Emerson Meets Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln as photographed by Alexander Gardner (believed to be November 8, 1863).
Ralph Waldo Emerson met Abraham Lincoln on two occasions. Emerson was lecturing in Springfield, Illinois on January 10, 1853 when a then-unknown Lincoln was in the audience. It was Lincoln who reminded Emerson of that prior meeting when they met again at the White House.
Emerson was in Washington, D.C. on January 31, 1862 to deliver a lecture titled “American Civilization” at the Smithsonian Institution. Through his colleague, Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner, he was introduced to most of Lincoln’s cabinet and on February 1st and 2nd, to President Lincoln himself. Upon meeting, Lincoln remarked, “I once heard you say in a lecture, that a Kentuckian seems to say by his air and manners, ‘Here am I; if you don’t like me, the worse for you.’”
Emerson wrote of their meeting, “The President…[is] a frank, sincere, well-meaning man with a lawyer’s habit of mind, good clear statement of his fact, correct enough, not vulgar, as described; but with a sort of boyish cheerfulness…”. He later wrote about Lincoln, “A great style of hero draws equally all classes, all the extremes of society, till we say the very dogs believe in him.”
A bit unsure of his feelings for the President at first, Emerson was completely won over by Abraham Lincoln’s motives and methods when Lincoln wrote the Emancipation Proclamation. Emerson lectured on the Emancipation Proclamation on October 12, 1862 in Boston and that address was published in The Atlantic Monthly in November 1862.
A lithograph of Lincoln hangs in the Emerson House.
Two days after President Lincoln’s assassination in April 1865, Emerson delivered a eulogy in Concord, Massachusetts. The moving remembrance captured the country’s shock and mourning. “I doubt if any death has caused so much pain to mankind as this has caused, or will cause, on its announcement…”
Emerson addressed Lincoln’s many attributes:
A plain man of the people, an extraordinary fortune attended him. He offered no shining qualities at the first encounter; he did not offend by superiority. He had a face and manner which disarmed suspicion, which inspired confidence, which confirmed good will. He was a man without vices. He had a strong sense of duty, which it was very easy for him to obey.
He was the most active and hopeful of men; and his work had not perished: but acclamations of praise for the task he had accomplished burst out into a song of triumph, which even tears for his death cannot keep down.
— B. Ewen, Emerson House guide
