!ii Class Book - Mft4? PRl si \ii.ii BY rW v -^ MACM1LLAN' S STANDARD LIBRARY ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN The BOY and the MAN BY JAMES MORGAN AUTHOR OP "THEODORE ROOSEVELT, THE BOY AND THE MAN " "THE CHILD IS FATHER OF THE MAN" NEW YORK GROSSET & DUNLAP PUBLISHERS bA<\ l03 E>57 UNSC Copyright, 1908, By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. Set up and electrotyped. Published September, 1908. Reprinted November, December, 1908; January, June, 1909; April, 1910. Norwood Press J. S. Cusbing Co. — Ber-wick & Smith Co. Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. s TO H. M. FOREWORD "Abraham Lincoln, The Boy and the Man," is not a critical study, but a simple story. Its aim is to present in dramatic pictures the strug- gles and achievements of a common man, in whom the race of common men is exalted ; who solved great problems by the plain rules of com- mon sense and wrought great deeds by the exercise of the common qualities of honesty and courage, patience, justice, and kindness. That is the Lincoln who, on the centenary of his birth, stands forth as the true prophet of a reunited people and the noblest product of that democracy which is slowly uniting all peoples in fraternal bonds. In the preparation of this volume many authori- tative sources have been freely drawn upon for illustrative incidents, a grateful acknowledgment of which is made in the chapter entitled "A Course in Lincoln." Vll CONTENTS I. A Child of Poverty I II. Life in the Indiana Wilderness 9 III. The Awakening of Ambition 17 IV. A Boyhood of Toil 2 3 V. On the Prairies of Illinois 30 VI. Wrestling with Destiny . 39 VII. In the Legislature . 50 VIII. Lover and Lawyer - 58 IX. Marriage and Politics 67 X. In Congress . 75 XI. Life on the Circuit 83 XII. Home and Neighbors 97 XIII. Called to his Life Mission 104 XIV. "A House divided against Itsel f" 116 XV. The Great Debate 124 XVI. A National Figure 135 XVII. The Standard Bearer H3 XVIII. President-elect 158 XIX. Going to Washington . . ix 170 CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE XX. The Inauguration . 179 XXI. Called to the Helm in a Storm . 187 XXII. " And the War Came " . 198 XXIII. In the Gloom of Defeat . 215 XXIV. A Break in the Clouds . . 234 XXV. " Don't swap Horses while crossing th e River " 253 XXVI. Life in the White House . 266 XXVII. Lincoln and his Children . 284 XXVIII. Lincoln and his Soldiers 292 XXIX. Lincoln the Emancipator • 3°7 XXX. Lincoln and his Cabinet . 322 XXXI. Lincoln and his Generals • 338 XXXII. Lincoln in Victory . 358 XXXIII. The Death of Lincoln . . 382 XXXIV. Sorrow of the World . • 397 XXXV. A Course in Lincoln . 407 XXXVI. Lessons from Lincoln . . . • 4"7 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS * Abraham Lincoln .... Frontispiece FACING rACB The Birthplace of Lincoln .... 6 The Creek in which the Boy Lincoln Fished 7 An Example of Lincoln's Craftsmanship . 36 Where Lincoln lived after his Marriage . 37 The Earliest Portrait of Lincoln • 80 Lincoln in his Circuit-riding Days • 81 Stephen A. Douglas • 108 Lincoln in his Prime . • 109 Life Mask of Lincoln . . 146 The Wigwam at Chicago • «47 The President-elect . 160 The Capitol in 1861 . • « . 161 President Lincoln in 1861 > 216 Lincoln at Antietam • . 217 An Interesting Lincoln Portra it • • 254 Mrs. Lincoln . . 255 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS FACING PAGE Willie and Tad Lincoln .... . 284 The President and his Son .... . 285 Lincoln and his Cabinet .... . 322 Lincoln and his Generals .... • 3 2 3 The Springfield Home .... 402 St. Gaudens's Statue ...... . 403 CHAPTER I A CHILD OF POVERTY Abraham Lincoln born to Thomas and Nancy Hanks Lincoln, in a log cabin on a farm near Hodgdenville, La Rue County, Ken- tucky, February 12, 1809. — Kentucky then a frontier state, to which Abraham's grandfather came about 1780, and where in 1784 he was killed by the Indians. — Narrow escape of Abraham's father, who became a wandering laborer, unable to read or write. — His rollicking marriage feast, June 12, 1806. — Abraham's privations in childhood. — His tribute to a soldier of 1812. — Troubled by a bad land title and by slavery, the family leave Kentucky to make a new home in a free state. Abraham Lincoln was born to poverty and ignorance. A rude log cabin on a poor, scrub farm was his birthplace. His father could not read and could barely write his name. His mother could both read and write, but she knew little of books or the world. Their home was on the Kentucky frontier, and there was not yet a state in all the West that lay beyond them. Kentucky itself had been a savage waste only a few years before, that "dark and bloody ground" on which no white man had set foot. The generation of bold pioneers who had threaded their way over the Alleghanies in the steps of Daniel Boone were still on the scene, and the boy Lincoln b 1 ABRAHAM LINCOLN heard from their lips the moving story of how they had hewn a path for civilization across the mountains and wrested peace from the roving red men in hard- fought battles. His own grandfather, Abraham Lincoln, for whom he was named had been one of that band of brave homeseekers. This elder Abraham, like most of the Kentucky settlers, came from Virginia. He found the land a wilderness. The buffalo roamed the blue-grass fields, and as Boone said, "were more frequent than I have seen cattle in the settlements, browsing on the leaves of the cane, or cropping the herbage on these extensive plains, fearless because ignorant of the violence of man." Warlike tribes of Indians lurked in the giant forests, and the white men, clad in skins, needed always to be on guard for their lives. They were as ready with the knife as with the rifle, and could outrun and outfight the Indian. They were of the same daring breed as the hardy men who have pushed the frontier westward to the Pacific and been the pathfinders of the nation. Abraham Lincoln, the pioneer, took up a tract of land near where the city of Louisville now stands and built his home on it. There he was killed by the Indians while opening a farm. He was going to his day's work in the clearing when a shot rang 2 A CHILD OF POVERTY out from the brush and he fell dead. His three sons were with him at the time. One of the boys started on a run to summon aid from the nearest fort, for there were forts all over Kentucky, in which the people gathered and defended themselves when attacked. Another son fled to the cabin for a rifle. Seizing the gun he looked out and saw an Indian stooping over the third and youngest boy, who had been left beside the murdered father. To save him from the hands of the savage he must shoot quickly through a crack between the logs of the cabin wall, at the risk of killing his baby brother. He aimed at a white ornament on the Indian's breast and fired. His aim was true, and the red foe pitched forward dead. By this narrow chance the little fellow, Thomas, was spared to be the father of Abraham Lincoln. The elder Abraham was a man of some thrift, for when he sold his property in Virginia the sale brought him $600, and he was a man of some spirit, else he would not have been a Kentucky pioneer. His grandson has said of him that he was a member of one of the "undistinguished families — second families perhaps I should say," but the younger Abraham lived and died without any definite knowl- edge of his grandfather's origin. "I am more con- 3 ABRAHAM LINCOLN cerned," he said, "to know what his grandson will he." He knew only of a "vague tradition" that the grandfather had come from Pennsylvania to Virginia. Those who sought to set up ancestral claims for him failed to arouse his interest in the subject. It is the accepted belief now that he was descended from a Massachusetts family which migrated to Pennsylvania, thence to Virginia, and finally to Kentucky. This, moreover, is not a very proud boast, for his branch of the Massachusetts Lincolns was wholly unknown to fame and fortune. Thus his descent has been traced through seven generations, disclosing four farmers, a miller, a blacksmith, and a weaver. All that is known of Abraham Lincoln, the grand- father, indicates that he measured up to the average of the men around him, the sturdy state builders who founded the first commonwealth of the West. In his untimely death, his family suffered a dire misfortune. The new home was broken up. The widow moved to another county, while the boy who shot the Indian was so embittered by his ex- perience that for some time he hunted the redskins in a passion for revenge. Under the law, most of the property went to the oldest son. Thus Thomas, the youngest, was left 4 A CHILD OF POVERTY poor and "grew up literally without education," a "wandering, laboring boy," as his famous son has recorded. He developed into a man of stalwart body, five feet ten inches in height, and was honest and sober. Ambition, however, seemed to be crushed in him by the hard circumstances of his youth and, drifting about from one job to another, he steadily sank in social condition. He was as often called "Linkern" or "Linkorn" as Lincoln, because he himself did not know how to spell his name. Finally he became a carpenter and married Nancy Hanks, the niece of the man in whose shop he worked. The Hankses had come from Virginia in the same party with the Lincolns, and it had been Nancy's ill fortune to be set adrift, an orphan, much after the manner of her husband's lot in life. She was regarded as handsome in her girlhood, and one old neighbor declared long afterward, "The Hanks girls were great at camp-meetings. They were the finest singers and shouters in our county." The union of Thomas Lincoln and Nancy Hanks was celebrated in the rollicking manner of the time and place. Bear meat, venison, wild turkey, and duck graced the feast. There was maple sugar, " swung on a string to bite off" for coffee or whiskey," there was syrup in big gourds, there were peaches and wild honey, and a sheep was cooked whole over 5 ABRAHAM LINCOLN wood coals in a pit. When Thomas went to house- keeping he was not so poor as to be without a cow, and he had "a good feather bed, a loom and wheel." He took his bride to a little cabin in the village no larger than one room of an ordinary dwelling. In spirit Nancy, who was twenty-three at her marriage, was much the superior of her twenty-eight- year-old husband, and she tried her best to teach him to read and write. His son frankly confessed, however, that his father "never did more in the way of writing than to bunglingly write his own name." With the birth of their first child, a daughter, the Lincolns were forced to the conclusion that a family could not be supported on what a carpenter could earn in a community where most men built their homes with their own hands, and they moved to a farm near the village. There, in a mere hut, on those poor, barren acres, Abraham Lincoln was born to Thomas and Nancy. His only cradle was his good mother's arms. His only playmate in his earliest childhood was his sister. His play- ground was the lonely forest. He had no toys, for toys cost money, and money was hardly ever seen in the Lincoln home. The father must raise or shoot what they ate, and the mother's restless ringers must spin and 6 - 1 ~ < pa 2 A CHILD OF POVERTY weave what they wore. Free schools were then unknown in Kentucky; but his mother, poor as she was, insisted on sending Abraham and his sister to a teacher. He could fish in the Big South Fork, and once, as he was coming from the creek, the patriotic spirit aroused in his home by the War of 1812, then in progress, was put to the test. "I had been fishing one day," he said years afterward, "and caught a little fish, which I was taking home. I met a soldier in the road and, having been told that we must be good to the soldiers, I gave him my fish." After a few years of struggling, Thomas Lincoln began to long for the newer country to the west. The deed to his place was in dispute and he could not afford to buy another farm, because Kentucky was rapidly becoming a settled state and its good land was valuable. Moreover, the people with profitable farms were slaveholders. There were very few slaves in the Lincoln neighborhood, it is true; the soil was not rich enough for such care- less labor. Still, Abraham Lincoln has said that his father's "removal was partly on account of slavery, but chiefly on account of the difficulty in land titles." The claim to the farm was sold for 400 gallons of whiskey and $20 in money, the whole amounting 7 ABRAHAM LINCOLN to S3C0. In those days, when there was no govern- ment tax on alcoholic spirits, anv farmer was free to set up a still and make his corn into whiskey. There was indeed little else to do with corn, for there were no railroads to carrv it to market, and it seldom sold for more than ten cents a bushel. \\ hen made into whiskev, however, it was easily traded. It was almost as good as money, which was extremely scarce. After Thomas had built a raft, he loaded the whiskev and his kit of tools on it. Leaving the family behind, he floated down the creek to the Ohio River and then across to the Indiana shore, where he chose some timber land for his new farm. On his return to Kentucky, the family made ready to go with him to their Indiana home. The last sad duty of the mother was to take Abraham and his sister to the burial place of her third child, and there drop her tears upon the sod before leaving forever the little grave in its unmarked desolation. CHAPTER II LIFE IN THE INDIANA WILDERNESS Removal of the Lincolns to a farm near Gentryville, Spencer County, Indiana, in the almost savage wilds of a new state, in 1816. — Their home, amid a primitive people, a mere hut, with no floor but the bare earth. — Abraham sleeping on a bed of leaves in the loft and growing up without education. — Wield- ing the axe in the primeval forest. — His one shot. — Death of his mother, October 5, 1818. — A desolate cabin. — Marriage of Thomas Lincoln and Sarah Bush Johnston at Elizabethtown, Kentucky, December 2, 1819. — The new mother transformed the rude home. — A family of nine living in one room. Abraham Lincoln was only seven years old when, his sister beside him, he trudged behind his father and mother into the trackless wilds of southern Indiana. All the possessions of the family were loaded on the backs of two borrowed horses, and three days were required to make the journey of eighteen miles from the Ohio River to the new home on Little Pigeon Creek, for Thomas Lincoln had to cut his way with an axe through the primeval forest. The land he had chosen was covered with a dense growth of timber, and no shelter awaited him and his family. He must hasten to cut down a lot of young saplings in order to build a shed of poles. This was the home. It shielded the family 9 ABRAHAM LINCOLN only on three sides, — an open-faced camp, as it was called. The home built, a field had to be quickly cleared on which to raise the necessary food. Abraham, young as he was, lent a hand, for he was large for his age and could swing an axe. While his father assailed the big trees, he chopped away the rank underbrush. He dropped the seed in the stumpy field in the light of the moon and planted potatoes in the dark of the moon, as all the wise folk of the region did. The minds of the early Hoosiers were filled with ancient superstitions, and they were governed in their daily lives by signs and charms. It was a wild country, inhabited by a primitive race. Indiana had only just been admitted to the Union as a state when the Lincolns took up their home within its borders. The court-house of the county in which they lived was made of logs. The grand jury sat on a log in the woods, and it was noted of one trial jury that there was not a pair of shoes among them, for nearly every one wore moccasins. The settlers dressed, as the Indians before them, in the skin of the deer, and never were without their rifles and their long side knives. A farmer's only implements were the axe, the rifle, the maul, 10 LIFE IN THE INDIANA WILDERNESS the plough, and the scythe. The brier of the wild thorn was the only pin in a woman's toilet. Tea was brewed from roots dug in the woods. House raisings and hunting parties were the main social pleasures known to the widely scattered pioneers, aside from the rare event of a wedding, when the people gathered uninvited, and, with practical jokes and all manner of boisterous sport, persecuted the poor bride and groom by night and day. On the hunts, all the game was driven into a common center, where it was slaughtered. Every table depended on the rifle. There was a salt "lick" in the creek near the Lincoln cabin, to which the deer came, and thus Thomas easily kept his family supplied with meat. Abraham cared nothing for shooting, and the one record of his hunting comes from his own pen in after life. "A few days after the completion of his eighth year," he wrote of himself, "in the ab- sence of his father, a flock of wild turkeys approached the new log cabin, and Abraham, with a rifle gun, standing inside, shot through a crack and killed one of them. He has never since pulled trigger on any larger game." This new log cabin was built by Thomas Lincoln the second year of his life in Indiana. His family lived in the open-faced pole camp through all the ii ABRAHAM LINCOLN freezing storms of one winter. In the spring the miserable habitation was turned over to some Hankses, who had followed their cousin Nancy from Kentucky, and the Lincolns moved into the new home; but even its walls apparently had cracks through which a rifle could be fired at a wild turkey. Moreover, it had neither a floor nor a window. The poor dwellers within its rude shelter actually lived on the bare earth, which turned to mud in the winter thaws. To shut out the sleet and snow, there was not even a skin to hang over the hole which served for a doorway. In one corner of the only room, two poles stuck between the logs made a bedstead. Nimbly climbing up on pegs driven into the wall, Abraham slept on a heap of loose leaves in the loft. Not a piece of crockery was there in the cabin. Tin and pewter and gourds were the table ware. The aim was to raise only enough corn to keep the meal box supplied and enough wheat for cakes on Sunday. It hardly paid to raise more, for corn brought little or nothing, and wheat only twenty- five cents a bushel, so far was the farm from the market. Besides, Thomas Lincoln never was a good farmer, and sometimes the family had nothing but potatoes to eat. A neighbor declares that even these were not always cooked, for he recollects LIFE IN THE INDIANA WILDERNESS eating raw potatoes at the Lincolns' ; it was not always easy to build a fire before the days of matches. Abraham Lincoln long afterward said with simple sadness in speaking of this period of his*life, "They were pretty pinching times." Malaria lurked in the deep glades of the forest, and pestilence was bred by the ignorant habits of the people. A large part of the population was stricken by a disease known to the backwoods as milk sickness. The wife of Thomas Lincoln, crushed in spirit by the hard fortunes of the family through two winters, and bent in body under the burdens of a frontier household, fell an easy prey to this epidemic. There was no physician within thirty-five miles, and the swift fever burned her life out while her helpless husband and children watched by her bed. As the end drew near, Abraham knelt sobbing be- side his dying mother, while she laid her hand on his young head and gave him her last message, telling him to be good to his father and sister, and calling on all to be good to one another, to love their kin, and to worship God. When the wearied soul was gone, the broken body was shrived by the Lincolns and the Hankses, there in the isolation of their forest home. Thomas himself felled the pine tree and cut out the green J 3 ABRAHAM LINCOLN boards, which he pegged together for the rude coffin. In a shallow grave on a knoll near by, with- out a spoken prayer, but bitterly wept by children and kindred, all that could die of Nancy Hanks Lincoln was tenderly lowered to that rest which was denied her in life. As long as he lived, her son held her in reverence as his " angel mother," and there is a tradition that sometime after her burial, the sorrowing boy induced a traveling preacher to deliver a sermon and say a prayer above her grave. With this death, that which made a home of the bare hut, a wife's devotion and a mother's love, was gone, and the widower and the orphaned were left in desolation to face a hard and dreary winter. After a short time of despair, the father rose to the practical necessity of his situation and went back to Kentucky to seek out a new head for his house and a mother for his family. On this mission, he made a wise choice. Find- ing that one whom he had known in his youth was widowed, he courted her with such despatch that they were married the next morning. When Thomas returned to Little Pigeon Creek with his tall, curly-haired bride and her son and two daughters, a four-horse team was needed to carry her property, for she was rich in comparison 14 LIFE IN THE INDIANA WILDERNESS with her groom. The forlorn, neglected little boy, Abraham, who was growing up like a weed, looked with wondering eyes as he helped unload the fine things. A bureau, that must have cost $50, was among them. There was an extra feather bed to take the place of his pallet in the loft, and at last he was to have a pillow for his head. There were also homespun blankets and quilts, a flax wheel, and a soap kettle. The new mistress ordered a wash-stand to be set up beside the doorway, and she scrubbed the children and fitted them out with decent clothing. She gave Abraham a linsey-woolsey shirt of her own make to take the place of his old deerskin shirt. Her husband was driven to make and hang a door, lay a floor, cut a window, and to grease some paper with which to cover it and let in the light. Abraham had so far forgotten the little he had learned in the Kentucky school that now, though ten years old, he could not write. Yet somehow he had become the leader of the household. With- out schools or books, his only chance to learn was from wayfarers, and on such occasions he showed a thirst for knowledge which annoyed his father, who could not sympathize with the inquiring mind of his boy. As he sat perched on the fence in front of the cabin, he would ask questions as long as any 15 ABRAHAM LINCOLN passer-by would tarry to answer him, or until his father sent him away. One day a wagon broke down in the road, and the wife and two daughters of the owner stayed at the Lincolns' until it was repaired. "The woman had books," as Abraham recalled in later life, "and read us stories. They were the first I ever heard." There never had been a book or a newspaper in the house, and he never forgot the sight of those pages nor the woman who, by the chance of a breakdown on the road, opened to his mind the field of printed knowledge. Hope and happiness entered the little cabin in the wilderness at the call of its thrifty and vigorous housewife, crowded though it was, for with the husband and wife, their five children, and two Hankses who had come to live with them, a family of nine dwelt in peace in its one room. There seemed to be a special harmony between Mrs. Lincoln and Abraham. "His mind," she said, "and mine — what little I had — seemed to run together." She shared her heart with her hus- band's children and sanctified the name of step- mother. 16 CHAPTER III THE AWAKENING OF AMBITION Learning life s lessons and building character amid poverty, toil and sorrow. -Abraham starting to school at ten.— Walking n.ne miles a day to and fro. - Eager to study. -Ciphering on a wooden shovel and making notes on the logs of his cabin — His passion for books — borrowing and reading all the volumes within a fifty-mile circle. - Working three days to pay for a damaged book. — Only a few months' schooling in all. "It was a wild region, with many bears and other wild animals still in the woods. There I grew up. There were some schools, so called, but no qualification was ever required of a teacher beyond 'readin', writin', and cipherin' to the rule of three.' If a straggler supposed to understand Latin happened to sojourn in the neighborhood, he was looked upon as a wizard. There was ab- solutely nothing to excite ambition for education." — Abraham Lincoln, in his own life sketch. Nevertheless it was in those backwoods of Indiana that the ambition of Lincoln was awakened. There, out of poverty and toil and sorrow, the sturdy nature' of the child was woven, and there the man was born, sprung from the very earth. The wild forest was his university, and it taught him more than i7 ABRAHAM LINCOLN many boys learn in academic groves, for it taught him to use his hand as well as his head, and to think and act for himself. His mental growth was slow and did not cease while he lived; but morally, his character seemed to come almost to its full stature in mere boyhood. His noble stepmother insisted that all her children should be sent to school, though the fee for the teacher must have been a heavy burden for the Lincolns. The father knew nothing of school, and cared no more. To him it was a sheer waste of time, and he needed what the labor of the boys could earn. There were no schoolhouses in southern Indiana. A roving teacher could hold sessions only in some tumble-down cabin. Mean as the opportunity was to gain an education in such a hovel, the boy Lincoln seized it eagerly. At one time he had to walk nine miles a day in going to and from school. The road he traveled probably was no more than a mere deer path through the lonely woods, but he loved the solitude. The noon lunch, which he carried in his pocket, was only a corn-dodger, a cake made from coarse meal. He would study all day Sunday, for there was no church to attend, and every minute he could steal as he went about his Saturday chores he gave to his lessons. The 18 THE AWAKENING OF AMBITION poor father hated the sight of a thing so useless to himself as a book, and the stepmother had to beg him to let Abraham read at home. To practise his lessons in arithmetic he used a wooden shovel, for he had no slate, paper was scarce, and there was not a lead pencil in the house. When he had covered the shovel with his sums done in charcoal, he would scrape off the figures and thus be ready for a fresh start. He scrawled his notes from his books all over the logs of his cabin and on any piece of board he could pick up. This spirit naturally sent him to the head of his class with a bound. He gained such readiness in spelling that he soon "spelled down" the entire school, and at last was barred from spelling matches, so it is said. Writing was another of his favorite studies, and he acquired a good, clear hand. This assured him the proud position of the letter-writer for the family and their illiterate neighbors. One of the earliest Lincoln manuscripts in existence was written by him as a form for a friend: — " Good boys, who to their books apply, Will all be great men by and by." He no sooner could read than he took fire with a passion for books. He had none at home, and there was no public library. Wherever he heard of J 9 ABRAHAM LINCOLN a book, near or far, he went afoot to see the owner, and borrowed it and kept it until he had de- voured all there was between its covers. In this way he found and read "iEsop's Fables," Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress," "Robinson Crusoe," and a history of the United States. To retain for reference the things he liked best, he bought a note-book, into which he copied his favorite selections. His pen was made from the quill of a turkey buzzard and his ink from the juice of a brier root. A dictionary coming to his hand, he read it, page by page, day after day, until the last ray of light had faded. In later years he said that if any one used a word or phrase in his hearing which he could not understand, it always had made him angry. He remembered as a boy climbing to his loft in a rage more than once on this account, and walking the floor far into the night, while trying to work out the meaning of something he had heard. He could not sleep until he had solved the puzzle and found a way to state the same idea in the plainest words. Even a copy of the statutes of Indiana fell a prey to the timber boy's wild hunger for knowledge. He read it through as eagerly as if it had been a detective story. Nor was he poorly rewarded, 20 THE AWAKENING OF AMBITION for it not only contained the Constitution of the United States, but it also introduced him to the Declaration of Independence. It held, too, the Ordinance of 1787, by which Indiana and all the country between the Ohio and the Mississippi had been dedicated to freedom in these simple and now familiar terms: "There shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in said territory, otherwise than in the punishment of crime, whereof the party shall have been duly convicted." Indeed, that worn and forbidding volume gave him a better understanding of the government of his country than many big schools impart to their pupils. Among his other borrowings was a copy of Weems's "Life of Washington," from which he drew the inspiring lessons of that immortal career and of the War of the Revolution. Those lessons sank deep into his youthful mind. After the lapse of a generation, he recalled in a speech to the men of '61, Weems's stories of the battles fought and hardships endured by the men of '76. "You all know," he said, "for you have all been boys, how these early impressions last longer than any others. I recollect thinking then, boy even though I was, that there must have been something more than common that those men struggled for. I am ex- ceedingly anxious that that thing . . . shall be 21 ABRAHAM LINCOLN perpetuated in accordance with the original idea for which that struggle was made." He had still another reason for remembering that book. He was so charmed by the tale that he carried it with him when he mounted to his loft, and there he lay in bed and read its pages until his bit of tallow had burned out. Then he poked the volume in a chink in the wall, where he could put his hands on it the minute he woke in the morn- ing. A driving rain in the night came through the cracks and soaked the book. The man who had lent it to him claimed damages and made Lincoln pull fodder in his corn-field for three full days. Nevertheless he went on borrowing right and left, until he felt assured he had read every book within a fifty-mile circle. His total schooling amounted to much less than a year. He attended from time to time until he was nineteen ; but each time his father felt obliged to take him out after a few weeks. When his labor was not required at home, the father was in need of the few cents a day which the boy could earn by working for other farmers, for the wolf of want was always at the door of the Lincoln cabin. 22 CHAPTER IV A BOYHOOD OF TOIL Stories of the giant strength of the youthful Lincoln. — Hired out by his father at twenty-five cents a day, — Rated as lazy by his employers, because his heart was not in his rough work while he dreamed of the great world without. — Walking fifteen miles to hear lawyers argue in court and haranguing his fellow-laborers from stumps in the fields. — Writing essays on morals and politics. — Hailed as the village jester. — Became a flatboat- man. — How he earned his first dollar. — The earliest monu- ment to Lincoln reared by a boy friend. Lincoln's figure shot up rapidly from his eleventh year, and at nineteen he had grown to his full height of six feet, four inches. He was wiry, and of rugged health, swarthy in complexion, and his face was shriveled not unlike that of an old man. The strangely serious look, so marked in his bearing through life, had already come into his countenance. The unreflecting rustics about him simply set him down as queer, as they saw this youth of strange moods pass in a flash from gay to grave. His tight buckskin breeches were "drawn up" in the rains, until twelve inches of blue, bony shins were exposed in the gap between them and the tops of his low shoes, and on his head he wore a coonskin cap. "Longshanks" was his descriptive nickname. Wonderful stories are told of the giant strength 2 3 ABRAHAM LINCOLN of his boyhood, of his picking up and moving a chicken house, weighing 600 pounds, and bearing off a great log while three men were disputing as to how they should unite to lift it. "His axe would flash and bite into a sugar tree or a sycamore," Dennis Hanks has said, "and if you heard him felling trees in a clearing, you would say there were three men at work by the way the trees fell." Lincoln and his sister were both "hired out" to the more prosperous neighbors, whenever there was a demand for their services. One woman re- called, in her old age, the time when the boy worked for her husband and slept in their loft. She praised him for knowing how "to keep his place" and for not coming where he was not wanted. He would lift his hat and bow when he entered her house, and was tender and kind, "like his sister." A day's work was from sunrise to sunset, and for this he received a quarter of a dollar, but if he missed any slight part of the long day, he was docked. The reward for his labor did not go to him, how- ever, but to his father, to whom he owed all his time until the noon of his twenty-first birthday. He had no spending money and felt little need of any. Money was not what he longed for. It was not the object of the ambition which gnawed like hunger within him. 24 A BOYHOOD OF TOIL Already he stood apart and alone. He was with, but not of, the backwoodsmen, among whom he toiled and jested. His thoughts and his dreams had borne him out of their forest world and far away from the tasks of his hands. His heart was not in hoeing and wood-chopping. He slaughtered hogs, swung the axe and the scythe, and wielded the flail, but he could not put the man into the work. His employers knew it and rightfully found fault. "I say he was awfully lazy," one of them insisted nearly half a century afterward. "He worked for me, but he was always reading and thinking. He said to me one day his father taught him to work, but he didn't teach him to love it." This man did not take into his calculations the fact that his big, lazy hired hand would walk farther and work harder to get an old book than any one else around him would walk or work to get a new dollar bill. In vain his father tried to get such fool- ishness out of his son's head and induce him to learn practical things ; the boy was a great, strong fellow, and it was time he made something out of himself. The father was anxious for him to be a carpenter, but he could not excite the young man's enthusiasm. He would do the day's work, as it was given him to do and after his own fashion, and that was all. He would rather, any time, tramp off to the county 25 ABRAHAM LINCOLN seat, some fifteen miles away, and listen to lawyers argue. For days afterward he would be a lawyer, holding mock trials in the fields and delivering speeches from stumps, while the other hands gathered around him, to the indignation of the farmer. Only one newspaper came to the neighboring village, and Lincoln delighted to go to the store and read aloud to the unlettered throng its reports of debates in Congress and its news from the great world. Some of his views startled the entire country- side. He insisted, for instance, the earth was round, that the sun did not move, and that the moon did not come up or go down, but that instead "we do the sinking." Hating to see even dumb creatures mistreated, he wrote an essay on "Cruelty to Animals," although many years were to pass before the first society was formed in their defence. He wrote a paper on "Temperance," although there was yet no organized movement in that direction and the very word was without meaning to the average person. Humor mingled with earnestness in the nature of the youth. He joked and frolicked as well as studied and argued. He wrote rhymes on passing events and sometimes had to back up his rough satires with his big fists. He celebrated in verse the long, crooked nose of the man who made him 26 A BOYHOOD OF TOIL work out the damage to the borrowed book, and took revenge in the same way when he was not invited to a wedding in the family of the rich man of the village. If he began to tell stories at the cross-roads store, the loungers crowded the place, and sometimes he held his roaring audience until midnight. All the while he longed for the wider world without; but he respected his father's right to his labor. He eagerly welcomed the chance to go down to the river to help the ferryman in the rough- est toil at thirty-seven cents a day, for there he was at last on the great highway of trade and travel. While working on the river, he found his way to a lawyer's library, where he could read half the night. In those surroundings he wrote a paper on the " American Government," in which he urged the necessity of preserving the Constitution and main- taining the Union. The lawyer, when he had read this appeal, declared the "world couldn't beat it," and would have taken him into his office, only the youth insisted his parents were so poor they could not spare him as a breadwinner. When a flatboatman offered him $8 a month, he went as bow-hand, and thus standing forward, poled the craft down the Ohio and the Mississippi to New 27 ABRAHAM LINCOLN Orleans. While idling about the river before start- ing on that voyage, a little incident happened which he always described as an important event in his life. It is the story of the way he earned his first dollar by taking two men and their trunks to a steamer which waited for them in midstream. "I was about eighteen years of age," he said, "and belonged, as you know, to what they call down South the 'scrubs.' I was very glad to have the chance of earning something, and supposed each of the men would give me a couple of bits. I sculled them out to the steamer. They got on board, and I lifted the trunks and put them on the deck. The steamer was about to put on steam again, when I called out, 'You have forgotten to pay me.' Each of them took from his pocket a silver half-dollar and threw it on the bottom of my boat. "You may think it was a very little thing, and in these days it seems to me like a trifle, but it was a most important incident in my life. I could scarcely credit that I, the poor boy, had earned a dollar in less than a day; that by honest work I had earned a dollar. I was a more hopeful and thoughtful boy from that time." When Abraham came of age, his father decided to leave Indiana. The son could no longer be 28 A BOYHOOD OF TOIL expected to stay on the unpromising farm in the timber, and his sister had lately died in young wife- hood. One of the Hankses had gone to the new state of Illinois, and his reports of the country induced the Lincolns to follow him. The people generally were sorry to lose the young man whose strong hands always had been ready to help any one in need and whose droll ways had made him the favorite character in the community. As he was leaving the dreary scene of so much sad- ness and struggle, a boyhood companion planted a cedar in memory of him, and that little tree was the first monument raised in honor of Abraham Lincoln. 