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ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 I 
 
From an ambrotype taken at 
 
 Princeton, Illinois, July 4th 1856 
 
 by William Masters 
 
J 
 
 ABRAHAM 
 LINCOLN 
 
 THREE ADDRESSES BY 
 
 MELANCTHON WOOLSEY STRYKER 
 
 i, 
 
 PRESIDENT OF HAMILTON COLLEGE 
 
 ptinm for 0)e author 
 
 €ot*m of ftttfclauD, iSeto gotfc 
 
 9!^uen april tat? 
 
E~4 
 
 Copyrighted 1917 
 By M. W. Stryker 
 
 All rights reserved 
 
 APR -2 ISI7 
 
 • 'Hi 54 
 
 ~H« 
 
 
* 
 
 
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 I 
 
<9ttC£&*!?<I!;&U{E, so louHp born, so ruDelr brcD, 
 SDerreeD ttjr Captain of tbosc luriD rears, 
 ilonrling of <Eime, mitl) suffocating tears 
 UaiD tenDcrly among tJje migljtiest DeaD, 
 W\)&t trust, uitjat lotie, tyy totnering spirit ieD 
 GTbro Darfe, tremenDous Davs! I^tjat sanity 
 <Siroro tt)? saDness, 1131 $€®\L$ ! H?umaniti? 
 Ctnj mystic bin, mtjose life mitb longing bleD. 
 <$ut of ttje 3£est, to uielD tbe £>outb anD j^ortl) 
 3f|n ttje mar blast, simple, so unatoarc 
 &{ tty rare Dignity, pitiful anD mise, 
 gearing tlje undertones tbat summoneo forttj 
 <Sreat hosts to Die, uUien all mas Done, to bear 
 WW *eD libation to tbe sacrifice! 
 
 I 
 
Hbrabam Xincoln 
 
 FIRST SAID TO THE UNION LEAGUE CLUB OF 
 BROOKLYN, FEBRUARY 12, 1895. 
 
 OUBT not, all you true gentlemen, that it 
 is time for an American Book of Days. 
 This land we love is old enough and rich 
 enough in men and achievements to have 
 a rubricated record all its own. 
 The dates which punctuate its great 
 events, its births and burials, its successive and inter- 
 woven crises of national evolution, its high tides and 
 low, its " storms and tempests greater than almanacs 
 can report," its feasts and fasts, its anguish and its 
 anthems— these dates make a calendar with all its weeks 
 illuminated and emphatic. More than we often pause to 
 remember are we rich in history, not merely of a conti- 
 nental, but of a world-wide significance. Our life is of 
 inter-centurial and planetary import. Each month is a 
 volume, with its peculiar, illustrious and garlanded 
 events. Wonder at all that our American Aprils have 
 witnessed, recall the annals of our great Julys, and then, 
 you who love your country and treasure in your hearts 
 her excellences of character and action, with also her sins, 
 her repentances, her renewed probations, turn your 
 thoughts to February, least in length of the twelve, but 
 with two natal days, starset and resplendent, and own 
 that the month with such a 22d and such a 12th, is the 
 chief and brightest in all the round of the zodiac ! 
 
 We are met, under the compulsions of a common rev- 
 erence, to keep high festival, upon one of Columbia's 
 cradle-nights, nay, to recall the gift, thro us, of one of 
 the royal heirs of a world's admiration and wistful affec- 
 
2 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 tion. Ours indeed he is : but not ours only. The pantheon 
 of Time claims him as one of Humanity's types and 
 leaders. The "razure of oblivion" shall never touch his 
 story, nor devotion to its high import become obsolete. 
 
 Amid the awed and woful group that watched that 
 wild April night sink to the ashen dawn, Stanton was 
 one, and when all was ended, it was his voice that spake 
 out in solemn and befitting prophecy, "Now he belongs 
 to the ages." The ages claim Lincoln. Thenceforward no 
 one city, commonwealth or clime could appropriate him. 
 History admits no transient and local monopoly to in- 
 trude between her and her elect dead. Thev are her own. 
 She is their Rizpah and their Rachel. 
 
 "Never before that startled morning" — wrote Lowell, 
 (at the conclusion of that essay whose strong and chiseled 
 paragraphs go with the masculine emotion of the Com- 
 memoration Ode to make up his complete and unsur- 
 passed tribute) — "Never before that startled morning 
 did such multitudes of men shed tears for one they had 
 never seen. Never was funeral panegyric so eloquent as 
 the silent look of sympathy which strangers exchanged 
 when they met on that day. Their common manhood 
 had lost a kinsman." 
 
 That day is one of the strange indelible memories of 
 my boyhood. How long and how little seems this inter- 
 val of thirty years! But as each year has gone, with 
 what certainty of just conviction, it has added one more 
 tier to the masonrv whereon is founded that ascendant 
 and invulnerable fame. How such a story effaces the 
 poor pride of language! How unequal are iridescent 
 word-bubbles to catch and carrv the tremulous half- 
 lights and the true splendors of that luminiferous char- 
 acter ! How must the soul stammer and sob that yields 
 to the whole appeal of a spirit so great, so genuine, so 
 gentle. Little indeed will the world heed, nor long re- 
 
AN IMMORTAL MEMORY 3 
 
 member, what any lips can now say of him, — enough 
 that it will never forget what he did for us and for all 
 men. 
 
 Who, then, shall presume to think that he has well 
 summarized or at all completely analyzed the contents 
 of such a life? I lay my withering blossoms with those 
 of his innumerable lovers, knowing that were their stems 
 of gold and their petals of ruby, these would rust and 
 dim long before the tooth of time had touched his im- 
 mortal renown. I deprecate your heed to me, even while 
 I entreat it. Think round, past, over, beyond, my frail 
 and slender utterances. Let your reasoned gratitude 
 and heartfelt admiration weave their own tributes in 
 words that no man can utter. Let the " mystic chords " 
 that he knew so well to touch into music, sound their 
 master's requiem. Sursum Corda! He was God's gra- 
 cious gift to a tormented and distracted time. He took 
 Who gave. He Who gave and took, guards the inacces- 
 sible honor of a supreme and solitary soul, who, "having 
 served his generation by the will of God, fell on sleep." 
 
 Bare-browed and wet-eyed, we stand in this our day 
 under a firmament whose four-and-forty stars, unnamed 
 and indistinguishable by any claim of severalty, make 
 one unrivalled and unquenchable constellation, and 
 highly resolve that Abraham Lincoln shall not have 
 lived in vain nor vainly died ! 
 
 And we declare our faith that the theme of that lost 
 leader's greatness will still be new, curious, alluring, in- 
 spiring, until America shall have failed of her memory, 
 until patriotism is senile, until self-sacrifice is no longer 
 cogent, until popular government is moribund and de- 
 mocracy is numbered with the lost arts. 
 
 In the city of Chicago, at the entrance of the beautiful 
 park that bears his name, there is placed commandingly 
 a statue of our greatest President. 
 
4 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 Doubtless nearly all of you are familiar with its noble 
 and unassuming pose. But what has always most im- 
 pressed my imagination is that which stands just behind 
 the exalted figure of the man — that empty chair ! Never 
 was vacant throne so suggestive and so full. Well might 
 those words have been sculptured there which Lincoln 
 uttered so early as 1858 — "Tho I now sink out of view, 
 I believe I have made some marks which will tell for the 
 cause of liberty long after I am gone." All of the memo- 
 rials of such a nature and the reminiscences of such a 
 life are significant and inestimably precious. We are to 
 be glad that the narrative by his partner, Herndon, both 
 establishes so much intimate fact and dispels so much 
 possible myth. It was an unusual witticism of Longfel- 
 low's that auto-biography is what biography ought to 
 be! In counterpart language, this close friend more 
 than any other, or than all others, sets forth the real 
 personality without gloss or apology. We want the neg- 
 ative to be untouched in a single line, that we may get 
 the truest impression of one who sat, quite behind what 
 any strange or casual eye could see, within a most sensi- 
 tive reticence. Frank as Lincoln was, unaustere, acces- 
 sible — there was an inwardness and reserve behind whose 
 further curtains few penetrated and they but seldom. It 
 is in his public words that we receive the deepest revela- 
 tions of the strong and longing soul, so tender and so 
 taciturn. His phenomenal gift of narrative was the 
 alleviation not the assertion of his inmost self. Talk 
 was his refuge from a proud and stately sorrow, — a 
 most pathetic and melancholy reverie. He was born 
 under the sign of Aquarius. His life was clouded and 
 rainy. Some of the sweetest sources of happiness were 
 frozen to him. His yearning spirit turned upon itself and 
 for the most part sealed its records. Upon that Crom- 
 wellian face (for tho it was more than Cromwell's, it was 
 
HIS INDIVIDUALITY 5 
 
 Cromwellian, wart and all) there were the seams of early 
 responsibility and long restraint, and in all the humor of 
 his smile there lurked the twitch of pain. 
 
