rome Reborn: The Vatican Library and Renaissance Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 128–29 and plates 101, 102.

2. John G. Nicolay and John Hay, Abraham Lincoln: A History, 10 vols. (New York: Century, 1890), 1:298; Autobiography Written for John L. Scripps, ca. June 1860, in Basler, Collected Works, 4:62. On Lincoln and Euclid, see Drew R. McCoy, “An ‘Old-Fashioned’ Nationalism: Lincoln, Jefferson, and the Classical Tradition,” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association, 23 (Winter 2002): 55–67; David Herbert Donald, Lincoln (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 142–43; Michael Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln: A Life, 2 vols. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 1:33–34, 333–34, 589. A recent book by David Hirsch and Dan Van Haften, Abraham Lincoln and the Structure of Reason (El Dorado Hills, Calif.: Savas Beatie, 2010), attempts to illuminate Lincoln’s Euclidean logic and rhetoric as reflected in his speeches and a few letters, but it is really an exegesis on how to achieve effective courtroom argumentation by using the rhetorical logic laid out in Proclus’s (412–485 A.D.) commentary on Euclid’s first book of The Elements. Lincoln is not known to have ever read Proclus. Nor did he ever explicitly say that studying Euclid helped him frame the logic of his courtroom arguments, political speeches, political or private letters, or legal briefs and other documents.

3. Michael Burlingame, The Inner World of Abraham Lincoln (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 1–19. Burlingame maintains that during Lincoln’s “midlife crisis,” he rose from “party hack to statesman.” Ibid., 1–2.

4. William H. Herndon and Jesse W. Weik, Herndon’s Lincoln (1889), ed. Douglas L. Wilson and Rodney O. Davis (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 193. On Lincoln’s legal training and law practice, see John J. Duff, A. Lincoln, Prairie Lawyer (New York: Rinehart, 1960); Mark E. Steiner, An Honest Calling: The Law Practice of Abraham Lincoln (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2006); Brian Dirck, Lincoln the Lawyer (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007). See also the impressive collection of primary sources available at the website The Law Practice of Abraham Lincoln, 2nd ed., http://www.lawpracticeofabrahamlincoln.org/Search.aspx. For more on Lincoln’s formidable powers of reason, see William H. Herndon to C. O. Poole, January 5, 1886, Herndon-Weik Collection, Library of Congress (LC).

5. John P. Gulliver, “A Talk with Abraham Lincoln,” Independent (September 1, 1864), 16. Gulliver’s article was also reprinted in Francis B. Carpenter, Six Months at the White House with Abraham Lincoln (New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1866), 313–14. Here is the contemporary definition of demonstrate in Webster’s dictionary: “1. To show or prove to be certain; to prove beyond the possibility of doubt; to prove in such a manner as to reduce the contrary position to evident absurdity.—2. In anatomy, to exhibit the parts when dissected.—Syn. To prove; evince; manifest.” See Noah Webster, An American Dictionary of the English Language, ed. Chauncey A. Goodrich (Springfield, Mass.: G. and C. Merriam, 1853). A variation of Gulliver’s account appeared as a syndicated article in newspapers around the country in 1901 and again in 1910. In the variant, Lincoln says he asked himself, “What constitutes proof? Not evidence; that was not the point. I groaned over the question, and finally said to myself, Ah, Lincoln, you can’t tell. . . . Soon after I returned to the old log cabin I fell in with a copy of Euclid. . . . I therefore began at the beginning, and before spring I had gone through the old Euclid’s geometry and could demonstrate every proposition in the book.” See, for example, “Lincoln’s Logic,” Fredericksburg (Va.) Free Lance, September 28, 1901; “Lincoln’s Lesson,” Rome (Ga.) Tribune-Herald, January 28, 1910. Thus are legends made. The source of the variant is not known.