29 CHAPTER V ON THE PRAIRIES OF ILLINOIS The Lincolns leave Indiana for Illinois, March, 1830, Abraham driving his father's ox team. — Building the new home on the Sangamon, and splitting rails for a fence. — Bidding farewell to the humble roof of his parents. — Once more a flatboatman in 1 83 1. — His strange introduction to New Salem. — Stirred to indignation by the sight of a slave auction in New Orleans. — Keeping store in New Salem, where he arrived in the sum- mer of 1 83 1. — Winning the title of "Honest Abe." — Battling with frontier roughs. — Failure of the store. — Studying and dreaming. In moving to Illinois, Thomas Lincoln resumed the westward journey which his ancestor had begun at Plymouth Rock and which had continued through seven generations of Lincolns. An ox team drew the family and its scanty pos- sessions from Indiana to Illinois, and Abraham was the driver. The wagon wheels were without spokes, being mere rounded blocks of wood, cut from the trunk of an oak tree, and with a hole in the center for the axle. There were neither roads nor bridges. Creeks and rivers had to be forded. The trails through the Hoosier forests were broken by the February thaw, while the prairies of Illinois were a sea of mud. 3° ON THE PRAIRIES OF ILLINOIS Across those great stretches of level and fertile land, ready to spring into richest gardens at the lightest touch of man, the Lincolns wended their toilsome way« until they came to the meaner soil of the timber country on the Sangamon River, where they chose to pitch their new home. All the early settlers shunned the broad, open country as a desert. They had always lived in the woods, in the older states whence they came, and, though they saw the tall grass waving and the flowers rioting in bloom on these wide plains, they could not believe nature had been generous enough to clear the land for the use of man. The Lincolns, therefore, as the rest, sought a place like that which they had left in Indiana, and no better. There they went to felling trees and hewing the logs for their cabin and ploughing a field among the stumps. Abraham's was the leading hand in this work, as well as in splitting the walnut rails for a fence. With the first winter came a season of utter dreari- ness, celebrated in local history to this day as the winter of the deep snow. The snow lay three feet on a level, when a freezing rain followed and crusted it. For weeks the people could not leave their cabins. No doubt young Lincoln's desire for another life than that which had been his 3 1 ABRAHAM LINCOLN from birth, was strengthened in this desolate period. When spring came, he left his father's humble roof forever. He was twenty-two and had duti- fully given to his parent all his labor through the years since childhood. He had helped him build his new home and clear and fence his new farm, as well as plant and harvest his first crop. Now, with his axe over his shoulder and all his other belongings in a little bundle, he started out for himself. At first he worked about the neighbor- hood, splitting rails and doing whatever was given him to do. If he saw a book; he read it, and he amazed the rustics with his speechmaking on various subjects. He even ventured to reply to a political speaker, and in this, his first joint debate, he won not only the applause of the audience in the field, but the praise of his opponent as well. While knocking about in this way, he happened upon a man who engaged him at fifty cents a day to go on a flatboat to New Orleans, with the promise of an added sum of money if the venture succeeded. He paddled the Sangamon in a canoe to the point where he fitted up the raft, on which he floated down the river until, unfortunately, it was stranded on a dam in front of New Salem. All the village flocked to the scene of the excitement, and the 3 2 ON THE PRAIRIES OF ILLINOIS wise men ashore offered their noisy advice to the crew One member of that crew moved the crowd to laughter. He was a tall, gaunt, sad-faced young man. His coat was ragged, his hat was battered; and his trousers of torn and patched homespun, with nearly half of one of the legs missing, com- pleted a picture that was forlorn indeed. He neither looked at the grinning people on the bank, nor said a word in reply to their gibes. He had thought out in his own mind a way to get over the dam. He met the emergency without turning to any one for advice, and in due time the boat floated onward and from view, the grotesque figure of the youthful Lincoln standing on the deck, pole in hand. After the cargo of corn and hogs had been landed and sold in New Orleans, Lincoln and John Hanks went about the city to see the sights. One of those sights made an impression on Lincoln's mind which the years did not efface and to which in after time he never could refer without emotion. It was a slave auction, and, as he came to it, he saw a young woman standing on the block, while the auctioneer shouted her good points. He saw her driven around the mart, exhibited and examined as if she were a horse, in that circle of sordid dealers in human flesh. This was slavery in its ugliest aspect, and D 33 ABRAHAM LINCOLN Lincoln was stirred to the depths of his nature. "If I ever get a chance to hit this thing," he de- clared to John Hanks, according to the story which the latter has given to history, "I'll hit it hard." From New Orleans, the flatboatmen returned by steamer to St. Louis. Thence Lincoln walked across Illinois to his father's farm. After visiting his family there, he went on his way until he came again to New Salem, where his boat had stuck on the dam. His employer in the boating enterprise had decided to open a store in that village of twenty log houses and one hundred population, and Lincoln was to help him. He walked into the little settle- ment to find that the merchant and his merchandise had not yet arrived. Every one remembered him as the silent, strange, and ingenious young man who had freed the flatboat from its obstruction, and his easy good nature and droll remarks won him a hearty welcome among the people, who, a few months before, had jeered at him from the river bank. Another distinction awaited him. An election was to be held, and penmanship not being a com- mon accomplishment in New Salem, Lincoln was asked if he could write a good hand. He answered he "could make a few rabbit tracks on paper," and he was selected to help the clerk of the election, 34 ON THE PRAIRIES OF ILLINOIS a post which brought him in touch with all the voters and which also brought him a small but needed sum of money. The stories he told at the polls that day increased the popular favor in which he was held, and half a hundred years later old men, with smiling satisfaction, retold them to a new generation. At last the new store was opened. The ambition of the owner was not content with this one venture, and he bought the mill as well. Lincoln was placed in charge of both businesses, for his employer had unlimited faith in him and his all-round ability. He boasted that his clerk was the best man in New Salem and could beat any one, fighting, wrestling, or running. The villagers were willing to admit, of one accord, that the young stranger was a mighty clever fellow, but the sweeping assertion of the merchant led to more or less argument, and was looked upon by some as a challenge. The Clary's Grove boys, a "generous parcel of rowdies," who "could trench a pond, dig a bog, build a house," who "could pray and fight, make a village, or create a state," were open doubters. They even risked |io in a bet with the merchant that their chief bully, Jack Armstrong, was a better man than his clerk. Lincoln held back. He had no desire to fight. 35 ABRAHAM LINCOLN The merchant, however, was very much in earnest, and so were the Clary's Grove boys. A man had to win their favor, and failing to win it, New Salem was no place for him. The big, good-natured new- comer finally consented, and all the village flocked to the battle-field. Lincoln's weight is given as 214 pounds at that time, but the long reach of his muscular arm was his strongest point, and he quickly seized Jack Armstrong by the throat and beat the air with him, to the admiration of the crowd, including the Clary's Grove boys and even Jack himself. The verdict of the battle was loyally accepted by all, and the winner became the sworn friend then and thenceforth of every man for miles around. His admirers never ceased to brag about the things he could do, and one of their favorite pastimes was to arrange feats of strength for him to perform. It is a tradition that once he raised a barrel of whiskey from the ground and lifted it until, standing erect, he could drink from the bung-hole, refusing, however, to swallow the liquor, for he always set before the community in his own life a much-needed example of total abstinence. Another legend represents him as having lifted, by means of ropes and straps fastened about his hips, a box of stones, weighing nearly 1000 pounds. 36 From the collection of U W. Fay, Esq., De Kalb III. A Yoke which is treasured as an Example of Lincoln's Craftsmanship : . . J -Ti * St , tt Wifc ■ Z o ►J o o .a x - ■S < 'J OX THE PRAIRIES OF ILLINOIS His neighbors respected him for his strength of character as well as for his strength of body. If a wagon stalled in the crooked, muddy lane, which was the only street of New Salem, he was among the first to go to the aid of the driver. If a widow were in need of firewood, he cut it for her. He watched with the sick, and any chance for kindness, from splitting a log to rocking a cradle, found his hand always ready to serve. If he made a mistake in weight or change across his counter, he did not sleep until he had corrected the error, though sometimes he tramped miles into the country in order to find the customer whom he had innocently wronged. All relied on his sincerity, and thus, while hardly more than a boy, he came to be hailed as "Honest Abe." He was not, however, a successful business man. He would rather lie on the counter, his head resting on a pile of calico, and study a grammar, which he had walked six miles to borrow, than cultivate trade. Sometimes intending purchasers found him not in the store at all, and had to call him from the wayside, where he was sprawling on the grass, covering a wrapping-paper with problems in mathe- matics. While a sale was pending or in a lull in social conversation, he was likely to pull out a book and lose himself in the pages of Tom Paine, Voltaire, 37 ABRAHAM LINCOLN Rollin, or Gibbon, rare copies of whose works he had come upon in that rude hamlet on the remote frontier. In less than a year the merchant had failed and his clerk was adrift again, free to ramble about the village, the life of its groups of loiterers, or to sit all day beside the eccentric old fisherman on the banks of the Sangamon and listen to his quotations from the poetry of Shakespeare and Burns; or else, silently to walk the street, absorbed in a book, speaking to no one and seeing no one. He earned enough by an occasional job to keep him, for he never let himself become dependent on others. There was a moral dignity about him which the villagers felt and respected. They did not rate him a loafer, but they did feel he was wasting his hours. Those bustling planners and builders of New Salem could not know that this dreamer among them was planning and building for all time, while the village they were rearing would in a few years be but a cow pasture and remembered among men only because fate had selected it as a station in the progress of Abraham Lincoln: — " For the dreamer lives forever, And the toiler dies in a day." 38 CHAPTER VI WRESTLING WITH DESTINY Lincoln already marked out for leadership. — Chosen a captain in the Black Hawk War, an honor which pleased him more than any other. — Saving the life of the only Indian he saw in the campaign against the red men in the spring of 1832. — Search- ing for his place in life. — Entering politics. — Defeated for the Legislature in August, 1832. — High finance in New Salem. — Lincoln's failure as a trust magnate. — A heavy burden of debt. — His first sight of Blackstone. — Doing chores about the village. — A barefoot law student. — Appointed post- master May 7, 1833, he carried his office in his hat. — Sur- veyor. — Crushed by a creditor, saved by a friend. — His gratitude. Homeless and unemployed, Lincoln was glad to respond to the Governor's call for volunteers, when Black Hawk, the old Indian chief, took the war path in Illinois. The scene of the conflict was far removed from the Sangamon, but the chance for a campaign aroused the spirit of adventure in the young pioneers about New Salem. When the company from that neighborhood met, many of the soldiers wished Lincoln to be their captain. At the election, he and the one other can- didate for the post took up positions apart, and their followers rallied around them. By far the larger number went over to Lincoln's side, and thus 39 ABRAHAM LINCOLN he was chosen. It was an honor which he said long afterward pleased him more than any that had come to him. He really cared nothing for the little military glory there was in it, and he never wore the title of captain after the war was over. That those among whom he had come only a year before, without friends and without a name, had singled him out for leadership, filled him with satisfaction. Doubtless it caused him to feel that his secret dreams of a higher destiny were coming true. He knew nothing of his new duties and took little trouble to learn. The story is told that when his men came to a narrow gate, he could only shout at them, "This company will break ranks for two minutes and form again on the other side of that gate." A more experienced commander would have had his troubles in reducing that band of rough merry- makers to martial discipline, and Captain Lincoln bore with entire good humor the various forms of disgrace which they brought upon their commanding officer. He was arrested and his sword taken from him for one day, because a member of his company fired a gun within the limits of the camp. At an- other time, when some of his men made a night raid on the headquarters' provisions, their captain had 40 WRESTLING WITH DESTINY to pay for their frolic by wearing a wooden sword two days. He even permitted them to draw him into a wrestling match with a champion from a rival command, and they had the humiliation of seeing their captain thrown. When his company was mustered out of the service and disbanded, Lincoln, with no vanity of rank, enlisted as a private in a cavalry troop. The fortunes of war, however, did not bring him within sight of Black Hawk or within sound of battle. Indeed, instead of slaying Indians, he saved the life of the only red man with whom he came in contact. This was an old Indian, who bore a pass as a trusted friend of the whites. He was set upon by a crowd of soldiers, who pretended to think his pass was a forgery, and who were determined to shoot him as a spy. Lincoln appealed to the men to spare him, and finding them deaf to his appeal, quickly placed his own body between the Indian and the guns of his enemies and thus shielded him from harm. With the end of the war, Lincoln returned to New Salem. He was, as he afterward said, "without means and out of business," and he "had nothing elsewhere to go to." An election was about to be held for members of the Legislature. He was en- couraged to become a candidate, for the sake of 4i ABRAHAM LINCOLN the experience and advancement the place would bring him. In a democracy like ours, all the govern- ment, from the little town up to the great nation, is but a school for the instruction, improvement, and elevation of the citizens. The Legislature was like a university for Lincoln, and it was in this spirit that he sought a seat in it. His announcement of his candidacy was in the nature of the man. After frankly stating his posi- tion on the questions of the hour, he added, " I may be wrong in regard to any or all of them ; but, hold- ing it a sound maxim that it is better only sometimes to be right than at all times to be wrong, so soon as I discover my opinions to be erroneous, I shall be ready to renounce them." He declared his greatest ambition was to "be truly esteemed of my fellow-men, by rendering myself worthy of their esteem. How far," he added, "I shall succeed in gratifying this ambition is yet to be developed. I am young and unknown to many of you. I was born and have ever remained in the most humble walks of life," and "if the good people in their wisdom shall see fit to keep me in the background, I have been too familiar with disappointments to be very much chagrined." His campaign was short and only one of his meetings has been called to memory. This was at 42 WRESTLING WITH DESTINY a place some distance from New Salem, where he waited until the close of an auction, when he got up and attempted to speak to the crowd. The peo- ple ignored him, for they seemed bent on enjoying a fight, and a general engagement followed. The candidate was forgotten. He quickly gained at- tention, however, by stepping down into the thick of the fray, seizing the ringleader and throwing him flat on the ground. Then he climbed upon the platform again, took off his old hat, and made a speech to an entirely respectful audience. He was a candidate before the voters of the entire county, and, having no acquaintance outside his own town, he was defeated; "the only time I have ever been beaten by the people," he was able to say nearly twenty years later. The vote cast in the precinct of New Salem, however, was most flatter- ing to him, for he received 277 ballots there among his neighbors in the village and the surrounding country, and only seven were thrown against him. He turned again to business, and with a partner he bought out a storekeeper. Not long afterward the Clary's Grove boys celebrated by smashing the windows of one of the other stores. The frightened proprietor took the hint, and offered to sell his stock cheap. Lincoln and his partner became the purchas- ers, and next they bought the only remaining store. 43 ABRAHAM LINCOLN By this combination, or trust, they gained a monop- oly of the trade of New Salem, and, after the fashion of high finance in a later day, they had done it all without a cent of cash. In each case they gave their notes, their promises to pay. Credit was the life of business on the frontier, for currency seldom was seen there, and personal notes passed from hand to hand almost as readily as treasury notes in our day. In his tan brogans, blue yarn socks, broad-brimmed, low-crowned straw hat without a band, and usually with only one suspender on his trousers, Lincoln did not look like a financial magnate or a merchant prince. He went to live at the tavern, a log structure of four rooms, where all the men lodgers slept to- gether, and where he delighted to meet the travelers, who tarried there on the stage route. When the place was crowded, he good-naturedly relieved the landlord by sleeping on a counter in his store. Storekeeping again failed to interest Lincoln. He continued to be a student of men and books. By a strange chance one book came to him, which probably fixed his course in life. The firm, in its readiness for a trade, bought from a stranger a barrel of odds and ends. While Lincoln was searching through its varied contents with his long arm, he fished out a copy of Blackstone's commentaries on 44 WRESTLING WITH DESTINY the common law. He was fascinated by the very sight of it, and dav after day pored over its pages as he lay on the ground near the store, his feet resting high against the trunk of a tree, and his bodv wrig- gling around to keep in the shade. Meanwhile his partner was giving most of his attention to the rear of the store where the liquors were kept, for all country stores in those times sold liquor, though in this one there was no bar. In a few months the firm was dissolved and the store was sold, the purchaser, of course, indorsing and promising to pav the notes of Lincoln and his partner. After a little while, however, the new man fled, Lincoln's old partner died, and Lincoln alone stood responsible for the total indebtedness, an obligation so heavy that he always spoke of it as the "national debt." He had shown himself a poor business man, it is true, but he bravely faced his responsibility. He did not run away from it or trv to beg ofF. "That debt was the greatest obstacle I have ever met in life," he said after many years. He owed $1100 and he had no way to get money except by hard labor at a small wage. He went to his creditors and told them if they would wait, he would give them all he could earn above the cost of living as fast as he could earn it, and thus work out the last 45 ABRAHAM LINCOLN dollar. It seemed to him that his whole life was mortgaged as he started out again, with only his strong right arm to help him lift the burden from his shoulders. One week he would split rails, another week toil in the fields, while from time to time he helped out in the store and did chores about the tavern. Through it all he did not cease to read. By walking to Springfield, a distance of twenty miles, he could borrow law books, and people long re- membered the picture of the big barefoot student, intently reading as he came and went along the dusty road. Another tale oft told, is of an old farmer finding his hired man lying in the field, with a book in his hand. "What are you reading?" he demanded. "I ain't reading; I'm studying," Lincoln answered, without losing his place on the page. "Studying what?" Law, sir. "Great — God — Almighty," the farmer snorted, as he went off, shaking his wise old head. The eager student would not stop reading even for darkness. The cooper gave him the freedom of his shop, and there he would go of an evening, build a fire of shavings, and read by its light. As fast as he learned anything about the law, he made 46 WRESTLING WITH DESTINY his knowledge useful to his neighbors by drawing up their legal papers and by representing them in trials before the justice of the peace, all without charge. The upward turn came in the fortunes of Lincoln when friends obtained for him the postmastership of New Salem. It was not a highly paid office, nor was there much to do. When the mails came only once or twice a week, and sometimes in the winter only once a month, the postmaster was not kept very busy. At best, letters were not many, for the cheapest postage then was six cents for thirty miles or less ; from that figure the rate rose as high as twentv-five cents on a letter going to a distant state. The people were so much given to doing business on credit that they would not pay cash even for their letters, and Lincoln had to carry numerous accounts in his head. While he was postmaster, the post-office of New Salem was in his hat. Meeting a man for whom he had a letter, he would take off his hat, withdraw the mail from it, and deliver it on the spot. As he went about his day's labor in the country, he would distribute the mail at the cabins on the way. Next, a chance to do surveying came to him, as it had come to Washington in his youth, and he fitted himself for the duty by hard study, so hard, 47 ABRAHAM LINCOLN indeed, that his friends were alarmed for his health. He gained repute for his accuracy in his new work, and this, with the natural fairness of his mind, won respect for the young surveyor's decisions regarding disputed boundary lines. One day, when he was suryeying a piece of land over which there was a long-standing quarrel, he put his stick into the ground and said, "Here is the corner." A man dug in the earth, and the by-standers were astonished to see him uncover the buried mark, which years before, the original surveyors of the national gov- ernment had placed at the exact spot indicated by Lincoln. For the first time in his life, he had a right to feel at ease. He was making a living and at the same time preparing himself for the future. Then once more, the shadow of misfortune fell across his path. A stranger, who had come into possession of one of his notes given in purchase of a store, sued him and seized his horse, saddle, bridle and all, and, worse still, his surveying instruments. It was a dark hour, filled with humiliation. A friend, how- ever, came to the rescue and saved him, by buy- ing in the property and handing it back to him. Lincoln never lacked a friend and never forgot one. A man in New Salem who had trusted him for board was himself homeless in his old age. 48 WRESTLING WITH DESTINY Lincoln, with his gratitude still warm after many years, went to the distant part of the state, where his one-time benefactor was an inmate of a poor- house, took him from the place and found a good home for him. The friendships he made along the Sangamon, amid the struggles of his early man- hood, when he had neither fortune nor fame, stood the tests of time and change and lasted through life. They were the corner-stone of his success. 49 CHAPTER VII IN THE LEGISLATURE Elected a Representative in 1834. — Borrowing money with which to clothe himself and going to Vandalia, then the capital of Illinois. — First meeting with Stephen A. Douglas. — Lincoln a member of Henry Clay's Whig party. — Favoring woman's suffrage. — An early joint debate. — Reelected to the Legis- lature in 1836, 1838, and in 1840. — Whig candidate for Speaker. — Leader of his party in the House. — Fighting for removal of the capital to Springfield. — Wild legislation. — Lincoln tak- ing his stand against slavery in the session of 1837, only one member in sympathy with him. Lincoln was no longer a stranger, when, for the second time, he announced himself a candidate for the Legislature. He now made a general can- vass, visiting as many of the voters as he could in their homes and in their fields, eating with them and laughing with them. Newspapers then were few and little read. Candi- dates, therefore, could not make themselves and their opinions known to the voters except by going among them in person. Lincoln showed himself a good campaigner, always ready for any situation. At one farm where he stopped, it was harvest time and the farmer was in no mood to talk politics. He bluntly told the young politician he judged a man by the 50 IN THE LEGISLATURE work he could do. Lincoln accepted the challenge good-naturedly, and, going down the field, he cut the grain with such ease that he led all the other work- ers. There were several voters among the harvest- ers, and when Lincoln shook their hands in parting, he was assured of their enthusiastic support. He was elected by a handsome vote. Borrowing the money with which to buy suitable clothing, he went to the capital at the opening of the session, and there entered upon the career for which he had long been fitting himself in the hard school of experience. He was now approaching his twenty-sixth birthday. He never had lived in a town, but always in log-houses in the woods. He never had lived where there was a church. He never had been inside a college, and had attended school hardly more than six months in all. He wel- comed the four dollars a day, which was allowed members of the Legislature, as by far the highest pay he ever had received. In fact, he had not aver- aged four dollars a week. His fellow-members were frontier solons, pioneer farmers and village lawyers, for there were no large towns in Illinois. Chicago was yet a mere trading post in a swamp. There were a few French- men, representing the surviving communities of the period when Illinois was under the lilies of the 5 1 ABRAHAM LINCOLN Bourbons and the tricolored flag of revolutionary France; the rest of the members generally were men of southern origin like Lincoln. The state was founded and ruled by Southerners. There was only a small population of Northerners in the upper half, which was sparsely settled, and the Yankee was an object of popular prejudice, since he was regarded as a thrifty and meddlesome person, prone to insist upon order and his own strict standards of life. Lincoln remained in modest silence through his first term in the Legislature. He no doubt regarded himself merely as a pupil and was content to watch and listen. He cultivated his associates quietly and laid the foundation for the future. It was then and there that Stephen A. Douglas entered the story of Lincoln's life. Douglas was a Yankee from Vermont, but he was acting with the Democratic party, which had long dominated Illinois. Although he had come to the state only a year before with thirty-seven cents in his pocket, he had picked up a living by teaching school and practising law, and was now at the capital to gain the appointment of prosecuting attorney in his district. While Douglas went with the majority, Lincoln made the harder choice and joined the minority. 52 IN THE LEGISLATURE Indeed, his party, afterward known as the Whig, was yet without even a name, with no victories to its credit and no honors to bestow. It was out of power in the nation and in the state, and had but few followers in New Salem. Lincoln, however, was naturally inclined to take the part of the weak in politics as well as in the everyday relations of life. Moreover, the new party was the party of Henry Clay, the model and idol of the young states- man of the Sangamon. In offering himself for reelection, Lincoln an- nounced he was in favor of "admitting all whites to the right of suffrage, who pay taxes or bear arms, by no means excluding females." As he had taken in boyhood a stand for temperance and against cru- elty to animals in advance of any general agitation of those questions, so now he came out for a measure of woman suffrage before there was a movement in favor of it anywhere. He had no thought of making an issue on this subject at that early day, but his declaration shows that he was thinking and not afraid to express his thoughts. His contest for a second term took place in a presidential year, and he entered into a number of exciting joint debates. In one of those debates, which was held in Springfield, he was stirred to make a spirited personal reply to an opposing speaker. 53 ABRAHAM LINCOLN This man was accused of having recently re- ceived a first-class federal office as a reward for changing his politics. He was also noted for having erected on his house the only lightning-rod in the town, and the first Lincoln had seen. Grouping these things together, Lincoln con- cluded a rousing rejoinder to the gentleman, by declaring he would rather die on the spot, than, like his opponent, "change my politics for an office worth three thousand dollars a year, and then feel compelled to erect a lightning-rod to protect a guilty conscience from an offended God." In the election that followed, nine members were chosen from Sangamon County, and Lincoln led them all with the highest vote. He took a prominent part in the work of the session and was on the most important committee. The young state dreamed of the greatness awaiting it and was eager to hasten its coming by all manner of legislation for building roads and canals. Plans were adopted with a hurrah, which, if carried out, would have bankrupted the state for a generation. Lincoln plunged in with the rest, all of whom, with the recklessness of youth, threw caution to the winds. He made it his more special mission, however, to have the capital of the state 54 IN THE LEGISLATURE transferred to Springfield, in his own county, and he won the battle. Nevertheless, in all the transactions of that am- bitious session, only one incident survives in human interest. The nation had been disturbed by the rumblings of a moral protest against slavery. The agitation had begun in New England, where Faneuil Hall echoed with the appeal for freedom, and thence had spread abroad. Those who had taken it up were pitifully few in number and without political standing, but their feeble voice startled the country like a cry in the night. The South demanded that these assaults upon the peace of the Union should be suppressed, and the great body of the northern people were equally opposed to the movement. The meetings of the Abolitionists were broken up in various parts of the North by violence under the leadership of conservative men of property. A "broadcloth mob" dragged William Lloyd Gar- rison through the streets of Boston with a halter round his body, and the Mayor of that city, apologiz- ing to the Mayor of Baltimore, explained that when the police had ferreted out Garrison and his paper, The Liberator, they found his office to be "an obscure hole; his only visible auxiliary a negro boy; his supporters a few insignificant persons of all colors.'* 55 ABRAHAM LINCOLN In New Hampshire and in Connecticut an in- dignant population raided private schools which received negro pupils. A mass meeting in Cin- cinnati demanded that the publication of an anti- slavery paper in that city should be stopped, and its press was thrown into the Ohio River. The meet- ing place of the despised agitators in Philadelphia was burned, and, within the year, the editor of an Abolition paper in Alton, Illinois, was murdered. Congress and the legislatures of several states united in denouncing all discussion of the sensitive subject. The Legislature of Illinois joined in this denuncia- tion of the agitators by a resolution of both houses. In all the work of that session Lincoln had gone with the tide, but now he boldly took his stand apart. He wrote a protest and called upon the members to sign it. In this short and simple document, he admitted that the Abolition movement tended rather to increase than abate the evils of slavery, J * and that Congress had no power to abolish the system in the states ; but he did urge his associates to place on record the declaration that "they believe that the institution of slavery is founded on both injustice and bad policy." This language, in the light of a later day, is mild to the degree of timidity, but when it was written, twenty-four years or almost a quarter of a century 56 IX THE LEGISLATURE before the Civil War, slavery never had been ar- raigned as an injustice in any party platform or by any party leader. In all the Legislature, Lincoln found only one man who would sign his moderate little paper. Dan Stone, a colleague from Sangamon was willing to write his name upon it, and under it appears the signature, "A. Lincoln." It was the still, small voice of conscience. The first test had come, and Lincoln had bravely chosen his part. Although he served four terms in the Legislature and became the Whig candidate for Speaker and the chosen leader of his party on the floor of the House, aside from this one act, big with prophecy, history has rescued from oblivion nothing else in his service which foreshadowed his future. 