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ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 THE YOUNG MAN 
 
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ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 THE YOUNG MAN 
 
 An Address delivered in the South Congregational 
 
 Church, New Britain, and before the Lincoln 
 
 Club in Berlin, Conn., February 11, 1906, 
 
 BY 
 
 < ozora 5. D/ivis t» 
 
 Printed and circulated under the auspices of the 
 Men's Sunday Club, of the South Church. 
 
 HERALD PUBLISHING COMPANY 
 PRINTERS 
 
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ABRAHAM LINCOLN, THE YOUNG MAN. 
 
 "Now there was a son of Benjamin whose name 
 was Kish, and he had a son whose name was Saul, 
 a choice young man and a goodly; from his shoulders 
 and upward he was higher than any of the people." 
 
 I Samuel 9:1-2 (parts) 
 
 The grave peril which threatens us in our 
 admiration of the heroic characters of the Old 
 Testament is the tendency that we have to think 
 that the living God worked and spoke so uniquely 
 through these men that He has never revealed His 
 will and purpose through other modern men, 
 equally noble and equally the agents of God's will. 
 
 To-day I propose that we turn to another and 
 modern Saul the son of Kish, stalwart, tall, goodly 
 and chosen, to see what his life and character has 
 to inspire and furnish as for our common life. 
 
 I shall speak, therefore, of Abraham 
 Lincoln, the young man. My purpose is simply to 
 outline the permanent characteristics of the great 
 American as they had become fixed, let us say, by 
 the time he had reached the age of twenty-six. 
 None of his powers was fully developed, for the 
 great critical tests had not come; he had become 
 neither a national nor a world figure, as he became 
 later. The man himself, however, prophetic of 
 what was to be in the future, was already outlined. 
 This outline we shall consider together now. 
 
Let me speak a word first of all concerning the 
 social group from which the young Lincoln came. 
 So much is said concerning the one-room cabin in 
 ■which he was born, the hard work and poverty that 
 accompanied his boyhood, that the notion seems 
 to prevail that Lincoln's boyhood surroundings were 
 all quite against him. Instead of this, I believe thai- 
 there lay in the environment of the boy in Indiana 
 and Illinois during those pioneer days the very 
 forces which were most helpful and hopeful toward 
 the formation of a resolute, self-reliant and ambi- 
 tious character. 
 
 We much misunderstand the real conditions in 
 which the lower middle class live. There is hard 
 work, self-denial, and poverty among them; but it 
 is true of this class more then ot- any other in the 
 country that ambition and hope and progress mark 
 their lives and make them beautiful in spite of their 
 limitations. The lowest ranks of society are sodden 
 With sin and devoid of hope; the so-called highest 
 classes are often debauched with vice and made 
 languid from excessive stimulus of pleasure. The 
 hope of the future and the glory of our civilization 
 lies with the lower middle class whose powers are 
 expanding, whose ambitions are tingling with yearn- 
 ing and appreciation, and who endure without one 
 word of complaint the limitations of their present 
 lot because they know that they possess within 
 themselves the power to transcend those conditions 
 and create a new world for themselves. I do not 
 mean that it is more desirable to be born into such 
 
an environment than it is to inherit the gifts and 
 culture which make, for example, a Lowell or 
 Emerson; but in general it is to be counted, a 
 privilege by any boy or girl that the conditions of 
 their early life call for struggle and sacrifice. 
 Lincoln's boyhood was full of healthy joy and con- 
 fident hope. He never speaks of it as gloomy or 
 too hard to be borne. He accepted life as just the 
 thing to try the strength of his soul upon, and to 
 bring forth the man. Above all things he would 
 have scorned receiving pity and compassion for his 
 early lot. 
 
 The young men of to-day may be divided into 
 two classes; those whose problem is how to succeed 
 In spite of the obstacles in their way, and those 
 whose problem is how to succeed and be strong in 
 spite of the fact that they have no resisting ob- 
 stacles to cultivate their moral muscle and en- 
 durance. The latter class faces the greater difficulty. 
 Lincoln belonged to that sturdy stock of the re- 
 solute, ambitious, hopeful poor, whose physical 
 vigor is not weakened by luxury or excess, md 
 whose movement is upward by tne rough road of 
 poverty and much denial to the point where they 
 fill the places of the rich whose wealth has been 
 the cause of their own destruction. Had he been a 
 millionaire's son in New York, young Lincoln 
 might have ended as a wit and debauchee. 
 
