Your Obt. Servt.

(See Cover)*

Harbert, Mich., is a crossroads town about 60 miles east of Chicago across the lake. To get there you have to drive through the gritty desolation of South Chicago, through Gary, where in autumn the blast furnaces at night make a glowering sheet lightning, through the smoke of Michigan City and into clean air again, along Lake Michigan behind some of the biggest sand dunes in the world. Carl Sandburg's place is on top of a dune a mile or so from the Harbert post office. On the land side the house is a triple decker, the top deck open and sunny. The front porch looks over ten miles of beach through the crests of some tall pines. Inside it is the kind of house a good workman likes to have for his family.

Sandburg bought this place eleven years ago, about the time he started work on The War Years, the second part of his biography of Abraham Lincoln. In the attic he put a stove, a cot, a few chairs and a lot of book shelves. Near a corner window he put his typewriter on an old box whose height suited him. He liked to tell people that if Grant and those fellows could run their war from cracker boxes, a cracker box was good enough for him. This attic and a room on the second floor called the Lincoln Room came in time to resemble second-hand book stores. In the first two years alone Carl Sandburg went through more than a thousand source books and marked them for copyists, of whom he had two at a time working downstairs in the glassed-in porch. His pretty, white-haired wife, Paula, and three daughters helped with the files. Gutted and exhausted books went to the barn.

From April to October each year Sandburg made no engagements; he sat at his cracker box and wrestled with a bigger job than any army commander ever faced. Fifty years old when he started it, he could summon to his aid a lifetime of singularly useful experience: as a shock-headed Swedish kid in Galesburg, Ill. in the '80s (his father was an immigrant blacksmith) listening to talk of Lincoln and the Civil War; as a harvest hand, a migrant worker, a volunteer in the Spanish-American War; as a young reporter in Milwaukee and Chicago getting ten years of schooling in the hard facts of politics, business, labor; as a poet, a big Swede trying to shape American lingo to fit his anger against bunk artists, his vague tenderness for common people, his sense of the power of U. S. Midland cities.

When the literary history of his time comes to be written, Carl Sandburg may well be esteemed the luckiest of his Midwestern generation. Vachel Lindsay and Edgar Lee Masters had as great if not greater native talent; even Ben Hecht, whose desk was next to Sandburg's on the Chicago Daily News in the early '20s, seemed a more brilliant, sophisticated writer. Of them all, Sandburg, the immigrant's son, got the surest roothold in authentic U. S. tradition, and got it perhaps by the near accident of digging for the truth about Abraham Lincoln. "That son-of-a-gun Lincoln grows on you," he once told a reporter. Before he finished The Prairie Years, which carried the biography to 1861, he had meditated on the basic Lincoln material, had achieved a clear, homely, sometimes lovely style. The greater demands of the Civil War material in range and stamina and subtlety unquestionably deepened and instructed him still further.

Partly from relief from those demands, partly to support the job, partly to get at libraries and private Lincoln collections throughout the U. S., every winter Carl Sandburg took one of his guitars and went on tour, reading his own poems and singing the ditties and ballads which he collected in 1927 in The American Songbag. His gifts include a sweet natural baritone, a born entertainer's command of moods and sense of audience, a deep, dreamy self-identification with the homely jigs and haunted lonesome songs of America. Sinclair Lewis once wept at Sandburg's singing of The Buffalo Skinners.

Sandburg thus became known to thousands as a folksy singer with a lilting, language-loving voice, a wide, delighted grin and silver hair falling over his eyes. Some people were so careless as to think that that was about all there was to Carl Sandburg--a misapprehension which The War Years should thoroughly destroy.

This four-volume biography as it now stands completed is a work whose meanings will not soon be exhausted, whose greatness will not soon be estimated. It can be said that no U. S. biography surpasses it in wealth of documentation and fidelity to fact, that none, not even Douglas Southall Freeman's monumental R. E. Lee (TIME, Oct. 22, 1934; Feb. 11, 1935), can compare with it in strength, scope and beauty. Carl Sandburg himself has a sense of the comparative importance of his other work. His long, loose poem, The People, Yes (1936), he calls "my footnote to the last words of the Gettysburg Address." H. L. Mencken believed The Prairie Years to be "the best American biography." In relation to The War Years it is like a lyric prologue to an inconceivably complex and crowded tragedy.

Great Storm. Each of the first three volumes of The War Years is over 650 pages long, the fourth volume 413 pages. By rough computation that makes about 1,175,000 words. Other word totals, as given in Sandburg's foreword: The Bible, including the

Apocrypha 926,877

Shakespeare, complete works. .. 1,025,000

Lincoln's printed speeches & writings 1,078,365

The War Years is therefore no weekend biography but a work to be read and studied at leisure, an hour or two a day, over a period of many months. It is a history of the time as well as the man and it is something more than a history in both cases. Meant to tell about everything that anyone would want to know, perhaps half of it consists of quotations--direct quotations from contemporary participants, observers, commentators; from newspapers, diaries, letters and books. "Take that Unionist mountaineer yell," Carl Sandburg says, and gives it: " For God's sake, let South Carolina nullify, revolute, secesh and be damned!'. . . What historian would dare try to render that in his own words?"

