Emancipation or "Going Green" with Shakespeare, Lincoln, and Nancy Hanks

            “The wise men always return to the soil,” wrote Henry Miller in an essay on Thoreau, published in the 1962 collection Stand Still Like the Hummingbird.  One only has to think of the poets, sages, artists in every land and in every generation to realize how deep this need is in every man.  What Miller observed fifty years ago is still largely true of America today:  It is a vastly unpopulated country.  Having made my annual pilgrimage to the Pine Barrens of South Jersey and, thanks to an adventurous husband, continued south through Delaware and rural Maryland to the islands of Chincoteague and Assateague and home along byways that wend round the hills and hollows of West Virginia, I share Miller’s vision of America as a land abounding in forests, streams, lakes, mountains, rivers, and fields—“where a man of good-will with a little effort and belief in his own powers can enjoy a deep, tranquil, rich life—provided he go his own way.” 

            To reconnect to the spirits of hard scrabble ancestors is why I return every summer to the Pine Barrens, preferably during blueberry season.  Since before the Revolutionary war, they smuggled goods off British sloops and transported them through the woods to Philadelphia.  Some dug bog ore out of the swamps for the iron furnaces that manufactured cannonballs for the war effort; some were pioneers in the glass-making industry; others raised cranberries and when they got the blight experimented with cultivated blueberries bred from wild stock.  There was a line of watermen who built boats, harvested salt hay in the marshes along the Mullica, dug clams; and their sons operated tug boats and built piers in Atlantic City.  They knew the environment intimately, worked with what was available, and stuck together.  When I was growing up, my mother took me and my siblings “home” four or five times a year, and I envied that extended family life lived up and down Pleasant Mills Road: a farm, a sawmill, a one-room school teacher, a railroad engineer, an alcoholic storyteller.  Everyone had a role.  Everyone had value.  It was clear to me when I was very young that life is best lived in a network of symbiotic relationships, and I grew up envying my mother’s life and memorizing her stories. 

            But every woman must go her own way.  I learned this lesson when I tried to copy my mother’s life, volunteering at the age of 12 to spend the summer packing blueberries for my uncle (a job that migrants have done for the last sixty years).  Up before dawn and still working after dark, I felt dejected and lonely.  The life of a farm girl was too hard for a spoiled, bookish subdivision girl.  I became an academic, but one who works hard in her own field, turning over and over Shakespeare’s blank verse, tending the seeds of my ideas, and gleaning the insights that other scholars have unearthed.  I do believe there is a profound connection between farming land and farming ideas (especially in relation to Shakespeare) that is quintessentially American.  This thought received surprising support by the end of our family trip.

            The last leg of our June journey (after Jersey and the wild ponies at Chincoteague) was to be an abbreviated version of the eighth grade field trip to Washington D.C. for our fourteen-year-old daughter who is aggressively disinterested in anything remotely interesting to us.  “I just want to go home,” she’d whine and flat out refuse to visit museums or see monuments.  Modifying selfies is an activity she prefers to watching egrets, hummingbirds, or ponies let alone taking pictures of the stone effigies of Lincoln or Jefferson.  “Kat, check out the view,” says my husband driving the Chesapeake Bay bridge.  “I AM LOOKING,” she states angrily. 

            Somehow we make it into D.C., drive around the Supreme Court, find a very tight parking spot on Capitol Hill, and drag her into the Folger Shakespeare Library.  “Let’s just see what they have on exhibit; it won’t take long,” I cajole.  Katya is relatively knowledgeable about Shakespeare, having played Hamlette in a school adaptation, and she resigns herself to putting up with another “boring” museum.

            The exhibit, America’s Shakespeare, is an eclectic display—something for everyone.  Most fascinating to me were the ways early Americans (from the colonial period through the Civil War) alluded to Shakespeare to express political views:  “To taxt or not to taxt,” read the headline in a colonial newspaper.  A British political cartoon presents the rebellious colonists as the rabble-rousers, led by Jack Cade, in Henry VI, Part 2.

            Even more fascinating were the ways that Shakespeare was used during Lincoln’s presidency by Lincoln, himself, by John Wilkes Booth, and by the grieving nation.  I had known of Lincoln’s particular interest in Macbeth, and, I had taped an advertisement for  Michael Anderegg’s new book, Lincoln and Shakespeare, to my refrigerator so as not to forget about it.  Lincoln was prone to depression and his wife, particularly after the deaths of several children, believed (like many “Spiritualists” of the time) that it was possible to make contact with the dead.  Many facets of Lincoln’s life predisposed him to connect with the play.  One week prior to his assassination at Ford’s Theater, Lincoln had a disturbing premonitory dream that “has got possession of me, and, like Banquo’s ghost, it will not down.”  Scholars cite this dream as proof that Lincoln identified with Macbeth, but they disagree in their readings of his identification.  Some believe Lincoln like Macbeth was ambitious.  Most suggest that Lincoln felt the blood of civil war deaths sticking to his own hands.  My guess is that Lincoln identified with the sensitive moral soul of Macbeth, whose first words in the play (coming fresh from a stunning battle victory) are “So foul and fair a day I have not seen.”  Macbeth feels deeply the moral ambiguity of all political action.  After the civil war was over, Lincoln visited Richmond, the devastated capital of the Confederacy.  According to witnesses, his mood oscillated between “hearty  bonhomie and sad introspection” and, on a steamer up the Potomac, he read passages from the play that describe the mental anguish that is an immediate consequence of Macbeth’s murder of Duncan.

