ALBERT KEITH WHITAKER
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edge of how to read, my class and I discovered that writing can bring to
life an author such as Lincoln. Even the humble process of copying-a
process that, again, Lincoln applied to his own favorite authors-can lead
the reader to discover a dozen nooks and crannies in any given paragraph
that the eye skipped blindly past. Also, for most of our forefathers, care–
ful reading meant speaking the words aloud. (Lincoln used to drive his
law partner crazy with his own vocal reading.) Such an approach makes
all the more sense when trying to understand an orator. For example, at
one point during the semester my students transcribed, memorized, and
then publicly declaimed the following passage, from Lincoln's speech in
Edwardsville, Illinois, during the senatorial campaign of
1858:
When ... you have succeeded in dehumanizing the Negro; when
you have put him down and made it impossible for him to be but
as the beasts of the field; when you have extinguished his soul in
this world and placed him where the ray of hope is blown out as in
the darkness of the damned, are you quite sure that the demon you
have roused will not turn and rend you? What constitutes the bul–
wark of our own liberty and independence?
It
is not our frowning
battlements, our bristling sea-coasts, our army and our navy. These
are not our reliance against tyranny. All of those may be turned
against us without making us weaker for the struggle. Our reliance
is in the love of liberty which God has placed in us. Our defense is
in the spirit which prized liberty as the heritage of all men, in all
lands everywhere. Destroy this spirit and you have planted the
seeds of despotism at your own doors. Familiarize yourselves with
the chains of bondage and you prepare your own limbs to wear
them. Accustomed to trample on the rights of others, you have lost
the genius of your own independence and become the fit subjects
of the first cunning tyrant who rises among you.
Besides impressing passages upon one's mind through memorization,
and besides allowing one to hear these beautiful words as they were
meant to be heard-aloud-the act of giving utterance to a man's words
gives the student of history and literature a chance to store up some of
an author's passion and character in his own soul. With such methods,
one can find one's own introduction to Lincoln the man, to how his
heart beat, and to how his mind worked.
As 1 quickly learned in class, if most people today know little about the
Civil War, they know even less about the people who fought with or
against Lincoln in that war or in the larger struggle over slavery. This
neglect owes something to Lincoln's own uniqueness; he charms, in part,
