Evening Republican, Volume 15, Number 26, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 31 January 1911 — LINCOLN'S PERSONAL APPEARANCE [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

LINCOLN'S PERSONAL APPEARANCE

JL A R- LINCOLN’S perfwm son a 1 appearance L.▼ jjL has been the subifck' ject of innumerable f a P ec d° tes an d ft 1m J° kes - He was not unaware, of the oddity of his figure (y and the characteristics of his face.

He came of a lanky race, gaunt, powerful people, and capable of great endurance. Their hard lives were not conducive to grace of figure or motion and their faces were often seamed and strongly marked. Climate, toil and improper or insufficient food had much to do with giving to the western and southern pioneers the peculiarities of form and action and the facial markings which identified them geographically as easily as did their speech. Lincoln never was ashamed of these things—at least he never changed his habits when he came into national prominence, but his continuance of .them did not arise from affectation. They were natural to him and he was. not willing to have one set of manners for Washington and another for the people back in Illinois. That he was careless of his appearance there was no doubt. When he sat for a photographer he never straightened his tie or smoothed his unkempt hair, blit, like Cromwell, told the picture 'man to take him as he was. He knew that a portrait of a “slicked up” Lincoln, as he would have said, would not have been recognized in Springfield, and he didn’t want them to think he was putting on airs because they had elected him to the presidency. It was his homeliness which per-

suaded the people that he was ond of them the moment he made his appearance on the platform—his homeliness and his intimate and apt use of the simple speech they could understand. There are anecdotes which are intended to show that even in a community of persons not noted for manly beauty he was considered pre-eminently the reverse. Yet, although this was the subject of jests at his expense, no one thought any the less of him for it. This homeliness—call it ugliness if you will —of his face, the awkwardness of his form, and the ungainllness of his gestures and attitudes seemed to the people to go naturally with his goodness of heart and the simplicity of his nature. In their eyes when advocating the cause of the oppressed and when opposing the forces which would destroy the nation he became to many / positively handsome. As years afterward one old man “who knowed’’ him said: “Lots of ’em will tell you he was homely. Seems to me that’s about all some folks around here has to tell about Abraham Lincoln. ‘Yes, I knowed him,’ they say. ‘He was the homeliest man in Sangamon county.’ Well, now, don’t you make no mistake. The folks that don’t tell you nuthin’ but that hewer knowed Mr. Lincoln. Mebbe they’d seen him, but they never knowed him. He wa'n’t homely. There’s no denyin’ he was long and lean, and he didn’t always stand straight, and he wasn’t pertikeler about his clothes, but that night up to Bloomington in ten minutes after he struck the platform, I tell you he was the handsomest man I ever see.’’ The month after his first election the publication Once a Week in Ldhdon printed the following personal skethh of Lincoln: “Abraham Lincoln is a gaunt giant more than six feet high, strong and long limbed. He walks slow, and, like many thoughtful men (Wordsworth and Napoleon, for example), keeps his head Inclined forward and downward. His hair is wiry black, his eyes are dark gray, his smile is frank, sld cere and winning. Like most American gentlemen, he is loose and careless in dress, turns down his flapping white collars, and wears habitually what wo consider evening dress. His head is massive, his Brow full and wide, his nose large and fleshy, his mouth coarse and full; his eyes are sunken, his bronsed face is thin and drawn down into strong corded lines, that disclose the machinery that moves the broad jaw. This great leader of the ‘Republican* party—this abolitionist —this terror of the ‘Democrats'—this honest old lawyer, with face half-Roman, half-Indian, so wasted by climate, so scarred by a life’s struggle, was born in 1809 in Kentucky. His grandfather, who came from Virginia, was killed by the Indians. His father died young, leaving a widow and severdl children. They removed to Indiana, Abe being at the time only six years old. Poor and struggling, his mother could only afford him some eight months’ rough schooling; and In the clearings of that new and unsettled country the healthy stripling went to work to hew hickory and gum trees, to grapple with remonstrating bears, and tr look out for the too frequent rattle-