"Many men and women, now faded and gone, lived this book before it could be written," he says in his foreword. "They do and say in these pages what they did and said in life--as seen and known to the eyes and ears, the mind and spirit, of themselves or other men and women of their own time. . . . What they say by act or deed is often beyond fathoming, because it happened in a time of great storm."

When Sandburg gave his first two volumes a rigorous rewriting in manuscript in 1935, he scaled down four opening chapters on the background of secession into one, making a packed picture of which he suspects "there are some pages over which people will stop and wonder." It was a time of growing violence, growing paradox, growing economic change and bewilderment: "of [Northern] abolitionists hanged, shot, stabbed, mutilated, disfigured facially by vitriol, their home doorways painted with human offal ... of the 260,000 free Negroes of the South owning property valued at $25,000,000, one of them being the wealthiest landowner in Jefferson County, Va. ... of Southern planters and merchants being $200,000,000 in debt to the North and chiefly to the money controllers of New York City "

In the Senate of the United States Senator Louis Wigfall of Texas, an elegant credited with winging his man in eight duels, could face the Northern Senators to say, delicately: "The difficulty between you and us, gentlemen, is, that you will not send the right sort of people here. Why will you not send either Christians or gentlemen?" And Senator Seward of New York, hearing a Louisiana Senator pour on him accusations of bad faith, could remark: "Benjamin, give me a cigar and when your speech is printed send me a copy."

Telling the story with an even, unemphatic clarity and selective power, Sandburg adds incident to incident, utterance to utterance, personality to personality until he recreates the wild winter of 1860-61, when the election of Abraham Lincoln, on a platform committed to the limitation of slavery, aroused the fire-eaters of the South to take their States out of the Union. History that is considered an old story takes on new body and quality in such bits as this:

"Amid falling snow at midnight, out of a carriage bundled a mass of shawls and woolen scarfs one winter evening to ring the doorbell at the home of a Virginia Congressman. Inside the house a manservant began unwinding the bundle. Out of it came the Secretary of State, General Lewis Cass, born in 1782, seventy-nine years old, whimpering: 'Mr. Pryor, I have been hearing about secession for a long time--and I would not listen. But now I am frightened, sir, frightened!'"A month before Lincoln's inauguration the Confederacy was already under arms. And young Henry Adams wrote to his brother: "No man is fit to take hold now who is not cool as death."

Old Abe. At 52, his brown face wearing a beard for the first time (no one ever heard him seriously explain why), Lincoln arrived in Washington "like a thief in the night," with one companion, his friends having sent him on ahead to escape a mob in Baltimore. At Columbus on the way he had said in a curious, trance-like speech: "Without a name, perhaps without a reason why I should have a name, there has fallen upon me a task such as did not rest even upon the Father of his Country. ..."

Carl Sandburg's method with Lincoln is to light up in every way possible the men and the problems he faced from week to week, to relate with exactness what he did and said, to tell in their own words what the contemporaries thought or printed about it (Nicolay & Hay, Lamon, Herndon and the other biographers bearing witness among hundreds less known), and to let his own extraordinary insight play upon the record. As an incidental part of this process, he brings to life the principal political, journalistic and military figures that surrounded Old Abe from his first week in Washington to the end. His extended portrait of Charles Sumner, for example, is masterly.

Above all other men, Senator Sumner of Massachusetts was a scourge and a goad to the South, an exasperation to practical statesmen like Stephen A. Douglas. Handsome, imposing, humorless and incorruptible, Sumner stood in the Senate for years denouncing slaveholders as keepers of a nameless abomination; yet he had nothing whatever to say as to how $4,000,000,000 in slave property could be liquidated. "He seemed to insist," says Sandburg, "that he could be an insolent agitator and a perfect gentleman both at once. His critics held that he was either a skunk or a white swan but not both." He was the only man of whom Lincoln said, "Sumner thinks he runs me."

William Henry Seward, Lincoln's cigar-chewing Secretary of State, was capable of trying to run the President and also capable of realizing he couldn't. Seward had tried to stave off war. "Night and day he had conferred and negotiated, become weary and rusty, vulgar and profane beyond his old habits, worn and frazzled as a castoff garment." He had a theory that war between the States could be stopped by getting a war started with some foreign power (Lincoln's observation on this later was "One war at a time"). On April 1 he sent a memorandum to Lincoln embodying this and other suggestions which implied that "Lincoln was a failure as a President but he, Seward, knew how to be one." One of many Lincoln classics is the gentle but ice-cold reply that Seward got, subscribed (without Lincoln's usual abbreviation) "Your obedient servant, A. Lincoln."