6. William H. Herndon, Lincoln and Strangers, [ca. 1885–1886], Herndon-Weik Collection, LC.

7. John P. Gulliver to Lincoln, August 26, 1864, Abraham Lincoln Papers, LC; Gulliver to Lincoln, September 12, 1864, ibid.

8. Gulliver to Lincoln, September 12, 1864, ibid.

9. Fehrenbacher and Fehrenbacher, eds., Recollected Words of Abraham Lincoln (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996), liii, 189–90. As many historians have learned, the Fehrenbachers are not always infallible, or impartial, judges. Sometimes they have a tin ear and a far too sweeping lack of trust when it comes to Herndon’s memories of Lincoln and the recollections he collected from people who had known Lincoln prior to his presidency. Either the Fehrenbachers were unaware of, or disagreed with, Douglas L. Wilson’s efforts to rehabilitate Herndon, which began in 1990. See, for example, Wilson, “Abraham Lincoln, Ann Rutledge, and the Evidence of Herndon’s Informants,” Civil War History, 36 (December 1990), 301–24.

10. McCoy, “‘Old-Fashioned’ Nationalism,” 66–67 and 66, note 38.

11. For books containing Jefferson’s writings alone (none of which have been included among any bibliophile’s lists of books known to have been read by Lincoln), which were published before or while Lincoln was working on Euclid, see, for example, Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (1785; New York, 1801; Philadelphia, 1801; Boston, 1832; Richmond, 1853); Thomas Jefferson Randolph, ed., Memoirs, Correspondence, and Private Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 4 vols. (London: Colburn and Bentley, 1829; Boston: Gray and Bowen, 1830, as Memoir, . . .); Resolutions of Virginia and Kentucky, Penned by Madison and Jefferson (Richmond: R. I. Smith, 1832); H. A. Washington, ed., The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, 9 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Taylor and Maury, 1853–1854). Lincoln did read one volume of Jefferson’s Correspondence when he resided in New Salem. As president, he read four volumes of H. A. Washington’s Writings of Thomas Jefferson, which Bray erroneously identifies as Jefferson’s Works. See Robert Bray, “What Lincoln Read—An Evaluative and Annotated List,” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association, 28 (Summer 2007), 58.

12. Drew R. McCoy, “Lincoln and the Founders,” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association, 16 (Winter 1995), 1–13. See also David Herbert Donald, “Reverence for the Laws: Abraham Lincoln and the Founding Fathers,” in Donald, Lincoln Reconsidered: Essays on the Civil War Era, 3rd ed. (New York: Vintage, 2001), 148–63; Phillip S. Paludan, “Lincoln, the Rule of Law, and the American Revolution,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, 70 (1977), 10–17; David Lightner, “Abraham Lincoln and the Ideal of Equality,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, 75 (Winter 1982), 289–308; Merrill D. Peterson, “This Grand Pertinacity”: Abraham Lincoln and the Declaration of Independence (Fort Wayne, Ind.: The Lincoln Museum, 1991); Pauline Maier, American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), 201–15; Douglas L. Wilson, “Lincoln’s Declaration,” in Wilson, Lincoln before Washington: New Perspectives on the Illinois Years (Urbana.: University of Illinois Press, 1977), 166–81; John A. Every, “‘In the Name of Our Fathers’: Abraham Lincoln and the Renaissance of America’s Founding Fathers” (Ph.D. dissertation, Boston College, 1998); Lewis E. Lehrman, Lincoln at Peoria: The Turning Point—Getting Right with the Declaration of Independence (Mechanicsburg, Penn.: Stackpole Books, 2008); Richard Brookhiser, Founders’ Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln (New York: Basic Books, 2014); Jeffrey J. Malanson, “The Founding Fathers and the Election of 1864,” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association 36, no. 2 (Summer 2015): 1–25. Several decades ago, a few writers attempted—all with minimal success—to analyze Lincoln’s relationship to the Founders in modern psychological terms. See Edmund Wilson, “Abraham Lincoln,” in Wilson, Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962), 99–130 (this essay is the best of the lot, although controversial); George B. Forgie, Patricide in the House Divided: A Psychological Interpretation of Lincoln and His Age (New York: W. W.