57 CHAPTER VIII LOVER AND LAWYER The tragic story of Lincoln's first love. — His wooing of Ann Rut- ledge, the tavern-keeper's daughter at New Salem. — The con- flict between her conscience and her heart. — Lincoln plunged in gloom by her death, August, 1835. — Friends feared he would lose his mind. — A primitive man always in his sentiments. — His removal to Springfield in 1837 to begin the practice of law with John T. Stuart. — Too poor to pro- vide a bed for himself. — At once the center of a group of brilliant and ambitious young men, destined to win fame. — Characteristic instance of his integrity. — Paying a claim made by the government. — Still working out his debt. The story of Lincoln as a lover forms a melan- choly chapter. No other experience of his early years gave him so much anguish, no other trial so tested and tempered his nature. If it did not bring him happiness, neither did it embitter him. On the contrary, he came forth from that period of soul-wracking doubt and despondency, a master of his passions, with a patience and a fortitude which fitted him to endure disappointment and suffering. If Lincoln had a sweetheart in his boyhood, a prying world has been unable to discover the 58 LOVER AND LAWYER tender episode. In his youth he was charmed by books rather than woman's looks, and no legends have come down of the gallantry of the Hoosier wood-chopper, sighing and wooing on the banks of Little Pigeon Creek. It is the accepted belief that he escaped a lover's pangs until he was a young man of twenty-five or twenty-six, when the auburn-haired daughter of the tavern-keeper of New Salem smote his heart. This was Ann Rutledge, a Kentucky girl by birth, a South Carolinian by descent. She was at- tractive both in mind and in person, refined in man- ner, and strong in character. If it was love at first sight, Lincoln's fortunes were so low that he did not venture openly to aspire to her hand in the begin- ning of their acquaintance, when sometimes he was only a penniless helper about her father's tavern. Moreover, she was engaged to another. It was not until after this man had disappeared from the knowledge of the village and Lincoln had risen to the surveyorship and a seat in the Legislature, that he told her of his love. It is a tradition that he first opened his heart to her at a "quilting," to which he escorted her, and as a proof that her own heart responded, there was preserved for years the very quilt over which her agitated fingers flew — and the uneven stitches told the story. 59 ABRAHAM LINCOLN The girl, however, felt bound in loyalty to the absent one. She asked Lincoln to wait until she could gain her release from that obligation. Her letter was sped on the way to its distant destination, and they could only watch for the slow coming of the answer. They waited through the months, and no reply came. At last she promised herself to Lincoln, who was compelled to postpone their marriage indefinitely, because he could not yet support a wife. In the midst of almost the first happiness which he had ever known, his sweetheart fell sick. Her faithful nature had been unable to free itself from the shadow of the man who had gone away with her pledge to remain true till he came again. The villagers said her heart was breaking for him. More likely, however, it was her conscience rather than her heart that was troubled. Her sickness ran into a fever, and she was for- bidden to receive callers. She disclosed her love for Lincoln by begging earnestly and constantly to be permitted to see him. She could not live, and her family let her have her only wish. The last song she sang was for him. After a few days the end came and Lincoln was borne down with woe. The love of Ann Rutledge had been like a beautiful flower in the hard and thorny pathway of his lonely 60 LOVER AND LAWYER life. To see this flower fade and die ere it bloomed, filled him with the darkest despair. In his senti- ments and emotions, Lincoln remained always a primitive man, a simple backwoodsman. No eleva- tion of mind or station seemed to affect these elements of his nature. His heart was unchanged to the end. He never rose superior to its aches and appeals; he could always cry. Malaria attacked the settlers in the dank forests and the tillers of the newly turned soil of the virgin land of the West. Lincoln did not escape the disease and this, together with his intellectual isola- tion and his naturally sensitive disposition, made him a man of dark moods. These he could sometimes disguise or momentarily beguile with jests and laughter, but, in his sluggish physical condition, he seemed powerless to conquer them and throw them off. He grieved for the dead girl until his friends feared he was losing his mind. Returning to the Legislature he summoned the spirit for carry- ing on his work there, but he sadly confessed to a fellow-member, "Although I seem to others to en- joy life rapturously, yet when alone I am so over- come by mental depression, I never dare to carry a pocket-knife." In this somber frame of mind, Lincoln bade 61 ABRAHAM LINCOLN good-by to New Salem. It, too, was dying. The post-office had "winked out," as its quaint post- master expressed it, and the trade of the place had been diverted to a near-by town. When, with everything he owned in his saddle-bags, he mounted a borrowed horse and rode away to be a lawyer in Springfield, he was even poorer than when he first walked into New Salem, for now he was deep in debt. He was in his twenty-ninth year, and the lawyer, from whom he had been borrowing law books, offered to take him into his office. Although Springfield was a little town of between one and two thousand population, it had been made the new capital of the state, largely through Lincoln's efforts in the Legislature. The townspeople naturally felt grateful toward him, and the field was a promising one. Arrived at Springfield, he ordered a bedstead of the cabinet-maker and then went to a general store to see how much the bedding would cost. The price was seventeen dollars. He sighed and his face took on an added shade of gloom. "I have not the money to pay," he confessed, "but if you will credit me until Christmas, and my experience here as a lawyer is a success, I will pay you then. If I fail in that, I will probably never pay you at all." 62 LOVER AND LAWYER While the storekeeper had no personal acquaint- ance with him, he had heard him speak and he admired him. His sympathy was aroused by his air of hopeless poverty and he told him, if he would accept it, he would share his bed with him. "Where is your room?" Lincoln inquired. "Upstairs," the proprietor answered. The forlorn-looking newcomer took his saddle- bags on his arm and went up the stairway. Coming down in a few minutes, his face was in a broad smile, as he said, "Well, I'm moved." There in the room above the store of his generous host, he lodged, while struggling to get a foothold in his new profession. For years his debts hung over him like a black cloud. He felt in honor bound to share every hard-earned dollar with his creditors. Long after the stores for which he contracted the debt had been razed to the ground and New Salem itself had utterly vanished from the earth, he was still paying for them out of his scanty earnings at the bar. Friends who knew through what stress he had passed and still was passing, gained a glimpse of the integrity of the man one day when an agent of the Post-office Department appeared in Springfield. This official came to collect a balance of seventeen dollars due the government from Lincoln at the 63 ABRAHAM LINCOLN time he had retired from the postmastership of New Salem. Lincoln stepped over to an old box in his office and drew forth a sock containing the exact amount in silver and copper coins. There it had reposed, untouched by him, through every temptation of years of pinching need, while he waited for the government to give him a chance to settle. Those who saw the proceeding were amazed, but he simply remarked that he had made it his practice not to spend money belonging to others. Had Lincoln been able to choose for himself, he could not have found more fortunate head- quarters in Springfield than the store over which he slept. In front of the big wood fire there, the rising young men of the town were in the habit of gathering in the evening, and, with his humor and his earnestness, he soon became the center of the company, which included Stephen A. Douglas, who was admitted to practice before the State Supreme Court the same day that Lincoln's name was en- rolled; O. H. Browning, afterward a member of a President's Cabinet; E. D. Baker, later a Senator from Oregon, and others destined to fame. It was an ambitious group, and Baker is said to have burst into tears while reading the Constitution of the United States and finding that he, a native 64 LOVER AND LAWYER of England, could never be President. The questions of the hour were warmly debated, and every cause found a champion. Once, when the arguments became unusually heated, Douglas sprang up and challenged his opponents to a public debate, which came off, four on a side, and raged for more than a week. Lincoln was the last speaker, and the world hardly would recognize the Lincoln it knows in the bombast which he delivered on that occasion. " Many free, countries have lost their liberties, and ours may lose hers," he declared, "but if she shall, let it be my proudest plume, not that I was the last to desert, but that I never deserted her." It was in a time when the mock heroic was the favorite tone of our public speaking. Lincoln, like the rest in that period, had nothing to talk about, and he split the ear with wordy declamation. In a day of ordinary things he could be as ordinary as any one. Only when his heart was touched by a lofty cause was he lifted above the commonplace. When the roaring log-cabin and hard-cider cam- paign of 1840 spread over the country, a period of all shouting and no thinking, he was in the thick of the idle fray. The bitter personal controversies of that year, in which he was involved, sufficed him for the rest of his days. It was a part of his edu- cation. Thenceforth, aside from an absurd duel 65 ABRAHAM LINCOLN two years afterward, he practised a self-control and a courtesy which held him aloof from all personal wrangling. He fought measures and not men, and relied upon the arguments of the mind rather than those of the fists. The Washingtonian temperance movement which swept over the land reawakened Lincoln's early interest in the subject. The moral and humane aspects of the crusade stirred him and inspired him to deliver a powerful address, in which he foretold the time "when there shall be neither a slave nor a drunkard on the earth." If there was a moral principle beneath any question presented to him, his nature was certain to respond to it. This was shown again when Knownothingism raised its head, and, by secret methods, attempted to place foreign-born residents under the ban and to discriminate against men on account of their re- ligious belief. As the movement gained in strength, timid politicians were thrown into a panic. Lincoln, on the other hand, struck at the thing boldly, and at the very outset of the agitation he offered a resolu- tion in convention declaring that the right of con- science "belongs no less to the Catholic than to the Protestant." No form of intolerance or proscription had a place in the make-up of the man. 66 CHAPTER IX MARRIAGE AND POLITICS Lincoln's lack of the social graces. — His strange courtship of Mary Todd. — Their sharp differences in temperament and breeding. — His long wrestle with doubt. — A period of almost suicidal despair. — Miss Todd innocently involved him in an absurd duel with General Shields, September, 1842, which became the means of reuniting them. — Their abrupt marriage, November 4, 1842. — The ambitious bride's faith in her husband's future. — Lincoln elected to Congress in 1846. The graces of a lady's man were denied Lincoln. "Mr. Lincoln was deficient in those little links which make up the chain of a woman's happiness — at least it was so in my case." This is the verdict, and doubtless a fair verdict, of one who rejected him as a suitor. She rightfully complained that when they were riding and came to a stream, he never thought of seeing that her horse got safely over the ford, but galloped on, trusting her to look out for herself. He never had any parlor small talk. He retained through life an indifference to social formalities. He seemed not to defy them, but never to understand them. In Springfield he could not wholly avoid 67 ABRAHAM LINCOLN the society of the place, because of the rank which he took at the bar and in politics. From the first his associations were with persons who pretended to some breeding in the young and ambitious capital, where, as he wrote, there was " a good deal of flourish- ing about in carriages." When he felt called upon to attend a ball, he danced little, and was rather given to annoying the women by diverting their partners to a corner of the room, where he generally held forth to a masculine group. In the same year he went to Springfield, Mary Todd came from Kentucky to visit her eldest sister, who had married into a notable family of Illinois. After a stay of a few months, she returned to her native state, but came again two years later to make her sister's home her own, in preference to her father's house, over which a step-mother presided. She was a spirited, impulsive, outspoken, pretty little woman of twenty-one, used to refined society and as well educated as a woman could be in those days. Her sister's spacious dwelling was the social center of the town, and Miss Todd never was without attentions and admirers. In an open competition among them, Lincoln, poor and awkward, would have been easily distanced, for in her train were graceful courtiers like Stephen A. Douglas. Not- withstanding her pride of family, for she was de- 68 MARRIAGE AND POLITICS scended from governors and generals, her interest was enlisted in the character of the former wood- chopper, and the bright promise of future distinction which he wore excited her ambition. Her family did not look kindly upon her prefer- ence for him, and the halting and doubting suitor himself would have discouraged a less resolute woman. She and Lincoln were not only opposites in breeding but in temperament as well, and the course of their love never ran smoothly. Whether in his conflicting emotions and morbid presentiments of unhappiness he failed her on the appointed wedding day, history is not certain. There is no question, however, that he brought his relations with her to an abrupt end, and plunged into a period of des- perate melancholy. Friends watched him and cared for him with anxious solicitude. He wrote to his partner, then in Congress, that he was the most miserable man living, and that if his misery were distributed among the human family, there would not be one cheerful face on earth. He could not tell if he would ever recover; "I awfully forebode I shall not." In his groping for help, he wrote a noted Cincinnati doctor, describing his condition, his early love for Ann Rut- ledge and his more recent experience, and asking him to prescribe. 69 ABRAHAM LINCOLN After months of this unhappy mood a good friend, who was going to Kentucky to see his betrothed, took Lincoln with him. There the heart-sick patient gained some relief amid new scenes and faces, and most of all in striving to cure his friend, who was strangely stricken with the same torment- ing doubts in his own love affair. When he had seen this case end in a happy marriage and he had returned to Illinois, he wrote to the bridegroom with glowing satisfaction: "I always was super- stitious. I believe God made me one of the instru- ments of bringing you and Fanny together, which union I have no doubt He had foreordained. What- ever He designs, He will do for me yet." Ever present in his mind was the sad plight in which he had placed Miss Todd. It was a wound in his honor. He reproached himself for even wishing to be happy when he thought of her whom he had made unhappy. "That," he wrote, "still kills my soul." When he heard, after a year, that she had taken a short journey and had said she enjoyed it, he exclaimed, "God be praised for that." Finally, this strange love story of Lincoln and Mary Todd was threatened with the blood stain of a tragedy, which, fortunately, turned out to be a roaring farce. For political purposes he wrote a letter to the Springfield paper, pretending to come MARRIAGE AND POLITICS from a widow, in which he ridiculed the auditor of Illinois, James Shields, destined to be a Senator of the United States and a general in the Union army. The letter was followed, the next week, by an imitation over the same signature, but with which Lincoln had nothing to do. This second communication made all kinds of fun of Shields, who was stung to demand the name of the writer. The editor of the paper came to Lincoln and told him that the offending article had been written in a spirit of pure mischief by Miss Todd and another young woman, afterward the wife of Lyman Trumbull, a distinguished Senator from Illinois in the period of the Civil War. To protect the true authors, Lincoln promptly told the editor to give his name to Shields, and a most ridiculous duel was the result. He was heartily ashamed of this encounter be- fore he went into it and never ceased to be ashamed of it. Being the challenged man, he chose as weapons the largest cavalry broadswords, and the party went forth to the field of honor, where Lincoln grimly ran his finger along the edge of his ugly duelling instrument, and, reaching out his long arm, cut off a twig from a tree, far above his head. Brought face to face, the principals quickly came to a peace- able understanding, but the spirit of fight was caught 7i ABRAHAM LINCOLN up by the seconds, and challenges flew back and forth for several days, all as bloodless in the out- come as the Lincoln-Shields duel. In the next scene, Cupid entered the fray and Lincoln surrendered to his fate and Mary Todd. His impulses were as weak and wayward as ever, but his sense of duty, his ideal of honor, were asserting themselves over his doubts and fears. He must, however, hasten to consult once more the friend who had borne him away to Kentucky and who had now been married eight months. "I want to ask you a close question," he wrote to him. "Are you, in feeling as well as in judgment, glad you are married ?" Whatever the answer may have been to this most unusual inquiry, Lincoln and Mary Todd called the latter's sister to where they were sitting one Friday morning, and told her they had decided to be married in the evening. No time was allowed for the arrangement of a feast or for the play of gossip. The bride must even borrow a wedding gown from a sister who had lately married. Mrs. Lincoln loyally accepted and shared the simple lot of her struggling husband. They went to live at a tavern at "four dollars a week," and it was enough for the aspiring wife to dream of fortune and fame, and to know, as she said, "that his heart 72 MARRIAGE AND POLITICS is as large as his arms are long." It is a pleasant legend that the bride boasted she would make her ungainly groom the President of the United States. He was steadily advancing at the bar and was already looked upon as a leader in politics. After retiring from the Legislature, he refused to consider the empty honor of the Whig nomination for Gov- ernor, Illinois being strongly Democratic. His one political ambition was to sit in Congress. He was perfectly frank about it. "If you should hear any one say that Lincoln don't want to go to Congress," he wrote, " I wish you, as a personal friend of mine, would tell him you have reason to believe he is mistaken. The truth is, I would like to go very much." His brilliant friend, E. D. Baker, however, got ahead of him, and Lincoln cheerfully awaited his turn to receive Congressional honors. He only mildly complained that the influence of the churches should have been exerted as one of the means of preventing his nomination, an opposition which was raised, he said, "because I belonged to no church and was suspected of being a deist." Another issue of that canvass only amused him. "I, a strange, friendless, uneducated, penniless boy," he said in explaining his defeat in a letter to a man who had known him in New Salem, "have been 73 ABRAHAM LINCOLN put down here as the candidate of pride, wealth, and aristocratic family connections." This referred, of course, to the family into which he had married, but to a group of friends Lincoln laughingly protested, "I do not remember of but one of my relatives who ever came to see me, and while he was in town he was accused of stealing a jews-harp." When, at last, his time came, Lincoln put forth every effort to succeed Baker in Congress. He wrote to several active men in each precinct and saw that the local paper did not neglect him. He was a shrewd and close campaigner, missing no points in the fight and keeping a sharp eye on all the details of the contest. In the election he carried his own county by the largest majority ever given to a Whig candidate up to that time, and won the district by a liberal margin. Then, as the first flush of victory passed away, he sadly admitted, "It has not pleased me as much as I expected." 74 CHAPTER X IN CONGRESS Lincoln, taking his seat, December, 1847, entered a Congress notable for distinguished members. — As the only Whig from Illinois, he was singled out and welcomed by the leaders. — His delight in the great library at the Capitol. — President Polk's Mexican War policy challenged by the new member, although his course cost him his popularity at home. — The House roaring with laughter over his stump speech on the floor in the campaign of 1848. — Speaking in Massachusetts in the summer of that year. — Affected by the Free-soil movement in that state. — His unsuccessful effort in 1849 to abolish slavery and the slave trade in the District of Columbia. — Seeking an appointment under President Taylor in 1849 ana " ms fortunate failure. Lincoln was thirty-eight when he took his seat in Congress and entered upon another grade in the university of life. The time was well chosen for him. The eloquence of Webster still contended with the philosophy of Calhoun for the mastery of a Senate, in which sat many other noted men, among them, Benton and Cass, Tom Corwin, Sam Houston in his Navajo blanket, Jefferson Davis and Simon Cameron, Hannibal Hamlin, and John A. Dix. Stephen A. 75 ABRAHAM LINCOLN Douglas received his promotion to the upper cham- ber the day Lincoln entered the lower. Robert C. Winthrop was the Speaker of the House, and under him sat Alexander H. Stephens, Robert Toombs, Collamer of Vermont, and Andrew Johnson. Horace Greeley was added to the membership by a special election. Above all, the name of John Quincy Adams still illuminated the roster of the House, and it was while Lincoln was a member that the "old man eloquent" fell, mortally stricken at his post of duty in the hall of representatives, worn out by a life of service to the republic. The new Congressman from Illinois was totally unknown to his fellow-members. As the only Whig from his state, however, he received a special wel- come from his party associates, and this, with his natural gift for winning men, soon marked him out from the crowd. He attracted the favor of Daniel Webster and was a guest at several of the great expounder's Saturday breakfasts. He needed only to tell his first story in the lounging room at the Capitol to gain attention there, and within a few weeks he was the recognized champion of the story-tellers of Congress. The Congressional Library and the Library of the Supreme Court, with their great stores of books, were like a gold mine in his eyes. More than once 76 IX CONGRESS the attendants were amused to see him tie up a lot of books in his bandanna handkerchief, stick his cane through the knot, and go forth to his boarding house with the bundle over his shoulder, just as in other days he had carried his wardrobe while tramp- ing from job to job. James K. Polk was President and the Mexican War in progress. Many people believed it was an unjust war and brought on for the purpose of gaining more territory for slavery and adding more slave states to the Union. The President insisted that the war was forced upon the United States by Mexico, that she had invaded our territory and shed the blood of our citizens on our soil. His opponents denied this. They contended that the President had sent American soldiers beyond the established boundaries of the country, and that the Mexican troops had only tried to repel them from what Mexico rightfully regarded as her own soil. Without waiting to follow the lead of older mem- bers, Lincoln drew up and presented a series of resolutions before his first month in Congress was at an end. These are known to history as the "spot resolutions," in which the question is sharply pressed upon President Polk as to whether the spot to which he had sent American soldiers and where the first blood of the war was shed was 77 ABRAHAM LINCOLN within the established boundaries of the United States. After a few weeks he addressed the House in support of his resolutions, delivering a sober argu- ment in behalf of them and giving a searching review of the case. He called upon the President to answer the questions candidly, reminding him that he sat where Washington sat and ought to answer as Washington would answer. If the ques- tions should be evaded, the country must accept the evasion as a confession that the war was wrong and that the President hoped to conceal the wrong be- neath military glory — "that attractive rainbow that rises in showers of blood, that serpent's eye that charms to destroy," and he gave it as his opinion that Polk was "a bewildered, confounded, and miserably perplexed man." This speech, made when the country was ringing with cheers for the victory of American arms, brought upon Lincoln's head the censure of many of his friends and constituents, to one of whom, a clergy- man, he wrote, asking if the precept "whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them" is "obsolete, of no force, of no application." Much as he opposed the sending of an army into Mexico, all the appropriations for supporting the soldiers in the field received his vote, and to capture 78 IN CONGRESS for his party the military hero of the hour, he aided in forming a Taylor Club in Congress. He attended the National Convention at Phila- delphia which nominated General Taylor for Presi- dent. To the same end, he delivered on the floor, in the midst of the campaign, a rousing stump speech, which set the House in an uproar of laughter and applause. A press correspondent pictured him as he worked his way down the aisle, talking and ges- ticulating, until he reached the clerk's desk, only to retreat to his starting point and then march down again. As the campaign advanced, there was a call for him from Massachusetts, where the Whigs were troubled by the rise of the Free Soil party, standing for the policy of keeping the soil of all the territories of the United States free from slavery. It was a novel experience for him to speak to audiences in the staid and settled East, and to see and hear this "capital specimen of a Sucker Whig," as one of the Massachusetts papers described him, was a novelty to the New Englanders. A lively demand for his services sprang up in the Old Bay State, and his stay there was crowded with engagements. Instead of the orator in a swallow- tail, to which the people were used, they saw a prairie giant in a black alpaca coat, who, in begin- 79 ABRAHAM LINCOLN ning, would roll up his sleeves, then roll back his cuffs, next loosen his tie, and finally pull it off in the melting heat of the weather and of his fervid oratory. In Boston he spoke with William H. Seward of New York, and at the hotel, after the meeting, he remarked: "Governor Seward, I have been think- ing about what you said in your speech. I reckon you are right. We have got to deal with this slavery question and got to give much more attention to it hereafter." For the first time he found himself in a community where there was an active, organized sentiment on that question and he felt the influence of his surround- ings. His party had nominated Taylor, a southern slaveholder, and was ignoring all the problems con- nected with slavery. Lincoln, however, face to face with the Free Soilers in Massachusetts, plainly saw that the politicians could not dodge the subject much longer and that the great conflict must come. He was not a candidate for reelection to Congress, because it was the custom in his district to give a member only one term, and besides his opposition to the Mexican War had made it impossible for him to win at the polls. Returning to Washington the following winter, he distinguished the closing year of his service by introducing a well-thought- out measure against slavery. 80 : iit- :-- - : c e 2 r.i: : ire: : _ : = - :~. _ . . . - . T. - ' ' - " - : : - - •-■ -.'-• \- : - - - - - . ' ~ '.' . . . - -.„.. _ . _■ . - .- . '. . . . - c _c_- L ' : : ' LINCOLN AND HIS CHILDREN door. The President was overwhelmed by his anxieties, private and public. He sat up with his boys through the nights and went about his heavy official duties by day. Willie died, and his father's heart was torn with grief. "This is the hardest trial of my life," he confessed to the nurse, and in a spirit of rebellion this man, overweighted with cares and sorrows, cried out: "Why is it ? Why is it ?" He strove like a little child to learn to say, "Thy will be done," while the lifeless body of his loved boy lay in the Green Room, beneath his office. For weeks the battle raged in his breast, and one day in each of those weeks while the struggle lasted he surrendered to his grief, dropping his work and wrapping himself in gloom. Mrs. Lincoln, meanwhile, sought to console herself by attempting to communicate with the spirit of her dead child through a medium and his table rappings and slate writings in a darkened room. A vision of the youth came to Lincoln several nights in his dreams, and gave him a certain melan- choly pleasure. In good time, however, the dark passion which had clouded his nature was entirely thrown off, and a nobler philosophy ruled him. Doubtless the fortitude he gained in this time of suffering became a part of that heroic faith in the 287 ABRAHAM LINCOLN man which lifted him above the general despair when his country's fortunes sank the lowest. After Willie's death, little Tad received a double share of his father's affection. Generally they slept together, and no time or place was sacred from the boy. He was free to interrupt his father on any occasion and to crawl over him even at a meeting of the Cabinet. The President liked to go through picture books with him, and laughed carelessly when teachers or tutors complained that he did not pay enough attention to his school books. The boy was all the dearer to his father because of an impediment in his speech, due to a defective palate. This was overcome as he grew older, but when he was a little fellow he could hardly make himself understood by strangers. Even Secretary Stanton, who was so stern with men, had a weakness for Tad. One day the Secre- tary of War pretended to appoint him a lieuten- ant in the army. The boy took the honor in dead earnest, and soon contrived somehow to fit himself out in a uniform appropriate to his rank. The little lieutenant was fond of drilling and eating with the President's guard of soldiers. Taking it into his head to relieve them one night, he sent away the squad on duty and proceeded to organize a new guard from among the laborers about 288 LINCOLN AND HIS CHILDREN the White House. The affair was excitedly brought to the President's attention, but the Commander- in-chief was moved to laughter rather than censure. In at least one great review of the army down in Virginia, this youngest lieutenant, mounted on a horse, rode behind his father and the commanding general as they galloped along the line of cheering troops. While Tad gained his military rank without em- ploying his father's influence, his brother Robert owed his commission in the army to the President's intercession with General Grant. The shyness with which Lincoln, who showered shoulder straps by the thousands, hinted for this little favor from his general lends peculiar interest to his applica- tion: "Please read and answer this letter as though I was not President, but only a friend. My son, now in his twenty-second year, having graduated at Harvard, wishes to see something of the war before it ends. I do not wish to put him in the ranks, nor yet to give him a commission to which those who have already served long are better en- titled and better qualified to hold. "Could he, without embarrassment to you or detriment to the service, go into your military family with some nominal rank, I, and not the public, furnishing his necessary means ? If no, say u 289 ABRAHAM LINCOLN so without the least hesitation, because I am as anx- ious and as deeply interested that you shall not be encumbered as you can be yourself." The President's letters and telegrams to his wife, when she and Tad were absent from Washington, were almost always laden with some piece of infor- mation for Tad's special benefit. In one such com- munication he noted that "Nanny was found resting herself and chewing her little cud on the middle of Tad's bed," and again he sent this message by telegraph, "Tell Tad the goats and father are very well, especially the goats." Perhaps the strangest document in all the volumes of the Complete Works of Abraham Lincoln is a telegram in reference to Tad : — "Executive Mansion, June 9, 1863. "Mrs. Lincoln, Philadelphia, Pa.: "Think you had better put Tad's pistol away. I had an ugly dream about him. "A. L." The son had the father's active sympathies. He used to get up little fairs of his own, at which he held sales for the aid of the sick and wounded soldiers. Sometimes he went into the crowd of office seekers, who were always at the White House, and solicited money for the same good end. He had 290 LINCOLN AND HIS CHILDREN a habit of going among the people in the halls and waiting room and learning their wants. Now and then when they touched his pity or appealed to his sense of justice, he promptly led them into the presence of the President. In the evening, it was Tad's custom to go to his father and make a report of all he had seen and done since morning. As a rule he fell asleep in the midst of his prattle, and then Lincoln turned again to his labors, his boy lying on the floor beside his desk. When the President's own long day was done, he took the sleeping child on his shoulder and carried him to bed. 291 CHAPTER XXVIII LINCOLN AND HIS SOLDIERS Indifferent to the pomp and glory of war, this commander of a million men in arms held himself no more than the equal of the least among them. — His deference to the men in the ranks and their love for Father Abraham. — Visiting the sick and wounded. — His interview with a blind soldier. — Heeding a baby's appeal. — His beautiful tribute to a bereaved mother. — Looking into the camp kettle. — His courage in the face of the enemy. — "There are already too many weeping widows." — His hatred of Fridays. — A friend of the coward. — " Leg cases." — Pity for a condemned slave-trader. — Lincoln and the sleeping sentinel. — The boy who paid the President's bill. " O, slow to smite and swift to spare, Gentle and merciful and just! Who, in the fear of God, didst bear The sword of power — a nation's trust!" — William Cullen Bryant. Lincoln's life was filled with striking contrasts. For this careless captain of a company of unruly rustics in the Black Hawk War to become the Commander-in-chief of a million soldiers, a mightier force of warriors than any conquering monarch of modern times ever assembled, was perhaps the strangest fortune that befell him. In four years he called to his command two and a half millions of men, probably a greater number than followed the 292 LINCOLN AND HIS SOLDIERS eagles of Napoleon in all his twenty years of cam- paigning from Areola to Waterloo. Yet this unparalleled martial power never touched the ambition of Lincoln. He cared nothing for the pomp of arms, the pride of rank, or the glory of war. This man who could say to ten hundred thousand armed troops, go, and they would go, come, and they would come, held himself to be no more than the equal of the least among them. While he stood toward all as a comrade rather than a commander, they looked up to him in perfect trust, and delighted to hail him as Father Abraham. It was enough for him to touch his hat to a general, but he liked to bare his head to the boys in the ranks. He himself created generals by the hundreds, but in his eyes the private soldier was the handiwork of the Almighty. The reported capture of an officer and twelve army mules in a raid near Washington only moved him to remark, "How unfortunate! I can fill that brigadier's place in five minutes, but those mules cost us two hundred dollars apiece." He never to the end solved the mystery of the uni- forms, and could not tell a general from a colonel by his epaulettes. If he passed the White House guard twenty times a day, he always saluted its members. He knew by name every man in the company which watched 293 ABRAHAM LINCOLN over him in his rest at the Soldiers' Home, and was the real friend of all, heartily enjoying an occasional cup of coffee at their mess and the little jokes they played on one another. If any were missing, he noticed their absence, and if they were sick, he never forgot to ask about them. The many military hospitals, crowded with human suffering, that sprang up in Washington, were his special care. He visited and cheered the wounded, pausing beside their cots of pain, bending upon them his pitying gaze and laying his great hand tenderly on their fevered brows. He remembered and watched those who were in peril of death, and