Lincoln on the Scmgamon

THE VALLEY OF SHADOWS (278 pp.)--Francis Grierson -- Houghton Mifflin ($3.50).

The people who lived in Sangamon County, Ill. before the Civil War left many homely records of the time, but the artist's eye & ear were rare among them. This little book, first published in 1909 and now reissued after being long forgotten and overlooked by historians, is almost the only reminiscence of Abraham Lincoln's Illinois in the 1850s that ranks as a classic of prose.

Real as Rock. The author was an English-born wanderer and adventurer named Benjamin Henry Jesse Francis Shepard, who took his mother's surname late in life. In the last quarter of the 19th Century he became famous in European salons for his gift of haunting improvisation at the piano; the French poet Mallarme thought him the first poet of the piano in the history of music. In Europe, Grierson thought often of his childhood years spent with his family in the Sangamon Valley (near Springfield) and at Alton, on the Mississippi. When he was 51 he sat down in London to recover his memories.

It took him ten years. The result is a book like a bucket of well water, without structure, simple-tasting, but real as rock and very clear. To many readers it will seem that the atmosphere evoked by Grierson is an essential element in the background of Abraham Lincoln.

At the first prayer meeting of the spring at Saul's Prairie in 1858, the preacher got really warmed up: " 'Under ye the yearth hez been shuck, over ye the stars air beginnin' te shift en wander. A besom o' destruction'll overtake them thet's on the wrong side in this here fight! . . . Fer they shell cry unto the Lord bekase of the oppressors, en he shell send them a saviour, en a great one--here he struck the table a violent blow--'en he shell deliver them! . . . En who shell deliver them? . . . Brethering, thar ain't but one human creatur' ekil to it, en thet air Abraham Lincoln. The Lord hez called him!' "

The congregation, electrified, felt that a voice of prophecy had sounded. This episode, the first in the book, sets the tone for all the best stories in The Valley of Shadows: a shrewd, quaint frontier humor playing over depths of religious awe. The great Donati comet drooped in the sky all that summer, and some of Grierson's best passages are descriptions of the night silences, the stars, and the slow change of seasons on the prairie land. The greatest scenes in the book are those in which the violence of nature--a storm at a camp meeting, a prairie fire that aids the escape of fugitive slaves--coincides for the people with the hair-raising will of God.

Willful on Water. The small English boy who witnessed these events went with his father in 1858 to the final Lincoln-Douglas debate at Alton. Grierson's inspiration in this and later chapters was not so sure, but his impression of Lincoln's spiritual presence deserves to stand with the best contemporary descriptions. "Douglas had been arrogant and vehement,'' he wrote. "Lincoln was now logical and penetrating . . . With a pride sufficient to protect his mind and a will sufficient to defend his body, he drank water when Douglas, with all his wit and rhetoric, could begin or end nothing without stimulants. Here, then, was one man out of all the millions who believed in himself, who did not consult with others about what to say, who never for a moment respected the opinion of men who preached a lie ... His looks, his words, his voice, his attitude, were like a magical essence dropped into the seething cauldron of politics, reacting against the foam, calming the surface and letting the people see to the bottom."

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