 We all know the story of his early days — Kentucky, 
 Indiana, Illinois — the bare poverty, the indomitable 
 struggle to learn, the country law office with its rough 
 clinic of human beings — its pathology of affairs, his small 
 book lore and yet his keen literary susceptibility, that 
 apparent listlessness in which he thought, and thought, 
 and grew. All around, as we see it, what a wretched 
 school, and yet what a schooling God gave him there ! 
 Soft raiment never sat well upon that home-spun king. 
 Here, providentially, and out of the unlikeliest origins, 
 was six feet and four inches of man. Little thripenny 
 minds once sneered at his suburbanity and thought him 
 outlandish, but splitting fencing or riving sophistry, 
 steering a flatboat or a government, at the cabin hearth 
 or at the capital of the Republic, in county law or com- 
 mander of armies and fleets — that man, uncouth of limb 
 and courtly of heart, is always and only Abraham Lin- 
 coln! There was but one. There will be no other. 
 The mould is broken. "The case of that huge spirit is 
 now cold." 
 
 Where did he get that aquiline wit, that shrewd and 
 sensitive judgment, that pronged logic, that felicity of 
 instance, that sure touch of nature, that vital and saline 
 style? For he was cunning in the niceties of language 
 and coined wisdom into colloquial aphorism. What 
 tough sense, what absence of vaporing, what conclusive 
 directness, what sagacious transparency ! " Honest Old 
 Abe' ? — what a thirty-third degree of popular confidence 
 was that ! Which of us does not remember his wish that 
 other generals "would get some whisky of the same 
 kind" — his ballot-winning remark about "swapping 
 horses while crossing a stream " — his appealing fun over 
 
6 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 " Uncle Sam's web feet." Thackeray, once for all, defined 
 a snob as "one who admires mean thing's meanly." A 
 great man is one who seeks great things in a great way. 
 So was Lincoln great. He "never sold the truth to serve 
 the hour." 
 
 With marvelous development he rose to each new 
 demand and met it adequately, and there never was a 
 day when he was not more of a man than the day before. 
 Vast tact and absolute rectitude went together. He was 
 a student of occasion, but never in the shifty and selfish 
 sense an opportunist. He discerned concrete issues and 
 was no doctrinaire. He cared for results and was no 
 respecter of persons. He used what he could get and so 
 got what he could use, knowing how to pursue that high 
 expediency whose duty it is both to forego and to trans- 
 cend mere legalities. Astute in deliberation and biding 
 his time, he never surrendered to others one ounce of his 
 own responsibility and he proved his wisdom in taking 
 all the advice he could get and using what he thought 
 best. 
 
 "Gentle, plain, just and resolute," he surprised those 
 who had thought to control him, by his revelations of 
 aptitude and of decision. Lowell wrote : " While dealing 
 with unheard of complications at home, he must soothe 
 a hostile neutrality abroad, waiting only a pretext to 
 become war." What tasks were these and with what 
 untried tools ! His temper equalled the emergency. He 
 wielded war measures without flinching, yet always as 
 an elect citizen, and so loved both the Union and the 
 Constitution, that in their preservation he saved the one 
 from those who would have destroyed it, and the other 
 from those who would have defended it to death by quib- 
 bles. He saw that the Union was the very life of the Con- 
 stitution — that academic distinctions are trivial in a 
 struggle for existence — he could not consent to the cult 
 
HIS AUGUST PATIENCE 7 
 
 of a disembodied spirit, nor protect the constitution of a 
 corpse ! His elastic tact was also stubborn. He refused 
 to embroil us with angry England in the Trent affair, 
 yet made her better sense halt when thro the lips of Min- 
 ister Adams he said: ''It is unnecessary for me to re- 
 mind your lordship that this means war ! ' Even to 
 John Bull what "Hosea Bigelow" called "the fencin' 
 stuff," seemed likely to come a little too high ! 
 
 Lincoln's self-restraint was not that of "a being with- 
 out parts and passions," but of one controlling his forces 
 for use. Of slavery he said in '55: "I bite my lips and 
 keep quiet": but, a while later, stirred to the depths by 
 the seizure of a free black boy at New Orleans, he said — 
 and I take his indignation not as an oath but as a vow 
 — "By God, gentlemen, I'll make the ground of this 
 country too hot for the feet of slaves ! ' It was in that 
 resolve that he entered upon the great debate in Illinois. 
 He loved peace: but as a "just and lasting peace." "I 
 hope it will come soon, and come to stay, and so come as 
 to be worth the keeping for all future time." But his integ- 
 rity never blenched. His utterances always ' meant busi- 
 ness.' In the teeth of the counsels of timid friends he 
 crystalized the truth in 1858. "This Union cannot 
 endure, half slave and half free. A house divided against 
 itself cannot stand." Withal, his rugged patience was 
 as cautious, strategic, diplomatic, as it was persistent 
 and courageous. Patience in him became a genius, a 
 purpose that censors could neither hurry nor hinder. 
 
 ; ' He know to bide his time ; 
 
 And can his fame abide 
 Still patient, in his simple faith sublime. 
 
 Till the wise years decide. 
 Great captains with their guns and drums. 
 
 Disturb our judgments for the hour: 
 But at last silence comes. 
 
 These all are gone, and, standing like a tower. 
 
8 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 Our children shall behold his fame ; 
 
 The kindly, earnest, brave, far-seeing man, 
 Sagacious, patient, dreading praise, not blame. 
 
 New birth of our new soil, the first American." 
 
 This many-sided, yet directly simple President, this 
 greatest Democrat of history, ennobled the people by 
 trusting them and trusting himself to them, as they en- 
 nobled themselves by responding to that trust. "When 
 he speaks," (wrote Lowell in 1864, in that monumental 
 essay which I have before quoted) "it seems as if the 
 people were listening to their own thinking aloud." His 
 alert ear heard always that little click which precedes the 
 striking of the clock. "It is most proper (he said at 
 Buffalo) that I should wait and see the developments 
 and get all the light possible, so that when I do speak 
 authoritatively I may be as near right as possible/ ? 
 "Why should there not be (so went his first inaugural) 
 a patient confidence in the ultimate justice of the peo. 
 pie?" At "this great tribunal" he pleaded. "This is 
 essentially a peoples' contest," ran his first message. 
 
 He knew how to interpret public opinion, and it an- 
 swered him with a mighty and unbetrayed confidence. 
 He both roused it to self -recognition and registered its 
 vast resolve. He knew how to speak for the Nation, 
 without obtruding himself. He knew how to speak to 
 the nation as the voice of its own conscience. He had no 
 conceit of vocabulary. The, to me, most moving lyric 
 of those days utters that response of the nation, as the 
 deed vindicated the song : 
 
 "Six hundred thousand loyal men 
 
 And true have gone before. 
 And we're coming, Father Abraham, 
 Three hundred thousand more! " 
 
 Verily be had prophesied well, in his good-bye to the 
 citizens of Indianapolis: "Of the people when they rise 
 in mass in behalf of the union and liberties of their coun- 
 
HIS SUPREME FAITH 9 
 
 try, truly it may be said, ' The gates of Hell shall not 
 prevail against them.' " 
 
 This soul to whose noble abstraction and dedicated 
 purpose the small gossip of the world was naught, drank 
 deep the cup of vicarious pain. He paid daily the pen- 
 alty of heroic love. In his sympathy he became a sacri- 
 fice. He " bore his cross " for the soldiers in the field and 
 the mothers in their homes. And all the while he was 
 " sustained and cheered by an unfaltering trust," a 
 "faith that right makes might," "that in some way 
 men can not see all will be well in the end." He deserves 
 a place with "the elders who obtained a good report 
 thro faith," and yet who only foresaw Canaan and the 
 Christ to be. He came, like Moses, no further than 
 Pisgah. But he believed. He believed in himself, in 
 America, in man, in God, and in that faith he climbed the 
 steps of the altar. 
 
 He was at once a poet and a prophet ; he had that in- 
 tuition which is the common differential of both — that 
 insight which is foresight. For hear him, when leaving 
 Springfield for "a duty greater than has devolved upon 
 any man since Washington" — "Unless the great God 
 who assisted him shall be with me and aid me, I must 
 fail : but if the same omniscient and almighty Arm that 
 directed and protected him shall guide and support me, 
 I shall not fail — I shall succeed." By that token so was 
 it unto him. I read and reread that pathetic invocation, 
 I trace his growing trust in supreme mercy, I witness him 
 "lead the whole nation thro paths of repentance and 
 submission to the Divine will," I hear him urge "humble 
 penitence for national perverseness and disobedience," 
 and as our representative and spokesman say, "If every 
 drop of blood drawn by the lash thro years of unrequited 
 toil shall be repaid by one drawn by the bullet, still must 
 we say our God is righteous." I see him not shrinking 
 
10 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 nor counting the chances of his own life. And blessing 
 God for such a heart-born testimony as that one more,— 
 "Die when I may, I want it said of me by those who 
 knew me best that I always plucked a thistle and planted 
 a flower where I thought a flower would grow," — I chal- 
 lenge those who question his intrinsic truth toward the 
 Highest. 
 