 The first point which I wish to make emphatic 
 concerning Lincoln is the superb quality of his 
 
idealism. The conditions surrounding him in 
 
 boyhood and young- manhood proved to be the at- 
 mosphere in which his ambitions were awakened 
 and his ideals born. This young fellow, keeping a 
 blaze of shavings burning in the open fire-place so 
 that he could have enough light by which to read, 
 is one of the noblest examples that history records 
 of the ideal mastering a young man until the fire 
 burning in the fire-place of the cooper's shop was 
 only a faint symbol of the fire burning within his 
 own breast. He was in love with something be- 
 yond his lot and place. He had not surrendered to 
 that pernicious, deadly policy of being content with 
 present duty, or even of passing from one duty to 
 another as easily and as comfortably as possible. 
 
 He fell in love with learning; he gave himself 
 with passion to the cause of freedom; as he once 
 gave a sound thrashing to a brute of a man who 
 swore in the presence of women in his country store, 
 so later he dared to undertake gigantic enterprises 
 in the championship of truth against error and of 
 freedom against all tyranny that fettered it, because 
 of his loyalty to the ideal. 
 
 Thus ever before him burned the pillar of fire 
 and of cloud, leading him into the desert marchings 
 and forward to cleave unknown dangers, because 
 he dared to discover and to follow the ideal. 
 
 Oh, young men, attend to the ideal! The very 
 ultimate worth of your being is registered by your 
 
aspirations and your deepest yearnings. Somewhere 
 there is a cause to be championed. You do not. 
 need to seek it out; it will come to you. In that 
 high hour when the cause that is worthy and the 
 work that claims youf service comes to your door, 
 you will not be ready unless you have kept fast and 
 vigil with the ideal of your own nobler selfhood and 
 your own vaster work. 
 
 The pressure of the many duties and the throng- 
 ing pleasures of your day tends to crowd to a place 
 of neglect the ideal. Be careful. There is one 
 great thing to be done; it is to keep personal life 
 high and clean and the soul open to God. This 
 
 young man did that, and God wrought through 
 him one of the holiest ransoms that the history of 
 the human spirit registers. The ideal fire burned: 
 the vision led him; he followed the gleam. 
 
 The next large line which I wish to draw in 
 this sketch portrays the extraordinary humanity of 
 this young man. He was a superb human being; 
 considered physically. His royal humanity never is 
 displayed, however, until we see the wider range of 
 his interests and sympathies and concern. Mankind 
 was his business. He shut the doors against no 
 appeal of any human want. He was at home at the 
 minister's and called his. wife affectionately "Aunt 
 Polly." Boys would lug his chain for him by the 
 hour when he was a surveyor out of pure love of 
 being near him. His famous log, where he sat 
 during no. ,11 hours to tell stories, was polished 
 
8 
 
 •smooth. Every interest, every sorrow, every joy of 
 the people was dear to him. You read about Jack 
 Armstrong and his wrestling matches, the Clary's 
 -Grove gang and their loyalty to him, the school- 
 master, the lawyers, the books and the stories, and 
 you are aware that here you are in the presence of 
 a real world where men and women are the great 
 centers of interest. There is small space given to 
 conventionalities and fashion; it is a world of 
 sincere, hearty human aspiration and activity, and 
 Lincoln is the most real and human center of it all. 
 
 Our modern life needs this very assertion of 
 human heartiness and interest which Lincoln dis- 
 played as a young man. Young men with rich, red 
 blood in their veins, who love life and work hard 
 and dare sometimes to let the mist cloud their eyes 
 when the sorrow of the world smites them as 
 well as to laugh heartily when the joy of life sweeps 
 over them, such young men are needed to assert 
 again the human soul's supreme interest and worth 
 above all the conventionality and rashion of an age. 
 You are men and nothing of human concern can 
 be foreign to you. 
 
 Undoubtedly one of the first impressions that 
 ever comes to any one who thinks over the charact- 
 eristics of Lincoln, is his sense of humor. The 
 secret of his popularity in the early days, before the 
 nobler and stronger traits of his heart and mind 
 had been disclosed, was his rare gift as the teller of 
 stories, and the discoverer of the humorous side of 
 
9 
 
 common life. Unfortunately too much has been 
 said concerning Lincoln's stories, so that he is 
 sometimes regarded as a mere genius at the sessions 
 of the daily gathering of men at the grocery store, 
 rather than the man whose humor was rich and 
 fine. There was, without question, in some of his 
 stories an element of coarseness so far as their 
 material is concerned. The witness of those who 
 heard him, however, is that when he told them, lhar 
 fact disappeared. His stories were finely told. It 
 is, however, concerning the deeper quality of his 
 humor that I wish to speak. For this was a saving 
 element in his nature. Woe to the man who must 
 walk through the world and never see its in- 
 congruity, or have his mirth provoked by the humor- 
 ous in common life. We need the ability to discover 
 the false and absurd proportions in the life around 
 us and sometimes too the power to laugh a cause 
 out of court when it cannot be convicted. Humor 
 when it is true is neither coarse, cruel nor vindictive. 
 If ever it descends to these levels it is falsified in its 
 deepest reach and becomes spite or cynicism. 
 
