Hawthorne Visits the White House
by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Unquestionably, Western man though he be,
and Kentuckian by birth, President Lincoln is
the essential representative of all Yankees,
and the veritable specimen, physically, of
what the world seems determined to regard
as our characteristic qualities.
It is the strangest and yet the fittest thing in
the jumble of human vicissitudes, that he, out
of so many millions, unlooked for, unselected
by any intelligible process that could be based
upon his genuine qualities, unknown to those
who chose him, and unsuspected of what
endowments may adapt him for his tremendous responsibility, should have found the
way open for him to fling his lank personality
into the chair of state, where, I presume, it
was his first impulse to throw his legs on the
council-table, and tell the Cabinet Ministers a
story.
There is no describing his lengthy awkwardness, nor the uncouthness of his movement; and yet it seemed as if I had been in the
habit of seeing him daily, and had shaken
hands with him a thousand times in some village street; so true was he to the aspect of the
pattern American, though with a certain extravagance which, possibly, I exaggerated still
further by the delighted eagerness with
which I took it in.
If put to guess his calling and livelihood, I
should have taken him for a country schoolmaster as soon as anything else. He was
dressed in a rusty black frock-coat and pantaloons, unbrushed, and worn so faithfully that
the suit had adapted itself to the curves and
angularities of his figure, and had grown to
be an outer skin of the man. He had shabby
slippers on his feet.
His hair was black, still unmixed with gray,
stiff, somewhat bushy, and had apparently
been acquainted with neither brush nor comb
that morning, after the disarrangement of
the pillow; and as to a night-cap, Uncle Abe
probably knows nothing of such effeminacies.
His complexion is dark and sallow, betokening, I fear, an insalubrious atmosphere
around the White House; he has thick black
eyebrows and an impending brow; his nose is
large, and the lines about his mouth are very
strongly defined.
The whole physiognomy is as coarse a one
as you would meet anywhere in the length
and breadth of the States; but, withal, it is
redeemed, illuminated, softened, and brightened by a kindly though serious look out of
his eyes, and an expression of homely sagacity, that seems weighted with rich results of
village experience.
A great deal of native sense; no bookish
cultivation, no refinement; honest at heart,
and thoroughly so, and yet, in some sort,
sly at least, endowed with a sort of tact and
wisdom that are akin to craft, and would
impel him, I think, to take an antagonist in
flank, rather than to make a bull-run at him
right in front. But, on the whole, I like this
sallow, 4ueer, sagacious visage, with the
homely human sympathies that warmed it;
and, for my small share in the matter, would
as lief have Uncle Abe for a ruler as any man
whom it would have been practicable to put
in his place.
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