 Whatever were his speculative doubts, born of wholly 
 inadequate religious teaching and hetchelled by exper- 
 iences that embitter many — justice, mercy, humility, 
 reverence, love, steadfast submission to God's will and 
 way, these are the elements of the piety that Heaven 
 accepts. He learned to pray and to intercede, and thro 
 a temperate life he pitied the widow and the fatherless 
 and kept himself unspotted from the world. " Pure relig- 
 ion and undefiled before God and the Father is this." 
 Who loves what Christ loves, loves Christ. This high 
 faith availed him in all affairs. He was no vagarist. Yet 
 seeing and seizing the possible, he strove toward the 
 stars. He was the most practical of idealists, believing 
 that what should be can be, and that what should be and 
 can be shall be ! 
 
 Per aspera ad astra — thro stripes to stars, for that 
 stands our dear flag. It is the seal of the national wed- 
 lock between each state and the Union, and that which 
 God hath joined together no man shall put asunder! 
 
 "Hard, heavy, knotty, gnarly, backed with wrath," 
 says Herndon, were Lincoln's words as in '56 he joined 
 the party pledged to resist the extension of slavery. 
 
 Lincoln felt the unconscious destiny of America and 
 helped, in the forefront, to abate the taunt of the world 
 that our eagle was but a vulture. In that stumbling 
 and disastrous night his soul was one that believed in 
 the morning. Only a base and bastard mind can forget 
 that he was a part of the great price wherewith we ob- 
 
HIS INDIVIDUALITY 11 
 
 tained this freedom. The lost cause of caste was a tri- 
 umphant failure. It freed the white man most. 
 " So find we profit by losing of our prayers." 
 "The struggle of today (said Lincoln's message of 
 December, 1861) is for a vast future also." Thankfully 
 I quote from that true poet,— Maurice Thompson : 
 
 " I love the South. I fought for her 
 
 From Lookout Mountain to the sea : 
 But from my lips thanksgivings broke, 
 
 When that black idol, breeding drouth 
 And dearth of human sympathy 
 
 Thro all our sweet and sensuous South, 
 Was, with its chains and human yoke, 
 
 Blown hell-ward from the cannon's mouth, 
 While Freedom cheered behind the smoke." 
 
 Gentlemen, recall, you who can, that Good Friday, all 
 those April days of 1865, when God " shewed us hard 
 things and made us to drink of the wine of astonish- 
 ment," — when victory was turned to mourning! 
 
 Horror, incredulity, anguish— one wild, convulsed 
 sob, "It can not, must not, shall not be!" And then 
 the reeling certainty that it was, and an orphaned nation 
 calling, "My father, my father, the chariot of Israel and 
 the horsemen thereof!' All the lowly of the Earth 
 mourned and in that mourning took hope for the uni- 
 versal cause of the people and so the great conclave of 
 human hearts canonized him by acclaim. Party passions 
 withered in that august homage. Critics and detractors 
 stood abashed or repentant. In the knowledge of what 
 it had lost the land first realized what it had had. 
 
 So that catafalque moved thro its slow procession of 
 sixteen hundred miles. Dirges, minute guns, flambeaux, 
 choirs, bells, and everywhere black misery and piteous 
 tears— at last, Springfield. The faithful tomb unveiled 
 its bosom to take to its trust this new treasure and the 
 troubled soul was at peace. But already that soul had 
 
12 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 begun to keep its endless Easter. The hand that penned 
 the proclamation has touched the hand of that lost child 
 whom the father's heart had never ceased to mourn. 
 Those steps have come out of tribulation to find that 
 One who " saved others and himself could not save." An 
 offering? Yes — his own tired and thankful soul ! A gift? 
 Y es _ not a sceptre, but a pen ; not a crown, but a broken 
 manacle. ' ' Well done, good and"— the gates are closed ! 
 
 Once more I cite him. "We cannot escape history. 
 The fiery trial thro which we pass will light us down in 
 honor or dishonor to the latest generation." To honor, 
 noble one I In contrast, how poor are the powers and 
 ambition of mere conquerors ! Where is the Bonaparte 
 by the side of that tall spirit. Lincoln has one solitary 
 peer in history — William of Orange, like himself , a martyr 
 to his patriotism. The first administration of Washing- 
 ton gives parallel in the state of the army, the treasury 
 and public opinion : but these were not war. The sorrow 
 for Hamilton is an analog. I think of these three as the 
 first three Americans. 
 
 If Lincoln had not the charm of Hamilton and the 
 urbane dignity of Washington, he had a sagacity rival- 
 ing the one, a patience rivaling the other, and a tenacity 
 that surpassed them both. But I would not compare 
 them ; I would blend them all. They have passed under 
 Time's impartial and dispassionate recognition. The 
 place of Lincoln is secure in the judgment of mankind. 
 Words can add nothing now to that monolithic fame. 
 Death hath no more dominion over him. He was the 
 top man of the century that is hurrying to its end. Let 
 the ascription of the French people, so significant in its 
 allusion to the lower empire, stand as our ultimate trib- 
 ute— "He saved the Republic without veiling the statue 
 of Liberty." 
 
II 
 
Hbrabam ^Lincoln 
 
 SAID TO THE REPUBLICAN CLUB OF 
 NEW YORK CITY, FEBRUARY 12, 1897. 
 
 y^^^gZM 
 
 
 xmmMm 
 
 
 
 UR President of the night, and my fellow- 
 Republicans, (without distinction as to 
 present condition of servitude) ; tho it is 
 somewhat out of my line, you will permit 
 me to remark that clubs are trumps. I 
 suppose I should add that of them all this 
 club is the ace. Certainly in the last twelvemonth a 
 remarkable hand has been played for all it was worth. 
 The superiority of the American lead to " bumble 
 puppy" has been demonstrated, and the absurd finesse 
 from a two-spot to a jack — from the platform to the 
 candidate — having failed, the best hand won by tre- 
 mendous odds, with what Charles Lamb delighted in, — 
 " A clean hearth, a good fire and the rigors of the game." 
 Brighter days are at the door. Empiricism is passing. 
 A trusty leader, with his party about him, will carry us 
 over the glad threshold of the new Century. 
 
 But to my errand,— the holiday and the man. Thanks, 
 under God, to him whose singular greatness is the token 
 of all these your greetings, we have a Republic undivided 
 and indivisible ! Your name and history is national ; so 
 be your sympathies and your endeavors. He whom we 
 are met to celebrate was a Republican, and was not 
 ashamed to say so. Confusion is revealed in the sterility 
 of the hybrid. Be it ours to wear the name of Republican 
 as he defined and ennobled it, who held party as an in- 
 strument, politics as his opportunity, patriotism his 
 motive, and the people's ultimate truth his goal. 
 
 Upon this radiant and solemn anniversary you are 
 
16 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 assembled to relight the torch of the ' Wide-awake ' and 
 the flambeau of mourning, gazing thro all upon yonder 
 untorn emblem, — the guerdon of our awful travail when 
 freedom was reborn and the guidon of our forward 
 marching. Beautiful flag ! He loved it and maintained 
 it. It is dearer for his true sake ! In the crises and ex- 
 actions of the unrevealed years may the great price of 
 which he was part never be forgotten; may its folds 
 never be dimmed by dishonor, nor its glory abated by 
 the recreancy of those nursed under its shelter ! Having 
 beamed over broken manacles, may it never blush over 
 broken promises or timid counsels ! From fort and fleet, 
 from school and Capitol and home, let it float unsullied 
 — the morning-bloom of freedom and equal justice to all 
 who hope because they remember. And if by foes with- 
 out, or direr foes within, its true meaning shall ever be 
 menaced, may it be protected and lifted higher yet by 
 hands that shall take heart of grace in recalling that 
 knight of the axe and master of the pen who made ours, 
 whatever else it shall be, Lincoln's land. 
 