eagerly welcomed any signs of improvement in their condition, while he joked with those who were well enough to take a joke. Once as he drove up to a hospital, Lincoln saw one of the inmates walking directly in front of his team, and he cried out to the driver to stop. The horses were checked none too soon to avoid running the man down. Then Lincoln saw that the poor fellow, only a boy, had been shot in both eyes. He got out of his carriage and, taking the blind soldier by the hand, asked him in quavering tones for his name, his service, and his residence. "I am Abraham Lincoln," he himself said, as he was leaving, and the sightless face of the youth was lit 294 LINCOLN AND HIS SOLDIERS up with gratitude as he listened to the President's words of honest sympathy. The next day the chief of the hospital laid in the boy's hands a commission as first lieutenant in the army of the United States, bearing the President's signature, and with it an order retiring him on three- fourths pay for all the years of helplessness that, until then, had stretched before him through a hope- less future. The sympathy of most men who get to be presi- dents, governors, or statesmen can be reached only through their heads. It becomes a thing of the mind, filtered and cooled by an intellectual process. Lincoln's sympathies always remained where nature herself placed them, in the heart, and thence they freely flowed, unhindered by reflection and calcu- lation. Kindness with him was an impulse and not a duty. His benevolence was far from scientific, yet he was so shrewd a judge of human nature that he seldom was cheated. The stone walls of the White House no more shut him in from his fellows, from the hopes and sorrows, the poverty and the pride of the plain people, than did the unhewn logs behind which he shivered and hungered in his boyhood home. A mother's tears, a baby's cry, a father's plea, an empty sleeve, or a crutch never failed to move him. 295 ABRAHAM LINCOLN A woman weeping in a hall of the War De- partment with a baby in her arms, disturbed him, and he could not put the affecting picture out of his thoughts. Learning that she was crying be- cause she could not be permitted under the rules to go to her husband in the Army of the Potomac, and show him their first born which the father never had seen, he caused the Department to summon the soldier to Washington by telegraph, and a bed in one of the hospitals to be assigned to the mother and child. This good deed done, the great simple man was happy for the rest of the day. A soldier who did not appeal to him at all, but whose angry curses on the government he chanced to hear while walking along a path in the White House grounds, gained his aid. The President, seating himself at the foot of a tree, examined the man as to his grievance, and gave him an order which promptly brought him the pay he had been unable to draw. His wonderful patience was most wonderful in his bearing toward all who wore the blue. They came to him in perfect trust, when colonels and generals and bureau chiefs and the Secretary of War were deaf to them. With the great burden of the nation on his shoulders, he always stopped to listen to their tales of trouble, although, as he said, 296 LINCOLN AND HIS SOLDIERS he might as well have tried to bail out the Potomac with a teaspoon as to go into every detail of the administration of a vast army. Once when disaster was on every hand, and he was overborne with care, he reproved a man, who had been refused by every one else, for following him to the Soldiers' Home, his only refuge, and sent him away. Early the next morning, after a night of remorse, he went to the man's hotel, begged his forgiveness for treating "with rudeness one who had offered his life for his country " and was in sore trouble. Taking him in his carriage, the Presi- dent saw him through his difficulties. When he told Secretary Stanton what he had done, the Sec- retary himself apologized for having rejected the appeal in the first instance. "No, no," said Lincoln, "you did right in ad- hering to your rules. If we had such a soft-hearted old fool as I am in your place, there would be no rules that the army or the country could depend on. When he heard of a poor widow in Massachusetts, a working woman who, it was reported, had lost five sons in battle, he sat down and wrote her one of the most beautiful letters of condolence that a hand ever was inspired to write : — "I feel how weak and fruitless must be any word 297 ABRAHAM LINCOLN of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming, but I cannot refrain from tendering to you the consolation that may be found in the thanks of the republic they died to save. " I pray our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavements and leave 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." Whenever he visited an army, he showed his unfailing interest in the enlisted men, going among them, and even looking into their camp kettles to see how they were fed. "General," he said to Butler, "I should like to ride along the lines and see the boys and how they are situated." Accordingly he and the General rode until they were within three hundred yards of the enemy's pickets. The latter heard the Union troops cheering their Presi- dent, and saw his tall figure as he sat in his saddle. Butler was uneasy and said, "You are in a fair rifle shot of the rebels, and they may open fire on you." He wished him to turn away. Lincoln laughed and replied, "The Commander-in-chief of the army must not show any cowardice in the presence of his soldiers, whatever he may feel." And he kept on until he had covered the entire 298 LINCOLN AND HIS SOLDIERS line of intrenchments, some six miles or more in length. It was for the men in the trenches that he felt the Union must be saved. He was not striving to per- petuate it for the sake of the business interests of the country, for the benefit of the prosperous. He believed the downfall of the Union, the overthrow of a government by the people, would be a heavy if not a fatal blow to the multitude the world over, to "the last best hope of earth." Each man can look upon the universe only with his own eyes. Lincoln saw how freely the democratic institutions of the United States had permitted him to rise, and this was the ideal which he cherished for the Union. "Gold is good in its place, but living, brave, and patriotic men are better than gold," he said. His Secretary of the Treasury complained of him, that he never once asked to see the treasury figures, to see how the money was coming in and going out to carry on the war. His Secretary of War, on the other hand, continually complained of him for inter- fering with that department, in his effort to protect private soldiers. The generals echoed this pro- test. Indeed, the only criticism of Lincoln's own direct use of his despotic authority which stands to-day is of his lavish exercise of the par- doning power. 299 ABRAHAM LINCOLN This interest on his part was no fickle, unsteady freshet of gushing sentimentality which overflowed one day and dried up the next, no alternating current of strength and weakness. Mercy flowed in a con- stant stream from its fountain in his great heart, nourishing the fragrant flower of charity under the withering blasts of war. The eye, in running over the printed pages of his official correspondence, is forever coming upon traces of this persistent quality of the man. "If you have not yet shot Dennis McCarthy, don't." "Has he been a good soldier, except the desertion ? About how old is he ?" "I do not like this punish- ment of withholding pay; it falls so very hard upon poor families." These several quotations from de- spatches sent by Lincoln are a few out of scores of similar inquiries and instructions which may be seen in casually turning the leaves of his published writings. Commanders in the field implored him to withhold his hand, and scolded him because he would not leave them free to apply the stern measures they deemed necessary to the discipline of the military machine. He never could forget, however, that a volunteer army after all is a human machine, and it was his faith that love conquers more than fear. Every soldier who carried a musket was as 300 LINCOLN AND HIS SOLDIERS a son of his. All were his children, and hardly more than children were the defenders of the Union. Of the two and a half million enlistments, more than two million were of boys under twenty-one; more than a million of the soldiers were not even eighteen; eight hundred thousand went into the army before they were seventeen, two hundred thousand before they were sixteen, and one hundred thousand before they were fifteen years old. "There are already too many weeping widows," Lincoln insisted to one of those who protested, when forbidden to shoot twenty-four deserters in a row; "for God's sake, don't ask me to add to the number, for I won't do it." "They are shoot- ing a boy to-day," he was heard to say once. "I hope I have not done wrong to allow it." He hated Fridays. As he turned to a heap of sentences lying on his table one Thursday, he said, "To-morrow is butcher's day, and I must go through these papers and see if I can't find some excuse to let these poor fellows off." He was honest about it. He did not pretend to apply any strict rules of justice. "I think this boy can do us more good above ground than under ground," was his reason in one instance. "The case of Andrews is really a very bad one," was his indorsement on a commutation, and he admitted 301 ABRAHAM LINCOLN he commuted the sentence solely "because I am trying to evade the butchering business." The coward found a friend in this brave man. Convictions on the black charge of "cowardice in the face of the enemy" he lightly called "leg cases." "If," he demanded of a frowning army officer, "God Almighty gives a man a cowardly pair of legs, how can he help their running away with him ?" A pigeon-hole in his desk was crowded with these "leg cases" of men who had run away, but who were suffered by Lincoln to live to fight another day. His hand, so ready to spare, paused above the death writ of a convicted slave-trader, as he sadly remarked, "Do you know how hard it is to have a human being die when you feel that a stroke of your pen will save him?" Even this heinous offender was not barred from his large pity as a brother man. He delayed the execution from the fear that in the man's delusive hope of pardon he had not prepared himself for death, and he admonished him in the days of grace which he gave him "to refer himself to the mercy of the common God and Father of all men." To his friend, David Davis, the presiding judge of the old circuit, whom he lifted to the bench of the supreme court of the United States, he once 302 LINCOLN AND HIS SOLDIERS said he did not believe in killing, and that if the world had no butcher but himself, it would go bloodless. He was open to appeals for clemency at any time and in any place. One man went to him late at night, after he had gone to bed, and he sat down in his night-clothes and wrote the order sus- pending the execution of a nineteen-year-old boy for sleeping at his post. The boy was to be shot the next morning, and Lincoln was so troubled by the fear that his telegram might go astray he rose and dressed and went to the War Department in order to get into direct telegraphic communication with the army in the field. Once when he was disturbed by a like fear he was not content until he had repeated his order by telegraph to four persons. A condemned man did not need any powerful influence in his behalf. "If he has no friend, I'll be his friend," Lincoln said as he stopped the shooting of a soldier. To a woman who pleaded for her brother's life, Lincoln said, "My poor girl, you have come here with no governor, or senator, or member of Con- gress to speak in your cause; you seem honest and truthful, and you don't wear hoops, and I'll be whipped if I don't pardon him." "God bless 3°3 ABRAHAM LINCOLN President Lincoln " was the written inscription under a photograph of Lincoln which was found in the pocket of a dead soldier after the battle of Freder- icksburg. By the President's mercy he had been spared a dishonorable death to die on the field of honor. The oft-told story of Lincoln and the sleeping sentinel has the power to move the heart far more than any feat of arms in the Civil War. The senti- nel was a young soldier from Vermont, who was con- demned to die in a camp near Washington because he had fallen asleep while on guard duty. The offence was particularly serious at the time, because the safety of the capital depended on the watch- fulness of the sentries. The officials determined to make an example of the Green Mountain youth. Every effort to save him had failed when the captain and the members of his company, all neigh- bors of the doomed offender, went to the White House and saw Lincoln. A few hours afterward the boy was astonished to receive a visit from the President of the United States, who asked him about his parents, their farm, his work, and his life generally. He told the Presi- dent the simple story of his old home among the hills, and took from his pocket a picture of his mother. Lincoln told him he was too good a boy to be shot 3°4 LINCOLN AND HIS SOLDIERS for merely falling asleep once. He himself had been brought up on a farm and knew how hard it must be for a country boy to keep awake nights when new to army habits and duties. He promised to free him, but he would have to present a heavy bill for his services. The soldier's happy face reflected a grateful heart. He was sure his father would raise what money he could by mortgaging the farm and pay the charge. Lincoln said that would not be enough; the boy alone could pay the bill and only by proving himself to be as brave and faithful as any soldier of the Union. His hand rested on the head and his kindly eyes looked full into the honest face of the boy, who pledged his life that he would not disappoint his benefactor. The President's bill was presented not long afterward. It was in the Peninsular Campaign and in the boy's first battle. In a desperate charge across a river and upon some blazing rifle pits he was among the first to face and among the last to turn his back on the enemy. When retreat was sounded, he swam in safety to the friendly bank of the stream. But he felt he had not yet paid the President's bill. He plunged into the water again and again, and swam to and fro under the shot of the foe in the work of rescuing wounded comrades, until he x 305 ABRAHAM LINCOLN had brought back the last of them, but with a bullet in his own loyal breast. Then he was ready to close his account with earth. He had paid the President's bill in full, and with his dying breath he blessed the mercy of Lincoln for trusting him and permitting him to give his life for the Union. 306 CHAPTER XXIX LINCOLN THE EMANCIPATOR His life-long hatred of slavery. — Why he was not an Abolitionist. — His courage and wisdom in resisting rash counsels. — Could not free the slaves as President, but only as Commander-in- chief and as a military, not as a moral measure. — General Butler's declaration that slaves were contraband of war, May, 1861. — Lincoln's effort to promote gradual, compensated emancipation in the border states. — The slaves in the District of Columbia emancipated by Congress, April 16, 1862. — Lincoln first announced to his cabinet, July 22, 1862, his purpose to proclaim emancipation in warring states. — Writing the Proclamation in secret. — His vow to God. — A strange scene in the cabinet room, Lincoln first reading from Artemus Ward, and then reading his Proclamation, September 22, 1862. — Emancipation of more than three million slaves proclaimed, January I, 1863. — The Confederacy staggered. — One hun- dred and fifty thousand black troops for the Union in 1864. — The South driven to arming the negroes. — Lincoln's ideals for the freedmen. — His dread of a race problem. — The thirteenth amendment adopted by Congress, February 1, 1865, and ratified by the states, December 18, 1865. Lincoln always hated slavery. Yet he never was an Abolitionist, for the Abolitionists who were ridiculed as long-haired men and short-haired women, or cranks, hated the Constitution and the Union as well as slavery. Because the Constitution recognized the existence of slavery and protected it within the states where it existed, they denounced 307 ABRAHAM LINCOLN it as a league with death and a covenant with hell. Despairing of the abolition of slavery within the Union, they loudly advocated disunion and the separa- tion of the North from the South. Lincoln, on the other hand, felt a deep passion for the Union, and it was his faith that the principles of liberty and equality, on which it was founded, would surely lead in the end to the gradual eman cipation of the slaves. He believed the nation would not permanently remain half free and half slave ; that it would become either one thing or the other, and that under the inspiration of the Decla- ration of Independence and the democratic institu- tions of the republic, freedom would triumph. The Abolitionists did not support him when he was a candidate for President, and after he became President their eloquent orator, Wendell Phillips, described him as "the slave hound of Illinois." Lincoln was still for the Union above all else, for he felt if that were lost, the surest guarantee of freedom for white men as well as black would be lost. If he had permitted the Civil War to become at once a fight against slavery rather than a fight for the life of the Union, he would have driven from his side the slave states on the border and a majority of the people of the free states of the North 308 LINCOLN THE EMANCIPATOR as well. Moreover, he believed that he had no right under his oath of office to destroy slavery except to save the Union. A President in time of peace could not free the slaves any more than he could enter a man's house and take away something that lawfully belonged to him. Not as President, but only as Commander- in-chief of the army engaged in open war, could Lincoln emancipate the negroes, just as he could kill, burn, or confiscate whenever and wherever he thought he could thereby hurt the enemy and help the Union. In resisting the rash counsels of the radicals, Lin- coln showed a courage equal to his wisdom. He must seem to ignore the moral sentiment "of the civilized world which was outraged by the institu- tion of slavery in a free country, and appear in- different to a cause which he had espoused in his youth. He could not fail to see, however, that freedom was on the way. No man could stop it, and it needed no encouragement. The South had made war in order to perpetuate slavery. As surely as the South lost, slavery would be lost. From the outset the army commanders were confronted with the question of what to do with the negroes who came within the Union lines. Some 3°9 ABRAHAM LINCOLN generals restored the slaves to their owners, while others went so far as to issue emancipation proc- lamations on their own responsibility. Both methods brought embarrassment to Lincoln. To return the runaways to slavery aroused in- dignation in the North and even in Europe, while to proclaim them free, alarmed the border states and the conservatives of the North. General Benjamin F. Butler found the happiest solution of all. He declared the negroes who came under his military jurisdiction "contraband of war," and held them just as any contraband article is held or treated in time of war. That fortunate phrase surmounted many diffi- culties, and "contrabands," as the fugitives came to be known in the speech of the day, flocked to the standard of freedom in increasing numbers. They dug trenches, threw up earthworks, and did all manner of labor for the Union armies. They were not free, however, in the cold eye of the law. As events continued to hasten the institution of bondage to its downfall, Lincoln did his utmost to prepare the Union slaveholders and their sympa- thizers for the inevitable end. He strove to put in operation a plan for paying the owners of slaves in the border states, and to gain their consent to a slow process of compensated emancipation. He 310 LINCOLN THE EMANCIPATOR pleaded earnestly with the representatives of those states in Congress, and he addressed the people themselves. "You cannot, if you would, be blind to the signs of the times," he warned them in a proclamation in the spring of 1862. Their prejudices against the abolition of slavery, however, clouded their vision, and his warning was unheeded. Congress, having power over the matter in the District of Columbia, passed a law for the compensated emancipation of the three thousand slaves at the capital, an act which Lincoln himself had proposed when he was a member of the House a dozen years before. A year of disaster to the national cause sealed the fate of slavery. The negro must be freed and called to the aid of the Union. Lincoln reasoned, "Often a limb must be amputated to save a life; but a life is never wisely given to save a limb." He must amputate slavery from the body of our in- stitutions in order to save the government itself from wreck. He would not emancipate the negroes because he personally wished to see all men free. To do that would be a violation of his oath. He would free them solely because he believed as Com- mander-in-chief of the army that their services had become a military necessity. As in every important transaction in his life, he 3 11 ABRAHAM LINCOLN kept his own counsel while waiting and watching for the time to act. He listened to those who ad- dressed him on the subject and discussed it with them; but he told no one of his purpose. In mid- summer of 1862 he first informed his cabinet of his intention, but he was urged to wait. Mc- Clellan's army was at that time retreating down the peninsula from Richmond, and it was argued that if the step were taken then, the world would look upon it as an act of desperation. While he waited, Lincoln wrote the Proclamation in secret. A month after the President had confided his purpose to the cabinet, Horace Greeley spread on the page of the New York Tribune a stirring appeal for immediate emancipation. Lincoln answered the editor without disclosing the resolution which he had already taken. He still insisted on keeping before the people the one issue of saving the Union. " My paramount object," Lincoln wrote to Greeley, "is to save the Union, and not either to save or destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it — and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it — and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that. What I do about slavery and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I 312 LINCOLN THE EMANCIPATOR forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union." Several weeks later, a delegation of clergymen from Chicago came to press him to free all the slaves at once, and they said they had come in obedience to a Divine command. Lincoln answered that it seemed as if God would be more likely to reveal His will on this subject to him than to others, and he assured his callers, if he could learn what God wished him to do, he would do it. Even then the written Proclamation lay in his desk, still con- cealed from every eye save his own. A few days more and the battle of Antietam brought victory to the Union arms. Five days after that event there was a meeting of the cabinet. When all the members were in their seats, Lincoln told them Artemus Ward, the humorist, had sent him his latest book, and he would like to read a funny chapter from it. "High-handed Outrage at Utica was the title of this chapter. One of the secretaries said he seemed to enjoy the reading of it very much, and that all the members smiled, except Stanton." When the President had finished it, and finished his laugh over it, his face and his tone underwent an instant change. "Gentlemen," he said gravely when the rebel army was at Frederick, I determined 313 ABRAHAM LINCOLN as soon as it should be driven out of Maryland to issue a proclamation of emancipation such as I thought most likely to be useful. I said nothing to any one, but I made the promise to myself — and to my Maker. The rebel army is now driven out and I am going to fulfil that promise. I have got you together to hear what I have written down. I do not wish your advice about the main matter, for that I have determined for myself. This I say without intending anything but respect for any one of you." He confessed it might seem strange that he should have submitted the matter to the judgment of God, but the way was not clear to his own mind. Now that God had decided in favor of the slaves, he was satisfied the Proclamation was right. He asked the members, therefore, merely to consider the language of the document and not its purpose, for that had been fully and finally decided. He acknowledged that others in his place might do better than he could do. If he believed any one else more fully possessed the public confidence and there were a constitutional way in which that person could be placed in the presidential chair, he would gladly yield it to him. "I am here," he added; "I must do the best I can and bear the responsibility." 3*4 LINCOLN THE EMANCIPATOR If a scene like unto this ever was enacted in the cabinet room of the White House, before or since, it is not recorded in history. Opening with laughter over a roaring farce from the pen of Artemus Ward, shifting in a twinkling to the freeing of a race from bondage, and concluding by a simple, humble con- fession of a childlike reliance on prayer, it affords in its contrasts a portrait of Lincoln as true as it is extraordinary. The Proclamation thus brought forth did not go into effect until the first of January following, and it promised freedom only to those negroes held to slavery in the states which at that date should still be at war with the Union. In other words, it gave the slaveholders one hundred days' grace, in which period, by bringing their states back into the Union, they could avert the emancipation of their slaves. The New Year came and with it the usual recep- tion by the President to the ministers from foreign nations, the justices of the courts, the members of the Senate and House, the officers of the army and navy, the chiefs of bureaus, and the public. This hard task finished, Lincoln seated himself to sign the final Emancipation Proclamation, declaring the slaves in the Confederate States thenceforward and forever free. As he took up his pen, his hand was stiff from the 3i5 ABRAHAM LINCOLN long ordeal of hand-shaking. He said he feared it would tremble so badly that posterity would look at his signature and say, "He hesitated." Yet, he declared, his whole soul was in it, and he remarked that if his name got into history at all, it would be for the act which he was about to complete. After resting his arm, he wrote his name at the bottom of the Proclamation with much care. Then examining his penmanship, he said with a smile, "That will do." The pen was given to a Massachusetts man, its handle gnawed by Lincoln's teeth, for it was his habit to hold his pen in his mouth while forming and rounding sentences in his mind before beginning them on paper. The Proclamation and his signa- ture he intended to preserve for himself and his heirs. When, however, he was asked to give it to a great fair in Chicago and let it be sold for the benefit of sick and wounded soldiers, he unselfishly parted with it. A generous sum of money, three thousand dollars, was realized by its sale at auction, but the document itself was destroyed in the conflagration which burned the larger part of Chicago eight years later. By the Proclamation more than three million of the four million slaves in the South were declared free. All those in the loyal border states, in Ten- 316 LINCOLN THE EMANCIPATOR nessee, and in the part of Louisiana held by the Union forces were excluded from its provisions, because, acting as Commander-in-chief of the army, the President could not interfere with slavery out- side the enemy's country. Lincoln's first purpose was to spread demoraliza- tion among the slaves of the Confederates, tempting the laborers who were tilling the fields and raising the crops which supported the Confederate army, and who besides were doing much of the heavy work in the construction of fortifications, to cease their labors and seek freedom within the Union lines. Wherever the Stars and Stripes appeared in the states of the Confederacy, slavery instantly perished. Everywhere the blacks hailed the advance of "Lin- kum's soldiers" as their deliverance from bondage. The next step after the issuance of the proclamation was to enroll negro troops and send them forth in the army of liberation. In the last critical period of the war, when the draft was necessary in the North and extravagant bounties had to be paid to white volunteers, there were one hundred and fifty thou- sand black men under arms, battling for the Union. Lincoln said of this new force, which the policy of emancipation had brought to the support of the government, " Keep it, and you can save the Union. Throw it away, and the Union goes with it." He 3*7 ABRAHAM LINCOLN was thoroughly convinced that only by calling in the help of the negroes could the life of the nation be preserved. The Confederacy reeled from the blow, when its full effect was felt, and the leaders of the South were enraged. Jefferson Davis denounced the Emancipa- tion Proclamation as the "most execrable measure recorded in the history of guilty man," and the Con- federate Congress enacted that any white officer cap- tured while commanding negro troops might be put to death. Some of the generals of the South an- nounced they would treat captured negro soldiers as they treated any other form of captured property. In a few instances black captives were massacred and an angry cry for retaliation arose in the North. Lincoln, however, said he could not bear the thought of killing southern prisoners of war for what other Southerners had done. He would not order the innocent shot as a punishment for the guilty. The time came when the South itself, in its ex- tremity, turned to the despised race. In November, 1864, President Davis sent a message to his Congress, saying that rather than accept defeat the Confeder- ates would employ negro soldiers and reward them with freedom. General Lee and General Johnston both urged the adoption of such a plan, and finally, on the eve of the fall of Richmond, provision was 318 LINCOLN THE EMA NCIPATOR made, by act of the Confederate Congress, for the enrolment of black troops under the Stars and Bars of a republic which had placed the slavery of the African race in its very corner-stone. Thus was Lin- coln's Emancipation Proclamation doubly justified as a military measure. Morally, Lincoln would have preferred to see the negroes freed, not at one stroke, but gradually. This was the ideal he expressed time and again, for he was always a very practical man. He dreaded sudden revolutions and their equally violent reac- tions. He feared the racial strife and the social problem which would follow any kind of emancipa- tion, and he even favored the experiment of sending the freedmen out of the South and colonizing them in Central America, or elsewhere. When he saw that this would not be done, he turned to the educa- tion of the liberated blacks as the best hope of fitting them to hold their own in a land where they had so long been in slavery. He favored no sweeping and radical plans. His purpose was to seek some slow but wise process, whereby "the two races could gradually live them- selves out of their old relation to each other, and both come out better prepared for the new." Universal negro suffrage did not strongly appeal to him. He preferred that the ballot should be placed only in the 3*9 ABRAHAM LINCOLN hands of the colored men who had fought for the Union, and the "very intelligent." Black voters of those classes, he thought, would "probably help in some trying time to come, to keep the jewel of liberty in the family of freedom." He continued to beg the people of the border states to complete the work of freeing the slaves by compensated emancipation. Millions of dollars were offered them in payment for their negroes, but the owners would not accept. The only course re- maining was the adoption of an amendment to the Constitution, forbidding slavery everywhere within the United States. After all the evil which the institution had wrought, it must be destroyed, root and branch, before the restoration of the Union. It would be a criminal folly to permit a vestige of it to linger and disturb the new Union. Lincoln therefore strove earnestly in the closing months of the war for the passage of the thir- teenth amendment, which he looked upon as the completion of his labors for freedom. In the evening following his second inauguration he held a reception. Frederick Douglass, who was born a slave, presented himself to be received by the President. No negro ever before had been seen on a social occasion at the White House, and the police started at once to put Douglass out. A protest being 320 LINCOLN THE EMANCIPATOR raised by some onlooker, however, he was permitted to take his place in the line of guests, where in due time he was cordially greeted by the President. For Lincoln, although he knew the prejudices of others, had a respect for the feelings as well as for the rights of the members of this enslaved race. "Mr. Lincoln," said Douglass, "is the only white man with whom I have ever talked, or in whose pres- ence I have ever been, who did not consciously or unconsciously betray to me that he recognized my color." He invited Douglass to tea in his cottage at the Soldiers' Home, and many negroes attended the President's New Year's reception in the closing days of the war, laughing and crying with joy as they stood in their new manhood before their eman- cipator. 