                        What hands are here?  Ha: they pluck out mine eyes.

                        Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood

                        Clear from my hand?  No: this my hand will rather

                        The multitudinous seas incarnadine,

                        Making the green one red.

Lincoln may have been ambitious to perform great deeds but Anderegg finds no evidence that he ever believed his ambition was responsible for the carnage, however grieved he was by its extent.  My own work on the play links Macbeth with Israel’s first doomed king, Saul, and suggests that there is something inherently tragic about monarchy and perhaps politics in general (which always makes “the green one red”).  And the tragedy of politics would have been felt acutely by men raised in Nature—men like Saul who would rather push a plow than be king and Lincoln, the frontiersman, who found in Macbeth powerful, imaginative expressions of pain and loss that echoed his own feelings. 

            One of the most stunning pieces of documentation in the Folger exhibit is a newspaper advertisement, printed after Lincoln’s assassination with quotations from Macbeth that would assist the nation in its grief.  Lincoln’s love of Shakespeare was recognized and honored in the imaginative identification of him with the saintly Duncan who, "Hath borne his faculties so meet, hath been / So clear in his great office."

            After leaving the Folger, we dragged Katya through the Library of Congress and headed back to the car after treating her to a Monster energy drink.  We wanted to see the Lincoln Memorial but got pushed by the steady traffic onto a highway that took us over the Potomac and toward Arlington Virginia and posh suburbs of horse farms and fox-hunting courses.  We pressed onward toward West Virginia where things became much poorer almost as soon as we crossed the state line.  We ate pizza in Romney, a small town so crucial during the civil war that it changed hands 56 times.  After dinner, we stood outside a local history museum watching a father and two kids try to catch lightning bugs.  Paul was remembering tidbits relating to John Wilkes Booth.  Apparently, after shooting Lincoln and jumping from the balcony, he yelled “Sic simper tyrannis” (“Thus always to tyrants”).  “You must be kidding!” I said and wondered aloud if Booth imagined himself as Malcolm who gathers an armed force to rid Scotland of Macbeth, who, by the end of the play, has become a brutal tyrant, killing friends, women, and children.  When Shakespeare wrote the play in 1606, pitching it to King James I’s pet interests (in witchcraft and biblical kingship), tyrannicide was a hot topic.  James, a staunch proponent of divine right kingship, believed that no matter how bad a king was, subjects could not challenge him.  But federalist thinkers believed it was the duty of magistrates to remove kings who were not living up to their covenant obligations to God and to their subjects.  By staging an armed resistance to monarchy, Shakespeare (a lowly actor/playwright like Booth) was doing something very risky. 

            Later that night in our hotel suite, while Katya took a whirlpool bath, I skimmed portions of Anderegg’s discussion of John Wilkes Booth’s escape from Washington through the swamps, rivers, and farms of eastern Maryland.  He carried a pocket diary with him in which he recorded his own feelings about his act, likening it to the deed that “Brutus was honored for.”  A bit later, he made another indirect but likely Julius Caesar allusion, writing of what he saw as “a country groaned beneath this tyranny.”  Wilkes Booth was one of three actor brothers, who—believe it or not—acted together only once in a single performance of Julius Caesar at New York’s Winter Garden Theater, a fund-raiser for a Shakespeare statue to be erected in Central Park.

         Shakespeare—an actor and playwright—throughout his career expressed revolutionary political views, but he did so very subtly, challenging the status quo through subtext and allusion.  That Wilkes Booth used Julius Caesar as pretext for a mad political act was nothing new.  The Earl of Essex paid Shakespeare’s company to stage Richard II (a regicide play) on the eve of his attempt to overthrow Queen Elizabeth.  The attempts and not the failed deeds are stunning because they express a faith in the power of art to unsettle and express an other kind of politics.  Wilkes-Booth’s deed insured that actors would be victimized in the search for scapegoats in the days after Lincoln’s death.  A minister in Philadelphia condemned theaters as “dens of pollution, these synagogues of Satan”—language that sounds exactly like that used by anti-theatricalist writers of the early-modern period.  One minister even intimated that Lincoln got what he deserved for going to see a play on Good Friday.

            The real gift of the trip came somewhere in Virginia when I was sitting in the co-pilot seat, studying the map and looking at the zigzag line of Route 50, imagining the road as a series of snake turns through dark mountains.  Just south of highway 50 near a settlement called Antioch was a red square marking the birthplace of Nancy Hanks, Lincoln’s mother.  “We have to check it out, Paul—tomorrow morning.”  The serendipity of events seemed to prove something I read in bright morning light as we drove through the peninsular fingers reaching into the Chesapeake:  “to understand what is real as real, and what is living as living, we have to know it in its own primal and individual community, in its relationships, interconnections and surroundings.”  Perhaps I could learn something about Lincoln’s habits of mind and ways of reading Shakespeare by seeing where his mother was born.  Macbeth asked the witches to look into the seeds of time to see which grains would grow, and that is exactly what I hoped to do—belatedly.