 Eighty-and-eight years ago his birthday. Long ere 
 this, even with no foreclosure, he would have died. How 
 swift are the years ! Thirty-six backward and last night, 
 the fair skies weeping, he was saying his good-by to 
 Springfield neighbors. Thirty-six years tomorrow, and 
 in the House of Representatives, while hate howled its 
 impotence, the electoral vote was officially declared. Let 
 not that time of astonishment and trembling be named 
 without recalling how Dix and Holt and Stanton stood 
 fast, while Floyd and Thompson and the rest were rot- 
 ting like maggots from a torch ! And with all the true 
 in deathless fame, name that last of the better Whigs — 
 that rugged Virginian — Winfield Scott, (do not forget 
 that also Thomas and Farragut were of the 'Old Domin- 
 ion' !) whose loyalty in those first frightening days alone 
 
THE LIKENESSES 17 
 
 safeguarded the all-important seat of government, and 
 who, when Wigfall asked whether "If for an overt act he 
 would dare arrest a Senator of the United States," re- 
 plied: "No; I would blow him to Hell!" Such deter- 
 mination sent the familiar spirits of secession to their 
 own place. There was "a dread Scott" decision worth 
 having. 
 
 Far more, gentlemen, than we are wont to realize, does 
 the dissemination of their whole biographies spread the 
 influence and perpetuate the motives of our lamented 
 and departed leaders. Thro all the first half of this cen- 
 tury the popular knowledge of Washington thus diffused 
 was an incalculable, however unrecognized, force in edu- 
 cating that loyal sentiment lying back of the tremen- 
 dous resolution which the Sixties registered and fulfilled. 
 Speaking of the hold had upon him by the story of the 
 Jersey campaign, Lincoln himself said; "I remember 
 thinking that these men must have been encouraged by 
 something uncommon to suffer so willingly." 
 
 The lately issued volume, by Ida Tarbell, that has 
 gathered so much that is new and nearly all that can be 
 authentic concerning Lincoln's early life merits our full- 
 est attention. With each item and shred of such a story 
 every American heart should be familiar. But to my 
 thinking the numerous and various portraitures, many 
 of them not before printed, are of pre-eminent impor- 
 tance. These, even alone, in a sequence which clearly 
 exhibits the development of his character, contain the 
 supreme biography. The last seven years of his life are 
 in those likenesses. There is the story of the great war. 
 His brow changes from 1861 to 1864 as if under the 
 pressure of thrice as many years. And under the shadow 
 and palimpsest of strife is — peace! His representative 
 responsibility for a people's trial and doubt and victory 
 is told there, and 
 
18 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 " There was a manhood in his look 
 That murder could not kill." 
 
 What a personality, and what a story ! How acutely, 
 how exhaustlessly fascinating is its pathos! My poor 
 sickle can only glean. At first, as we think of his heredity 
 and environment, we wonder how such a man could have 
 issued from such circumstances: but reflecting, we dis- 
 cern that those antecedents were not accidental, but 
 providential, and that the God who intended the result 
 furnished the disciplines. 
 
 Sprung from the loins of the people to be their leader 
 and commander, he was one by whom it shall always 
 mean more to be an American and a man ! God was the 
 tutor of this great commoner, and, as he so often said, 
 " God knows what is best." One of that God's surprises 
 — his career — is a standing rebuke of all dilettante idle- 
 ness and freezes the sneer upon the thin lips of caste. He 
 inherited his father's frame and his mother's heart as 
 his sole fortune. They w r ere enough. They gave him, as 
 his pre-eminent traits, that courage and that sympathy 
 which w r ere the outfit of a peerless manhood. 
 
 Humanly speaking, he was never brought up — he 
 came up, by hardest struggle, thro dismal lack and 
 stark necessity. But up he came and up he stands for- 
 ever, distinctly the typical American nobleman. Let 
 those who would hold the stirrup of alien underlings and 
 play the flunkey to titular rank, however rank its 
 ignobility, summon their scant brains to consider this 
 indigenous soul and to learn that no cradle of Plantag- 
 enet or Hanover, of Bourbon, Hapsburg or Branden- 
 burg, ever rocked so much of immortal renown. 
 
 Opportunity for the lowliest to become the loftiest, — 
 this is the lesson of that frontier hovel. Spite of all con- 
 trary opinion, true beauty and integrity of manhood is 
 not incompatible either with harsh beginnings or with 
 
HIS MATERIAL 19 
 
 the strenuous exactions of affairs. His education, as 
 Lincoln said, was "picked up under the pressure of neces- 
 sity." Of school attendance one year was all he had. 
 But always a learner, he came at last in practical wis- 
 dom to be a scholar and to the last day of his life he 
 grew in mental and moral stature. How must that 
 example of painful struggle toward self-improvement 
 shame the most of us ! For who of us has made his best 
 of those advantages for which this backwoodsman pined 
 in vain ? 
 
 His books were chiefly these: — Burns, "The Pilgrim's 
 Progress," Shakespeare, Weem's "Life of Washington," 
 the English Bible. But these he knew. Of the Bible he 
 memorized much. Its style and actual phrase were at 
 his large command, and its supreme ideas, as well as its 
 elastic idiom, gave power to many of his most critical 
 utterances. This apparatus of education, gentlemen, if 
 small, w r as not meagre — allegory, humor, moral imagin- 
 ation, dramatic feeling, patriotic history, folk-lore, devo- 
 tion, — these were in those few but potent books. He 
 mastered his material and one language sufficed him. 
 No one can ponder the substance, the solidity, the tact, 
 the appeal of that majestic second inaugural and not 
 feel that here was a master of arpeggios. Who, to take 
 an earlier instance, can consider the acumen and precis- 
 ion of his emendation of Seward's State despatch over 
 the matter of the Trent affair and not confess Lincoln as 
 "cunning with the pen" as he was astute in diplomacy? 
 
 Carlyle wrote, "All true greatness is melancholy." 
 There ran thro this introspective soul a deep vein of sen- 
 timent. The sad-faced child became a brooding and 
 silently yearning man. He saw visions and dreamed 
 dreams. His adroit humor is pathetic as we think how 
 truly he could have said, after Desdemona, 
 " I am not merry ; but I do beguile 
 The thing I am by seeming otherwise." 
 
20 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 There was a minor note which gave the people's heart 
 a near access to him which few had as individuals ; for 
 most reverently we can say that he, too, was "a man of 
 sorrows and acquainted with grief." Much misery had 
 taught him mercy, and there is a most plaintive longing 
 in that admonition to his little Tad, — "My boy, I would 
 have the whole human race your friends and mine." Lin- 
 coln's love of that poem, " Oh, Why Should the Spirit of 
 Mortal Be Proud?" has re-written it, and not for "Tril- 
 by," but for his sake, who loved it dearly, will we still 
 sing "Ben Bolt." For he, too, had his "sweet Alice" — 
 long dead. 
 
 Farmhand, flatboatman, store-clerk, land surveyor 
 (as was Washington), militiaman, county lawyer, then 
 all at once the heart and the will of a mighty party — 
 nay, of a people ; then the object lesson of the world ; 
 then the lament of a generation ; then — immortal ! The 
 path fitted the goal. For his sake, if for no other, the 
 Potomac and the Ohio and the Sangamon are the "three 
 principal rivers" of America. What a time was that for 
 which he came to his more than kingdom ! Curtis said : 
 "The world sneered as it listened, and laughed at a Re- 
 public founded upon liberty and afraid to speak the 
 word at home. Our feet had slipped to the very brink 
 of the pit and were scorched with fire." The Missouri 
 Compromise had been repealed. The "Dred Scott" 
 decision had seemed to make the Ship of State a slave- 
 ship ! The President's place, as one has sternly said, was 
 vacant, while James Buchanan drew the salary ! 
 
 The Chicago Convention of 1860 did not realize all it 
 had done in placing its banner in Lincoln's hand : but 
 which one of all his apparent peers could so have borne 
 it ? Neither he nor the wisest could then have compre- 
 hended his mission or its grandeur. But he went on his 
 way "with firmness to do the right as God gave him to 
 
THE RESPONSE 21 
 
 seethe right," and the common people, who once had 
 flocked to listen to his court pleas, still flocked and still 
 listened to their leader. 
 
 With what broad sagacity he composed the first Cabi- 
 net and with what surprise they discovered the calm 
 self-reliance and determination of their master! From 
 the outset his remarkable estimating of men, his keen 
 perception of aptitude, his dignified independence, his 
 finality of cautious decision, stood revealed. No 'boss' 
 whispered behind that chair which some before him had 
 occupied, but which Lincoln abundantly filled. He re- 
 deemed the Chief Magistracy from those associations of 
 mediocrity which a Tyler, a Polk, a Pierce had imposed 
 upon it. Such as this unshorn Nazarite be all our Presi- 
 dents to come ! Seward had imagined that for himself 
 to be Secretary of State was to be first in the Cabinet 
 group, but he learned that even he was as a boy driving 
 with a father's hands over his upon the reins ! He recog- 
 nized the situation, as later Stanton also did,— Stanton, 
 so magnanimously appointed and whose affection was 
 at once his own rarest honor and to his chief the most 
 masculine tribute. Would that Chase had been as 
 great ! 
 