321 CHAPTER XXX LINCOLN AND HIS CABINET A group of naturally discordant advisers moulded and harmonized by Lincoln's unsuspected mastery of men. — Seward or Chase expected to be the real power behind the chair of the unknown and untried President. — Seward's amazing proposal to Lincoln, April I, 1861, and the kindly firmness with which the latter rejected it. — Chase's pathetic failure to understand his chief. — Attempt of the Senate to reconstruct the cabinet, December 19, 1862, and Lincoln's successful method of meet- ing the crisis. — Lincoln and Stanton a strangely matched team. — "I have very little influence with this administration." — How Lincoln slowly and gently gained the lead over all. — Chase's resignation, June 28, 1864, and Lincoln's generous appointment of him to the Chief-justiceship, December 6, 1864. — Estimates of Lincoln's leadership by Seward and Stanton. Lincoln hated to dictate. He shrank from assum- ing to control the members of his cabinet until forced by circumstances to take upon himself the responsibility. His natural preference was to work with, rather than to lead men. He could not bear to humble any fellow-being, however low his rank. He found, however, as emergencies arose, that some one must rule, and that as President he alone was responsible to the people. His courage never per- mitted him to shirk a duty, and thus little by little 322 Edward Bates Attorney General Montgomery Blair Postmaster General From the collection of Frederick H. Meserve, Esq., New York City Lincoln and his Cabinet From the collection of Frederick II. Meserve, Esq., New York City Lincoln and his Commanders An old group reproduced LINCOLN AND HIS CABINET his power was modestly put forth until his quiet mastery was complete. When the members of Lincoln's cabinet first met, probably no one among them suspected that their counsels would be ruled by the man who sat at the head of the table. None of them knew him, and most of them felt they were the superiors of the un- tried and untrained President. They had all been chosen by him for political and party reasons. Four had been his competitors for the nomination at Chi- cago. He had not one personal friend in the group. The construction of such a cabinet was a daring venture. There was no binding tie between the secretaries. Rivals or strangers to Lincoln, they were not united in loyalty to him. Drawn from hos- tile factions, there was no harmony of purpose among them. Only a President with the power to mould and master men could hold together a group of advisers naturally so discordant. Few, if any, imagined that Lincoln would dominate them. For twenty years there had been a succession of weak Presidents, reigning but not ruling. The Chief Executive had come to be no more than the figurehead of a strong faction. Lincoln's administra- tion, therefore, was expected to be his only in name. Two men in the cabinet, Seward and Chase, repre- senting opposing forces in the new Republican party, 3 2 3 ABRAHAM LINCOLN aspired to be the real power behind the President's chair. Their struggle for control began before Lin- coln reached Washington, and grew more intense as time went on. Seward, an old and adroit New York politician, had been the original choice of a large majority of Republicans for President, and he looked upon Lincoln as a mere accident of politics. Moreover, as Secretary of State, he held the ranking place in the cabinet. Under these circumstances he assumed at once to be the directing genius of the administration. He was a man of free and easy manners, and had been long in Washington. Lincoln liked him, and relied for a while upon his larger experience with public men and public affairs. In this period, Seward amused himself by play- ing the part of a prime minister. He undertook not only to conduct the State Department, but to deal with the seceded states of the South, and to give orders to the army and navy. By his advice there were no stated cabinet meetings for several weeks, because he preferred to be the sole adviser of the President, and he took it upon himself to call the few meetings which were held in the early stages of the administration. Intoxicated by power, he lost his head. He de- termined to have his supreme position formally 3 2 4 LINCOLN AND HIS CABINET recognized and established. It was then that he made in writing his wild proposal to the President, that the United States should bring on a war with some foreign nation in order to awaken the patriot- ism of the South, and that the President should let him conduct the government. Lincoln ignored this mortal insult as if it had come from a child, and put aside the folly of it all with the patience and firmness of a large nature — a display of strength which instantly and forever conquered his ambitious Secretary. When Seward had finished reading the brief and kindly reply, he was entirely changed. Ever after he was content simply to serve. Straightway taking his place in his own department, he kept it to the end, an able and loyal lieutenant of his chief, whose path he never crossed again. He was the first to challenge the new President and the first to accept his leader- ship. No hint of the encounter escaped the lips of either. Lincoln had maintained his own dignity, without humiliating Seward. The good understanding be- tween them in their official relations ripened into a hearty personal friendship, which nothing ever dis- turbed. Chase, the other ambitious member of the cabinet, built for himself the enduring fame of a great Secre- 3 2 5 ABRAHAM LINCOLN tary of the Treasury, but he remained throughout his service a stranger to the President. The Secretary was a man of culture, and was an eminent statesman when Lincoln was yet unknown outside of Illinois. He never could persuade himself to accept the latter's elevation above him. Worst of all, he was totally without a sense of humor, and that deficiency hopelessly and pathetic- ally separated the two men. "The truth is," Chase observed with all his solemn seriousness, "I have never been able to make a joke out of this war." He was a persistent and open critic of the President, at whose council table he sat. "He may have been a good flatboatman and rail-splitter," he admitted to one of his correspondents, in a flippant reference to the President, but he failed to appreciate Lincoln's statesmanship. His constant faultfinding with the President and his associates aided in finally bringing on a serious crisis. When the administration was well-nigh over- whelmed with disaster in the field and defeat at the polls, the Republican senators, still cherishing the delusion that Lincoln was not his own master, de- termined to rescue him from Seward's influence, which they thought was wrecking the administration, and place him under the wiser guidance of Chase. They did not dream that the entire cabinet could go 326 LINCOLN AND HIS CABINET and a new one come without affecting the President's policies. A caucus was held, and a delegation of leading senators was sent to force the retirement of the Secretary of State. Lincoln received them without showing any resentment, and invited them to return in the evening. When they came at the appointed time, they were surprised to find that he had as- sembled all the members of the cabinet except Seward, and the two groups were thus obliged to discuss the situation face to face. This unexpected meeting resulted in clearing the air and in silencing several of the senators. Seward offered his resignation, and Chase felt that he had been exposed in a position where it was only proper for him to show the same self-sacrificing spirit. He came to see the President the next morning, with his written resignation in his hand. While he was still hesitating to present it, however, Lincoln approached him, and guessing what the irresolute Secretary held in his hand he reached for the paper. Chase could do nothing less than deliver it to him and take his departure. Lincoln was made happy thus to have the two rivals on an equal footing. He sat down at once and wrote to both of them, declining to accept their resignations, whereupon they resumed their duties. 3 2 7 ABRAHAM LINCOLN "Now," said Lincoln, with a smile of satisfaction, " I can ride ; I have got a pumpkin in each end of my bag." He had retained the two factions in his ser- vice in order that they should balance each other, and had reorganized his cabinet without losing either of his able secretaries. After that experience with the President, the sen- ators concluded that he knew enough to conduct his own affairs, and they let him alone. They could sympathize with Horace Greeley, who adopted the prudent policy of keeping away from the White House. "Lincoln is too sharp for me," the famous editor declared; "every time I go near him, he winds me around his finger." With equal tact and skill, the President made a much-needed change in the head of the War Department. Secretary Cameron, a powerful poli- tician, had not conducted this most important de- partment to the satisfaction of his chief and the country. Lincoln succeeded in the delicate task of securing his withdrawal from it without wounding his feelings, and appointed in his place Edwin M. Stanton, a Democrat, who had shown himself an out- spoken personal and political enemy of the President. Stanton, who was a lawyer in Washington, had not entered the White House since Lincoln's ap- pearance there, and had been free with his criticisms 328 LINCOLN AND HIS CABINET of the administration. All this counted for nothing against his fitness for the office. Lincoln's nature was a stranger to the spirit of revenge. He did not have to forgive the insult he received at Stanton's hands the first time they met in the reaper case in Cincinnati a few years before, or his bitter criticism of the administration; he could calmly ignore them. The new Secretary of War brought to his duties a patriotic devotion that was almost fanatical and an energy that thrilled the dispirited armies. He forgot himself, the President, and every one else in his rage for the success of the Union arms. "Now, we will have some fighting," was his grim watch- word. He trod intrigue and influence like serpents under his ruthless heel. He would have no secret influences in his department. Taking his stand each day at a certain hour to receive his callers,— senators, generals, and all alike, — he placed bes'ide him a stenographer who took down a report of everything that was said. Men rushed to the White House in offended dignity to complain of the high-handed measures of the new Secretary. To smooth the ruffled feel- ings of one of them, Lincoln told a story. "We may," he said, "have to treat Stanton as they are sometimes obliged to treat a Methodist minister I know out West. He gets wrought up to so high 3 2 9 ABRAHAM LINCOLN a pitch of excitement in his prayers and exhorta- tions that they put bricks in his pockets to keep him down. But I guess," the President concluded with a twinkle, "we'll let him jump awhile first." A Governor who came to the White House in a rage over some act of Stanton's was sent away in a better frame of mind, but without receiving any concession. Lincoln was asked to tell how he appeased him, and he said he did it the same way that an Illinois farmer got rid of a big log which lay in the middle of his field : he " ploughed around " the wrathful Governor. " But," the President confessed, " it took me nearly three hours to do it, and I was in mortal fear all the time that he would discover what I was up to." No doubt Lincoln secretly rejoiced in the very violence of Stanton's temper as a quality which he himself lacked, and was glad to employ it in the service of his administration. When a man who had wheedled the President into giving him a note of introduction to the Secretary hastened back to the White House to tell him that Stanton had angrily torn up the President's card and thrown it in the waste basket, Lincoln looked upon it as a good joke. "Well, that's just like Stanton," he exclaimed with real enjoyment of the situation. A Congressman who went to the Secretary with an order from the President came back to report 33° LINCOLN AND HIS CABINET that Stanton ignored the order and said the President was a fool. Lincoln only answered that if Stanton said he was a fool, he must be a fool, as "Stanton is nearly always right and generally says what he means." To another man who begged him to overrule Stanton's refusal of a pass through the military lines, the President remarked with a helpless air, "I can do nothing; for you must know that I have very little influence with this administration." Nevertheless, in his own quiet way, Lincoln took care to slip a few bricks into the pockets of his ram- pant Secretary of War as occasion required. If un- checked in his remorseless passion for the triumph of the Union, he might have shut the gates of mercy and set up an iron-handed despotism that would have wrecked the cause which he had so much at heart. Lincoln ruled him with a forbearance and firmness which gave the government the aid of his great powers, while restraining him from harming its interests. When the capital was in peril from Lee's first in- vasion, and Lincoln determined to recall McClellan to the command of the army, he knew that Stanton would never sanction the step, and he acted without consulting him. The Secretary when he heard of it came to the White House in an ugly mood. The President met him in the kindest 33* .1 I A.HAM LINCOLN : : : : _: :.- :e:~ = rr. irked " .:r. = _:.- i:: r.L' it::i::r. l ha : then : old be no appeal, he told him he had en the order and he alone would stand responsible : : : : t : * : : t zr.t . it.tt At another time when Lincoln gave a permit without knowing that it was contrary to the wishes of both Grant and Stanton, the latter positively refused to complv with it- The President regretted his act, but he had gh en hia word and felt he must see it through, in order to avoid a serious difficulty with powerful persons who were concerned in the rr. i : : t : : : - — - . I reckon you'll have to execute : - t it it: r. Presiden-. --.ton replied with feeling, "I cannot do it; die order is an improper one ■ • Lincoln persisted with a look of determination, "it will have to be dor .-.- lough. Xo man could have a quarrel with Lincoln, and Stanton obeyed without further protest. Then, always fair, the President n rant explaining in plain words that the permit i blunder on ': n part and that Stanton should not be blamed for it. "He might appear I . :d ? s way one ch Am.it and on's another; but all the time he LINCOLN AND HIS CABINET his own course and the*.' with him. It was that gentle firmness in earning out his own will wil argument, force, or friction that formed the basis." The bravery and cons:. the man g him the lead without effort on his part. His patience was a large part of his strength. His temper slow and under excellent control. He never s] in haste, acted in haste, or moved in haste. No member o{ his cabinet ever heard a word of fault- finding from him or received even a Frown. Yet if it suited him. he could speak with p ness. When Halleck as General-in-chie: armv dared to ask that one o{ the :aries be dropped. Lincoln bluntly replied, "I propose to be myself the judge as to when a memK I I cabinet shall be dismis Again, to a quarrel between the men: fc :■■. "S :.- obliged to read the cabinet a rather stern lecture, in which he said he did not wish t? hear in such a thin: '"Here or elsewiu W hile compelled by hi n to be the head oi his administration, and nes 1 his subordinates, he seldom interfered in the affairs of any department other than the V» ai Dep where as Commander-in-chief it was necessar] him to take a close and active interest. Incapable or jealousy, he left the members o: his 333 ABRAHAM LINCOLN cabinet free to conduct their respective branches of the public service in their own way and to reap for themselves whatever fame their success brought them. He was ignorant of the details of their duties and did not try to acquire a knowledge of them, trusting entirely to their judgment and experience. He had no taste for desk work, and with his remark- able memory he was able to carry the Presidency of the United States in his hat. "Money," Lincoln cried to some bankers. "I don't know anything about money. I never had enough of my own to fret me, and I have no opinion about it anyway. Go see Chase." The Secretary of the Treasury was as innocent as he of finance in the beginning of the administration, but with a high order of intelligence he had built up a sys- tem which brought in the three billions required for the expenses of the army and enough more to carry on the rest of the public work. It stands in history as a great achievement and wholly to his credit. Lincoln had the sound common sense not to waste his time in meddling with the work which he appointed another to do and who gave all his thought and strength to the task. Unfortunately Chase's extraordinary abilities were impaired by a childish vanity and a peevish temper. He was a poor chooser of men, and whenever the 334 LINCOLN AND HIS CABINET President saw fit to revise or interfere with his ap- pointments, he took offence. Resignation was his favorite way of showing resentment, and Lincoln coaxed him out of several such fits of ill humor. "I went directly up to him with his resignation in my hand," he recalled, in describing one expe- rience of this kind when he had driven out to his Secretary's house, "and putting my arm around his neck, said to him, 'Chase, here is a paper with which I wish to have nothing to do. Take it back and be reasonable;' I had to plead with him a long time." In his restless ambition to be President and in his contempt for Lincoln's qualifications for the place, Chase finally permitted himself to be a candi- date against his chief. It was at a time when Lin- coln was pursued by opponents, and the outlook for his reelection was dark. Yet he patiently bore with this opposition in his own official household. Chase himself came to see the false position which he was occupying and offered to resign. Lincoln answered that he had ignored the entire matter as far as he could. He had refused to read the circulars issued in behalf of the Secretary's candidacy and had not encouraged any one to discuss the subject in his hearing. He concluded by declining to accept his resignation. 335 ABRAHAM LINCOLN "Whether you shall remain at the head of the Treasury Department is a question," the President added in fine temper, "which I shall not allow myself to consider from any standpoint other than my judgment of the public service, and in that view I do not perceive occasion for change." Long after the movement for Chase's nomination had perished in its absurdity and Lincoln himself was nominated again, the Secretary once more lost his patience with the President and resigned. A grave financial crisis was upon the country, and it was generally a time of gloom for the Union. Lin- coln, however, had the courage to face the inevitable, and with a promptness which took Chase by sur- prise he accepted the resignation on the ground that the differences between them had become so embarrassing that it was best they should part. "I had found a good deal of embarrassment from him," the retiring Secretary in his unfortunate lack of humor confided to his diary, "but what he had found from me I cannot imagine." Lincoln, on the other hand, ungrudgingly said, "Of all the great men I have known, Chase is equal to about one and a half of the best of them." The Chief-justiceship of the United States soon became vacant. With a magnanimity rarely equaled, Lincoln conferred on Chase this highest honor in n 336 LINCOLN AND HIS CABINET President's gift. There is genuine pathos in this entry which the ex-Secretary made in his diary at a time when Lincoln, ignoring their unhappy estrange- ment, had determined to crown his great services with a splendid prize, "I feel that I do not know him." Others whose good fortune it was to sit at the cabinet table of Lincoln were more happily gifted by nature to appreciate the homely yet lofty nature which swayed their counsels by its moral force. Seward pronounced it a character "made and moulded by Divine Power to save a nation," and Stanton beheld in his chief "the most perfect ruler of men the world has ever seen." 33) CHAPTER XXXI LINCOLN AND HIS GENERALS All the great soldiers destined to reap the harvest of glory, in obscurity when the war began. — Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, and Thomas unknown men in 1861. — The advantage of the Confederacy in its military leaders. — Lincoln's trials with McClellan and the earlier commanders. — His remarkable letter to Hooker, January 26, 1863. — How he applied his gift of common sense to the art of war. — Some of his homely words of wisdom regarding strategy. — No meddlesome spirit. — Stand- ing by Grant when the general was a stranger and friendless. — "I can't spare this man; he fights." — His faith in him. "You were right and I was wrong." — Grant, General-in- chief in the spring of 1864. — Grant and Sherman's estimates of Lincoln. — His model relations with his generals. — His great achievement in maintaining the civil power supreme, and himself, the elected chief of the people, superior to military heroes. The great captains destined to lead the armies of the Union to victory were unknown men when the war began. Grant had resigned his captaincy in the regular army and was a clerk in his father's leather store at Galena, Illinois, at a salary of fifty dollars a month. His duties were to keep books and buy hides from the farmers' wagons. He was thirty-nine and his life a failure, although he had shown in the Mexican cam- paign that he was a good hand at the trade of war. 338 LINCOLN AND HIS GENERALS Sherman, too, had resigned from the regular army, in which he had risen to the rank of captain in the commissary department. He had missed active service in the Mexican War, having been on a detail in California at that time. After leaving the army he tried banking and the practice of the law, each of which occupations he abandoned, and he was at the head of a military school in Louisiana when that state prepared to secede. At the out- break of the war he was forty-one and the president of a street railway in St. Louis. Sheridan was only thirty and a captain in the quartermaster's department. Thomas also was in the army and a major. Meade, who was forty-six, had been in the service most of the time since leav- ing West Point, twenty-five years before. Hancock was thirty-five and a captain. McPherson was a lieutenant. Whether in the army or out, the generals who reaped the harvest of glory were veiled in obscurity when the war came. Fortune seemed determined to keep them in concealment until, like the stars of the theater, the stage of action was made ready for their entrance upon it. Grant vainly applied to the War Department and to the governors of three states for a commission; his applications were pigeon-holed. Sherman, who had a brother in the Senate, was not entirely neg- 339 ABRAHAM LINCOLN lected. He received the offer of the chief clerkship of the War Department, but feeling that he would be more useful with the sword than with the pen, he refused the place and bided his time in the street- car office. Sheridan was sent out to buy horses, the one task of all for which he probably was the least fitted. Thomas was under suspicion because he was a Virginian, and his superiors could not understand why he had not gone over to the South. They did not deem it safe to trust him with an independent command. Thus it chanced that the men who were to bear the flag of the Union to its final triumph were all hidden from view in the early days of the war. Fate dealt more kindly with the Confederacy. Its President was himself a soldier, trained at West Point and in the war with Mexico, and he had besides been Secretary of War of the United States. Whether due to Jefferson Davis's acquaintance with military men and military affairs, or to some other cause, the Confederate government discovered and developed at the outset some of its greatest commanders —men like Lee, Johnston, Longstreet, and Jackson. Lincoln, on the other hand, knew nothing of war or warriors. He was wholly dependent on the 34o LINCOLN AND HIS GENERALS professional advice of the men whom he found at the head of the regular army. Scott, the command- ing general, was seventy-five and in his dotage, while the next officer in rank, the commander of the department of the East, General Wool, was seventy-three. Another aged major-general, Twiggs, in command of the department of Texas, abandoned his entire charge to the Confederacy, and the Ad- jutant-general himself went over to the enemy. The duty of constructing an army thus was thrust upon Lincoln, feebly aided by Scott. The Secretary of War, Cameron, was a politician and ignorant of military matters. Governors and senators pressed for the appoint- ment of political favorites. While Lincoln yielded to this pressure, he accepted in most instances the counsels of General Scott. At the suggestion of the old General, the command of the army in the field was offered to Robert E. Lee; but the latter listened to the call of his state rather than to that of his country. McClellan was Scott's next choice, and he also selected Halleck to take charge of the operations in the West. To both of these men the President clung, long after they had lost the favor of the cabinet and the public. Lincoln and McClellan first met in Illinois, where the latter was a railway official. Being a Democrat, 34i ABRAHAM LINCOLN he supported Douglas in his campaign for the Senate and carried him over the state in his private car. While Lincoln ignored their past political unfriend- liness, McClellan seemed to regard him rather as the poor country lawyer whom he had known in the West than as the Commander-in-chief who had lifted him to his high eminence in the army. His stafF were cautioned against imparting military secrets to the supposedly guileless and garrulous President, who, not standing on the order of prece- dence, was in the habit of seeking out his young general, whom he fondly addressed as "George," at his home in the city instead of troubling him to come to the White House. One evening when he called, McClellan refused even to see him. The General entered his house and went upstairs, sending down word to Lincoln, who modestly sat waiting for him in his anteroom, that he was going to bed and must be excused. After that incident they met as a rule only at the White House and on official business. Even there the soldier did not always show the respect due to his chief. He refused, in the presence of the cabinet, the President's request that he sub- mit his plans, at a time when the public patience was worn out by the army's delays. On another occasion he failed entirely to respond to a sum- 342 LINCOLN AND HIS GENERALS mons to meet the President; but Lincoln remarked to the indignant men who were waiting with him, "Never mind; I would hold McClellan's horse if he would only bring us success." The General was a young man. His rise had been too rapid for his own good, and he mistook Lin- coln's patient deference for weakness. His letters to his wife overflowed with boyish conceit. " By some strange operation of magic I seem to have become the power of the land," he confided to her. Growing Napoleonic in spirit as well as in name, at another time he informed her, "I would cheerfully take the dictatorship and agree to lay down my life when the country is saved." McClellan's constant grievance was a lack of support, both in men and supplies, while his chronic weakness was his unwillingness to make the best of what he had, and to remember that the President and others in authority, as well as himself, had their duties and their troubles. When Lincoln at last replaced him, after a trial of more than a year, he selected as his successor the man next in rank, Burnside, in spite of the latter's own protest that he was "not competent to command such a large army." It was hoped that the new General's modesty would avail more than his prede- cessor's self-assurance; but in a month he went 343 ABRAHAM LINCOLN down in the disastrous battle of Fredericksburg, and Hooker, the next man in line, took his place. Lincoln wrote the new commander an extraor- dinary letter, such a letter as has seldom been ad- dressed to a man at the head of a great army by any civil official. In this unusual communication he said to Hooker: — "I believe you to be a brave and skilful soldier, which of course I like. I also believe you do not mix politics with your profession, in which you are right. You have confidence in yourself, which is a valuable, if not an indispensable, quality. You are ambitious, which within reasonable bounds does good rather than harm; but I think that during General Burnside's command of the army you have taken counsel of your ambition, and thwarted him as much as you could, in which you did a great wrong to the country and to a most meritorious and honorable brother officer. I have heard in such a way as to believe it, of your recently saying that both the army and the government needed a dic- tator. "Of course it is not for this, but in spite of it, that I have given you the command. Only those gen- erals who gain successes can set up dictators. What I now ask of you is military success, and I will risk the dictatorship." 344 LINCOLN AND HIS GENERALS These plain words of reproof and warning combined, as only Lincoln could, firmness with good humor. They sobered rather than angered Hooker. "He talks to me like a father," he said. "I will not answer this letter until I have won him a great victory." At this time, Lincoln was most sorely tried. The war had been going on two years, and he was not sure he had yet found a general. He was in a mood to despair of shoulder straps and the military profession. Man after man had risen in the magnifi- cence of a splendid new uniform and the mystery of the art of war. Lincoln had watched them come on at first with a layman's simple confidence, but afterward with increasing distrust, flourishing their swords and issuing high-sounding proclamations to their troops. Napoleon seemed to be the favorite model among them. Too often, alas, their ambitions outran their performances. McClellan was going to "crush the rebels in one campaign." Again he confidently promised, "In ten days I shall be in Richmond." Now, Hooker was filled with the same confidence, and talked so much and jauntily of taking Richmond, that Lincoln's heart sank at the familiar sound of it. Although Halleck, the General-in-chief, was at his elbow to serve as military adviser, the President 345 ABRAHAM LINCOLN in his responsibility to the country and to history had been driven slowly to undertake the direction of the armies. He sat up nights with military books, and his eye was continually on the war maps. He found, probably greatly to his surprise, that his gift of plain common sense had its usefulness even in the strategy of warfare. Little by little he gave his generals the benefit of it, but always with a good deal of diffidence. "With these continuous rains," he once reminded McClellan, "I am very anxious about the Chicka- hominy — so close in your rear and crossing your line of communication. Please look to it." " By proper scout lookouts," he telegraphed General Fremont, "and beacons of smoke by day and fires by night you can always have timely notice of the enemy's approach. I know not as to you, but by some this has been too much neglected." "I state my general idea of this war to be," he wrote to General Buell, "that we have the greater numbers, and the enemy has the greater facility of concentrating forces upon points of collision; that we must fail unless we find some way of making our advantage an overmatch for his." He added, however, that he did not offer his views as orders and would blame the General if he should adopt them contrary to his own judgment. 346 LINCOLN AND HIS GENERALS "You would be better off anywhere," he wrote General Banks, "for not having a thousand wagons doing nothing but hauling the forage to feed the animals that draw them." "He who does some- thing at the head of one regiment," he gently ad- monished General Hunter, "will eclipse him who does nothing at the head of a hundred." "I would not take any risk," he cautioned Hooker, when urging him to begin the pursuit of Lee, which reached its glorious climax in the great victory at Gettysburg, "of being entangled upon the river, like an ox jumped half over a fence, and liable to be torn by dogs front and rear, without a fair chance to gore one way and kick the other." "If he stays where he is," he telegraphed again to Hooker re- garding Lee, "fret him, and fret him." "If the head of Lee's army is at Martinsburg and the tail of it on the plank road between Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville," so ran one of his messages to the same General early in the Gettysburg cam- paign, "the animal must be very slim somewhere. Could you not break him?" In trying to compose the untimely quarrel between Halleck and Hooker, he wrote to the latter, "If you and he would use the same frankness to one another and to me that I use to both of you, there would be no difficulty." All he asked, he said, 347 ABRAHAM LINCOLN was that the two generals should harmonize their judgments and go ahead, "with my poor mite added, if indeed he and you shall think it entitled to any consideration at all." In such instances as these, it is seen how Lincoln sought to leaven the counsels and campaigns of his commanders with simple common sense. The same common sense, however, saved him from meddling with men who went about their business and let him alone. There rose a general with whom he never inter- fered, to whom he never offered a word of advice. This was Grant, who got into the war by leading to the front a mutinous Illinois regiment, from which the fair-weather political colonels had fled in terror. Without influence and opposed by jealous su- periors, this soldier mounted the ladder of military rank by strictly and silently minding his own business. He never asked for promotion. He was heard from in Washington only when he had some action to report. He did not stop to clamor for more men or to complain of a lack of supplies. He took what was given him and went ahead. He must have puzzled and amazed Lincoln, this strange man from his own state, whom he never had heard of until he was winning victories for him. It is doubtful if, when Grant was charged 348 LINCOLN AND HIS GENERALS with intemperance, he said he would like to send the same brand of liquor to other generals, but the familiar story well expresses the President's con- fidence. While his victory at Fort Donelson was yet fresh, Grant was placed under arrest by Halleck for a petty military offence, but Lincoln caused him to be released and restored to his command. The early reports from the battle of Shiloh gave the im- pression that the army had been imperiled through Grant's dissipation, and a storm of denunciation assailed him. Lincoln sustained him single-handed, simply saying, "I can't spare this man; he fights." In the disappointments of the long Vicksburg campaign, the old prejudices against the General were revived, and once more Lincoln stood by him when he was friendless. All the while the two men remained strangers, and the General could not even know who it was that was shielding him. When the victory came, the President took pains to let the world know that all the credit belonged to Grant. "I do not remember that you and I ever met personally," he wrote to him; and after praising his campaign, which led to the capture of Vicksburg, he admitted that he had feared it was a mistake. "I now wish," Lincoln generously concluded, "to 349 ABRAHAM LINCOLN make the personal acknowledgment that you were right and I was wrong." It was in the course of this movement that Sher- man developed as Grant's great lieutenant, protesting to those who would give him a share in the congratu- lations over the Union success at Vicksburg, "Grant is entitled to every bit of credit for this campaign ; I opposed it." In the battles about Chattanooga in the fall, Sheridan came in contact with Grant and Sherman, and thus at last the fortunes of war brought to- gether the three generals whose trusting and af- fectionate military companionship lasted to the end, sealed in devotion and unstained by jealousy. The Union now had a thoroughly organized army led by great commanders. Congress revived the grade of Lieutenant-general, and Lincoln sum- moned the victor of Donelson, Vicksburg, and Chat- tanooga to the capital to receive the high rank which none but Washington, among American soldiers, had worn, Scott having held it only by brevet. Notwithstanding Grant's renown filled the land, he was unknown at the seat of government. His post of duty had been at the front, and he had kept it. When, leading a young son by the hand, he walked up to the desk of a Washington hotel with a cigar in his mouth, a well-worn army hat on his head, 35° LINCOLN AND HIS GENERALS and a linen duster on his back, the clerk told him he had no room except at the top of the house. The little blue-eyed, rusty man, with rough light brown whiskers, seemed not to care where he was sent as he went on writing the name, which startled the clerk when he turned the register around and read "U. S. Grant and Son, Galena, 111." The truth is, the newly arrived guest would have preferred the obscurity of an attic chamber to the honors which were thrust upon him in the parlor suite, to which he was promptly assigned. He never showed the dread of the guns of Vicksburg, which he betrayed whenever he was obliged to face the noisy enthusiasts who crowded the lobbies of the hotel, waiting to catch a glimpse of him, while, as he tried to eat his dinner under the eyes of the cheering people in the big dining room, he probably wished he was living off the country again down in Mississippi. When he was taken to the White House in the evening, he was embarrassed to find a reception in progress. Men and women drew back in their surprise as they saw the illustrious soldier led to Lincoln. The President clasped his hand in hearty gratitude and held it, while his little eyes looked down upon his general in frank curiosity. It was a picture ready for the pages of history. 