Intricacies. The lank man in the White House whom a large section of the press, North and South and in England, referred to as a "gorilla" proved himself through four years of heartbreaking war to be one of the ablest and most subtle statesmen in history. Step by step, chapter & verse, Carl Sandburg sets him forth as indeed the merciful, mystic and benign being of the monuments, but as also--and with profound consistency--a hard, circumspect, far-seeing politician and manager of men. Lincoln's speeches and writings were the work of a remarkably pure human intellect, always questioning, circumscribing the area in which he could be positive, saying once: "In times like the present, men should utter nothing for which they would not willingly be responsible through time and in eternity." His difficulties as they are unfolded in detail seem unbearable, his performance a manual of political behavior for men in any time. Two out of hundreds of instances:

>Lincoln was up against a Congress in which at one time there were just three Representatives defending him. During the bitterest weeks of the war his own family came under suspicion of treason. One of the most awesome scenes in the book is that of the secret meeting which the Senate Committee on the Conduct of the War held early in 1863 to consider this rumor. A member told of it:

"We had just been called to order by the Chairman, when the officer stationed at the committee room door came in with a half-frightened expression on his face. Before he had opportunity to make explanation, we understood . . . and were ourselves almost overwhelmed with astonishment. For at the foot of the Committee table, standing solitary, his hat in his hand, his form towering, Abraham Lincoln stood." What the Committee member got was "above all an indescribable sense of his [Lincoln's] complete isolation."

"I, Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States," said the caller slowly, "appear of my own volition before this Committee of the Senate to say that I, of my own knowledge, know that it is untrue that any of my family hold treasonable communication with the enemy." He went away. Speechless, the Committee adjourned.

> Against him across the Potomac was an army which could probably have taken Washington in the first weeks of the war, and a commander who outguessed and outfought every Union General. Sandburg on Lee: "Enfolded in the churchman and the Christian gentleman, Robert E. Lee was the ancient warrior who sprang forth and struck and cut and mangled as if to tear the guts and heart out of the enemy. . . ." The Union General George Brinton McClellan, who prudently chose to fight a war of attrition, never meeting Lee if he could help it without overwhelming superiority in manpower, caused Lincoln a long year of anguish. Yet by resisting for months public and political pressure to remove him, Lincoln allowed him to build a great army; by later reappoint-ing him, again against great pressure, he restored to the army the one favorite and familiar commander under whom it had the spirit to beat off Lee at Antietam.

One of Lincoln's exquisite modulations of conduct was noted in the fact that at army reviews he touched his hat to officers, uncovered to men in the ranks.

Structure. As Sandburg's narrative of war and politics goes on, it gathers such momentum that he can toss in a chapter the length of an ordinary novel, dealing entirely with White House routine, and lose little by it. The look and sound and layout of Washington, the character of battles, the diversity of talk and action over the country emerge as clearly as the central presence of Lincoln, revealed in touches both familiar and unfamiliar (e.g., Emerson's noting that he "showed all his white teeth" when he laughed). On the bitter subject of conscription, North and South, Sandburg gives the fruit of original research. Nothing in the narrative, however, stands out with such power for readers in 1939 as the deep tenacity of Lincoln's efforts: first (vainly) to win the South to gradual, compensated emancipation; then to forestall class and sectional savagery, to maintain representative government in the torn border States (sometimes he seems to have done so by an act of will), to build, even as the war went on, a foundation for "a just and lasting peace."

The execution of the book is not flawless; Sandburg's method of filing and attacking his material by subject as well as by chronological batches seems to have caused a few unconscious repetitions. A few--but very few--allusions will remain unclear to readers who are not students of the period. There is at times a certain bleakness.

This quality, however, is perhaps necessary to the grandeur of the total effect. Sandburg's prose is mostly direct, savored, terse, with scarcely a perfunctory or a pretentious sentence. If it had a smell it would be leaf smoke on an Illinois dirt road in November. Closely-knit to the material, it has almost none of the lyric blurring of The Prairie Years (where he wrote of Nancy Hanks as "sad with sorrow like dark stars in blue mist"). Because Sandburg has been compared often to Walt Whitman, his mature portrait of Walt is instructive: "Undersized, with graying whiskers, Quaker-blooded, softhearted, sentimental, a little crazy, this Walt Whitman sang to the war years, 'Rise O days, from your fathomless deeps. . . .' "

When Sandburg's eloquence rises to the occasion offered by his story's end, it lifts up toward something by no means common in U. S. writing. The chapter on Lincoln's assassination and death is surgical in the closeness of its reporting, until it breaks--with powerful effect--into one simple, lyrical sentence. Later:

"There was a funeral.

It took long to pass its many given points.

Many millions of people saw it and personally moved in it and were part of its procession.

The line of march ran seventeen hundred miles.

As a dead march nothing like it had ever been attempted before.

Like the beginning and the end of the Lincoln Administration, it had no precedents to go by.

It was garish, vulgar, massive, bewildering, chaotic.

Also it was simple, final, majestic, august. . . .

The people, the masses, nameless and anonymous numbers of persons not listed nor published among those present--these redeemed it.

They gave it the dignity and authority of a sun darkened by a vast bird migration. . . .

They gave it the color and heave of the sea which is the mother of tears. . . ."

* ABRAHAM LINCOLN: THE WAR YEARS -- Carl Sandburg -- Harcourt, Brace (Four Volumes, $20).

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