 Then came the solemn "So help me God!" of that 
 fourth of March, and when, after the long suspense dur- 
 ing the first part of that deliverance, the shout of the 
 concourse broke out in floods, rebuking the faces of dis- 
 loyal hate that glowered about, this Union knew that it 
 had found not only an official, but a man! As over 
 Israel's first King, " Certain sons of Belial said, 'How 
 shall this man save us?' : but he held his peace." Fast 
 went the strange, foreboding days until there came the 
 hour of that other Kentuckian— Robert Anderson! 
 Then rang out the awful trumpet, and every good hand 
 was at the halliards. Up went the flag to the watchword 
 
22 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 of John A. Dix. This city was scarlet with it as never 
 since — save once. The Sixth Massachusetts marched 
 out of your Astor House to the tune of "Yankee 
 Doodle!" After her swept your own true Seventh to 
 the Capital. Stephen A. Douglass (and for that we for- 
 get all else) declared: "When hostile armies are march- 
 ing under new and odious banners against our common 
 country, the shortest road to peace lies in the most 
 unanimous and stupendous preparation for war ! " There 
 leaped the live thunder and every rattling crag of Lib- 
 erty answered it ! 
 
 Sounded out mightily the first of those proclamations 
 demanding the great price of freedom ! Then from the 
 lumber camps of the Androscoggin and the Escanaba; 
 from the quarries of Vermont and New Hampshire ; from 
 the fishing-smacks of Massachusetts and the spindles of 
 Rhode Island ; from the colleges of Connecticut and New 
 York and Ohio; from the mines of Pennsylvania and 
 Michigan ; from the counting-rooms of the cities of Sam 
 Adams and Alexander Hamilton and Ben Franklin, and 
 cities a hundred more; from the Adirondacks and the 
 Alleghanies and the far Sierras ; from village and prairie 
 and lakeside and highway, there rose the answer of the 
 free — "All up! " The old Liberty Bell that so long had 
 slumbered found its voice again. The giant was awake ! 
 
 Froude, of whom Birrel writes that his "antipathies 
 seemed stronger than his sympathies," declared in Feb- 
 ruary, 1864, "Washington might well have hesitated to 
 draw the sword against England could he have seen the 
 country which he made as we see it now.'' The trouble 
 with some Britons, gentlemen, (thank God not all!) has 
 been that they spelled the word prophets with an "f" 
 and an "i." There was another England— the England 
 of the Prince Consort and of John Bright. But desper- 
 ate indeed were those ransoming years. In 1860 we only 
 
THE TENSION 23 
 
 hoped that we had a country. In 1865 we knew that it 
 was more than we had asked or thought. 
 
 While the plough rusted and the anvil was dumb, one 
 high soul never doubted nor hesitated. Leading always, 
 even when he seemed only to follow, he was the piston 
 behind which the pulse of the people pushed irresistibly. 
 Firm, conservative, moderate, sure, this great emanci- 
 pator understood that there is a time to wait and a 
 time to strike. Too swift for some, too slow for others, 
 his vast common-sense, his judgment, that became an 
 intuition, perceived both the right word and the right 
 moment. Wendell Phillips, whose electricity was so much 
 of it generated by the reaction between metal and vit- 
 riol, called Lincoln a "tortoise"; but Lowell said "he 
 knew to bide his time." 
 
 At a New Orleans slave auction in the forties he had 
 said of that devilish system: "If I ever get a chance to 
 hit it, I will hit it hard." When the hour struck he 
 crushed it forever and now there is none so low but does 
 him reverence. Can you not see him (when at last the 
 dream of Sophism was broken to awake and find itself 
 empty) pressing the streets of fallen Richmond, and can 
 you not hear that aged negro: "May the good Lord 
 bress you, Massa Linkum"! Silently the great man 
 raises his hat, bows and passes by. There fell the bene- 
 diction of a disenthralled race and there responded the 
 salutation of a martyr — the true moriturus saluto of a 
 gladiator in the arena of Time and from under the shad- 
 ows of Death. 
 
 What words, what elemental words, he spake — this 
 unconditional man! What a repertoire are his untar- 
 nished phrases of patriotism and high devotion! His 
 proclamations were battles, conclusions, anthems. Apt 
 in adage and apothegm, his illustrated speech, so homely 
 yet so constructive, was like that of zEsop and his plain 
 
24 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 wisdom was most of all like that of Socrates. "I have 
 talked with great men/' said Lincoln, "and I do not see 
 how they differ from others." No, not in talk, in mean- 
 ing, nor in wit, so much as in the will to use these wisely. 
 Lincoln had that true oratory which in Webster's words 
 "does not consist in speech, but exists in the man, in the 
 occasion and in the subject." Candor, conviction, clear- 
 ness — these were his ; and of him David Davis said : "All 
 facts and principles had to run thro the crucible of an 
 inflexible judgment." 
 
 This homely oracle, tho never clouded by abstrac- 
 tions, was withal a supreme idealist. He saw above the 
 storm the white-winged Angel of Peace, and therefore 
 with all his heart and soul he urged forward the neces- 
 sary war. 
 
 Having handled every rung of the ladder, Lincoln was 
 in all things practical. He would jettison any theory to 
 save the fact. Intense, yet tranquil ; temperate, yet un- 
 austere; bold, but never rash; informal, but self-respect- 
 ing; as modest as resolute, — his were no footlight graces. 
 
 He felt for others, and plain men trusted him by in- 
 stinct. Himself walking upon hot ploughshares, he 
 smiled and looked up ! He loved the whole nation and 
 the whole nation now loves him. In him the South that 
 was lost its ablest friend, and the South that is has 
 come to know it. 
 
 In the study of that lofty individuality I note first his 
 courage. Of desponding temperament, he was the stub- 
 born conqueror of his own fears. That critical utterance 
 concerning "a house divided" recalls it. Manipulators 
 shrank, time-servers winced, friends protested, but with 
 all the fearlessness of Luther at Worms he said: "By 
 this statement I will stand or fall." That declaration 
 was at once a war and a peace — a peace with honor. 
 There this Atlas bowed his back to lift a world ! Detrac- 
 
HIS CONFIDENCE 25 
 
 tion and jeers but steadied him. His was that forbear- 
 ance which in the words of Governor Black's late inaug- 
 ural, "is the highest proof of courage." When the tumid 
 press ranted, raved, caricatured, he told the story of the 
 man who prayed in a frightful thunder-storm, "Oh, 
 Lord, a little more light and a little less noise!" He 
 replied to nervous advisers in 1863: "Grant tells me 
 that by the Fourth of July he will take Vicksburg and I 
 believe he will do it; and he shall have the chance." It 
 was done. In April, 1864, he put his whole confidence in 
 that same Grant, saying to him as he went down to that 
 awful reaping, "With a brave army and a just cause, 
 may God sustain you ! ' When Early, in 1864, checked 
 but not stopped by the tremendous resistance of Lew 
 Wallace at Monocacy, thundered at the very gates of 
 Washington, Lincoln never doubted, but waited for the 
 Sixth Corps and deliverance. 
 
 His courage was rooted in his sublime faith. It was 
 exceptional, absolute, grand. It moved mountains. His 
 central power was moral. Herndon said, "His con- 
 science is his ruling attribute." Mr. L. E. Chittenden, in 
 his invaluable "Reminiscences," has collected in a whole 
 chapter Lincoln's own and many words as a devout be- 
 liever in the power of the Highest. It should forever 
 stop the mouths of gainsayers, whether infidel or theo- 
 logical. "Whatsoever shall appear to be God's will I 
 will do," was his constant attitude, and than that 
 naught can deeper go. 
 
 This is of record : Upon the third day after the "Peach 
 Orchard" Lincoln called upon the wounded Sickles. I 
 have had it also from Sickles' own lips. Talking of the 
 great slaughter, with streaming eyes the President told 
 of his own assurance of the result, of his praying in his 
 own locked room as never before: "I told God that I 
 had done all that I could, and that now the result was 
 
26 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 in His hands ; that if the country was to be saved it was 
 because He so willed it. The burden rolled off my shoul- 
 ders, my intense anxiety was relieved, and in its place 
 came a great trustfulness ; and that was why I did not 
 doubt the result at Gettysburg." Others for themselves 
 may say what they like of that ; I say that it is the de- 
 monstration of one anointed — of the Nation's High Priest. 
 