35i ABRAHAM LINCOLN As soon as the brief scene was ended, the visitor was caught in an eddying whirl of eager admirers and swept on to the East Room, where at the sug- gestion of some one he climbed up on the safe heights of a sofa and there timidly submitted himself to the gaze of the people. It was his first appearance as a lion. When he had finally broken the siege and escaped to the outer air, he was perspiring from the ordeal through which he had passed, and hoping that the "show business" was ended for good. The next day, in the presence of the Cabinet, he received his commission as Lieutenant-general and his designation as General-in-chief of all the armies, East and West. He kept out of sight as completely as he could the rest of the day, and on the day following went to the headquarters of the Army of the Potomac, while the day after that found him on his way back to Tennessee, having pleased Lincoln not a little by declining a White House dinner. War had become a business, and Grant was all business. No longer did the commander prance along cheering lines at grand reviews, dwell in state in Washington, or issue ringing proclamations to his army. The new General-in-chief was one who had always lived with his men, who shared their 35 2 LINCOLN AND HIS GENERALS hardships and perils, and who in uniform and bearing could easily be mistaken for a private soldier. Grant pressed matters with such despatch, that in the first week of May, while Sherman's army was starting southward from Chattanooga on the great Georgia campaign, he himself led the Army of the Potomac into the wilderness on its slow and bloody journey to Richmond. This latter prize was within an easy day's walk, but now every inch of the way must be paved with Union dead. With Lee in front of him, Grant for the first time faced a foeman worthy of his steel. Lincoln no longer troubled himself with the direc- tion of the armies. He trusted all to Grant and his brothers in arms. "The particulars of your plan I neither know nor seek to know," he told Grant, who replied, "Should my success be less than I desire and expect, the least I can say is that the fault is not with you." The General-in-chief gave secret orders to Sherman, which involved the famous march to the sea, and requested that Sheridan be placed in com- mand of a division. When the latter came to Washington, Lincoln frankly admitted that he himself, as well as Stanton, was opposed to his appointment on account of his comparative youth, but had given it to him solely 2A 353 ABRAHAM LINCOLN because Grant desired it. After the new appointee had gloriously justified Grant's confidence by his victories in the Shenandoah Valley, the President playfully remarked to " Little Phil," that although his ideal cavalry leader was at least six feet four in height, he had come to the conclusion that five feet four would do in a pinch. The only grievance Lincoln ever expressed against Grant took the form of a tribute of praise. "General Grant," he said, "is a copious worker and fighter, but a very meager writer or telegrapher." In the conduct of his cabinet, Lincoln showed himself a leader of leaders. In his relations with his generals, he proved himself a commander of com- manders. "He was incontestably the greatest man I ever knew," is Grant's estimate of him, while Sher- man said, "Of all the men I ever met, he seemed to possess more of the elements of greatness combined with goodness than any other." Lincoln did not go to the head of the group of statesmen whom he called into his cabinet, or the galaxy of generals whom he called to the colors of the nation, because he was more brilliant or more ambitious than the others. He did not conquer men by sheer strength, or trick them by smartness. Leadership came to him because he had a purpose that never wavered, a heart that never quailed, a 354 LINCOLN AND HIS GENERALS faith that never drooped, a courage that never shrank from responsibility. Besides the possession of these qualities, he was a gentleman among gentlemen, with a knightly sense of honor and a fine regard for the feelings of others. He dropped men from the cabinet and from com- mand, and moved them around freely, but without quarreling with them or incurring their enmity. His letters and messages to his generals are models of simple frankness, kindly courtesy, and good taste. As he confessed to Grant in congratulating him on the capture of Vicksburg, "You were right and I was wrong," so he took pains to admit in telegraphing to Sherman the thanks of the nation for his capture of Savannah, "The honor is all yours, for I believe none of us went further than to acquiesce," and finally, after the surrender at Appomattox, he declared to the rejoicing nation, "No part of the honor for plan or execution is mine." It is not easy to get up a rivalry with a man who is without envy; he is exalted above comparison and competition. Lincoln's was not a jealous nature. If he had shown a fear of a general's fame, he would thereby have lifted him at once to his own level. His opponents were always looking for a chance to displace him in the confidence of the people with some military hero. At first McClellan, then Rose- 355 ABRAHAM LINCOLN crans, and finally Grant was the favorite among them. Lincoln was fearful at one time that the conqueror of Vicksburg, in his innocence of politics, might lose his head and be tempted to be a candidate against him in 1864. When he was assured by Grant's friends that the "presidential grub" was not "gnawing at him," he expressed his sense of relief. Afterward, when a movement to make Grant President was openly started, his only comment was, "If he takes Richmond, let him have it." It is sometimes claimed for Lincoln that he became a better general than any in the field. That may not be true. At any rate, it was not a necessary qualifica- tion for his place. It was far more important that, as the Chief Magistrate of the republic and Commander- in-chief of the army by the voice of the people, he should have the ability to maintain his supremacy over his military subordinates. This he did at all times, and it stands as one of the most useful and wonderful of his achievements. There never was an hour when his hand did not rule the giant hosts in arms, when his pen was not mightier than the sword; never an hour of weakness, tempting a "man on horseback" to spurn his au- thority and seriously dream of setting up a military despotism. For this signal vindication of democratic institutions, the American people themselves are un- 356 LINCOLN AND HIS GENERALS doubtedly entitled to the larger share of credit, while no small share is due to the democratic characters of the military chieftains. With a weak or wilful man in Lincoln's place, however, it would have been impossible. He would surely have been overridden by events and men too powerful for him to direct and control. This was at once the test and the triumph of a gov- ernment by the people. All things considered, prob- ahlv it is without a parallel in history. In a long and mighty civil war in a democracy, with a million men under arms, the civil power remained always supreme, and the lawfully elected chief, a plain citizen, who never had set a squadron in the field, stood forth at the end, easily the foremost figure, without even a rival among the victorious generals and martial heroes who surrounded him. 357 CHAPTER XXXII LINCOLN IN VICTORY His noblest qualities called out in the hour of success as his hand turned to the new task of binding up the wounds of the Union. — Striving to win the South by magnanimity. — Applying Christian principles and the golden rule to statecraft. — Dis- appointed in his efforts for peace at Hampton Roads conference, February 3, 1865. — How he disposed of Charles I as an example. — His plan to offer to pay the South for its slaves defeated in the cabinet, February 5, 1865. — His rejoicing over the passage of the thirteenth amendment. — His second inauguration, March 4, 1865, and his second inaugural address. — His visit to Grant's army at City Point, Virginia, March 22 to April 9, to supervise terms of peace. — Lincoln and Grant, Sherman and Sheridan in conference. — The fall of Richmond, April 3. — Lincoln in Richmond, April 4 and 5. — Modest bearing of the conqueror in the capital of the enemy. — The black freed- men in ecstasy. — Lincoln in Jefferson Davis's chair. — " Judge not, that ye be not judged." — Returning to Washington, April 9. — Prophetic words from Shakespeare. Victory called out Lincoln's noblest qualities. He accepted it as humbly as he had borne defeat. When assured at the close of the military opera- tions, in the fall of 1864, that the country was saved, and that in a brief campaign in the spring the Con- federacy would surelv be overthrown, he did not pause to exult. His hand turned at once to its new task. He must bind up the wounds of the Union 358 LINCOLN' IN VICTORY and restore it. He would not fasten it together with bayonets and erect a rebellious Ireland or a deso- lated Poland within its borders. The South, con- quered by force, must be won by magnanimity. For him, this was a grateful duty. No bitterness rankled in his great, patient heart. Even when the blows of the foe rained heavy upon him, the Con- federates still were to him countrymen and fellow- Americans. His habit of fairness forbade him to hold any individuals, however high their stations, personally responsible for a great civil war. It better suited his sense of humor to refer to his adversaries as "the other side" or as "these south- ern gentlemen" than to rail at them as "rebels." "Jefry D." and "Bobby Lee" were his favorite names for the two principal chieftains of the Con- federacy. When Stonewall Jackson was killed and a Washington newspaper printed an editorial tribute to that gallant upholder of the Stars and Bars, Lin- coln wrote a letter to the editor, commending his article. No sooner was he assured that the arms of the South must yield to the Union than he gave his anxious thought to winning the hearts of the south- ern people. Many, if not most, of the leaders of the Republican party were unable so readily to calm the passions which the long and desperate struggle had 359 ABRAHAM LINCOLN aroused in them. The radicals were loud in their call for the hanging of the foremost Confederates, for the confiscation of property, and for ruling the south- ern states as conquered provinces. Not a few who had clamored for a cowardly peace in the midst of war now lustily cried out for harsh measures as peace drew near. Lincoln's next battle must be with Congress and a large section of his own party. He disliked the form of the oath which Secretary Stanton prescribed for those in the South who wished to swear allegiance and which required them to de- clare they had not given "aid and comfort to the enemy." This, he complained, " rejects the Christian principle of forgiveness on terms of repentance. I think it is enough if the man does no wrong here- after." His whole course was guided by his feeling that the government should be animated by "no motive for revenge, no purpose to punish for punishment's sake," and he laid down as the golden rule of statesmanship that "we should avoid planting too many thorns in the bosom of society." He stated only a guiding principle of his own life when he said, "If any man ceases to attack me, I never remember the past against him." He refused to lend himself to any vengeful spirit toward those in the North who had opposed his elec- 360 LIXCOLX IN VICTORY don. "I am in favor," he said, "of short statutes of limitations in politics." In his annual message to Congress he claimed the people who voted against him, as well as those who voted for him in the recent election, as friends of the Union. No candidate, he proudly pointed out, sought support on the avowal that he was for giving up the Union. Men had dif- fered only as to the method of saving it. At the approach of spring, in 1865, the season for opening a new movement against the army of Lee, Lincoln was most anxious to gain peace without further bloodshed. He cared nothing for the mili- tary triumph which was certain to come. He would rather coax than drive the South into sub- mission. In this generous spirit he went to Hamp- ton Roads to meet Alexander H. Stephens, the Con- federate Vice-president, and other representatives of the Richmond government. If he had cared to stand on his dignity as President, he would not have gone to meet those subordinates of Jefferson Davis. If he had been moved by any pride of victory, he would have spurned the repre- sentatives of a foe already staggering to defeat. He thought, however, not of himself, but of the lives of the men in blue and the men in gray which would be sacrificed on the renewal of the struggle. In an effort to save them, he left the capital and journeyed 361 ABRAHAM LINCOLN to the meeting place aboard a boat in Hampton Roads. On this mission he was deeply disappointed, for he found that the men he met had been instructed to insist on the recognition of the Confederate govern- ment. The President could not, of course, admit that there was any other established nation within the United States. One of the Confederates, in urging him to recog- nize them in their official capacity, pointed out as a precedent that King Charles I of Great Britain had deigned to treat with the representatives of the Par- liamentary army when it was in the field against him. Lincoln met this argument with a characteristic reply, which completely silenced it. " I do not pro- fess," he said, "to be posted in English history. On such matters I will turn you over to Seward. All I distinctly recollect about Charles I is that he lost his head." That was quite sufficient to dispose of this historic example as a safe one to follow. The conference having failed, Lincoln returned to Washington and tried another measure of stopping the war. This was in the form of a message to Con- gress, recommending that the government ofFer four hundred million dollars as compensation for the loss of the slaves, provided the Confederates should lay down their arms before April i. Again he was dis- 362 LINCOLN IN VICTORY appointed. When he submitted his plan to the cabi- net, its members were unanimously against it. "I see that you are all opposed to me," he said with a heavy sigh as he put the draft of his message in a drawer, "and I will not send it." One other object engaged his serious attention in that period. He was anxious that in the restored Union there should be no trace of the institution of slavery, the source of so much discord in the old Union. Slaves had been transformed into freedmen at the advance of the armies of the North, bearing his Emancipation Proclamation, and the system of bondage was in shreds throughout the South. He earnestlv wished, however, to see its abolition in the border states as well as in the Confederate states decreed in the Constitution. Senator Sumner proposed a constitutional amend- ment, declaring that "everywhere within the limits of the United States and of each state or territory thereof, all persons are equal before the law, so that no person can hold another as a slave." Lincoln, however, preferred this form, "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as punish- ment of crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction." The first part of that sentence was copied word for word from 363 ABRAHAM LINCOLN the Ordinance of 1787, which in his boyhood Lin- coln had read in a borrowed copy of the statutes of Indiana. He liked it then, and he desired now to see it embedded in the fundamental law of the land. No battle won brought him the joy which he felt when Congress adopted the resolution proposing this amendment. The Legislature of Illinois was in session at Springfield and before night it had given its approval. The news was sent to Lincoln by telegraph, and he was proud to see his own state take the lead in ratifying this thirteenth amendment of the Constitution. As he drove to the Capitol to be inaugurated a second time, a battalion of negro soldiers had an honorable part in the procession. While proudly escorting the emancipator of their race, they kept martial step on a pavement which, at his first inaugu- ration only four years before, had been pressed by the feet of slaves. When Lincoln again took his place on the steps of the Capitol to renew his pledge to preserve the Union, the group which surrounded him on the former occasion was gone. Buchanan was in re- tirement and Breckinridge was battling against the Stars and Stripes. Taney had sunk into his grave beneath the weight of years. Douglas was dead in 3 6 4 LINCOLN IN VICTORY his prime. Baker had fallen on one of the first fields of the conflict. Lincoln himself was another man. No longer the untried stranger, he stood there, the trusted and faithful leader crowned with a people's love. The awful story of the great war was written in his kindly face, where the heroic struggles and sacrifices of the imperiled nation could be traced in the new lines of strength about his mouth and in the added furrows of sorrow and care about his eyes. Whichever way he glanced over the audience hushed in expectancy, he saw sick and mutilated veterans from the hospitals, at once the witnesses and wrecks of the strife. There was less fear of an attempt at assassination now than at the former inauguration, and no ex- traordinary precautions were taken. When a well- known but eccentric actor, John Wilkes Booth, tried to press his way toward the presidential stand, the police pushed him back, and nothing more was thought of it, as an incident of this kind is not unusual on such an occasion. A rain had been falling and the day was gloomy. As Lincoln was about to take the oath, however, the sun burst through the clouds, an omen which he said made his "heart jump." The people listened to his inaugural address, awed by its solemn and 365 ABRAHAM LINCOLN stately beauty, gazing upon him as if he were a prophet speaking by inspiration: — "Fellow-countrymen: At this second appear- ing to take the oath of the presidential office, there is less occasion for an extended address than there was at the first. Then, a statement, somewhat in detail, of a course to be pursued, seemed fitting and proper. Now, at the expiration of four years, during which public declarations have been con- stantly called forth on every point and phase of the great contest which still absorbs the attention and engrosses the energies of the nation, little that is new could be presented. The progress of our arms, upon which all else chiefly depends, is as well known to the public as to myself; and it is, I trust, reasonably satisfactory and encouraging to all. With high hope for the future, no prediction in regard to it is ventured. "On the occasion corresponding to this four years ago, all thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending civil war. All dreaded it; all sought to avert it. While the inaugural address was being delivered from this place, devoted alto- gether to saving the Union without war, insurgent agents were in the city seeking to destroy it without war — seeking to dissolve the Union and divide effects by negotiation. Both parties deprecated 366 LINCOLN IN VICTORY war; but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive; and the other would accept war rather than let it perish. And the war came. "One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was, somehow, the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union, even by war; while the government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it. "Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with, or even before, the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. "Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces; but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered; that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His 367 ABRAHAM LINCOLN own purposes. 'Woe unto the world because of offences! for it must needs be that offences come; but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh.' "If we shall suppose American slavery is one of those offences which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offence came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him ? "Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, 'The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous al- together.' "With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and 368 LINCOLN IN VICTORY his orphan; to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and a lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations." The Second Inaugural at once took its place beside the Gettysburg Address, and thus he, who in his untutored youth practised his native gift of oratory on the field hands among whom he toiled, had given to the world the two noblest examples of American eloquence. "With malice toward none, with charity for all," came forth from his soul like a chant, while his closing words fell upon the thronged esplanade with the effect of a benedic- tion. When he had finished, some freed their emotions with cheers, some with tears. All went away as from an impressive religious ceremony. He had deliberately chosen to place on record in his inaugural the historical fact that the offence of slavery came by both the North and the South, and his belief that God had brought upon them a terrible war as the woe due to each section be- cause of that offence. At the same time he re- minded the North that God had not fully answered its prayers, and that the Almighty had His own purposes. Lincoln said he knew it would not flatter men to be told there was a difference in purpose between God and them. "It is a truth," he added, "which I thought needed to be told, and as what- 2B 369 ABRAHAM LINCOLN ever of humiliation there is in it falls more directly on myself, I thought others might afford for me to tell it." When the time came for Grant to leave his winter quarters and begin his campaign, Lincoln went down to the seat of war, near Richmond. He had already sent positive instructions to the General-in- chief not to decide or even discuss any political question with Lee. "Such questions," he added firmly, in the true spirit of a government where the civil is at all times superior to the military authority, "the President holds in his own hands, and will submit them to no military conferences or con- ventions." Feeling now that the downfall of the Confederacy was near, he determined to be on the scene and in readiness to meet any emergency which might arise. There he lived on a boat in the James River, opposite the cluster of huts on the bank which served as Grant's headquarters. Admiral Porter urged him to accept his bed, but he insisted upon not disturbing the Admiral, and sleeping in a small stateroom whose berth was four inches shorter than his body. "I slept well," he said the next morning, "but you can't put a long sword into a short scabbard." His host set carpenters to work in the absence 37° LINCOLN IN VICTORY of his distinguished guest, to remedy the deficiency. The stateroom was quickly lengthened and widened, and the following morning Lincoln soberly reported: "A miracle happened last night; I shrank six inches in length, and about a foot sideways." The Admiral was positive, however, that if he had "given him two fence rails to sleep on, he would not have found fault." Mrs. Lincoln and Tad were sent for, and the elder son, Robert, came from Harvard to see a few days' soldiering as a member of Grant's staff. It proved to be more nearly a vacation than any the Presi- dent had been privileged to enjoy since the burdens of the nation had fallen upon his shoulders. The wife noted with pleasure that his old forebodings of an evil fate seemed almost to have been driven from his bosom by his rising spirits. He sat about the camp fire in the evenings, telling stories and listening to the officers' tales, and he devoted not a little of his attention to the care of a furry family, which Grant's cat had lately presented to the General. As he and Mrs. Lincoln drove about the country one day, they came to a remote little graveyard, on the banks of the James. The new green foliage of the trees cast its shade upon the tranquil scene, and the flowers of spring were budding above the mounds. Lincoln was so attracted to the spot, 37i ABRAHAM LINCOLN that he and his wife left their carriage, and walked among the graves. The restfulness of the place touched his fancy, and this victorious master of a million men in arms turned wearily from the vain pomp of power, and sighed for the simple peace about him. "Mary," he said, "you are younger and will survive me. When I am gone, lay my body in some quiet place like this." Sherman came from the South, and Grant, Sher- man, and Sheridan grouped themselves about their Commander-in-chief. "Must more blood be shed ?" Lincoln anxiously inquired. "Can't this last bloody battle be avoided ?" He whose voice never faltered in the dark days of the war, shrank from the thought of one more volley, now, when it seemed so needless. He was assured, however, that Lee would not give up until thoroughly beaten. He rode with Grant hour after hour, through swamps and over corduroy roads, with the ease of a seasoned cavalryman. The cheers of the soldiers swept around him wherever he appeared. He sat for hours in front of the camp, tilted back in his chair, and his hand shading his eyes, watching the movements of the men. It was on the last day of March when the Army of the Potomac and the Army of Northern Virginia once more faced each other in battle array and began 372 LINCOLN IX VICTORY the fifth year of their struggle for the soil of the Old Dominion. Grant's legions in blue dashed into the fray with the spirit of confidence, while there were heavy hearts beneath the tattered coats of gray as the mere remnant of Lee's once magnificent army wearily but loyally gathered about their devoted chief in his last stand for a cause that was already lost. Lincoln waited behind, eagerly watching each courier as he rode in from the front. "How many prisoners?" was almost always his first question. Every capture was welcomed by him as a merciful hastening of the end. On the first of April came Sheridan's victory at Five Forks and the doom of Richmond. Its certain and immediate fall was decreed by that battle. The Confederate flag continued to wave above the Capitol, and the buying and selling of men, women, and children went on, even when the columns oi freedom were advancing upon the city. A man would still bring one hundred dollars in gold. Jefferson Davis sat in his pew listening to the prayer for the President of the Confederate States, the day after the battle of Five Forks, when word came to him from Lee that he, whose mighty arm had parried every blow at Richmond for four long 373 ABRAHAM LINCOLN years, could defend it no more. He must flee from Grant along the Appomattox River. The government of the Confederacy was hastily loaded upon trains, and Davis and his cabinet fled southward. Silver plate and family treasures were taken from the old homes of the aristocracy and buried beyond the sight of the pillaging invaders, at whose approach the city trembled. Some masters collected their slaves beside the railway and sought safety in flight for their property in human beings; but the institution of bondage perished while the bondmen waited there in their chains. The military supplies were fired by the Con- federates as they quit the town, which soon was ablaze. Liquors were emptied into the gutters and scooped up in pans and buckets by whites and blacks, who became frenzied from drink. The en- tire place was speeding to a mad destruction when in the early hours of Monday morning the vanguard of the Union forces, which had cautiously entered the outer intrenchments only to find them deserted, whirled into Richmond. On their heels came the negro troopers of a cavalry regiment, their waving swords a sign of deliverance for the people of their race who ran beside the proud horsemen shouting for joy. The flag of the nation was hoisted again upon the Capitol 374 LINCOLN IN VICTORY of Virginia, and the Union commander established his headquarters in the house of the fugitive Presi- dent of the Confederacy. Richmond had fallen, and Richmond was saved. For the army of the Union did not come to loot or triumph. On the contrary, it extinguished the roaring flames that were devouring the city, fed the hungry of the long-besieged and starving capital, and repressed the drunken rioters and robbers and loosened convicts who had struck terror to every home. "I want to see Richmond," Lincoln said, with a curiosity as simple as a boy's, when he heard of the capture of the stronghold against which he had hurled his soldiers by the hundreds of thousands. He went by the river from Grant's headquarters on Tuesday and landed from a twelve-oared barge near Libby Prison. There was no military escort to meet him, and not even a vehicle of any kind. Taking his boy Tad by the hand, he walked through the streets for a mile and a half, guarded only by ten sailors. The negroes were in ecstasy as they beheld their emancipator. They touched the skirt of his coat in awe, or prostrated themselves at his feet. He was annoved and even saddened to have any human being humble himself before him. "Don't kneel 375 ABRAHAM LINCOLN to me; that is not right," he said, and a leader among them commanded in a hoarse whisper, "Sh — sh — be still; heah our Saviour speak." Lincoln continued: "You must kneel to God only. I am but God's humble instrument; but you may rest assured that as long as I live no one shall put a shackle on your limbs." He told them they were as free as he was, and even freer, for they had less care and worry. " God bless you and let me pass on," he said to them as he moved forward with difficulty through the black mass. Again, in the strange progress of this modest conqueror an old slave lifted his hat, and the Presi- dent returned the salutation by lifting his, whereat the crowd of negroes who followed him gaped in wonder to see a white man uncover to a black. Lincoln went on until he came to the "White House of the Confederacy," which Davis had left only thirty-six hours before. The day was hot and the perspiration ran down his face as he entered the old mansion. Walking into the office, he seated himself at a desk. "This must have been President Davis's chair," he said, as his hands rested on its arms, and he leaned against its comfortable back. There he sat in revery, gazing into space, while not unlikely his sympathies were touched by the misfor- tunes of the exiled master of the house. "He ought 376 LINCOLN IN VICTORY to be hanged," some one said in his passion against Davis. 'Judge not, that ye be not judged," was Lincoln's only reply. He returned to the army headquarters on the river at night, but came again to Richmond on Wednesday. He sought out the home of General Pickett, the hero of the memorable charge at Gettysburg, who valiantly but vainly made the last defence of Richmond at Five Forks. Lincoln forgot that Pickett was an enemy in the field. He remembered only his old friendship for him, when the famous General was a boy on a visit to Illinois, and he himself had obtained for him his appointment as a cadet at West Point. He found the house and knocked at the door. "Is this where George Pickett lives ?" he asked the woman who came with a baby in her arms to answer his summons. She said it was and that she was Mrs. Pickett. Then he told her who he was, pro- testing he came not as "the President," the title which she had exclaimed in her astonishment, but simply as "Abraham Lincoln, George's old friend." The baby stretched forth his little hands, and the conqueror took the conquered in his arms. Thus the union was restored beside one hearthstone at least. Lincoln tarried at Grant's headquarters until the morning of the day on which Lee surrendered his famished army. " Get them to ploughing and gather- 377 ABRAHAM LINCOLN ing in their own little crops," he said as he discussed the terms that should be offered to the vanquished, "and eating pop-corn at their own firesides, and you can't get them to shoulder a musket again for half a century." It was Sunday. The end of the great Civil War was at hand, "the mightiest struggle and the most glorious victory as yet recorded in human annals," according to the judgment of Mommsen, the eminent German historian. The North was still ringing with the echoes of the people's rejoicing over the fall of Richmond, and to-morrow all the bells would peal forth the glad tidings from Appomattox. The new birth of freedom, to which Lincoln had dedicated the nation among the dead at Gettysburg, he had seen with his own eyes, and government of the people, by the people, for the people, was saved from wreck. As he sailed up the Potomac, he read aloud these words from Macbeth : — "Duncan is in his grave; After life's fitful fever, he sleeps well. Treason has done its worst; nor steel, nor poison, Malice domestic, foreign levy, nothing Can touch him further." A second time he read this passage from Shake- speare, seemingly, fascinated by the words. The boat approached Washington, the white dome of 378 LINCOLN IN VICTORY the Capitol swimming in the sky. As Mrs. Lincoln looked upon their journey's end, an expression of dread came into her face. "That city," she said, "is filled with our enemies." "Enemies!" Lincoln replied, as if the word had no place in the new era of peace, "we must never speak of that." 379 ABRAHAM LINCOLN From THE HARVARD COMMEMORATION ODE By James Russell Lowell 1865 Nature, they say, doth dote, And cannot make a man Save on some worn-out plan, Repeating us by rote: For him her Old World mould aside she threw, And, choosing sweet clay from the breast Of the unexhausted West, With stuff untainted shaped a hero new, Wise, steadfast in the strength of God, and true. How beautiful to see Once more a shepherd of mankind indeed, Who loved his charge, but never loved to lead; One whose meek flock the people joyed to be, Not lured by any cheat of birth, But by his clear-grained human worth, And brave old wisdom of sincerity ! They knew that outward grace is dust; They could not choose but trust In that sure-footed mind's unfaltering skill, And supple-tempered will That bent like perfect steel to spring again and thrust. Nothing of Europe here, Or, then, of Europe fronting mornward still, Ere any names of Serf and Peer Could Nature's equal scheme deface; 380 LOWELL'S ODE Here was a type of the true elder race, And one of Plutarch's men talked with us face to face. ***** Great captains, with their guns and drums, Disturb our judgment for the hour, But at last silence comes; These all are gone, and, standing like a tower, Our children shall behold his fame, The kindly-earnest, brave, foreseeing man, Sagacious, patient, dreading praise, not blame, New birth of our new soil, the first American. 