    Norton, 1979); James Hurt, “All the Living and the Dead: Lincoln’s Imagery,” American Literature, 52 (1980): 351–80 (another insightful essay); Dwight G. Anderson, Abraham Lincoln: The Quest for Immortality (New York: Knopf, 1982); Charles B. Strozier, Lincoln’s Quest for Union: Public and Private Meanings (New York: Basic Books, 1982).

13. Lincoln, The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions: Address before the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois, January 27, 1838, in Basler, Collected Works, 1: 108–15; Bray, “What Lincoln Read,” 28–31.

14. For the Founders’ papers, see the online subscription database project Rotunda: The American Founding Era, http://rotunda.upress.virginia.edu/founders/FGEA.html.

15. George Washington to Benjamin Harrison, January 18, 1784, Washington Papers, LC; Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), in Merrill D. Peterson, ed., Thomas Jefferson: Writings (New York: Library of America, 1984), 266.

16. Morris Kline, Mathematics for the Nonmathematician (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 1967; reprinted, New York: Dover, 1985), 17. See also Leonard Mlodinow, Euclid’s Window: The Story of Geometry from Parallel Lines to Hyperspace (New York: Free Press, 2001); Joseph Mazur, Euclid in the Rainforest: Discovering Universal Truth in Logic and Math (New York: Pi Press, 2004); Alex Bellos, Here’s Looking at Euclid: A Surprising Excursion through the Astonishing World of Math (New York: Free Press, 2010); David Berlinski, The King of Infinite Space: Euclid and His Elements (New York: Basic Books, 2013). Seelye Martin, an oceanographer, wonders if Lincoln was aware of non-Euclidean geometry and examines the Gettysburg Address for clues. See Martin, “Euclid’s Fifth, July Fourth: What’s Math Got to Do with It?” LabLit.com, June 30, 2010, http://www.lablit.com/article/606.

17. Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1945; reprinted, New York: Touchstone, 2008), 36–37; Richard Hudelson, Modern Political Philosophy (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 1999), 14–16; Michael Meyerson, Political Numeracy: Mathematical Perspectives on Our Chaotic Constitution (New York: Norton, 2002), 28–29; Raymond S. Nickerson, Mathematical Reasoning: Patterns, Problems, Conjectures, and Proofs (New York: Psychology Press, 2010), 81–82. The Founders’ understanding of deductive thought also derived from Isaac Newton’s Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (“Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy”) (London, 1687). An illuminating discussion of the Founders and their reliance on Euclid and Newton may be found in I. Bernard Cohen, Science and the Founding Fathers: Science in the Political Thought of Jefferson, Franklin, Adams, and Madison (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), 56–59, 72, 98–99, 122–28, 132–33, 254, 281–82.

18. John Playfair, The Elements of Geometry: Containing the First Six Books of Euclid (New York: W. E. Dean, 1849). Robert Todd Lincoln recalled seeing his father with an edition of “Playfield’s” Elements of Geometry. See Robert Todd Lincoln to Isaac Markens, November 4, 1917, in Paul M. Angle, ed., A Portrait of Abraham Lincoln in Letters by His Oldest Son (Chicago: Chicago Historical Society, 1968), 47. It’s extremely likely that he meant Playfair.

19. Gulliver, “A Talk with Abraham Lincoln.” On Lincoln as a lawyer, see footnote 4, above. The website on the law practice, http://www.lawpracticeofabrahamlincoln.org/Search.aspx, offers more than substantial evidence that Lincoln by 1850 had become a skillful, clever, and competent attorney.