 Diplomat, strategist, master of speech, monarch of 
 occasions, humane, believing, often did he weep; but 
 never did he flinch or falter; and, when he was not, it 
 was with "abundant entrance" that he went to find his 
 Anne Rutledge and his Lord! "Oh, piteous end!" 
 "Fallen, cold and dead" the Captain lies. That face, 
 with all its rugged honesty, its homely beauty, its lines 
 of leadership in suffering, its august peace, is gone ! The 
 long columns that tread Pennsylvania avenue, with the 
 smoke of the great sacrifice behind them, will not salute 
 the chief. 
 
 But those other squadrons invisible that crowd the 
 air—the loyal legions of those who have passed from the 
 camp-fire to the Hosanna, from the blood-red bayonet 
 to the wreath of amaranth, "the great cloud of wit- 
 nesses" — there is he, passed over to the ranks of the im- 
 mortal great. At its very meridian, snatched from our 
 skies, that soul shines on and will shine "till the stars 
 are cold." 
 
 The completions of such a life are not withheld— they 
 are transfused. We are today what Lincoln helped us to 
 become. That God he so trusted and served grant that 
 this may be the nation Lincoln strove and died to make 
 it. His work is not yet done. That tale, fit for the 
 foundation of a mighty drama, worthy of a deathless 
 epic, will never be exhausted while the last American 
 remains who is a man. The hills sink as we leave them, 
 the mountains rise. 
 
THE LESSON 21 
 
 Once more, if you are true Republicans, by this im- 
 mutable renown are you bidden to that patriotism to 
 which all narrower titles are but subordinate and instru- 
 mental. This people's man certifies to us that the Re- 
 public must voice the people, else it shall sink into 
 autocracy, plutocracy, oligarchy, anarchy. So God 
 purge us of bad men and their bad ways. 
 
 " Bring me men to match my mountains, 
 
 Bring me men to match my plains ; 
 Men with empires in their purpose 
 
 And new eras in their brains ; 
 Pioneers to clear thought's marshlands 
 
 And to cleanse old error's fen ; 
 Bring me men to match my mountains — 
 
 Bring me men! " 
 
 We shall be just as good a party as we are determined 
 to be. We shall have just as good leaders as we deserve 
 — no better. We must summon to our ranks and be 
 worthy to keep there all who love our Nation's truth, 
 and who fear not to voice its conscience, at every haz- 
 ard. We must be sworn anew not to surrender our inde- 
 pendence to unauthorized proxies. We must hold to the 
 most exact audit the men we select and trust — to watch, 
 to cheer, to correct, to promote or to depose them. 
 
 Ship of State! 
 "In what a forge and what a heat 
 
 Were shaped the anchors of thy hope! 
 
 ******* 
 
 Our hearts, our hopes, our prayers, our tears, 
 Our faith, triumphant o'er our fears, 
 Are all with thee." 
 

 
Ill 
 
 
 

 
Hbrabam ^Lincoln 
 
 SAID AT CARLISLE, PA., 1900; AT SYRACUSE, N. Y., 
 1903; AT NEW BRITAIN, CONN, 1903; AT YOUNGSTOWN, 
 OHIO, 1904; AT PEORIA, ILL., 1908; AT GRAND RAPIDS, 
 MICH., 1909; AT THE COOPER UNION, NEW YORK CITY, 
 1910; AT INDIANAPOLIS, IND., 1911; AT UTICA, N Y., 
 1917; AND FOR SUBSTANCE FIVE TIMES ELSEWHERE. 
 
 F5S" 
 
 
 j 
 
 ISTORY is the study of personal deeds. 
 Their dramatic example is the sum of all 
 precept. The physical world is but the 
 scenery of those events in which great 
 leaders find their following. We speak to- 
 night of "a life 
 Given for the life of the whole live land." 
 The story of Lincoln does not wear out. That sincere 
 and intrepid personality lacks not one element of appeal 
 to reverent gratitude, to affection, to imagination, to 
 courage. It is the deepest and humanly most dear thing 
 in the annals of America. We are hungry for every 
 authentic item as to what he wrought and was. It is all 
 so simple and attainable that it is not to be exploited, 
 but only explained. Its mystical charm, its ripple of 
 rare music, is no theme for mere rhapsody and boister- 
 ous rhetoric, but for quiet reason, asking apostrophe 
 as little as the polar star! Needing no superlatives, there 
 he stands, — "one of Plutarch's men" — serenely fair, a 
 point for us steadfastly to steer by thro all the weathers 
 of change. 
 
 Introducing his 'Spirit of the Laws,' Montesquieu 
 said — "If this work meets success, I shall owe it to the 
 grandeur and majesty of the subject." Let the sermon 
 be hidden by its text. Let us recite fond names that 
 
32 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 ourselves may be surer of what is really potent and that 
 our kindled emulations may effectually perpetuate the 
 deeds of the just. "A people is but the attempt of the 
 many to rise to the completer life of one." 
 
 Let Abraham Lincoln rebuke those who shelter under 
 the banyan-trees of genealogy, prizing themselves that 
 they 'are not as other men are'; for not source and cir- 
 cumstance, but the man, rules every epic. He fellowed 
 his time and walking with the multitude he taught the 
 multitude to march with him. "Many kings have sat 
 down upon the ground and one that never was thought 
 of hath worn the crown." 
 
 Chronology is an excellent framework. About these 
 clustering ten thousand events, one hundred major 
 dates sketch the world. Fifty out-standing lives give us 
 the bed-plates and rafters of our American house. 
 Typical biographies reflect the eras their men created. 
 
 This month of February is enriched for us by the anni- 
 versaries of our two chief political ancestors — one, under 
 God, Father of our Country, one its Preserver. Each of 
 these thought continentally, served to the full, and lives 
 immortal. We consider the issue of their lives that we 
 may better imitate their faith. Copy them, repeat them, 
 none can. There could be no ' understudy ' of Washing- 
 ton and to pose as a resemblance of Lincoln would be 
 only ludicrous. Each was his own largest self. But these 
 vital men if not our models are our mentors. They im- 
 part their great motives, and by our estimate of them 
 we are judged. "To turn events into ideas — (writes 
 San ty ana) — is the function of literature." But to turn 
 ideas into events is the function of life ! Thus we recon- 
 struct the story into new fact and in our turn dare live. 
 
 Some persons are temperamentally incapable to under- 
 stand Lincoln. Would we, who praise him dead, have 
 appreciated him living? It is an emaciated pedantry to 
 
THE ACTUAL MAN 33 
 
 " garnish the sepulchres of the prophets'' and then to 
 refuse faithfully to meet the crises of our times ! If Lin- 
 coln's spirit shall no more be our monitor, laud him as 
 we may, we are no more his heirs ! To extol the departed, 
 yet to abandon living moral leadership, is not even a 
 good plagiarism. 
 
 It cannot be mine to tell you any new thing of this 
 prevailing man: but only to urge your more resolute 
 honor of his name, thinking of him the while as a dear 
 personal friend,— thanking God that thro Lincoln we 
 did not break up housekeeping and that these war- 
 welded states are a Nation at peace and not in pieces ! 
 
 We must demand to know the actual Lincoln — the 
 whole of him, without omission, glamour or apology, 
 without artifice or myth,— all that he did and spake— 
 his homemade fashion, his temperament, ambitions, 
 means, obstacles, — his large laughter, his splendid wrath 
 — we will have him just as he was! 
 
 Every reflection of him therefore — Hapgood, Hay, 
 Herndon, Stoddard, Carpenter, Chittenden, and the rest ; 
 the early details of Ida Tarbell's book, but especially 
 those likenesses, showing the imprint of that last decade 
 of swift, solemn years— the pain, the patience, the pur- 
 pose; — we want all of it, undecorated and undissembled. 
 
 We want everything he said or wrote; the Douglas 
 debate, his proclamations, his letters (and this was one 
 he took time to pen) : "I have been shown in the files of 
 the War Department a statement of the Adjutant-Gen- 
 eral of Massachusetts that you are the mother of five 
 sons who have died gloriously on the field of battle. I 
 feel how weak and fruitless must be any words of mine 
 which would attempt to beguile you from the grief of a 
 loss so overwhelming. But I cannot refrain from tender- 
 ing to you the consolation that may be found in the 
 thanks of the Republic they died to save. I pray that 
 
34 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your 
 bereavement and leave you only the cherished memory 
 of the loved and lost and the solemn pride that must be 
 yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of 
 freedom." (Nov. 21, 1864.) What four sentences are 
 these ! 
 
 Yes, and his blunt personalities ; his jokes ; his caustic 
 logic; the law-brief memorandum — "Skin defendant"; 
 those syllables at Gettysburg, showing how straight and 
 far one thinks who thinks with his heart ; and that tre- 
 mendous "lost speech," at whose close the audience 
 heaved toward him with one terrible roar of resolve, 
 while out of the clouds of passion blazed the angry light- 
 nings of war! His words are his open and electrical 
 secret. They were deeds, campaigns. We want to know 
 what others said to him and of him and what the world 
 says of him now — this huge wonder! 
 
