"In the End You are Sure to Succeed": Lincoln on Perseverance

Abstract

If there was one quality Abraham Lincoln believed essential both to individual success and to social advancement, it was industriousness. A child of the impoverished frontier who went on to take proud advantage of what historian Gabor Boritt has called “the right to rise” in America, Lincoln expected others to share his ambition for advancement. As he put it: “I am always for the man who wishes to work.” Politically, this meant opposing slavery and advocating full opportunity: the hope, as he put it once, that “the weights should be lifted from the shoulders of all men, and that all should have an equal chance.” Personally, it meant urging friends and relatives to pursue the unfettered path toward upward mobility. “Free labor,” he insisted, “has the inspiration of hope.” Lincoln occasionally provided such inspiration himself. When a school teacher from Pleasant Plains, Illinois, wrote in 1860 to inquire how best to transform himself into a lawyer, Lincoln's advice was simple and straightforward: “Work, work, work is the main thing.” Later, as President, supervising the vast federal bureaucracy, Lincoln discovered that not everyone in government shared his enthusiasm for tireless labor. When asked by a needy mother in October 1861 to supply army jobs for her eager boys, the new President was barely able to contain a newfound cynicism when he obliged with a letter of referral. “Set them at it,” he instructed an army major. “Wanting to work is so rare a merit, that it should be encouraged.” His own step-brother, John D. Johnston, was guilty of one sin that Lincoln could not pardon: laziness. “You are destitute because you have idled away all your time.… Go to work is the only cure for your case.”