Of all the U.S. Presidents, Abraham Lincoln was easily the best writer, even surpassing John F. Kennedy – who won a Pulitzer Prize for his book Profiles in Courage. Had Lincoln not been President, he still would have made a name for himself due to his gift with words – both written and spoken.

Good writers are also avid readers – and Lincoln was certainly both.

Lincoln’s writing style, based on his eclectic reading material and his life experiences on the prairie, was different from most of the writers and poets of the mid-nineteenth century. He deftly wove together a blend of prairie homespun logic with the literary high-ground of Shakespeare and the Bible – both tomes which he knew well. Lincoln, in fact, read the Bible daily, even as President. He also carefully edited his work, and practiced speaking it until he knew it by heart so that his connection with his audience was unbroken.

To contrast Lincoln’s simple elegance with other well-known writers of the time, consider Charles Dickens, Alexandre Dumas, and Victor Hugo – all celebrated masters of their genres. Have you ever read Dickens’s Little Dorrit? (A word of advice: don’t. Almost all of Dickens’s other works are better, and have fewer extemporaneous words.) Have you read Dumas’s eight hundred plus pages (in tiny print no less) of The Count of Monte Cristo? The story is a literary masterpiece, but it takes quite a while to read through all the words. The movie is better – and that is something I almost never say! Victor Hugo’s masterpiece, Les Miserables (which was published in the United States in 1864 and widely read by Civil War soldiers north and south) totals 1479 pages, and is indeed a great work. I have read it three times over the years and love it, but could easily skip over the hundred pages describing the sewers of Paris or the one hundred fifty pages about the Napoleonic Wars. These authors were just too wordy. Lincoln was not. He was definitely onto something. 

Edward Everett, a noted orator of Lincoln’s time, happened to be the keynote speaker for the cemetery dedication at Gettysburg on November 19, 1863; Lincoln was invited weeks after Everett had been, and was asked to give only a few remarks. No one remembers Everett’s speech, which lasted two hours. Lincoln’s succinct and deeply moving Gettysburg Address, lasting about two minutes, is the memorable one.

Though panned by most Democratic newspapers, many journalists recognized Lincoln’s address for the shining example that it was. Horace Greeley, editor of The New York Tribune, wrote on November 20, 1863: “I doubt that our national literature contains a finer gem than that little speech at the Gettysburg celebration.”

Most of the world agrees with him.

In reading the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln begins with “Fourscore and seven years ago”, which is both Biblical and poetic in its cadence. It prepares the audience for something higher, and immediately the listeners grasped its significance.

Lincoln followed with the symbolism of birth – “our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty.” He uses the same symbolism of life and birth throughout his message – an oration that was dedicating a cemetery to men slain in the worst battle of the Civil War. Death was pervasive in Gettysburg – the dead were not all buried – and Lincoln knew that he needed to remind us that the slain “gave their lives that that nation might live.” He ended his remarks promising that “this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.” He rarely used the term death in dedicating that cemetery. He was thinking of the lives, perpetually afterward, who would be affected if the Union lost the war. His address was simple and effective, and beautifully symbolic – and the people got the message.

Another example of Lincoln’s eloquent prose is found in his annual message to Congress in December 1862. The war was escalating with no end in sight – and were there to be an end in sight at that time, it did not bode well for the Union. Lincoln said in his prepared speech, “The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion.” The first part of the sentence contains prairie common-sense, the second part, almost poetic in its parallel, shows that Lincoln chose his words carefully. He did not say “rise to the occasion”, but “rise WITH the occasion.” That single word, wisely selected, provides an image of not allowing the vicissitudes of war to escape their leadership. Whatever the challenge, Lincoln was keeping up with it, determined to supersede the situation. It provides an excellent glimpse into Lincoln’s gift with the written (and spoken) word.

A final example of Lincoln’s amazing prose is found in the final paragraph of his Second Inaugural Address, given on March 4, 1865. He said, “With malice toward none, with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have bourne the battle, and for his widow; and his orphan – to do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.”

It is interesting to note that Lincoln did not use the words “love” and “hate”, but “charity” and “malice”. Charity is the apogee, the highest form, of pure love. Malice is deeply seated hatred with intent to do harm – and war is the nadir of all malice. He perfectly blends these opposing poetic and literary terms with day-to-day common language – “let us strive to finish the work we are in.”

He also personifies the nation – “let us bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have bourne the battle” – reiterating that this nation indeed is a nation of the people. Those who listened grasped that concept, just as they had with his Gettysburg Address. His words also imply a wish that he held throughout his Presidency: that liberty would one day become a common way of life for all people, of all nations. While this remains a dream, it is notable that many nations have adopted their own constitutions, and fewer nations answer to a monarch or dictator than was common in the nineteenth century.

Today, politicians, and especially Presidents, have a bevy of speechwriters and advisors to tell them what to write, and what to say. Lincoln had none of them. While it is true that he ran most of his speeches by his Secretary of State, William Henry Seward, Lincoln wrote his own speeches, crafted his words and ideas carefully and decided all by himself what he was going to say.

He was someone who knew how to write the feelings of his heart, how to say them, how to convince the people to understand them. He then willingly took the consequences.

The consequences were personally terrible for him and his family, yet even now, we are better because of them. The ideals he dreamed of have largely come into fruition, first introduced to us through his magnificent writings and speeches.

The world still pays attention, as they should, to the words of Abraham Lincoln.

Quotes from Abraham Lincoln: Selected Writings. New York: Barnes & Noble, 2013, pp. 672, 686, 727; Horace Greeley quote is found at Gettysburg National Military Park.