 We would see his great ears; his shambling, bony 
 length ; that big determined nose ; those honest, twink- 
 ling, tender, far away, eyes; his strange, mobile and 
 capable mouth ; his strong, affectionate chin ; his tousled 
 hair ! We would consider the mold of that experienced 
 
 hand — 
 
 " The hand of Anak, sinewed strong, 
 
 The fingers that on greatness clutch ; 
 Yet lo ! the marks their lines along 
 
 Of one who strove and suffered much. 
 
 Lo, as 1 gaze, the statured man, 
 Built up from yon large hand, appears, 
 
 A type that Nature wills to plan 
 But once in all a people's years ! 
 
 All is indispensable. All belongs to us. Lincoln is ours! 
 
 In his concentrated person was the unrecognised spirit 
 
 of his time and into that he led even those who could 
 
 not or would not understand him. How far he was un- 
 
THE BLIND CRITICS 35 
 
 comprehended let the scurrile, but well-repented, jests of 
 Punch, not only, but of Harper's testify;— the biting 
 assaults of the Tribune and the gibes of editors a hun- 
 dred more. And yet Horace Greeley lived to write, ''Lin- 
 coln was the foremost convincer of his time." 
 
 It is well to recall that popular impatience of him and 
 his words that answered it: "We accepted this war for 
 an object, a worthy object, and the war will end when 
 that object is attained. Under God, I hope it never will 
 end until that time." 
 
 To collate the spleen vomited upon him in the elec- 
 toral campaign of 1864 would show the endurance to 
 which he was called. Alas, they knew not what they 
 
 did ! But hear— 
 
 "The election of Lincoln means anarchy." (Indianap. Sen. 
 
 Sept. 18.) 
 
 "If Lincoln is re-elected the liberties of the people are gone 
 
 forever." (NilesRep.) 
 
 " Ought he not to receive the eternal maledictions of the white 
 race ? " (Cin. Enq. Sept. 24. ) 
 
 But why quote more of a malignity and raving rivalled 
 only by the villification once poured upon Washington ! 
 Verily, these purblind fools have also their award from 
 
 history ! 
 
 Before pencil of caricature and pen of travesty ; before 
 these who scolded, snubbed, patronized, lampooned, 
 him ; who deemed character by clothes and courage by 
 declamation, his sorrowful and stately spirit stood as 
 some tall tower stands to the wind and rain. He ex- 
 pected men to desert him : but, artist that he was in 
 humility and in patience, he bore and waited. With his 
 vast resolution and audacious tenacity there went also 
 a beautiful forbearance and a sublime magnanimity, 
 and in these he rose a royal head above his rash and 
 vociferating censors. Judge Davis bore witness— " I 
 
36 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 never heard Lincoln complain of anything." But that 
 he felt it all is told in his pathetic avowal — "I have en- 
 dured a great deal of ridicule without much malice, and 
 have received a great deal of kindness not quite free 
 from ridicule. I am used to it." 
 
 Where did he come from, — this big being, "striding 
 out of the woods of the west"? He was no angel, he 
 walked the ground. Born into the rough cradle of the 
 pioneer, all about those earliest days was squalid and 
 raw. He knew the earth and the axe. Daily bread was 
 a problem in that dismal frontier cabin, with its door of 
 slabs and no windows. A little lad he climbed to his bed 
 of leaves in the loft by a row of pegs driven into the log 
 walls. (Always he was climbing, a peg at a time !) But 
 we need not linger at that hovel ; both because it is all 
 painfully familiar, and because every exceptionally orig- 
 inal man is unprecedented and not explicable by environ- 
 ment. We only know that so it was, and that 
 
 " As the Sun breaks thro the darkest clouds 
 So honor peereth in the meanest habit." 
 
 Thank God for that blessed stepmother— Sarah Bush 
 Lincoln, whose kind heart first wakened and warmed the 
 yearning soul of the solitary boy! She began him. 
 
 This reassuring and necessary man comforts us that 
 in the loins of Democracy are those who shall arise to 
 vindicate man-right, and to refute the Brahmin. Time's 
 surprises have always been ' laid in a manger ' and come 
 out of some Nazareth. In the crucible of penury and 
 privation Lincoln became in the noblest sense a Stoic 
 and a Spartan. He was indigenous to plain men— the 
 great average of the world— and knowing them he was 
 always toward them. "So long (said he) as I have the 
 memory of my hard-working, hard-fisted father, the 
 people will have my heart." Thus he stood against 
 
HIS MENTAL MUSCLE 37 
 
 oligarchy and eYery-archy that oppresses manhood, in 
 a day when the Republicans were the true democrats. 
 
 Grounded by emergency and drilled by fact he was 
 ever stripping away the merely incidental and striving 
 to manage the essential idea, studying reality, holding 
 each expediency as a step to the end. With none of the 
 advantages, nor the disadvantages, of possession, he had 
 self-possession and split his way along. He drove each 
 rung he climbed by. He built his own stairs. "Never 
 schooled and yet learned" he entered life heavily con- 
 ditioned and sat upon the lowest bench in the plain pri- 
 mary of hardship. Like Moses he was forty years in get- 
 ting his education there : but he graduated with honor 
 from the great university of America, in the class of 
 1865 ! and into a fame which himself made and none can 
 mar. For ease and power are of inverse ratio. It is 
 strain that knits men. He who quarrels with the ordi- 
 nary as insipid or trivial will not recognize the great 
 occasion when it comes. Limitations, which for a weaker 
 spirit smother aspiration, often reveal fitness to survive. 
 Where the radish strikes the stone and is stunted, the 
 oak grapples it, surrounds it, builds it into its own foun- 
 dation and anchors into a second century ! 
 
 Abraham Lincoln is the standing rebuke of caste, and 
 of the whole hyper-valuation of apparatus. Few are 
 willing to master the tonic lessons of adversity, tho the 
 tuition is free : but this stubborn soul endured hardness 
 all the way. What he was he had and little else, and he 
 is a saving offset for the emetic trifler and the litter of 
 snobs, who care more for "Who's Who?" than for 
 what's what! His grace was fairness, his dignity hon- 
 esty, his etiquette no Delsartian affectation, but the 
 good manners of the heart. Imagination, invention, 
 initiative, were bred of his sinewy experience. 
 
38 ABBAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 When a country store-clerk he bought of a passing 
 emigrant an old barrel and found in it a tattered copy 
 of Blackstone. That settled it. Now he knew what he 
 wanted and the choice was made which bore upon the 
 resultant man. At every date making the most of what 
 he had, he was always becoming more and learning 
 that ingenuity and ingenuousness which were to stand 
 him in well at last. For the bulk and heft of education 
 is moral. Application is more than appliances. We do 
 not judge a workman by the novelty of his tools. A 
 small school may issue large scholars. His fibrous, 
 wiry and limber mind held like a vise all it gained. It 
 was screwed in. The old spelling-school, the flat-boat, the 
 village wrestling-match, the primitive circuit-riding, — 
 these, and then— Lincoln! He felt for the hinges and 
 handles of things, and tempered his plain tools to the 
 hardest point. To know just what "demonstrate" 
 meant, he resolutely mastered the six books of Euclid. 
 Thus he taught himself to avoid the irrelevant, to get 
 the gist and core, to find order and clarity — to become 
 the keenest cross-examiner and best all-around jury- 
 lawyer in Illinois. "I was afraid some of them might 
 not know him" !— "If Douglas answers my question, it 
 may cost me the Senatorship but it will cost him the 
 Presidency." — His summary of the noisy doctrine of 
 alleged ' Popular Sovereignty' — "If any man choose to 
 enslave another, no third man shall be allowed to 
 object." So elemental was he! His mental independence 
 did not count precedents, but weighed them. Candid 
 and open, he was in every circle the interesting and out- 
 standing man. At first appearance he was to many 
 weird and disappointing: but he grew commanding as 
 he spoke on and with every lifting sentence the souls of 
 those who listened came toward him ! His quaint and 
 unstarched parables were never for mere mirth, but for 
 
HIS HUMAN FEELING 39 
 
 the end's sake, and, laying the rock of his argument with 
 the mortar of his humor, his wit sparkled in his logic 
 like the mica in granite! He mimicked the wrong- 
 never the true, nor busied himself to invent random 
 epithets ! 
 