            The morning sun lit up the wet grass as we sped past places with biblical names—Canaan Valley, Pisgah Road, Good News Gospel Church.  The road followed the curve of Saddleback mountain and ran next to a stream.  The birthplace is not well marked but we found it, parked the car, and walked up the gravelly road, ducking under a metal fence to deter cars and protect creatures like the doe and fawn, fresh from a morning drink, walking high on delicate legs and leaping away when they saw us.  The cabin, although not the original birthplace, dates from the early nineteenth century and was moved from another site.  There is only one explanatory placard, and it obscures Nancy Hanks in the verbiage of West Virginia senators, anxious to prove their Union loyalties by writing a paean to motherhood.  Lincoln’s simple statement—that everything he is he owes to his mother—is far more touching.  Nancy Hanks’ family didn’t stay in this one-room cabin for long.  In her day, people bought land cheap, cleared it, sold it for a profit and moved on.  These hard-working nomads moved from what was then Virginia, to Kentucky, and onward to Indiana.

            I look in the window and try to conjure up the legendary image of the self-taught young Abe reading by firelight.  Imagination fails me.  Much has been made of Alexis de Tocqueville’s claim in Democracy in America (a guide to life in the United States in the 1830s) that there was “hardly a pioneer’s hut that does not contain a few odd volumes of Shakespeare.”  But how many log cabins did de Tocqueville visit?  As much as I would love to believe Nancy Hanks introduced her young son to Shakespeare, I don’t see it.

            But I read in Wikipedia that Nancy Hanks Lincoln was “superior” to her husband, a strong personality who taught young Abraham his letters as well as the extraordinary sweetness and forbearance he was known for all his life.  Nancy was also described as “a bold, reckless, daredevil kind of woman, stepping on the very verge of propriety” with a melancholy expression and intellectual inclination.  She sounds fascinating, and Abe lost her when he was nine years old—whittled the pegs for her coffin.  She died homesteading, age 34, at Little Pigeon Creek in southern Indiana.  No one knows for sure what killed her:  milk sickness (drinking milk from cows that had eaten white snakeroot), tuberculosis, or cancer.

            If you read my first post, you will understand that in the last few weeks I have been trying to reclaim my own life, and have found consolation in a circle of female friends.  Some of them are real, but most are biblical, fictional, and historical.  All of them were “ruined” in some way and pushed out to labor in the wilderness.  I am thinking of Hagar, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, and Nancy Hanks.  I have wondered at the intense and original intellects of hardworking rural women—a focus of Thomas Hardy’s novel.  We don’t need books and universities to teach us to think.  All we really need are our senses at play with Nature which, as Emerson wrote, “conspires with spirit to emancipate us.”  When a beautiful rose dies, beauty does not die because it is not in the rose.  Beauty is an awareness in the mind.  It is a mental and emotional response that we make.  Hardy’s narrator describes Tess as being “of a piece with the element she moved in” and “at times her whimsical fancy would intensify natural processes around her till they seemed part of her own story.  Rather they became part of it; for the world is only a psychological phenomenon, and what they seemed they were.”

            Mothers who learned to think and feel by working closely with Nature and with others have a wide vision unobstructed by manmade things and gifts of sensibility that they pass on to their children.  Tess, for instance, has great sympathy for animals—the horse, Prince, who she is partly responsible for killing, the cows she milks, her siblings, and fellow dairy maids, less physically beautiful but with equally passionate hearts.  Tess is immune to contempt and remains open, porous, alive, and responsive.  It is no wonder that my own mother—a Jersey farm girl who milked 7 cows before going to school every day of her life—raved about Tess ever since I can remember.  I finally read her book.

            To lose such a mother is to lose a whole world.  It only makes sense, then, that Lincoln would have found a mother surrogate in Shakespeare’s capacious dramatic worlds.  Shakespeare never lectures, doesn’t dictate.  Rather, he whispers, he hints, he engages, he charms, and finally wins us, through mesmerizing figures, into a deep and dedicated covenantal relationship—one on one—that rewards labor and original thought.  Anderegg thinks that Lincoln preferred reading Shakespeare to seeing the plays staged: I do, too.  Seeing the cabin where Nancy Hanks was born and thinking about Lincoln’s early experiences—it makes sense that he didn’t try to be an expert reader, didn’t strive to read every play but pored over those he loved and, most importantly, needed to live.  “Throughout his life,” writes Anderegg, “Lincoln adapted Shakespeare to his own needs and desires, selecting a speech here or a passage there, fitting the playwright’s works into his own worldview.”  He farmed the verse.  Even if Nancy could not give him Shakespeare, she opened his eyes and mind to the wide world:  emancipating him, she (and Shakespeare) prepared him to emancipate us.