20. Herndon and Weik, Herndon’s Lincoln, 193; William H. Herndon to Jesse W. Weik, October 28, 1885, Herndon-Weik Collection, LC; David Herbert Donald, Lincoln’s Herndon (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1948), 30.

21. Lincoln, Fragment: Notes for a Law Lecture, ca. July 1, 1850, in Basler, Collected Works, 2:81. The notes consist of only 705 words. The document might have been written later in the 1850s, but Basler accepts this conjectured date first assigned to it by John G. Nicolay and John Hay in their documentary collection of Lincoln’s works. See Nicolay and Hay, eds., Complete Works of Abraham Lincoln, enlarged ed., 12 vols. (New York: Francis Tandy, 1905), 2:140. It is doubtful that Lincoln ever delivered the lecture.

22. Herndon and Weik, Herndon’s Lincoln, 193.

23. Ibid.; Lincoln to Jesse W. Fell, Enclosing Autobiography, December 20, 1859, in Basler, Collected Works, 3:512; Lincoln, Autobiography Written for John L. Scripps, ca. June 1860, in ibid., 4:66. On Lincoln’s struggle with melancholia, see Burlingame, Inner World, 92–122; Joshua Wolf Shenk, Lincoln’s Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005). The biggest problem with these analyses is that they too casually equate Lincoln’s melancholia with what is today called clinical depression. The former is pre-Freudian; the latter post-Freudian. As a result, both scholars commit presentism in their examination of Lincoln’s melancholia. In our own time, Lincoln cannot be put on a couch to determine how he would describe himself and his feelings. We know a great deal about what Lincoln said and did; we will never know what he felt.

24. Herndon, Judge Parks on Lincoln as Lawyer, n.d., typescript, Lincoln Collection, Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, Springfield, Illinois; Herndon, Lincoln as Lawyer, Politician, Statesman, n.d., Herndon-Weik Collection, LC; “A Statistical Portrait,” Law Practice of Abraham Lincoln, op. cit. Despite Herndon’s claim, we do know, at the very least, that Lincoln read Blackstone’s Commentaries, probably in its entirety, and a few other law books while living in New Salem and Springfield. Bray, “What Lincoln Read,” 39, 44, 59, 75.

25. David Davis, Interview, September 20, 1866, in Douglas L. Wilson and Rodney O. Davis, eds., Herndon’s Informants: Letters, Interviews, and Statements about Abraham Lincoln (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 350.

26. Robert B. Rutledge to William H. Herndon, ca. November 1, 1866, in ibid., 384.

27. Lincoln, The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions: Address before the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois, January 27, 1838, in Basler, Collected Works, 1:115.

28. William H. Herndon, “Analysis of the Character of Abraham Lincoln, Lecture No. 2,” December 26, 1865, in Abraham Lincoln Quarterly, 1 (December 1941): 425.

29. For photographic reproductions of the surviving remnant pages of Lincoln’s Sum Book, ca. 1824–1826, see Basler, Collected Works, 1: [xxviii–xlviii] (unpaginated front matter). A torn page, the halves of which are today owned by a repository and a private collector, have been reunited online at The Papers of Abraham Lincoln, http://www.papersofabrahamlincoln.org/new-documents/series-ii-illinois-papers/reunited-documents/113-page-from-copybook-c-1824-1826. On Lincoln’s formidable mathematical talents, see Nerida F. Ellerton, Valeria Aguirre-Holguín, and McKenzie A. Clements, Abraham Lincoln’s Cyphering Book and Ten Other Extraordinary Cyphering Books (New York: Springer, 2014), 123–86; McKenzie A. Clements and Nerida F. Ellerton, “Abraham Lincoln’s Cyphering Book and the Abbaco Tradition,” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association, 36, no. 1 (Winter 2015): 1–17.