 Note, first of all, Lincoln's sympathy. The valves 
 of his heart were wide. The imagination of love aligned 
 him with the central mass of men. The noblest enthus- 
 iasm is tender toward others, and his conviction, always 
 'touched with emotion', gave an uplift to human 
 nature. One who is all will can do many things that 
 catholic feeling cannot do, also he can fail of the final 
 appeal to palpitating life. That searching minor voice 
 had never forgotten his Ann Rutledge! Far from "the 
 shout of the crowd," a mysterious melancholy enfolded 
 him. Pining for 'company in this busy wilderness', his 
 inmost life was a solitude. Miscellaneous popularity 
 was never his and even upon his few intimates in his 
 sombre moods he shut the door. Always there was a 
 thorn— " a minister of Satan to buffet him." It was as 
 if an impending eclipse held him in its advancing 
 shadow : but that cold craft which climbs by its friends 
 and then spurns them he did not know. He had no 
 schoolmasterly airs nor self-exploitations. 
 
 The plaintive rhythm and elegiac note in song were 
 dear to him. These lines, his own, show that his world 
 was a sad one ; — 
 
 " The friends I left, that parting day, 
 
 How changed as Time has sped ; 
 Young childhood grown, strong manhood grey, 
 And half of all are dead." 
 Thus he was the vicar of the longing and the lonely. He 
 held in his soul the woes of Fredericksburg and Chan- 
 cellorsville and the terrific anxiety of July 1863. It was 
 a priesthood of pain. 
 
40 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 He delighted to pardon. A mother coming forth, with 
 her son's life granted, cried, with streaming face — 
 "Homely! It's a copperhead lie. He's the handsomest 
 man I ever saw!" But for two things his mind would 
 have buckled under the strain,— his humor and his chas- 
 tised and ever-enlarging faith. Courage, of a surface 
 sort, is easy to the sanguine, but to a temperament like 
 his only ' the fellowship of suffering ' can teach it. It was 
 in this patience of hope that he uttered at Gettysburg 
 the greatest poem ever said in America,— the immortal 
 paean of democracy ! 
 
 Remember next, his intuitive judgment,— dispassion- 
 ate, decisive, so sane and alert it was. A politician, in 
 the astute but not the shifty sense, his tact read the 
 times like a raised alphabet. His prescience was moral. 
 He trusted the rigors of eternal right and so ' endured 
 as seeing the invisible'. He had ethical perspective. His 
 adroitness lay in striding past all irrelevant trifles and 
 his timeliness in listening toward every point until his 
 hour was ready. He bent himself to advance the fron- 
 tiers of justice. All equity was dear to him and he 
 " opened his mouth for the dumb." By shrewd instinct 
 he dwelt upon the greater problems, common to all men, 
 and appealed to the ordinary mind with extraordinary 
 sagacity. Tennyson wrote of Wellington ;— 
 
 "Rich in saving common sense. 
 And, as the greatest only are, 
 In his simplicity sublime":— 
 
 but greater than he who held the pinnacle of the world 
 at Waterloo, was here,— filled with that salt of wisdom 
 which Coleridge said is "common sense in an uncommon 
 degree." The pilot house was dark, but a big-boned 
 hand was on the wheel, and, thro the wrack, a vigilant 
 eye, a gaunt prophetic will, and a humble, praying 
 
HIS FARSIGHT 41 
 
 heart was steering the great ship into the channels of 
 righteousness ! 
 
 For he was a prophet, — a dreamer, but not a vision- 
 ary. May, 1856, at Bloomington, sounding such dia- 
 pasons that the throng trembled and rocked before him 
 like a stormy sea and that the very reporters forgot to 
 make their notes, he thundered "Those who deny free- 
 dom to others deserve it not for themselves, and 
 under the rule of a just god cannot long retain it. 
 * * * Forbearance will stand us in good stead when 
 if ever we must make an appeal to battle and to 
 the God of Hosts. * * * We will say to the South- 
 ern DISUNIONISTS, — WE WONT GO OUT OF THIS UNION AND 
 
 you sha'n't!" In April, '64, he said — "At the end of 
 these three years of struggle the Nation's condition is 
 not what either party or any man desired or expected. 
 God alone can claim it. If God now wills the removal of 
 a great wrong and that we of the North, as well as you 
 of the South, shall pay fairly for our complicity in that 
 wrong, impartial history will find new cause to attest 
 the justice and goodness of God." 
 
 The Divine dramatist was indeed standing within the 
 shadows and thus did Lincoln "see the curtain tremble 
 with the breath of Him that was behind it." 
 
 All these traits combined and culminated in his inde- 
 pendence OF CHARACTER, 
 
 " Pouring his splendid strength thro every blow, 
 The conscience of him testing every stroke." 
 
 He could distinguish good advice from bad. He hated 
 chicanery. Others might falter and palter, but he stood 
 like a rock, holding fast to what he was sure of and liv- 
 ing one day at a time. With everyone his critic he abode 
 the event and did what he could with what was fur- 
 nished. He had no local partialities. He trusted Sew- 
 
42 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 ard and Stanton, he forgave Chase, he believed in Grant, 
 and he endured Cameron ! 
 
 Snre that the Constitution was a modus vivendi, not a 
 rigor mortis, that the Nation was paramount, he saved 
 both and with his blood cemented this "indissoluble 
 Union of indestructible States." Bending to no calumny, 
 be sure he would stand now for all he stood for then. 
 
 The first time he was nominated as an availability, to 
 become the second time an indispensability. Then Sum- 
 ter and Baltimore and the North leaping to the ranks, 
 the direful, exasperating, days of ' 61-'63, while we were 
 getting ready, every north- and west-going train bear- 
 ing coffins, a generation turning prematurely grey and 
 the Nation — "plunged in heats of burning fears," 
 shrinking appalled while God taught us integrity by the 
 swingle of war. 
 
 With straining back and bloody sweat Lincoln 
 brought the capstone of that Nationality which Hamil- 
 ton had grounded, Marshall defended, Webster exalted. 
 With deeper pangs he set it fast, and then, the work of 
 the Federalists completed, this enduring and accom- 
 plished man gave up the ghost ! That last day, amid 
 his familv, Lincoln had said — "For the first time I feel 
 the load lightened a little." The minor symphony was 
 moving to its cadence ! The harsh harness was unfast- 
 ening ! The last that passed those troubled lips was to 
 his wife. He was saying what he would wish to do when 
 free to rest — "There is no city I desire to see so much as 
 Jerusalem" That word yet upon the air, the bullet 
 came ! So fell life's curtain ; — nay, rose! The blow that 
 tore away that sensitive soul, smote millions of hearts : 
 but to him it was the accolade of God ! 
 
 Then the people he had wrought for knew him at last. 
 His story is theirs. They never will forget. The plain 
 folk of all the world know him and they challenge Amer- 
 
THE CADENCE 43 
 
 ica to be "dedicated to that cause which he so nobly 
 advanced." His great democratic cause cannot be a lost 
 cause. The soil that bore such a son cannot become 
 sterile. The bronze of that blessed and blessing memory 
 can never tarnish, nor that granite equity fall. 
 
 "So, (wrote Curtis, in 1865) came the May, softly 
 gliding over grieving hearts and with her royal touch 
 healing all our varied sorrows,— came the Queen for 
 whom the people sighed and the land yearned, — came 
 the well-beloved, the long-desired, palms in her hands 
 and doves flying before her, and the name of that May- 
 day Queen was Peace ! " But upon him, whose dauntless 
 conviction had untangled the skein, who under God had 
 pacified the land, a heavenlier light had broken ! 
 
 Inveterate man ! Great immortal ! Out of the dusty 
 years, we too salute thee ! Not as at Bloomington, with 
 that fearless challenge to the future ; not uttering those 
 two sublime inaugurals; nor there, nor there: — but in 
 that hospital, bending to hold the hand of that dying 
 soldier, in a mother's place ! Oh, benign story ! Unre- 
 proachf ul and unreproachable thy patience and thy fame ! 
 
 If ever, girt by alien foes or threatened by mad hands 
 from within, this Nation, so highly dedicated, shall again 
 have the endurance of its liberties tested ; if ever we are 
 summoned to rally to the death about that constella- 
 tion which Lincoln kept unshredded ; the old organ tone 
 will swell once more into 'the full chords of devotion' 
 and upon every wind will flow the deep bourdon of 
 answer,— "We are coming, Father Abraham! " 
 
THIS BOOK WAS PRINTED AT THE 
 COURIER PRESS, CLINTON, NEW YORK, 
 DURING JANUARY AND FEBRUARY, 1917, 
 FROM TYPE AT ONCE DISTRIBUTED 
 AND IT WAS ISSUED IN APRIL. 
 
 THE EDITION WAS OF ONE HUNDRED 
 AND FIFTY-FIVE COPIES, NUMBERED, 
 ONE COPY UPON PARCHMENT AND THE 
 REMAINING COPIES UPON TUSCANY 
 HAND-MADE PAPER. , — 
 
 OF THESE THIS COPY IS NUMBER 10.' 
 

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