381 CHAPTER XXXIII THE DEATH OF LINCOLN To win the hearts of his foes, his chief care in his closing days. — No exulting at the White House over the conquered South. — Lincoln's last speech, April II, 1865. — His anxiety for a speedy restoration of the Union. — His strange dream the night before his assassination. — His last cabinet meeting, held on the fatal Friday. — Peace and good-will his watchwords. — "We must extinguish our resentments." — Fondly planning the future with his wife. — Her unhappy premonition. — Their theater party with Major Rathbone and the daughter of Senator Harris of New York as their guests. — Lincoln assassinated in a box at Ford's Theater, April 14, by John Wilkes Booth. — Escape of the assassin. — Secretary Seward stabbed by Lewis Powell, alias Payne, one of Booth's accomplices. — Death of Lincoln, April 15. Lincoln's chief care on returning to his post of duty seemed to be to win the hearts of his foes. He longed to see the great armies of both sides dis- perse and the soldiers return to the ways of peace. The North was wild with joy over the ending of the war. Probably no other event in history ever was so universally celebrated among any people. The multitude felt it was their victory, won by themselves and for themselves. Yet if Lincoln could have had his choice, not a salute would have been fired or a bell rung in triumph 382 THE DEATH OF LINCOLN over his defeated countrymen in the South. He would have had the nation at large emulate the spirit of Grant at Appomattox when he ordered the artil- lery to stop firing in honor of Lee's surrender. At a serenade the next day, Lincoln called on the band to play "Dixie," and, as its stirring strains echoed through the White House, his foot kept time to the battle song of the Confederacy. A great crowd coming to rejoice with him on the night of the second day after the surrender, he appeared at a window and read his speech while a man at his elbow held a lamp above his manuscript. He spoke to the humbled vanquished rather than to the exultant victors, and in a tone of the utmost soberness. "It may be my duty," he said in con- cluding, "to make some new announcement to the people of the South. I am considering, and shall not fail to act when satisfied that action will be proper." April 14 fell on Good Friday. It is doubtful, however, if the religious significance of the day oc- curred to Lincoln's mind, for he always lived among a people who were not used to observing it as the anniversary of the crucifixion of the Saviour. By his own selection it was the occasion for raising above the ruins of Fort Sumter the flag which had been lowered there four years before. Anderson, 383 ABRAHAM LINCOLN its defender then, was the central figure in the cere- mony, and the orator of the day eloquently thanked God that Lincoln had been spared to behold the glorious fulfilment of his labors for the Union. An unwonted ease and happiness seemed to rest upon the President. Robert returned from the army and for an hour his father listened to the young man's account of what he had seen and done. General Grant, the captor of three armies, came, wearing modestly his latest and noblest honors. There was still a Confederate army in the field in North Carolina, under Johnston, and Grant was worried because no report of its capture had been received from Sherman. Lincoln was sure that good news would soon come, for he had had a dream the night before, the same dream which had been the forerunner of other great events. He dreamed he was in a strange ship, moving rapidly toward a dark and indefinite shore. This was the vision which he had seen in his sleep before the battles of Antietam, Murfreesboro, Gettysburg, and Vicksburg, and he was confident it meant now that Sherman had de- feated, or was about to defeat, Johnston. What else could it mean ? He knew of no other important event that was pending. Mrs. Lincoln joined in welcoming the victorious General-in-chief, and, as a return for the courtesies 3 8 4 THE DEATH OF LINCOLN she had latelv received at his headquarters, invited him and Mrs. Grant to go to the theater in the even- ing. The General promised to consider the invi- tation, and Mrs. Lincoln sent a messenger to Ford's Theater with a request for a box. Within an hour, John Wilkes Booth called at the theater for his mail, which he was accustomed to re- ceive there, and a man in the office spoke to him of the distinguished partv that was coming to the even- ing performance. Booth's was a familiar and dra- matic figure in the streets of Washington. He was a handsome young man of twentv-eight, who was generally regarded as a person of dark but harmless moods. As an actor, his gifts were by no means worthy of his name, which had been made famous bv the genius of his brother Edwin and his father, Junius Brutus. Throughout the war he vaunted his loyalty to the South, and his hostility to the Union preyed upon his never well-balanced mind. It is apparent that the news he heard at the theater instantly determined him to carry out a desperate project which had long been in his thoughts, and he called into council a group of mad adventurers. It was cabinet day at the White House. When Lincoln took his seat at the head of the table, Stan- ton had not come. While waiting for the Secretary 2C 3*S ABRAHAM LINCOLN of War, the President told again the story of his dream voyage in a phantom ship toward an unseen shore. The uppermost topic of discussion at the meet- ing was the policy to be pursued toward the states of the South, as well as toward Jefferson Davis and various other principals in the war against the Union. Lincoln said he regarded it as providential that Congress was not in session to interfere in the matter of reconstruction. He believed that by wise and discreet action the administration could set the states upon their feet, secure order, and reestab- lish the Union before the meeting of Congress in December. As to the treatment of the Confederate leaders, he said with much feeling that no one need expect he would take any part in hanging these men, even the worst of them. " Frighten them out of the country," he cried, in a high-pitched voice. "Open the gates ! Let down the bars! Scare them off!" and he threw up his arms as if to drive a herd of sheep. "Enough lives have been sacrificed," he continued. "We must extinguish our resentments, if we expect harmony and union." He expressed his dislike of the disposition of some persons to hector and dictate to the people of the South. "All must begin to act in the interest of 386 THE DEATH OF LINCOLN peace." Such was his parting injunction to the cabi- net, and the members left him with this sentiment of a generous statesmanship ringing in their ears. He was in high spirits, but Stanton was troubled at the thought of both the President and the General- in-chief exposing themselves in a theater box at a time of intense excitement when there were men abroad who had been made desperate by defeat. Lincoln, however, was an avowed fatalist, believing, as he often said, that what is to be will be, regard- less of anything we may do. Thus it will be remem- bered he argued with Herndon in the old law office, that Ca?sar had been appointed to die by Brutus's hand, even as Brutus had been foreordained to slay Caesar. Moreover, assassination never had stained the pages of American history. Lincoln paid no atten- tion to the many threatening messages which came to him, and kept only a few of them, which he labeled "Assassination Letters" and laid away in his desk. "If I am killed, I can die but once," he protested on one occasion; "but to live in constant dread of it, is to die over and over again." Stanton repeated his warning to Grant. Whether the General was influenced by this is not known, but at any rate he withdrew his acceptance of Mrs. Lin- coln's invitation and with his wife left the city in the 387 ABRAHAM LINCOLN early evening to visit their daughter, who was at school in New Jersey. The President and Mrs. Lincoln went for a drive in the afternoon, he expressing a wish that they should go alone. Tender recollections came back to him, and he spoke of their early struggle to- gether, their home in Springfield, and their friends. "We have laid by some money," he continued, "and during this term we will try to save up more. Then we will go back to Illinois." He meant, when he returned, to go on practising law. He hoped first, however, they would see a little of the old world and visit California. Mrs. Lincoln was so unused to finding him care free, that her superstition was aroused by his light- headedness. She told herself it was unreal, and could not last. "I have seen you thus only once before," she reminded him; "it was just before our dear Willie died." When the evening paper came out, it carried this announcement of the theater management: "Lieu- tenant-general Grant, President and Mrs. Lincoln and ladies, will occupy the state box at Ford's Theater to-night, to witness Miss Laura Keene's company in Tom Taylor's 'American Cousin." Already Booth's conspiracy was complete, and his evil secret, which it might be supposed he could find 388 THE DEATH OF LINCOLN no one to keep, was in the breasts of his trusted followers. Soon after Lincoln returned from his drive, an offi- cial of the War Department called to report that Jacob Thompson, formerly Secretary of the Interior of the United States, and during the war the leader of the group of Confederates who had made Canada their headquarters in their operations against the Union, was about to escape from Portland, Maine, by a steamer sailing for Europe. Stanton wished to arrest Thompson. "Well," the President said to his caller, who had informed him of Stanton's wishes," I rather guess not. When you have an elephant on your hands, and he wants to run away, better let him run." Lincoln was detained by visitors in the evening, and was late in starting for the theater. On the way, he and his wife were joined by a happy young couple, lately betrothed, and whom they had invited in place of the Grants. It was nine o'clock when they entered their box to the orchestral strains of "Hail to the Chief," and amid the hearty cheering of a crowded house. Lincoln seated himself in a rocking chair, near the railing, and the members of his party settled themselves to enjoy the comedy, which later gained celebrity under the name of "Lord Dundreary," the elder Sothern making a notable success of the title role. 389 ABRAHAM LINCOLN Meanwhile Booth, impatiently awaiting the time which he had chosen for his appearance at the theater, paced up and down Pennsylvania Avenue. As the hour drew near, he went to a bar and min- istered to his madness by taking a large drink of brandy. Then he sauntered into the theater, and at ten o'clock was seen strolling along the wall aisle of the balcony toward the state box. Within, sat the Commander-in-chief of mighty armies, without a soldier to guard him. Booth, stepping into the little anteroom of the box, barred the door behind him with a piece of wood, which one of his dupes, an employee of the theater, had placed there for the purpose. Peeping through a hole which this fellow had bored for him, he looked upon his illustrious prey, and noted his position. Thus prepared, he noiselessly opened the door. The audience was roaring with laughter over the farcical lines of the one actor on the stage at the moment. A little while before, Lincoln had been speaking with his wife, his thoughts still fondly dwell- ing on plans for their future, and he had closed his remarks by saying, "There is no place I should like so much to see as Jerusalem." There he sat, "with malice toward none, with charity for all," without a personal enemy in the world. Could Booth have looked into his coun- 30° THE DEATH OF LINCOLN tenance, its simple benignity might have appealed to his better nature, as the frenzied intruder paused for a second on the verge of his awful deed. But stealing upon him from behind, he fired his cowardly shot. Lincoln rose from his chair under the impulse of the shock, and then sank back, his head drooping and his eyes closed, only to open again upon the unseen shore of that mysterious bourne, toward which he had sailed in his dream-ship the night before. By a great mercy, he neither saw the assassin nor felt the wound. The young man in the party sprang at the murderer, who let his pistol fall as he plunged a knife in the arm outstretched to restrain him. A realization of the terrible scene slowly dawned upon the bewildered mind of Mrs. Lincoln, and she screamed. The wife's cry aroused the stupefied audience to the great tragedy which had supplanted the comedy they were watching. They saw the handsome face of Booth, his eyes lustrous with passion, as he leaned out of the box, blade in hand, making ready to leap upon the stage. The distance was only nine feet, and Booth had often made a jump of twelve feet from a rock while playing in " Macbeth." In his flying descent now, however, his spur caught in an American flag, with which the front of the President's box had been 39i ABRAHAM LINCOLN draped, and he fell upon the stage, dragging down the flag in his fall. His leg was broken, but with the strength of a crazed man, he quickly rose and drew his knife through the air, shouting, "Sic semper tyrannis," the motto on the seal of Virginia. To his distracted mind it was all a play, and he but a player. His lines spoken, his part finished, he strode from the stage. At the stage door stood a boy holding a horse, hired for the occasion, and crouching on its back, Booth dashed away in the light of the moon, the animal's hoof beats clattering noisily in the stillness of the night, and the rider squirming in pain from the broken bone which was tearing through the flesh of his leg. Men rushed to Lincoln's box, to find its door secured against their entrance. An army surgeon in the audience, climbing up on another man's back, made his way into the front of the box. The door was unbarred, and one or two other doctors came. It was seen at once that the bullet had entered the back of the head and crashed into the brain. Lin- coln must die, meeting the fate which had brooded over him from youth, and which he had long fore- boded. It seems as if it were written in the book of life, that this man of trials and disappointments should not live to enjoy the success which he had achieved, or the applause of the world which he 392 THE DEATH OF LINCOLN had won. The irony of it was that he, the faithful son and loving father of the people, should be struck down as a tyrant. He was lifted from the chair into which he had sunk. With a doctor holding his head, and others supporting the stricken body and legs, he was borne from the theater, men going ahead and tearing the seats from the floor to make a passageway. Mrs. Lincoln, only less helpless than her husband, was led after him, and as the little procession left the audi- torium, the curtain was lowered forever upon the stage of Ford's Theater. It was felt the President could not survive a ride over the cobblestones to the White House in his waiting carriage, and those who were bearing him paused on the sidewalk, not knowing which way to turn. A lodger in the house of a tailor, opposite the theater, came to the door to learn the cause of the commotion on the street, and he told them to bring the wounded man to his room. Lincoln was carried into the house, his blood dripping on the steps. There he was taken into a little room, where he was laid diagonally upon the bed, which was shorter than his body. In the meantime the excited crowd from the theater poured into Pennsylvania Avenue, spreading as they went the direful news of what they had seen. Soon 393 ABRAHAM LINCOLN they were met by others, equally excited, who said that Seward had been assassinated in his home. Stanton, hearing first of this latter crime, was has- tening to the house of the Secretary of State when he was astounded by the report of the murderous attack on the President. Naturally fearing there was a plot afoot to paralyze the government, he closed the liquor saloons, threw a heavy guard around the house where the President lay, placed the city under martial control, and took general command. The bitter suspicion started in his mind and in the public mind generally, that some of the Confederate leaders, blinded by the misfortunes of war, had con- spired with the assassins. In this way Booth's horrid act at once wrought a grievous injury to the very people who, in his wild mania, he fancied he was serving. The true friend of the disarmed and pros- trate South was struck down, while his heart throbbed with generosity toward the conquered states, and in a flash Lincoln's policy of peace and good-will was dashed to the earth. All through the hopeless night, death battled with the giant strength of Lincoln. He moaned con- tinually, but happily he was unconscious of the long struggle which was so painful for others to watch. Statesmen and generals were about him, not ashamed of their tears, while Mrs. Lincoln grieved in a 394 THE DEATH OF LINCOLN near-by room. The night was as dismal without as within, for a raw and drizzling rain had set in and continued to fall throughout the following day. Hour by hour the pulse of the dying man grew weaker. At twenty-two minutes after seven in the morning of Saturday, April 15, it ceased to beat, and turning from the mortal Lincoln, Stanton hoarsely whispered, "Now he belongs to the ages." 395 ABRAHAM LINCOLN O CAPTAIN! MY CAPTAIN! By Walt Whitman 1865 O Captain ! my Captain ! our fearful trip is done, The ship has weather'd every rack, the prize we sought is won, The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting, While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring; But O heart ! heart ! heart ! O the bleeding drops of red, Where on the deck my Captain lies, Fallen cold and dead. O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells; Rise up — for you the flag is flung — for you the bugle trills, For you bouquets and ribbon'd wreaths — for you the shores a-crowding, For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning; Here Captain ! dear father ! This arm beneath your head ! It is some dream that on the deck, You've fallen cold and dead. My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still, My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will, The ship is anchor'd safe and sound, its voyage closed and done, From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won; Exult O shores, and ring O bells ! But I with mournful tread, Walk the deck my Captain lies, Fallen cold and dead. 396 CHAPTER XXXIV SORROW OF THE WORLD The day that Lincoln died unique in history. — National joy turned to universal grief. — "God reigns and the government at Washington still lives." — A revolution in the policies of the nation wrought in a day. — Unseemly rejoicing by the radicals. — Lincoln's plans of reconciliation supplanted by a bitter suspicion of the South. — Jefferson Davis arraigned as an ac- complice in the assassination. — The punishment of Booth and his plotters. — The awful fate which pursued the President's companions in the theater box. — The widow's mind broken by the blow. — Lincoln's estate. — The funeral day, April 19, 1865, observed all over the country. — The body lying in state at the Capitol. — The sixteen-hundred-mile journey to Spring- field began April 21. — A million Americans looked upon the face of their dead chieftain. — The arrival of the remains in Springfield, May 3. — The burial at Oak Ridge, May 4. The Saturday that Lincoln died stands alone in history. There never was another day like it. A victorious people awoke to continue their week of rejoicing. All the North was gayly decked. In an hour the land was engulfed by a tidal wave of grief and rage. It was no mere show, no ceremonial tribute of a nation to its chief. On the contrary, millions mourned the loss, not of an official but of a friend. Men met in the streets, in the stores and in the shops, 397 ABRAHAM LINCOLN with tears in their eyes, and their throats aching with emotion. Sorrow filled the homes. Services in the churches on Easter Sunday were robbed of their usual joyousness. No other death ever touched so many hearts. People rebelled against the cruelty of their bereave- ment, and a bitter spirit of revenge toward the South burned in their breasts. Stanton feared that wild rumors might cause panic and disorder in New York, and while Lincoln was dying he arranged for a public meeting to be held in Wall Street in the early morning. Garfield, then a member of Congress, was among those sent to calm the public of the metropolis, and, standing by the statue of Washington on the steps of the Sub-treasury, he thrilled the thousands who crowded the street with the eloquent assurance that " God reigns and the government at Washington still lives." Nevertheless, a revolution really had taken place. Benjamin Disraeli, in his speech on Lincoln in the British House of Commons, declared that "assassi- nation never has changed the history of the world." It is true, however, that in the flash of Booth's pistol shot, the policies of the government had been com- pletely reversed. The hands of the radicals, which Lincoln had restrained for four years, were free at last. The reign of the bayonet and the carpet-bagger, 398 SORROW OF THE WORLD the ku-klux, the shot-gun, and the "bloody shirt" was inaugurated in the South, and the country entered upon a decade of angry turmoil. Stanton left the death chamber to order the arrest of Jacob Thompson, the Confederate emissary, with whom the President had refused to interfere the day before. Extreme men in high places hailed the ac- cession of Vice-president Johnson to the Presidency as "a godsend to the country." The new President delighted them by declaring "treason must be made infamous, and traitors must be punished." Senator Wade of Ohio, the President of the Senate, exclaimed, " By the gods, there will be no trouble now in running the government." A caucus of Republican senators was held within a few hours of Lincoln's death, and plans were laid for overturning his projects for the reconstruction of the South. Grant himself was swept into the current of retaliation. "Extreme rigor will have to be observed," he said in a severe military de- spatch, "whilst assassination remains the order of the day with the rebels." Stanton proclaimed an offer of one hundred thousand dollars for the arrest of Jefferson Davis as an accomplice in the murder of Lincoln, and for two years the President of the fallen Confederacy was held in prison on that and other charges without trial. 399 ABRAHAM LINCOLN Happily history acquits him and all responsible men of any knowledge of or sympathy with the assassina- tion. Booth was hunted down and shot, while four per- sons convicted of conspiring with him, including a woman, Mrs. Surratt, were hanged. A physician, who set the broken leg of the assassin, and two other men were sentenced to banishment for life on Dry Tortugas, one of the Florida keys, and the man who bored the hole in the theater box was condemned to pass six years on that remote and lonely island. The future held in store for the innocent com- panions of Lincoln on the night of the assassination a fate not less terrible than that which befell the guilty companions of the assassin. The widow's always frail nervous organization was wrecked by the shock. She raved throughout the dreadful night that fol- lowed, and throwing herself upon the corpse in the morning, it was with difficulty that she was persuaded to leave. As she was led to the White House car- riage which had stood at the door through the long hours, she cast a glance at the theater and cried in bitterness, "Oh, that horrible house! " The only mitigation of her misfortune lay in the small competence which her husband left her and her children. Aside from the real estate, which he owned when he went to Washington and which he still held 400 SORROW OF THE WORLD at his death, he died possessed of a personal estate valued at more than one hundred thousand dol- lars. Since he never was a money maker and was obliged to borrow in order to pay his expenses in his first months in the White House, he must have been fortunate in the choice of a wise financial adviser, thus to have accumulated amid absorbing cares a personal property, equaling in value the total of the salary he received as President. Mrs. Lincoln went to live in England and France, but she found no refuge, even in far-away lands, from the relentless specter which pursued her. The picture of the frightful scene in the theater was imprinted for- ever on her broken mind. She continually dwelt on it in her thought and conversation. For some time she was in a private asylum near Chicago, while her later years were passed in a sister's home at Springfield. The young couple who were her guests in the box, married, but the wife was slain by the crazed husband. Lincoln's was the kindest fate of all. His body was removed from the modest dwelling of the tailor to the Green Room of the White House, where it was enthroned on a splendid catafalque. There it lay in state, resting beneath the roof where, living, he had found only toil and care. A peace, not of this world, was in the upturned face, in striking con- 2D 401 ABRAHAM LINCOLN trast to the turbulent passions which disturbed the men who gathered about the bier. Seward, who had been stabbed while in bed by one of the conspirators and narrowly escaped death, was not told of Booth's crime. He could only wonder why his kind and thoughtful chief did not call, for he felt he would be the first to visit him in his affliction. On Sunday, when he caught a glimpse from where he lay of a flag at half staff, the meaning of it flashed on his mind. The funeral was held in the White House on Wednesday, and all the people of the North rever- ently kept the day. Not a kinsman of the lonely man was among the mourners, but races and sects were knit together in a kinship of sorrow for this brother of man. Queen Victoria sent her condolences to Mrs. Lincoln, " as from a widow to a widow." More than kingly honors were paid the mortal remains of one who entered the world through a hovel of logs. He was borne to the Capitol, where many thought his appropriate sepulture was in the crypt built for the bones of Washington, his only peer in American history. Illinois, however, claimed his dust, as the rightful heritage of her soil. The prairies must be hallowed by the grave of the first great man to be nurtured by them. Cities and states begged the privilege of honoring 402 St. Gaudens's Statue of Lincoln In Lincoln Park, Chicago SORROW OF THE WORLD his body on its way to the grave. Arrangements were made for the cortege to pass over nearly the same route which Lincoln had followed on his way to the capital four years before. At Philadelphia, Liberty Bell was placed at the head of his coffin in Independence Hall, where, in 1861, he had solemnly declared he would rather be assassinated then and there than surrender the Union. Hundreds of thousands looked upon his face in New York. A multitude of people from all over the upper part of the Empire State gathered at Albany, and were in waiting at midnight when the body was placed in the Capitol. At every little station the people gathered and stood with bared heads as the funeral train swept by. Arches were erected over the track of the railroad. Bonfires lit the way by night. The people of the West assembled in Chicago, to bend in reverence above the bier of the first President they had given to the nation. Springfield, proud in her grief, welcomed home the familiar form of her immortal citizen. It was carried in honor to the hall of the House of Representatives, where the now silent lips had aroused a people to battle for freedom. There it lay, surrounded by the scenes and friends of his early struggles. His loving stepmother lived to mourn the wilder- ness waif, whom she had reared for his wonderful 403 ABRAHAM LINCOLN destiny, but she was too feeble from age to attend his funeral. The news of his assassination did not sur- prise her, for she had dreaded it every day since he left her to enter upon his duties at Washington. His sign still swung in front of the old law office, and from the country about New Salem and Clary's Grove simple men and women brought their tribute of tears, not to the dead President, but to the good neighbor, who had helped them in the field, in the forest, or on the highway, and with whom they had shared the crust of poverty. Long before the world knew him and enrolled him among the great, they knew him and honored him. In the imposing procession to the tomb, "Old Bob," the horse that had carried him on his travels around the circuit, walked behind the funeral car of his dead master. The prairie was in its Maytime bloom, when Lin- coln was laid to rest on its bosom, beside his Willie and the other little boy who had died in early child- hood, w 7 here Tad soon joined him, and where, after seventeen years of weary waiting, the distracted wife and mother found the peace for which she yearned. Above his grave, a lofty monument w T as reared by his countrymen, and thousands of olack men, from whose ankles he had struck the shackles of slavery, contributed for its erection out of the earnings of their free labor. 404 PUNCH'S TRIBUTE r rom ABRAHAM LINCOLN Foully murdered, April 14, 1865 By Tom Taylor in London Punch May 6, 1865 You lay a wreath on murdered Lincoln's bier! You, who with mocking pencil wont to trace, Broad for the self-complacent British sneer, His Length of shambling limb, his furrowed face. His gaunt, gnarled hands, his unkempt, bristling hair, His garb uncouth, his bearing ill at ease, His lack of all we prize as debonair, Of power or will to shine, of art to please; Beside this corpse, that bears for winding-sheet The stars and stripes he lived to rear anew, Between the mourners at his head and feet, Say, scurrile jester, is there room for you ? Yes; he had liv'd to shame me from my sneer, To lame my pencil, and confute my pen, To make me own this hind of princes peer, This rail-splitter, a true-born king of men. My shallow judgment I had learn'd to rue, Noting how to occasion's height he rose; How his quaint wit made home-truth seem more true; How, iron-like, his temper grew by blows; How humble, yet how hopeful he could be; How in good fortune and in ill the same; Nor bitter in success, nor boastful he, Thirsty for gold, nor feverish for fame. 405 ABRAHAM LINCOLN So he went forth to battle, on the side That he felt clear was Liberty's and Right's, As in his peasant boyhood he had plied His warfare with rude Nature's thwarting mights, — The uncleared forest, the unbroken soil, The iron bark that turns the lumberer's axe, The rapid that o'erbears the boatman's toil, The prairie hiding the maz'd wanderer's tracks, The ambush'd Indian, and the prowling bear, — Such were the deeds that help'd his youth to train: Rough culture, but such trees large fruit may bear, If but their stocks be of right girth and grain. So he grew up, a destin'd work to do, And liv'd to do it; four long suffering years' 111 fate, ill feeling, ill report, liv'd through, And then he heard the hisses change to cheers, The taunts to tribute, the abuse to praise, And took both with the same unwavering mood, — Till, as he came on light from darkling days, And seem'd to touch the goal from where he stood, A felon hand, between the goal and him, Reach'd from behind his back, a trigger prest — And those perplex'd and patient eyes were dim, Those gaunt, long-laboring limbs were laid to rest. The words of mercy were upon his lips, Forgiveness in his heart and on his pen, When this vile murderer brought swift eclipse To thoughts of peace on earth, good will to men. 406 CHAPTER XXXV A COURSE IN LINCOLN Some of the more notable Lincoln books, by means of which a course of reading may be planned and the most inspiring ethical lesson in American biography may be studied. —A long line of side reading. — Lincoln in poetry. I have ventured to borrow the title and text of this chapter from Charles E. Hughes, who, speaking as the Governor of New York, at a Lincoln Birthday meeting, expressed the wish that "in our colleges, and wherever young men are trained, particularly for political life, there could be a course in Lincoln. " My purpose is twofold. I wish to make some acknowledgment, inadequate as it necessarily must be, of the sources from which I have derived inspira- tion and material for this narrative, and at the same time to point inquiring readers the way to a fuller knowledge of Lincoln than may be gained from any single story or interpretation of his life. There is no more companionable figure in history, and, for my own part, my memory dwells with grat- itude on the very titles of most of the books to which I owe what knowledge I have of him, and with which I have passed so many pleasant and 407 ABRAHAM LINCOLN profitable hours while pursuing a "course in Lin- coln." Whether an eminent British educator was gifted with prophecy when he said that in the future " morals will be taught only through biography," the character and career of Lincoln present an inspiring ethical lesson such as Americans, at least, cannot draw from any other man in history. He lived the life of America so completely as to touch it at every grade, and in nearly all its phases. Moreover, the elements were so varied and mixed in his nature as to make him in an unusual degree "all things to all men." Numerous as the books about him already are, it is to be hoped they and the readers of them will continue to increase and multi- ply, for no two writers depict the same man in the same mood. Foremost among the works to which Lincoln writers and readers alike are indebted stands that monumental structure, "Abraham Lincoln, A His- tory," by his secretaries, John G. Nicolay and John Hay. Nicolay and Hay have not only left in their ten volumes a life of the man, but as well a history of his times. William H. Herndon, Lincoln's law partner, aided by Jesse W. Weik, compressed into his two volumes a work which is unique in American biography. In its 408 A COURSE IN LINCOLN intimacy, its sincere criticism, and its thoroughness, this life of Lincoln offers an extraordinary portrait. Ida M. TarbeU's Life, which is published in four volumes and in two volumes, deservedly ranks high among Lincoln hooks, not only because of the vitality of Miss Tarhell's story, hut as well by reason of the diligent and enterprising research that it rep- resents, and which seems to have sought out and exhausted every neglected witness. "The Everyday Life of Abraham Lincoln," by Francis F. Browne, has a wealth of anecdote and reminiscence in its single volume, while William Elerov Curtis's "True .Abraham Lincoln" abounds in entertaining and graphic pictures of the man, de- rived from men who knew him in the flesh. Norman Hapgood's "Abraham Lincoln, the Man of the People " is a virile exposition of the subject, while John Tvler Morse's Life, in two volumes, is an able and critical study of Lincoln and his work. Isaac N. Arnold, in preparing his Life, well im- proved an advantage only second, if not equal, to Herndon, and Nicolay and Hay, for as a brother lawyer at the bar of Illinois, and as a member of Congress in war time, he was long associated with Lincoln. Ward H. Lamon's Life is another book based on a personal relationship with the subject. Henry J. Raymond's Life is specially interesting 409 ABRAHAM LINCOLN among the earliest Lincoln books, as it presents the view of one who himself played a prominent part in the politics of the war period. John G. Holland is another of the pioneers in the Lincoln biographi- cal field, and his simple story still holds its charm after the lapse of years. F. B. Carpenter's "Six Months in the White House" is from the pen of the artist whose brush painted the familiar picture of the "Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation," and is one of the most readable of all contributions to Lincoln literature. Henry C. Whitney's "Life on the Circuit with Lin- coln " is a racy portrayal of the man in a picturesque background, by a fellow circuit rider, and the volume has an attractive atmosphere peculiar to it. "Recollections of Abraham Lincoln," by L. E. Chittendon, is a book crowded with memory pictures, which the author gained while an official of the Lin- coln administration. Alonzo Rothschild's "Lincoln, Master of Men " is laid out on an original plan and executed with skill. "Personal Recollections of Abraham Lincoln," by James R. Gilmore, afFords not a few novel glimpses, while "Washington in Lincoln's Time," bv Noah Brooks, presents some impressive scenes, clearly drawn by the hand of a trusted friend of the President. "Abraham Lincoln," by Carl Schurz, is a luminous 410 A COURSE IN LINCOLN" appreciation, and coupled with it in its latest reprint- ing is a highly suggestive essay by Truman H. Bart- lett, on "The Physiognomy of Lincoln." Professor Bartlett, who has long been a student of Lincoln por- traits, aggressively combats the common impression that Lincoln was a man of ungainly appearance and awkward movement. He sees a statuesque beauty in the outer Lincoln, corresponding to the recognized beauty of his mind and character, and does not hesi- tate to compare his life mask favorably with the profiles of Washington and the Greek Jove. It is well not only to read about a man, but also to go to the man himself and form impressions of him at first hand. To know Lincoln in this way, a reader must turn to the "Complete Works of Abraham Lincoln," edited by Nicolay and Hay. In the twelve volumes of this work, a diligent and enter- prising effort has been made to present every authen- tic line in existence from the man's speeches and writ- ings. No Lincoln book is more interesting than the "Complete Works," which contains some attractive portraits, several notable tributes to Lincoln's memory, a thorough index, an admirable Lincoln bibliography by Daniel Fish, and an intelligent Lin- coln anthology. There is an unending line of side reading for the student of Lincoln, and I am indebted under this 411 ABRAHAM LINCOLN head to "Lincoln in the Telegraph Office," by D. H. Bates ; " Lincoln, the Lawyer," by Frederick Trevor Hill; "Memories of the Men who saved the Union," by Don Piatt; "Lincoln at Gettysburg," by Clark E. Carr; "Recollections of Abraham Lin- coln," by Joshua R. Speed; "Reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln by Distinguished Men of His Time," compiled by Allen Thorndike Rice; "Grant, Lincoln, and the Freedmen," by John Eaton; "Lin- coln and Stanton," by William D. Kelley; "Memo- ries of Many Men and of Some Women," by Maunsell B. Field; "Inside the White House in War Times," by William O. Stoddard; "Echoes from Hospital and White House," by Rebecca B. Pomeroy; "The Spirit of Old West Point," by Morris Schaff; "Cau- cuses of i860," by Murat Halstead; "Recollections of the Civil War," by Charles A. Dana; "The Assas- sination of Abraham Lincoln," by Osborn H. Old- royd ; John Carroll Power's account of the Lincoln funeral and description of the Lincoln memorial at Springfield; "Nancy Hanks," by Caroline Hanks Hitchcock; "Abraham Lincoln and Men of War Times," by Alexander K. McClure; "Lincoln's Plan of Reconstruction," by Charles H. McCarthy, and "Lincoln and Seward," by Gideon Welles. A view of a man may be gained through the eyes of his contemporaries, which is not afforded by any 412 A COURSE IN LINCOLN other means. Interesting and significant lights are shed on Lincoln by such books as Grant's "Memoirs," Garland's " Life of Grant," " General Grant's Letters to a Friend," "The Sherman Letters," Michie's " Life of General McClellan," Gardner's "Life of Stephen A. Douglas," Charles Francis Adams's Life of his father, Boutwell's "Sixty Years in Public Affairs," "Butler's Book," Cox's "Three Decades of Legisla- tion," Blaine's "Twenty Years of Congress," Storey's "Life of Sumner," McCall's "Life of Thaddeus Stevens," Hart's "Life of Chase," Lothrop's "Life of Seward," Joel Benton's "Greeley," and George W. Julian's "Reminiscences," while in various papers in the Century s " Battles and Leaders of the Civil War," Lincoln is incidentally shown in his relation to military men and movements. A reader of James Ford Rhodes's "History of the United States," and James Schouler's "History of the Civil War," is permitted to see Lincoln in the setting of his times and cannot fail to incur lasting obligations to those historians. Addresses on Lin- coln by Bancroft, Sumner, Ingersoll, Watterson, McKinley, Swett, and other orators, are rich in dra- matic pictures of the man and eloquent estimates of his character. Some excellent Lincoln reminiscences can be found only in the bound volumes of the magazines of several 413 ABRAHAM LINCOLN decades, ready access to which, however, is provided by Poole's Index. Moreover, Lincoln lives in poetry as well as in prose. The latter records his deeds, while the former gives us the spirit of the man. The historian is a reporter, but the poet is a prophet. In history we may find what a man was; it is the office of the poet to foretell the verdict of the future and imagine for us the immortal that he is to be. Measured by this standard, Lincoln's enduring greatness assumes heroic proportions. What other figure of the nineteenth century inspired a body of verse equal in quality to that which has been offered in tribute to him ? Much of it came forth in the year of his death, but it has stood the test of time. Walt Whitman was stirred by the passion of grief to produce in "O Captain! My Captain!" his most lyrical poem. Lowell, after delivering his "Com- memoration Ode" in 1865, in honor of the soldiers of Harvard, hastened to add to it his memorable tribute to Lincoln. London Punch's apology re- mains one of the most interesting of all the Lincoln poems. It is a remarkably clear estimate of his char- acter and picture of his career for a writer in London so quickly to have grasped. By a strange coinci- dence, the author of Punch's tribute, Tom Taylor, was also the author of "Our American Cousin," the 414 A COURSE IN LINCOLN play which held the boards at