30. Lincoln, Autobiography Written for John L. Scripps, ca. June 1860, in Basler, Collected Works, 4:65; Abel Flint, A System of Geometry and Trigonometry, with a Treatise on Surveying (Hartford, Conn.: Cooke, 1804; reprinted, 1830), 9–23; Robert Gibson, The Theory and Practice of Surveying (New York: Evert Duyckinck, 1814; reprinted New York: Harper, 1832), 40–64; Bray, “What Abraham Lincoln Read,” 49, 50.

31. Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason (1794), in Eric Foner, ed., Thomas Paine: Collected Writings (New York: Library of America, 1995), 736–37 (on Euclid, see also 696, 811, 812).

32. Herndon, Lincoln and Strangers, [ca. 1885–1886], Herndon-Weik Collection, LC. As a rule, Herndon did not ride the circuit with Lincoln; in their law partnership, he was the man who stayed in the Springfield office while Lincoln rode Illinois trails from county to county, though Herndon often handled cases in Menard County. See Fehrenbacher and Fehrenbacher, eds., Recollected Words, 244. Milton Hay, John Hay’s

    uncle, believed he saw Lincoln with a copy of Euclid around 1839 or 1840. A less reliable informant, John T. Stuart, Lincoln’s first law partner, claimed that Lincoln carried Euclid’s The Elements with him on the circuit from 1846 to 1855, and, in a later interview, “as Early as 1844 and [he] continued to do so down as late as 1853.” See Milton Hay to John Hay, February 8, 1887, “Recollections of Lincoln: Three Letters of Intimate Friends,” Bulletin of the Abraham Lincoln Association, 25 (December 1931): 8; John T. Stuart, Interview, ca. late June 1865, in Wilson and Davis, eds., Herndon’s Informants, 62; John T. Stuart, Interview, December 20, 1866, in ibid., 519. Three modern scholars believe that Lincoln began studying Euclid while serving in Congress. See Daniel Walker Howe, The Political Culture of the American Whigs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 282; J. R. Pole, “Abraham Lincoln and the American Commitment,” in Pole, Paths to the American Past (New York,: Oxford University Press, 1979), 157–58; Harry V. Jaffa, American Conservatism and the American Founding (Durham, N.C.: Carolina Academic Press, 1984), 110. They provide no evidence to support their claims, but presumably their error stems from a passage in an early biography of Lincoln written by Josiah G. Holland, who believed that Lincoln began his study of Euclid while he was in Congress. See Holland, The Life of Abraham Lincoln (Springfield, Mass.: G. Bill, 1865), 125–26.

33. William H. Herndon to Ward H. Lamon, December 16, 1887, Lamon Papers, Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif.; Weik, The Real Lincoln, 240–41.

34. Herndon and Weik, Herndon’s Lincoln, 194.

35. Walter R. Agard, “Classics on the Midwest Frontier,” Classical Journal, 51 (December 1955): 103–10; Edwin M. Miles, “The Young American Nation and the Classical World,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 35 (1974): 259–74; Howard Mumford Jones, O Strange New World—American Culture: The Formative Years (New York: Viking, 1964), 265–72; Russell B. Nye, Society and Culture in America, 1830–1860 (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), 19–24.

36. McCoy, “‘Old-Fashioned’ Nationalism,” 22–24.

37. Bernard Bailyn et al., The Great Republic: A History of the American People (Boston: D. C. Heath, 1977), 390–402, 425–27, 513–22; Howe, Political Culture of the American Whigs, 150–80; Joseph F. Kett, The Pursuit of Knowledge under Difficulties: From Self-Improvement to Adult Education in America, 1750–1990 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994), 38–76, 81–101; Daniel Walker Howe, Making the American Self: Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), 107–56; Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), 254–80. In 1856 the Lincolns expanded their house by adding a second story to it, which transformed it into an attractive Greek Revival structure. See Donald, Lincoln, 197–98.

38. William H. Herndon to Jesse W. Weik, October 28, 1885, Herndon-Weik Collection, LC; Herndon to Weik, February 11, 1887, ibid.; Henry Clay Whitney, Life on the Circuit with Lincoln (Boston: Estes and Lauriat, 1892; Paul M. Angle, intro. and notes, Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton, 1940), 51.

