He [President Abraham Lincoln] has a face like a hoosier Michael Angelo, so awful ugly it becomes beautiful, with its strange mouth, its deep-cut, criss-cross lines, and its doughnut complexion.

Whitman wrote this description while reflecting on Abraham Lincoln’s appearance during the Civil War years, when Whitman was living in Washington, D.C., working in government offices and frequently visiting Union hospitals. He saw Lincoln in public on multiple occasions—at reviews, receptions, and on the streets—and developed a powerful personal and poetic fascination with him as a representative American figure. The phrase “hoosier Michael Angelo” captures Whitman’s sense that Lincoln’s rough, frontier plainness could nonetheless carry a monumental, sculptural grandeur. The remark belongs to Whitman’s broader effort, in his Lincoln writings, to record the President’s physical presence as inseparable from his moral and historical weight.

Whitman treats Lincoln’s “ugliness” as an aesthetic and moral paradox: the face is so marked by hardship and individuality that it becomes “beautiful” in a higher sense. The “deep-cut, criss-cross lines” suggest suffering, labor, and the pressures of national crisis etched into the body, while the odd “doughnut complexion” and “strange mouth” emphasize unclassical irregularity. By invoking Michelangelo, Whitman implies a kind of heroic sculpture—an art of powerful forms rather than polished symmetry. The description advances Whitman’s democratic aesthetics: greatness in America may look unrefined, even grotesque, yet possess a sublimity born from experience and character.