snake. Tall, strong, lithe and smiling, Abe toiled on as a farm laborer, mule driver, sheep feeder, deer killer, woodcutter, and, lastly, as boatman on the waters of the Wabash and the Mississippi.” Another English writer in describing the president is still more realistic than his countryman when he says: "To say that he is ugly is nothing; to add that his figure is grotesque is to convey no adequate impression. Fancy a many six feet high, and then out of proportion; with long bony arms and legs, which somehow seem to be always in the way; with great rugged, furrowed hands, which grasp you like a vise when shaking yours; with a long enaggy neck and a chest too narrow for the great arms at its side. "Add to this figure a head cocoanut shaped and somewhat too small for such a stature, covered with rough, uncombed and uncombable hair, that stands out in every direction at once; a face furrowed, wrinkled and indented, as though it had been scarred by vitriol; a high, narrow forehead; and sunk deep beneath bushy eyebrows two bright, dreamy eyes that seem to gaze through you without looking at you; a few irregular blotches of black bristly hair in the place where beard and whiskers ought to grow;’a close set, thin lipped, stern mouth, with two rows of j£rge white teeth, and a nose and ears wbkrifhave been taken by mistake from a head twice the size. “Clothe this figure, then, in a long, tight, badly fitting suit of black, creased, soiled and puckered up at every salient point of the figure (and every point of this figure is salient), put on large, ill-fitting boots, gloves too long for the long, bony fingers, and a fluffy hat, covered to the top with dusty, puffy crape; and then add to this an air of strength, physical as well as moral, and a strange look of dignity coupled with all this grotesqueness, and you will have the impression left upon me by Abraham Lincoln.” Ward Lamon, who knew him intimately, goes more Into details. He says: Mr. Lincoln was about six feet four inches high, the length of his legs being out of all proportion to that of his body. When he sat down in a chair he seemed no taller than an average man, measuring from the chair to the crown of his head; but his knees rose high in front, and a marble placed on the cap of one would roll down a steep descent to the hip. He weighed about 180 pounds, but he was thin through the breast, narrow across the shoulders, and had the general appearance of a consumptive subject Standing up, he stooped slightly forward; sitting down, he usually crossed his long legs or threw them over tto arms of the chair as the most convenient mode of disposing of them. His “head was long and tall from the base of the brain and the eyebrow;” his forehead big and narrow, but Inclining backward as it rose. The diameter of his bead from ear to ear was 6V4 inches and from front to back eight Inches. His ears were large, standing out almost at right angles from his head; his cheek bones AUh nnd

prominent; his eyebrpws heavy and Jutting forward over., small, sunken blue eyes; his nose long, large and blunt, the tip of it rather ruddy and slightly awry towards the right hand side; his chin, projecting far and sharp, curved upward to meet a thick, material lower lip, which hung downward; his cheeks were flabby, and the loose skin fell'A in wrinkles or folds; there was a large mole on his right cheek and an uncommonly prominent Adam’s apple on his throat; his hair was dark brown in color, stiff,' unkempt, and as yet showing little or no sign of advancing age or trouble; his complexion was very dark, his skin yellow, shriveled and “leathery.” In short, to use the language of Mr. Herndon, “he was a thin, tall, wiry, grisly, raw-boned man,” “looking woe-struck.” His countenance was haggard and careworn, exhibiting all the marks of deep and protracted suffering. Every feature of the man —the hollow eyes, with the dark rings beneath; the long, sallow, cadaverous face, intersected by those peculiar deep lines; his whole air, his walk, his long, slleqt reveries, broken at long intervals by sudden and startling exclamations, as if to confound art* observer who might suspect the nature of his thought—showed he was a man of sorrows —not sorrows of today or yesterday, but long treasured and deep—bearing with him a continual sense of weariness and

pain. He was a plain, homely, sad, weary-looking man, to whom one’s heart warmed involuntarily, because he seemed at once miserable and kind. James B. Fry, who became intimately acquainted with Lincoln early in the latter’s political career, says: Lincoln was tall and thin; his long bones were united by large joints and he had a long neck and an angular face and head. Many likenesses represent his face well enough, but none that I have ever seen do justice to the awkwardness and ungainllness of his figure. His feet, hanging loosely to his ankles, were prominent objects, but his hands were more conspicuous even than his feet —due perhaps to the fact that ceremony at times compelled him to clothe them in white kid .gloves, which always fitted loosely. Both in the height of conversation and in the depth of reflection his ,hand now and then ran over or supported his head, giving his hair habitually a disordered aspect. His expression in repose was sad and dull, but* his ever-recurring humor, at short intervals, flashed forth with the brilliancy of an electric light. I observed but two well defined expressions in his countenance; one that of a pure, thoughtful, honest man, absorbed by a sense of duty and responsibility; the other, that of a humorist so full of fun that he could not keep it all in. His power of analysis was wonderful. He strengthened every case he stated and no anecdote or joke ever lost force or effect from his telling. % ' Apropos of his large feet there is an anecdote told of Lincoln when he was in. the legislature: He had walked his hundred miles to Vandalia, in 183 C, as he had in 1834, and when the session closed he walked home again. A gentleman of Menard county remembers meeting him and a detachment of the “long nine” on their way home. They were all mounted except Lincoln, who had thus far kept up with them on foot. If he had any money he was hoarding it for more important purposes than that of saving leg weariness and leather. The weather was raw and Lincoln’s clothing was none of the warmest Complaining of being cold to one of hlB companions, this irreverent member of the “long nine” told his future president that It was no wonder that he was cold —“there was so much of him on the ground.” None of the party appreciated this homely Joke at the expense of his feet (they were doubtless able to bear it) more thoroughly than Lincoln did. We can imagine the cross fires of wit and humor by which the way was enlivened during this cold and tedious Journey. The scene was certainly a rude one and seems more like a dream than a reality, when we remember that it occurred, not many years ago, in a state which now contains hardly less than three millions of people and 7,600 piles of railway. Cassius M. Clay in describing an address which he delivered at Springfield in 1856 says: “Lincoln and Browning lay upon the ground whittling sticks and heard me throughout with marked attention. Hurrying on to my appointments, I saw him then no more. I never shall forget his long, uugrlnly person and plain but even then sad and features '