39. William H. Herndon to C. O. Poole, January 5, 1886, Herndon-Weik Collection, LC. On Lincoln’s quest to find social stability in a “rational-legalistic or procedural concept of order and community,” see George M. Fredrickson, “The Search for Order and Community,” in Cullom Davis et al., eds., The Public and Private Lincoln: Contemporary Perspectives (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1979) 86–98, quotation at 93.

40. Lincoln quoted in Joshua F. Speed to William H. Herndon, December 6, 1866, in Wilson and Davis, eds., Herndon’s Informants, 499.

41. “A Statistical Portrait,” The Law Practice of Abraham Lincoln, 2nd ed., http://www.lawpracticeofabrahamlincoln.org/Reference.aspx?ref=Reference html files/StatisticalPortrait.html.

42. Fourth Debate with Stephen A. Douglas at Charleston, Illinois, September 18, 1858, in Basler, Collected Works, 3:186; Lincoln to Henry L. Pierce et al., April 6, 1859, in ibid., 375–76; Speech at Columbus, Ohio, September 16, 1859, in ibid., 316–17.

43. See, for example, John Channing Briggs, Lincoln’s Speeches Reconsidered (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 15, 164–83, 303–15; Frank J. Williams, “Abraham Lincoln: The Making of the Attorney in Chief,” in Joseph R. Fornieri and Sara Vaughn Gabbard, eds., Lincoln’s America, 1809–1865 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008), 126–27; Hirsch and Van Haften, Abraham Lincoln and the Structure of Reason, 217–40. Allen C. Guelzo discusses the Euclidean nature of the Gettysburg Address by focusing on the word proposition. See Guelzo, Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President (Grand Rapids, Mich.: W. B. Eerdmans, 1999), 370–72. In trying to turn Lincoln’s writings into reflections of the Euclidean process of demonstration, many writers fail to consider other influences, such as common rhetorical devices (logic, rhyme-sound repetition, grammatical antithesis, rhythmic patterns, assonance, figures of speech)—used invariably by Lincoln and other orators of his time. What’s more, it is known that Lincoln read books on rhetoric and the speeches of Henry Clay, Jefferson, William H. Seward,

    and Daniel Webster before his presidency. See Bray, “What Lincoln Read,” 38, 45, 50, 58, 73, 78, for the most likely titles (those given A or A+ ratings by Bray). On American rhetoric and public oratory during the antebellum period, see Donald M. Scott, “The Popular Lecture and the Creation of a Public in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America,” Journal of American History, 66 (1980), 791–809; Thomas W. Benson, ed., American Rhetoric: Context and Criticism (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989); Kenneth Cmiel, Democratic Eloquence: The Fight over Popular Speech in Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley: University of California Press, and New York: Morrow, both 1990); Thomas A. Gustafson, Representative Words: Politics, Literature, and the American Language, 1776–1865 (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Carolyn Eastman, A Nation of Speechifiers: Making an American Public after the Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). See also Roy P. Basler, “Lincoln’s Rhetoric,” American Literature, 11 (May 1939), 167–82. Interestingly, Basler argues that Lincoln’s rhetoric differed from that of his contemporaries and that it possessed “geometric precision,” which is an overstatement. Basler, “Lincoln’s Rhetoric,” 168.

44. On the difficulty of attributing influence in history, see Gordon S. Wood, “‘Influence’ in History,” in Wood, The Purpose of the Past (New York: Penguin Press, 2008), 17–29.

45. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “The Improvisatore,” in The Poetical Works of S. T. Coleridge, 3 vols. (London: Pickering; and Boston: Hilliard, Gray, 1835), 2:123.

46. Lincoln to Isham Reavis, November 5, 1855, in Basler, Collected Works, 2:327.