 Lincoln presents nobly the figure of a young 
 man who had the rare gift, which he had rarely 
 cultivated, of discovering the inconsistencies and 
 the contradictions of the life about him and then pre- 
 senting them with telling force In trie form of 
 anecdote or story, and using the keen blade of his 
 humor in court or on the stump. 
 
10 
 
 His example bids us keep our eyes wide open 
 to the humorous in common life and to use the 
 weapon well when the time comes. 
 
 The more one reads of Lincoln's early life, the 
 more striking becomes his passion for clearness. 
 It really amounted to a passion with him. He says 
 himself that nothing- ever made him so angry as 
 not being able to understand what people meant 
 by what they said. After hearing the neighbors 
 talk in his father's cabin, he would go to bed or 
 walk up or down, trying sometimes for hours to 
 restate clearly what had been said obscurely and to 
 work over the meaning of the talk, which was chiefly 
 political, until he had mastered it, and made it 
 perfectly plain. The more I study his life and the 
 more I think over the characteristics of the present 
 day, the more I am convinced that one of our 
 chief modern sins is lack of clearness, and that we 
 need mightily to-day the clearness of Abraham 
 Lincoln. Young people, especially young men, are 
 doing too little clear, resolute, thorough thinking. 
 We accept the traditional view, and we do the 
 customary thing without thinking- out for ourselves 
 the reason of our action. Mental, mor.tl and 
 
 spiritual fog lies over large areas of the landscape 
 with every one of us. When Abraham Lincoln sook • 
 the people knew what he meant. He spoke cle irly 
 because he had done his own thinking and had don 
 it thoroughly. He did not a< cept opinions or 
 forms of expression simply because they bore the 
 
11 
 
 hall-mark of approval by the politicians of the day. 
 Clever repetition of the speech of other men was 
 not his task. It is no easy task to think out a 
 fundamental truth to its widest implications. Many 
 young men are too lazy to think. Like the South 
 American chief, "great ideas make them very 
 sleepy." We need young men who are resolute 
 enough to think life through and come to clear, 
 definite conclusions about it. Abraham Lincoln 
 
 did this. 
 
 Again let me sketch in the line of Lincoln's 
 rugged, uncompromising honesty. His store in 
 the country village was a financial failure. That 
 
 was no fault of his. He had not found his sphere 
 of most profitable activity. The failure was caused by 
 no sharp or dishonest practice of his. A debt of 
 eleven hundred dollars was thrown upon his 
 shoulders, 3 burden which seemed to be insur- 
 mountable. Under these circumstances it was the 
 custom for men to "clear out," in the language of 
 the time. Lincoln did not clear out. Going to his 
 creditors he told them that if they would let him 
 alone he would pay them what he owed as fast 
 as he could do it. It took fifteen years for him 
 to keep his promise; but he did it. At last every 
 note, with the interest at high rates, had been paid 
 and he was able to stand up in the face of every 
 man knowing that the obligations were met with 
 honor. 
 
12 
 
 It was not easy. Lincoln commonly spoke of 
 this as "the national debt." He was not afraid of 
 hard work, however, so much as he was afraid of 
 dishonor. He did not "clear out'* because he knew 
 that it was felly to try that futile way of escaping 
 the demands of the moral law. He paid his debts 
 because honor is the law of all manly living and he 
 was no coward in the presence of hard work. His 
 example bids every one of us be true to the demand 
 of personal integrity in business, life. 
 
 Another trait of Lincoln which the young man- 
 hood of today needs to understand and to imitate, 
 is his keen sense of moral wrong, and his terrific 
 determination to bear his part in setting it right. 
 You are all familiar with the story of his visit to 
 the slave-market in New Orleans. 
 