Ford's Theater the night of the assassination. In William Cullen Bryant's "Abraham Lincoln," there are other lines as good as these : — " Whose proudest monument shall be The broken fetters of the slave." Richard Henry Stoddard's "Horatian Ode," Bayard Taylor's "Gettysburg Ode," George H. Boker's and S. Weir Mitchell's verses, Whittier's "Emancipation Group," his dedicatory poem on the occasion of the unveiling of a monument in Boston, Richard Watson Gilder's "Life Mask of Abraham Lincoln," and a Lincoln sonnet by Edmund Clarence Stedman, are among other notable contributions. Stedman's "Hand of Lincoln" opens with a stanza which discloses the quality and plan of this interest- ing poem : — "Look on this cast, and know the hand That bore a nation in its hold; From this mute witness understand What Lincoln was — how large of mould." Maurice Thompson, a Confederate soldier, in his poem on " Lincoln's Grave," has interpreted perhaps best of all the full breadth of the man's sympathies, as these few verses may serve to show: — 415 ABRAHAM LINCOLN "He was the southern mother leaning forth, At dead of night to hear the cannon roar, Beseeching God to turn the cruel North And break it that her son might come once more; He was New England's maiden pale and pure, Whose gallant lover fell on Shiloh's plain. ***** "He was the North, the South, the East, the West, The thrall, the master, all of us in one. 416 CHAPTER XXXVI LESSONS FROM LINCOLN Time and change, instead of dimming his fame, have only served to make his example more Deeded and useful. — Claimed by all parties and all sections. — The true prophet of the reunited people. — His influence growing world-wide. — Washington and Lincoln. — The latter belongs wholly to America. — The full meaning of the man remains for future generations to discover. — His greatness a miracle, or onlv the common sense of a common man ? — Lincoln's inspiring message to all men. Abraham Lincoln was horn into a world very different from ours — so different that it seems to have been in another age. The bees of Bonaparte swarmed over Europe, and the peace of Vienna had left him, at the climax of his career, the master of the continent, from the Russian frontier to the Medi- terranean. George III, though in his dotage, yet wore the crown from which the most splendid jewel had been plucked bv the sword of Washington. Africa was almost unknown, and, aside from India, Asia was as little known as it was five hundred years before. Along the western shore of this continent, the banner of Spain waved over an immense empire, which stretched unbroken from the Sierra Nevadas 4i7 ABRAHAM LINCOLN to Cape Horn. In our own flag there were only seventeen stars. Thomas Jefferson was the Presi- dent of a nation of seven million people. Robert Fulton's steamboat was only two years old. Ste- phenson's locomotive was yet twenty years away. Labor's burden was measured only by what it could bear. The black toiler was a chattel, and his white brother struggled beneath an industrial serf- dom which had every legal and social sanction. Women had almost as few rights at law as they had a cycle before, and no broader sphere of activity. Democracy was without a foothold in any of the principal countries of the Old World. England was still an aristocracy, and as much ruled by the few as at any time in the six centuries since Runnymede. The United States had a government for the people, but not yet by the people. There was a governing class in the town, the state, and the nation. The log-cabin was not regarded as a breeding-place for statesmen, and if a fortune-teller had whispered in the ear of Jefferson that the babe in Nancy Hanks's arms would one day sit in the President's chair, the imagination even of that great Democrat would have been staggered. Lincoln's death, as well as his birth, seems remote to the people of this generation. It is commonly said that life has changed quite as much in the few 418 LESSONS FROM LINCOLN decades which have passed since he died as it some- times has changed in an equal number of centuries. Certainlv the country, which he did the most to save, has grown more in population in that brief period than it grew in the two hundred and fifty years before. Its growth in wealth and luxury has been even more astounding. One of our multi-millionaires to-day could have bought and sold all the millionaires of the world in 1865. Probably there is one railway system now with as much mileage as there was in all the land then. One city in these days has as many people as there were in all the cities together in those days. Life is so swift that men of middle age think of Abraham Lincoln as among the ancients. Distance, however, does not dim the fame of Lin- coln. The years only increase the force of the lesson which his life teaches. Time and change have served to make his example even more needed and more useful. As the strife in which he spent himself recedes and subsides, his figure looms larger and clearer. Con- troversy has fallen away from him. He no longer leads a party, as Jefferson and Hamilton still do. All parties invoke his name. In the growing harmony and security of the federation of states, he is ceasing to be the chieftain of a section. In the end all 419 ABRAHAM LINCOLN Southerners will claim him, as many Southerners already are claiming him. The self-respect of the new South does not require that a line he spoke or wrote be stricken out. He stands as the true prophet of the reunited people in this happier day, when the mere reminders of the battles between fellow-countrymen have long been dropped from the regimental standards of the army of the nation and the very name of rebellion has been discarded by the government at Washington. "The Union with him, in sentiment, rose to the sublimity of a religious mysticism," said Alexander H. Stephens, the Vice-president of the Confederacy, while Henry W. Grady, the most eloquent spokes- man of that great and flourishing South, which has risen from the devastation of war, pronounced him "the first typical American, the first who compre- hended within himself all the strength and gentleness, all the majesty and grace of this republic." In truth, Lincoln is rising above politics entirely. The concrete issues, for which he directly stood as a statesman, are of the past. He is coming more and more to stand for social rather than political principles, — for democracy in all things, in all lands. His countrymen are thus moving to place him on the broadest, firmest, and most enduring basis, where the vicissitudes of politics and government cannot 420 LESSONS FROM LINCOLN reach him. It well may be that in time the world will take him, that he will cease to be even national, and that all the races of his "plain people" every- where, catching the inspiration of his career, will make universal the old chant: — " We are coming, Father Abraham ! " Whether Lincoln ranks with, or outranks, Wash- ington, is an old but not an important question. Comparison is unnecessary. Men who may be counted off in pairs, whether in history or among our everyday associates, are not interesting. A real man suggests no one but him- self. Abraham Lincoln was not made in any other man's mould, and when he was made his mould was broken. As a brave, adroit, and patriotic soldier, Washing- ton led the American people to independence. As a wise, prudent, and incorruptible statesman, he led them in establishing a government. He was the foremost American in the last twenty-five years of his life. On the other hand, Lincoln was on the national stage hardly half a dozen years. Until his debate with Douglas in 1858, he was unknown outside of Illinois. So brief a record, however crowded, could not account for so great a renown. 421 ABRAHAM LINCOLN When we think of Washington we think of what he did. When we think of Lincoln we think. of what he was. True, he wielded a greater and more des- potic authority than Washington or any other Ameri- can ever wielded. Nevertheless, he is remembered and revered more as a man of ideals than as a man of power. The smoke of battle has rolled away from Lincoln. We know he was the master of generals and the leader of armies; but that is not the picture which posterity carries in its mind's eye. The Kentucky log-cabin, and not the White House, is in the back- ground of that familiar picture. He is surrounded not with the gleaming bayonets of the martial mil- lions whom he commanded, but by the primeval forest of his Indiana wilderness, an axe rather than a sword in his hand. We dwell less on his triumphs at the bar than on his achievements in arithmetic on a wooden shovel, with a lump of charcoal for a pencil. Oftener we see him among his rustic familiars on the banks of the Sangamon than in the camp of his grand army on the Potomac, among his bucolic equals in the streets of Springfield than with his outriders in the avenues of Washington. His little Gettysburg ad- dress is worth more to us than all his official messages to Congress. 422 LESSON'S FROM LINCOLN We mark the height of glory which he gained, but chieflv to measure his lifelong struggle upward from the depths of poverty and ignorance, whence he rose. A passionate protest assails the historian, who at- tempts to remove or modify a single trace of the disadvantages over which he triumphed. That is the Lincoln who is sacred to us. That is the Lincoln whom Americans claim wholly as their own. Other nations have bred great statesmen, but other nations have not bred them the way Lincoln was bred, "as God made Adam," said Lowell, "out of the very earth, unancestried, unprivileged, un- known." Napoleon might boast he made his mar- shals out of mud, but he did not make his statesmen from that material. In the upheaval of war, men sometimes rise from the bottom. In the work of peace, the upper crust generally remains intact. Even the French Revolution did not develop one peasant leader among its statesmen. Lincoln's greatness is still a mysterv, to many a miracle. Possibly it may have been fundamentally the common sense of a common man. The world does not yet know, for it has no standard by which to try him, since he is the only common man who has walked in a high place without losing his commonness, the only man of the people in the pages of history 423 ABRAHAM LINCOLN whom no honor could exalt above his native sim- plicity. It was reserved for Lincoln to verify to the world the American contention, proclaimed in 1776, that all men are fit to govern themselves. It remains for future generations to catch the full meaning of his life. If his countrymen to-day should see ahead of them a task like his in the Civil War, would they dare to choose one of his bringing up for that task ? Would they not put their trust in training rather than in character — in an expert rather than in a man ? In the resistless progress of democracv, the race will learn "how much truth, how much magnanimity, and how much statecraft await the call of oppor- tunity in simple manhood, when it believes in the justice of God and the worth of man." Then, it may be, that the career of Lincoln will cease to be a riddle, and that a line of Lincolns will, like him, spring from the soil — yes, even from city pave- ments — and usher in the reign of common men and common sense. Meanwhile, all men may find in Lincoln's life an inspiration against every obstacle in their path- way, whether they be choppers, fishers, or ploughmen. As toil and hope redeemed him, so any one may redeem himself from poverty, illiteracy, and ob- 424 LESSONS FROM LINCOLN scurity, the disinherited may claim their inheritance, the unschooled may make their scantiest leisure their teacher, and the benighted hew their way out of the wilderness of ignorance. As Washington is the father of his country, so Lin- coln stands for the brotherhood of the American people. He himself passed through all classes and belonged to none. The boast of heraldry and the claim of privilege are covered with irony in the pres- ence of "This hind of princes peer, This rail-splitter, a true-born king of men." As the Christian church always returns from afar to its humble source in the rude manger of Bethlehem, so must Americans, while the name of Lincoln lasts, own their kinship with the lowborn, the poor, and the ignorant. 425 INDEX Abraham Lincoln Birthplace described, i, 6; ignorant of his family origin, 3; indifferent to ancestral claims, 4; descended from farmers and mechanics, 4; anec- dote of the War of 1812, 7; moved to Indiana, 7, 8; a hut in the wilder- ness, 9 ; his first shot, 1 1 ; his mother's farewell, 13; his step- mother's good influence, 15, 16; schooling, 18, 19, 22; eagerness for books, 19, 20, 21, 22; great height and strength, 23, 24; accused of laziness, 25; boyhood dreams, 25, 26, 27; early writings, 26, 27; on a flatboat, 27; his first dollar, 28; moved to Illi- nois, 29, 30; left his father's roof, 32; once more a flatboatman, 32, 33; a slave auction, 34; arrived in New Salem, Illinois, 34; whipped a frontier bully, 36; clerk in a store, 36; his honesty, 37; loafing and dreaming, 38; failure in busi- ness, 43, 44, 45- Politician and Lawyer, Captain in Black Hawk War, 39, 40, 41 ; de- feated for Legislature, 42, 43 ; read- ing law, 46; postmaster, 47; sur- veyor, 48; elected to the Legisla- ture, 51; met Stephen A. Douglas, 52; joined the Whigs, 52; reckless legislation, 54; took his stand against slavery, 55, 56, 57; defeated for Speaker, 57; leader of the minority, 57; his first love, 59; death of Ann Rutledge and his despair, 60, 61 ; moved to Spring- field, 62; his poverty, 62; prac- 427 tising law, 62 ; a group of brilliant associates, 64; early oratorical manner, 65; ceased to engage in personal controversies, 65; oppo- sition to Knownothingism, 66; lack of social graces, 67 ; met Mary Todd, 68; relations with her abruptly ended, 69; his desperate melancholy, 69; duel with Shields, 70, 71; marriage, 72; defeated for Congressional nomination, 73; suspected of being a deist, 73; elected to Congress, 74; attracted the favor of Webster, 76; opposition to Mexican War, 77, 78; stumping Massachusetts for Zachary Taylor, 79; first meeting with Seward, 80; foresaw slavery conflict, 80; intro- duced bill for abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia, 81 ; a disappointed applicant for office, 81, 82 ; returned to law practice, 83 ; declined a Chicago practice, 84; his small fees, 85 ; his largest fee, 85 ; discouraged unnecessary suits, 86; habits on the circuit, 87, 88, 89; mastering Euclid, 90; important cases, 93, 94; rebuffed by Stanton, 94, 95 ; realized lack of education, 95 ; offended Mrs. Lincoln's sense of propriety, 98, 99; devotion to his children, 99, 100; office habits, 100, 101 ; defended Jack Arm- strong's son, 102; confuted a wit- ness with an almanac, 103. nti-slavery Leader, aroused by repeal of Missouri Compromise, 104; confronted Douglas, 109; candi- date for Senate in 1854, in; his stirring watchwords, 112; compli- INDEX merited by Douglas, 112, 113; defeated for the Senate, 113; joined the Republican party, 114; the "lost speech," 114; supported for Vice-president, 115; candidate for the Senate against Douglas, 116; antagonized by Horace Greeley, 117; friends opposed "house di- vided against itself" speech, 118, 119; opening of the debate with Douglas, 125; the Freeport ques- tions, 128; his position on the issues of the campaign, 131, 132; defeated by Douglas, 134; campaign ex- penses, 134. Candidate for President, his national leadership recognized, 137; Ohio speeches, 138; declined to be candi- date for President, 138, 139; re- considered and consented, 139; Cooper Union speech and its suc- cess, 140, 141, 142; his rhetoric praised by Yale professor, 142; regarded himself merely as a "dark horse" for President, 144; hailed as the rail-splitter, 146; western enthusiasm aroused for him, 147; warned friends against making pledges, 149; his nomination by the Chicago convention, 150; his reception of the news, 151, 152; a disturbing omen, 153; visited by the committee of notiheation, 154; the East bitterly disappointed by his nomination, 155; Douglas's tribute, 155; campaign and elec- tion, 156; his election regretted by many Republicans, 161; con- structing his cabinet, 161; his silence and seclusion, 161; his beacon lights in the storm, 162; first speech after election, 162; his character portrayed by Hern- don, 162; his appearance shocks visitors, 163; position on secession, 164, 165; feared his election would not be proclaimed by Senate, 166; farewell visit to stepmother, 167; his small estate, 168; last visit to his law office, 168, 169; farewell to Springfield, 171; cold reception in New York, 174; stirring address at Philadelphia, 175; warned by Pinkerton of an assassination plot in Baltimore, 175, 176; going through Baltimore by night, 177, 178. President, 1 861 -1863, coolly received in Washington, 179; his power to lead unsuspected, 180, 323; diffi- culty with Seward, 180, 181; sur- rounded by armed guards at his inauguration, 181; the center of a remarkable group of men, 183; his hat held by Douglas, 184; his appeal for the Union, 185; a time of great trial, 188; his apparent indifference, 189; overwhelmed by office seekers, 190; shocked Charles Francis Adams, 191, 192; extra- ordinary proposal by Seward brushed aside, 194, 195, 324, 325; appreciated by Seward, 195; ad- vised by General Scott to surrender Fort Sumter, 195; advice endorsed by cabinet, 196; his own determi- nation against surrender, 196; a sleepless night, 196; expedition to Fort Sumter ordered, 197; the attack on Sumter, 198, 199; leaders steadied by his coolness, 199; the surrender of Fort Sumter, 200; call for volunteers and extra session of Congress, 200; Douglas's offer of support, 200; the North rallied around the President, 201 ; hostility in the border states, 201, 202; eleven southern states in secession, 202; wholesale resignations in the army, 202 ; Lee declined the Union command, 202 ; notable Southerners who stood by the Union, 203 ; no desertions among the private soldiers, 203 ; his anxiety INDEX for the safety of the capital, 205; crippled state of the government, 206, 207 ; his struggle with novel duties, 208; his greeting to Major Anderson, 209; first experience in diplomacy, 210; first message to Congress, 211; his bearing under the defeat at Bull Run, 213, 214; wild counsels ignored, 216; ap- pointed General McClellan to com- mand the army, 216; meeting the threat of war from Great Britain in the Trent case, 220; saving the border states from secession, 220, 221, 222, 223; appointed Stanton Secretary of War, 224; faith in the Monilor, 227; grieving over loss of son, 287; depressed by failure of Peninsular Campaign, 228; a strange pledge, 229; letter to Greeley on emancipation, 312; extraordi- nary cabinet scene, 313; provisional emancipation proclamation, 229; disappointed again by McClellan, 230; administration rebuked at the polls, 230; skilful handling of a cabinet crisis, 326, 327, 328; final Emancipation Proclamation, 315; seeking relief in jests, 231 ; attempt to force his resignation, 232 ; agony over defeats at the front, 232; ex- traordinary letter to Hooker, 344; ordered Hooker to pursue Lee, 235 ; appointed Meade to command, 236 ; blamed himself for not taking command in person after Gettys- burg, 238; anxiety over Vicksburg, 238; nearly alone in standing by Grant, 240; rejoicing over Vicks- burg, 241, 242; "The father of waters goes unvexed to the sea," 243 ; distressed by draft riots, 244 ; troubles with the Copperheads, 246 ; Gettysburg address, 248, 249, 250, 251, 252. President, 1 864-1 865, reelection op- posed by radicals and Republican 429 leaders, 254; relations with poli- ticians, 255; sustained by the plain people, 256; renominated on a non- partisan ticket, 257; "Don't swap horses while crossing the river," 258; on the firing line near Wash- ington, 259; disgusted with "gold sharks," 259; insisted on calling for 500,000 men, 259, 260; heart racked by the wounded, 260, 261 ; retirement from ticket planned by leaders, 261, 262; admitted his own probable defeat, 262 ; saved by timely victories, 263; reelected, 263 ; old friends among the Con- federates, 267; weeping for the loss of a Confederate brigadier, 267; no vacations, 269; religious creed, 271 ; attitude toward Mrs. Lincoln, 271 ; manner toward callers, 271, 272, 273; modesty, 274; visited by Dennis Hanks, 274; kindness, 275; reading, 276; diet, 277; office habits, 278; democracy, 280, 281; leadership, 281, 282, 283; advice to workingmen, 282, 283; children, 285 ; diffident application for son's appointment on Grant's staff, 289; appreciation of private soldiers, 293; caring for the sick and wounded, 294, 295; tribute to a mother, 297; ideal of the Union, 299 ; saving soldiers under sentence, 300, 301, 302, 303, 304; opposed to capital punishment, 302 ; received Frederick Douglass, first negro at White House, 320; invited Doug- lass to tea, 321 ; shaking hands with freedmen at New Year's reception, 321; relations with Seward, 324, 325; relations with Chase, 326; relations with Stanton, 328, 329, 33°> 33 x > 33 2 < firmness toward cabinet, 333; indifferent to finance, 334; relations with Chase, 335, 336, 337; anecdote of relations with McClellan, 342, 343; giving gener- INDEX als the benefit of his common sense, 346,347; first meeting with Grant, 351, 352; first meeting with Sheri- dan, 353, 354; only grievance against Grant, 354; estimates of, by Grant and Sherman, 354; pos- sessed the essential qualities of a gentleman, 355; frankness and courtesy toward his officers, 355; lack of jealousy and envy, 355; baffled attempts to supplant him with a military hero, 356; main- tained his own supremacy at all times, 357; attitude toward foes in arms, 359; efforts to conquer the South by magnanimity, 359; op- posed by the leaders of his party, 360; objected to ironclad oath, 360; adopted the golden rule in states- manship, 360; at the Hampton Roads conference, 361, 362; planned to pay for slaves rejected by cabinet, 362 ; pressed the Thirteenth Amendment, 363, 364; a changed man at second inaugura- tion, 365; Booth pushed back by the police, 365; second inaugural, 366, 367, 368; took its place beside the Gettysburg address, 369. Last Days, at the front with Grant, 370; anxious to avert another battle, 372; in Richmond, 375; among the freedmen, 375, 376; in Davis's chair, 376; visited Mrs. Pickett, 377; discussed terms of surrender, 378; returning to Wash- ington, 378; prophetic lines from Macbeth, 378; his wife's strange dread, 379 ; no exultation in victory, 382; called for "Dixie," 383; last speech, 383; a dream, 384; invited Grant to the theater, 385 ; anxious to hasten reconstruction, 386; "Enough lives have been sacri- ficed," 386; parting injunction to cabinet, 386; ignored Stanton's fears for his safety, 387; attitude regard- ing assassination, 387; invitation to theater declined by Grant, 387; future plans discussed with wife, 388; her premonition, 388; at Ford's Theater, 389; last words, 390; shot by Booth, 391; closing hours, 392, 393, 394, 39s ; death, 395 ; tribute by Lowell, 380, 381 ; tribute by Whitman, 396; mourned by the nation, 397, 398; policy toward the South reversed, 398, 399; Radicals welcomed the change, 399; punishment of the conspirators, 400; awful fate of companions in theater box, 400; value of estate, 400, 401 ; funeral and burial, 402, 403, 404; tribute in London Punch, 405, 406; a course of Lincoln reading, 407, 408, 409, 410, 411, 412, 413; tributes by the poets, 414, 415, 416; lessons from his life, 417, 418, 419, 420, 421, 422, 423, 424, 425. Habits and Manners: — Ambition, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 25, 28. Education, 15, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 25, a6 . 2 7> 37. 3 8 . 42, 44, 45. 46, 76, 90, 95, 248, 249. Friendships, 48, 49, 88, 145. Humor, 26, 27, 76, 89, 90, 231, 256, 268, 269, 329, 330, 331. Kindness, 37, 88, 275, 294, 295, 296. Lawyer, 84, 85, 86, 90, 91, 92, 95, 96. Literary Tastes, 101, 276. Melancholy, 61, 69, 97, 98. Oratory, 25, 65, 126. Personal Appearance, 15, 23, 33, 44, 77, 79, 80, 88, 89, 95, 98, 99, 126, 140, 163, 173, 191, 272. Physical Strength, 23, 24, 36, 43. Superstitions, 10, 100, 153, 169, 247, 290, 384. Temperance, 26, 36, 66. Thrift, Lack of, 44, 84, 85. 43° I N D E X Opinions and Principles : Fatalism, 82, 153, 387. Honesty, 37, 45, 46, 63, 64, 9 2 . 93. 148, 149. Ktunonothingism, 66, 137. ReJigion, 70, 73, 118, 271, 313, 314. Slavery, 21, 34, 55, 56, 57, 66, 80, 8i, no, 138, 307, 308. Woman's Suffrage, 53. Abolition, its advocates few in number, 108, 109; Lincoln's opposition to, »3'- Adams, Charles Francis, shocked by Lincoln's appcaram 1 . position in London saved by Lin- coln's diplomacy, 210. Anderson, Robert, his meeting with Lincoln, 20Q. Armstrong, Hannah, her son de- fended by Lincoln, 103; last fisit to Lincoln, 168. Armstrong, Jack, whipped by Lincoln, 36; his son defended by Lincoln, '°3- Baker, Edward D., early association with Lincoln, 64; at Lincoln's inauguration, 183. Booth, John Wilkes, pushed back by the police at the second inaugura- tion, 365; informed of Lincoln's plan to visit theater, 385; con- spiracy, 388, 389, 390; shot Lin- coln, 391; leg broken, 392; flight, 392; death, 400. Breckinridge, John C, candidate for President, 158; as Vice-president declared Lincoln's election, 166; at Lincoln's inauguration, 183. Browning, Orville H ., early associa- tion with Lincoln, 64. Bryant, William Cullen, presided over the Lincoln Cooper Union meeting, 141. Buchanan, James, escorted Lincoln to the Capitol, 181; at Lincoln's inauguration, 182. Burnside, Ambrose E., appointed to command by Lincoln, 343. Butler, Benjamin F., proposed for 43 President, in place of Lincoln; 262; anecdote of Lincoln in camp, 298; do 1 1 red negroes contraband of war, 310. Cameron, Simon, member of the same Congress with Lincoln, 75; forced out of Lincoln's cabinet, 328. Chase, Salmon P., preferred for President by Lincoln, 138; bis threat to the bankers, 207; issuing greenbacks, 218; relations with Lincoln, 326; resignation declined by Lincoln, 327; relations with oln . 335. 336. 337- Tenry, model and idol of Lin- coln, 53; his Compromise of 1850, 106. Compromise of 1850, adopted, 105, 106, 107. David, complained of Lin- cob's small fees, 85 ; fondness for Lincoln, 89; managed Lincoln's campaign in the convention of i860, 117; not confided in by President- elect, 161; anecdote of Lincoln concerning capital punishment, 302. Davis, Jefferson, member of the same Congress with Lincoln, 75; assailed Douglas's "Freeport Heresy," 136; sighing for the old flag at Bull Run, 212; denunciation of the Emanci- pation Proclamation, 318; advo- cated employment of negro soldiers, 318; military training, 340; flight from Richmond, 373, 374; charged with complicity in Lincoln's assassi- nation, 399. Douglas, Stephen A., first acquaint- ance with Lincoln, 52; admitted to the Supreme Court with Lincoln, I INDEX 64; advocated "popular sover- eignty," 107, 108; mobbed in Chicago, 109; confronted by Lin- coln, 109, no, 111; complimented Lincoln, 112, 113; reelection op- posed by Lincoln, 116; opening of the debate with Lincoln, 125; elected to the Senate, 134; rebuked by Democratic caucus of Senate, 136; his tribute to Lincoln, 155; defeated for President, 156; held Lincoln's hat at inauguration, 184; supporting Lincoln at the outbreak of the war, 200; death, 201. Douglass, Frederick, first negro re- ceived at the White House, 320; invited to tea by Lincoln, 321. Dred Scott Decision, its political effect, 117. Emancipation, adopted for District of Columbia, 311; first proclamation, 229; delayed by Lincoln for con- stitutional and political reasons, 308, 309; discussed by Lincoln in a letter to Greeley, 312; extraordi- nary cabinet scene when draft of proclamation was presented, 314, 315; signing of the final proclama- tion, 315; loss of the original copy, 316; effect of the proclamation, 317, 318; justified by events, 319. Emerson, Ralph Waldo, tribute to Lincoln's leadership, 283. Ericsson, John, inventor of the Moni- tor, 227. Everett, Edward, orator at Gettysburg, 248; complimented Lincoln's ad- dress, 251. France, invaded Mexico, 218; Em- peror exalted over supposed fall of Washington, 259. Fremont, John C, nominated for President against Lincoln, 254. Garfield, James A., speech on Lincoln, 398. Garrison, William Lloyd, mobbed in Boston, 55. Grant, Ulysses S., capture of Fort Donelson, 223; Vicksburg cam- paign, 238, 239, 240, 241, 242; per- sonal situation at the outbreak of the war, 338, 339; how he rose to command, 348, 349; his appoint- ment as General-in-chief, 350, 351, 352; first meeting with Lincoln, 35 J > 35 2 > estimate of Lincoln, 354; visited by Lincoln at the front, 370; declined Lincoln's invitation to the theater, 387; stirred to retaliation by Lincoln's assassination, 399. Great Britain, conceded belligerent rights to the Confederacy, 209; protest of the United States as revised by Lincoln, 210; invasion of Mexico, 218; cotton famine, 218; threat of war in the Trent case, 219; conciliated by the United States, 220. Greeley, Horace, member of Congress with Lincoln, 76; favored Douglas against Lincoln, 117; at the Lin- coln Cooper Union meeting, 141; praised Lincoln's speech, 142; favored letting the South go, 160; letter from Lincoln on emancipa- tion, 312; opinion of Lincoln, 328. Halleck, Henry W., rebuked by Lincoln, 333. Hamlin, Hannibal, member of the same Congress with Lincoln, 75; proposed for President, 232. Hanks, Dennis, at the White House, 274. Hanks, John, an anti-slavery anec- dote, 34; introduced in campaign of i860 rails split by Lincoln, 146. Hemdon, William H., anecdote of Lincoln's devotion to the truth, 93; letter to Senator Wilson on Lincoln, 162. Hooker, Joseph, instructions from Lincoln, 233; ordered to pursue Lee, 235; resigned, 236; received 43 2 INDEX extraordinary letter from Lincoln, 344, 345- Jackson, Thomas J., tribute to, en- dorsed by Lincoln, 359. Johnson, Andrew, member of Con- gress with Lincoln, 76; nominated for Vice-president, 257; accession to the Presidency welcomed by the Radicals, 399. Kansas, the battle between slavery and anti-slavery, 113, 114- Kansas-Xebraska Ad, adopted, 10.S. Lamon, Ward H ., escorted Lincoln through Baltimore, 177, 178. Let, Robert E., de< lined the command of the Union army and resigned his commission, 202, 203; first inva- sion of the North, 23<>; defeated at Gettysburg, 257; advocated employment of negro soldiers, 318; last stand, JJ ). Lincoln, Abraham, g r and f ather of the President, came from Virginia to Kentucky, 2; killed by the Indians, 2; his estate, 3. Lincoln, Mary Todd, her first meeting with Lincoln, 6S; her temperament, 69; relations with Lincoln abruptly ended, 69; brought on duel be- tween Lincoln and Shields, 71; marriage, 72; brothers and sisters in the Confederacy, 267, 368; confided in by her husband, 271; with her husband at Grant's head- quarters, 371; a strange dread, 379; a premonition, 388; suffering and death, 400, 401. Lincoln, .Xancy Hanks, mother of the President, girlhood and ante- cedents, 5 ; married to Thomas Lincoln, 5; her superiority, 6; death and burial, 13, 14- Lincoln, Robert Todd, anecdotes of his boyhood, 99, 100; visited at school by his father, 142; student at Harvard, 285; appointed on Grant's staff, 289. Lincoln, Sarah Bush Johnston, step- mother of the President, marriage, 14, 15; visited by stepson on his way to Washington, 167; mourned her stepson's death, 303, 304. Lincoln, Thomas, father of the Presi- dent, saved from the Indians, 3; a "wandering, laboring boy," 5; sober but without ambition, 5; married to Nancy Hanks, 5; car- penter, 5; his illiteracy, 6; farmer, 6; moved to Indiana, 7, 8; second marriage, 14, 15; moved to Illi- nois, 29, 30. Lincoln, Thomas, "Tad," life in the White House, 285, 286; pretended appointment as lieutenant in the army, Lincoln, William Wallace, life in the White House, 285, 286; death, 287. Lour/I, James Russell, impatient of Lincoln's conservatism, 222; esti- mate of Lincoln's statesmanship, 283; the Harvard Commemoration Ode, 380, 381. Massachusetts, Lincoln awakened by its Free Soil Movement, 80. McClellan, George B., lent his private car to Douglas in the campaign against Lincoln, 123; appointed by Lincoln to the command of the army, 216; dis- astrous Peninsular Campaign and retirement from command, 228; recalled to command and victory of Antietam, 229; finally relieved of command, 230; candidate for President against Lincoln, 262; anecdote of relations with Lincoln, 342, 343- Meade, George G., appointed to com- mand the Army of the Potomac, 236. Missouri Compromise, repealed, 104. Negro, The, Lincoln's opinion of his racial status, 131 ; his service to the 2F 433 INDEX Union indispensable, 317, 318; his deportation favored by Lincoln, 319; Lincoln favored giving him conditional suffrage, 319; Lin- coln's respect for his feelings, as well as rights, 321 ; recognized at second inauguration, 364. Pemberton, John C, surrendered Vicksburg, 241, 242. Phillips, Wendell, disgusted by Lin- coln's nomination, 155; threatened in the streets, 161 ; denunciation of Lincoln, 308. Pickett, George E., charge at Gettys- burg, 237; a friendly visit from Lincoln, 377. Pinkerton, Allan, warned Lincoln of an assassination plot in Balti- more, 175, 176. Polk, James A"., his Mexican policy opposed by Lincoln, 77. Popular Sovereignty, advocated by Douglas, 108. Porter, David D., entertained Lincoln on his flagship, 370. Rutledge, Ann, Lincoln's early sweet- heart, 59; death, 60. Scott, W infield, ' ' Wayward sisters, de- part in peace," 160; first instruc- tions from Lincoln, 164; his plans to preserve peace at Lincoln's in- auguration, 181; advised Lincoln to surrender Fort Sumter, 195; re- fused to go with the South, 203; in his dotage, 207; recommended McClellan's appointment, 341. Seward, William H., first meeting with Lincoln, 80; preferred for President by Lincoln, 138; his nomination in i860 deemed a cer- tainty, 143, 144; defeated by Lin- coln, 150; for compromise, 160; disappointed in effort to control Lincoln's cabinet, 180, 181; his extraordinary proposal brushed aside by Lincoln, 194, 195; protest to the British government revised by Lincoln, 209, 210; meeting the threat of war from Great Britain in the Trent case, 220; relations with Lincoln, 324, 325; resignation declined by Lincoln, 327; stabbed in bed, 394; first news of Lincoln's death, 402. Sheridan, Philip H., won the battle of Winchester, 263; cleared the Shen- andoah, 264; personal situation at the outbreak of the war, 339, 340; first meeting with Lincoln, 353> 354 ; victory at Five P'orks, 373- Sherman, John, introduced his brother to the President, 189. Sherman, William T., amazed by Lincoln's flippancy, 189; relieved of command, 224; captured At- lanta, 263; marched to the sea, 264; personal situation at the out- break of the war, 339, 340; esti- mate of Lincoln, 354. Shields, James, duel with Lincoln, 71. Spain, invaded Mexico, 218. Stanton, Edwin M., his early rebuff to Lincoln, 94, 95; feared the fall of Washington before Lincoln's inauguration, 166; called to the cabinet, 224; alarmed by the vic- tory of the Merrimack, 226; rela- tions with Lincoln, 328, 329, 330, 331; feared for Lincoln's safety, 387- Stephens, Alexander H ., member of Congress with Lincoln, 76; letter from Lincoln on secession, 165; at the Hampton Roads conference, 361. Sumner, Charles, favored Lincoln's retirement, 262; at the White House, 273; slavery amendment not favored by Lincoln, 363. Taney, Roger B., at Lincoln's inaugu- ration, 183. Taylor, Zachary, supported by Lin- coln, 79. 434 I X D I. X ed Con- Thompson, Jacob, An, 3S9; arrest ordered by ■ ./', Lyman, hi> 6 uu €e shielded by Lincoln, 71; elected to the ite by Lim • 1 1 •.. rmined th Carolina , ; northern ellorts for City propose d, 160; business panic, 160; Lincoln's j m j-i t i> >n 00 . Sumter's surrender advisi similar advic e from the 1 dition to Fort Sumter order the attai k on Sumter, 198, 1 surrender, 200 ; the response of the North, 201 ; eleven states in seces- sion, 202 ; wholesale resignation of army officers, 202; no desertions among the privates, 203; the Sixth Regiment of Massachusetts attacked in Baltimore, 204; Washington cut off and defenceless, 204, 205, 206; Bull Run, 212, 213, 214; ■ Han appointed to command, the border states saved from -ion, 220, 221, 222, 223; Grant's capture of Fort Donelson, 223; fall of New Orleans and Mem- phis, 224; battle of Hampton Penin- sular Campaign and McClellan's retirement from command, 228; second Bull Run, 339; Mil d to command and victory of Antietam, 229; McClellan finally relieved of command, 230; battles of Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville, 232; Gettj camp.. |S, 236, 23;. 338, 239, 240, 241, 242; the draft, 243, 244, 245; of Chattanooga, Lookout Mountain, and Missionary I 247; battles of the Wild' Spottsylvania, and Cold Harbor, j;4: Washington in danger, gold rose to 285, 259; capture of Atlanta, 363 ! Winchester, Grant, Lieutenant-general, 351, 352; Sherman's march, the Wilderness campaign, 353.; campaign against Lee, 372, Richmond in flames, 374; entered by the Union troops, 374; Appomattox, 378. Webster, Daniel, recognition of Lin- coln, 76; amazed by smallness of Lincoln's legal charges, 85; favored Compromise of 1850, 106. Whitman, Walt, "O Captain! My Captain !" 386. Wilson, Henry, letter from Herndon on Lincoln, 162. 35°. final 373; 435 LIBRARY OF CONGRESS