 "In New Orleans for the first time, Lincoln be- 
 held the true horrors of human slavery. He saw 
 negroes in chains — whipped and scourged. Against 
 this inhumanity his sense of right and justice re- 
 belled, and his mind and conscience were awakened 
 to a realization of what he had often heard and 
 read. No doubt, as one of his companions has 
 said, 'slavery ran the iron into him then and there." 
 One morning in their rambles over the city the 
 trio passed a slave auction. A vigorous and come- 
 ly mulatto girl was being sold. She underwent 
 a thorough examination at the hands of the bidders: 
 they pinched her flesh, and made her trot up and 
 
13 
 
 down the room like a horse, to show how she 
 moved and in order, as the auctioneer said, that 
 'bidders might satisfy themselves whether the 
 article they were offering- to buy was sound or not.' 
 The whole thing was so revolting that Lincoln 
 moved away from the scene with a deep feeling of 
 'unconquerable hate.' Bidding his companions 
 
 follow him, he said: 'Boys let's get away from this.' 
 If ever I get a chance to hit that thing, (meaning 
 slavery) I'll hit it hard." 
 
 (Miss Tarbell's "Lincoln," Vol. I.) 
 
 Here we strike at the very heart of Lincoln's 
 message to the young men of this generation. He 
 did not belong to that class of indifferent and blase 
 young manhood which looks squarely into the face 
 of debauchery and immoral life raid says with a 
 snap of the finger, "what concern is this of mine?" 
 It has come to pass that the sins and shames of 
 life to-day fall without much appeal upon the moral 
 sensitiveness of young men. One of the most ap- 
 palling facts which we meet is the moral indiffer- 
 ence of those who should be responsible for the 
 highest life of the city and state. The very persons 
 who should be the guardians of the Commonwealth 
 blink at the things which make for the common de- 
 bauchery and distress. To Abraham Lincoln the 
 New Orleans slave market meant a direct challenge 
 to him, the young Illinois pioneer. And he an- 
 swered it. He answered it as only a young man 
 can answer, when he is true to the noblest im- 
 
14 
 
 pulses of his being-, the thing- which calls for his 
 noble and most sacrificial service. If every incident 
 were lost from the life of the young store-keeper, 
 and this alone preserved, we could sum up the noble- 
 ness of his nature, and the genius of his character 
 from his resolution made there in the New Orleans 
 slave market to "hit that thing hard if he ever had 
 the chance." God almighty gave nim the chance 
 because He knew He could trust His man. God 
 never gives a man a chance when He knows He 
 cannot trust the man to do his duty. 
 
 The reason why that tall, mighty man was 
 given the privilege of signing the Emancipation Pro- 
 clamation was because he did not avert his eyes, 
 or skulk from duty when he faced the shame of the 
 slave market, and knew that it meant something 
 for him to do. 
 
 Give me a few words in conclusion to speak of 
 Lincoln's religion. His was one of those elemental 
 faiths, so deep, so strong, so simple and so natural 
 that it is hard to classify it under any current 
 names. Thank God there are some things too big 
 too be named and some aspirations too holy to be 
 condensed into formulas or packed into statistics. 
 Lincoln's religion was one of these. 
 
 You remember those words with which he 
 closed his little talk to his friends before he left 
 Springfield for Washington to assume the Presidency. 
 It is one of the most holy episodes in his history. 
 
15 
 
 "I now leave, not knowing- when or whether 
 ever I may rettfrn, with a task before me greater 
 than that which rested upon Washington. Without 
 the assistance of that Divine Being- who ever at- 
 tended him, I cannot succeed. With that assistance, 
 I cannot fail. Trusting in Him who can go with 
 me, and remain with you, and be everywhere for 
 good, let us confidently hope that all will yet be 
 well. To His care commerding you, as I hope in 
 your prayers you will commend me, I bid you an 
 affectionate farwell." 
 
 (Miss Tarbell's "Lincoln, Vol.1, p. 410.) 
 
 The people were sobbing as he closed his words. 
 Those who were present and stood in the rain 
 while he spoke never forgot the scene. 
 
 The politicians sneered outwardly, but the plain 
 people were touched to the heart. Here, they said, 
 is a man who believed in God and dared to ask the 
 prayers of good men and to confess that he pray- 
 ed. 
 
 Oh, young men, what about your religion? I 
 am not asking just now about certain external 
 things, ceremonies, confessions of faith, — but what 
 about your religion? Do you b3)ive in God; are you 
 relying upon God; do you pray; are you anxious 
 that good men should pray for you? 
 
 Here was a man who did these things and 
 dared to be genuine enough to declare it among 
 
16 
 
 those who knew him best, htk townspeople and own 
 familiar friends. 
 
 Forget all else about him if necessary, bui 
 never forget him, standing among his fellows at 
 Springfield, facing an unknown future, and de- 
 claring his personal trust in God anct beseeching the 
 prayers of men on his behalf. 
 
 There he is noblest of all. 
 
LB S 72