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A Universal Man 
 
Abraham Lincoln 
 
 A Universal Man 
 
 BY 
 
 CLARK PRESCOTT BISSETT 
 
 PROFESSOR OF LAW- 
 UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON 
 
 SAN FRANCISCO 
 
 JOHN HOWELL 
 
 MCMXXIII 
 
COPYRIGHT, 1923 BY JOHN HOWELL. SAN FRANCISCO 
 
 PUBLISHED OCTOBER, 1923 
 
 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 IMPERIAL & INTERNATIONAL COPYRIGHT SECURED 
 
 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED IN ALL COUNTRIES 
 
 E & R GRABHORN, PRINTERS :: SAN FRANCISCO 
 

 TO MY WIFE, 
 
 EDITH D. BISSETT 
 
 FRIEND, COUNSELLOR, GUIDE, 
 FOR MORE THAN A QUARTER 
 CENTURY MY DAILY COMPANION 
 AND NEVER FAILING INSPIRATION. 
 LIKE THE BLESSING OF THE 
 LORD — MAKING ME RICH AND 
 ADDING NO SORROW THEREWITH. 
 
 C. P. B. 
 

TABLE OF CONTENTS 
 
 INTRODUCTION IX 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 I BIRTH I 
 
 II CHILDHOOD 6 
 
 III BOYHOOD 24 
 
 IV YOUTH 30 
 V MANHOOD 36 
 
 VI PURIFYING FIRES 48 
 
 VII CONQUERING HIMSELF 59 
 
 VIII LAWYER AND LEGISLATOR j6 
 
 IX INFLUENCE OF MARY TODD 82 
 
 X APOSTLE OF DEMOCRACY 95 
 
 XI THE HOUSE DIVIDED 112 
 
 XII THE GRAPPLE OF GIANTS I34 
 
 XIII FROM STATE TO NATION 1 44 
 
 XIV AT COOPER INSTITUTE I50 
 XV PRESIDENT OF THE REPUBLIC l66 
 
 XVI IN THE WHITE HOUSE 1 74 
 
 XVII SAVING THE UNION 1 84 
 
 XVIII RED FIELDS OF WAR 201 
 
 XIX LINCOLN A PRESENT POWER 220 
 

UNDOUBTEDLY an apology is necessary for adding 
 another page to the overwhelming mass of books and 
 pamphlets devoted to the genius of Abraham Lincoln. My 
 reason is a purely personal one. For more than a quarter of a 
 century I have been a collector of Lincolniana, and the life of 
 Abraham Lincoln has become consciously and unconsciously a 
 part of me. I have ever felt a deep reverence for this great soul, 
 and I venture to hope that I may communicate this reverence to 
 some of my fellow citizens, especially to my children. 
 
 It seems fitting to call attention once more to the genius of 
 Abraham Lincoln, who, more than four score years after the 
 Declaration of Independence, was the one man who held a brief 
 for the full interpretation of that proclamation for freedom to 
 humanity, and who after a lifetime of devotion to the principles 
 enunciated in that sacred document was able in his Cooper In- 
 stitute Speech to convince his country that if universal freedom 
 were to be won for all people, it must be won through the preser- 
 vation of the Constitution of the United States. 
 
 However far the performance may have fallen below my desires 
 the task has been purely a labor of love. No man can speak for 
 another; the best that any man can do is to give expression to 
 himself. Tet it is my hope that this little book may result in a 
 closer sympathy and a clearer ^understanding of the great 
 
Abraham Lincoln 
 
 principles for which Lincoln lived, and for which he died. I shall 
 be most happy if I have done even a little to make plain the devo- 
 tion of Abraham Lincoln to the principles of constitutional and 
 representative government. 
 
 'The one central attribute of Abraham Lincoln, the very sun, 
 as it were, of his being, was Justice. All other attributes circled 
 around it and were governed by it. You may call it Justice or you 
 may call it Love. It matters not, for there is little difference in the 
 quality or quantity of the two words. A man who is primarily 
 actuated by justice will do precisely the same things under the 
 same circumstances as one who is actuated by love. Those out- 
 standing leaders of men who have most fully reflected these dis- 
 tinctive attributes of Deity give abundant proof that this is true. 
 
 Lincoln the boy was just as Lincoln the man. He required no 
 precedent on which to found his reasoning. He was as ready as 
 Solomon to give his decision on any vital point and his verdicts 
 are as simple and uncontrovertible . Born and reared on the 
 borderland between states that were divided on a question which 
 had reached no decisive solution through all the ages, he never 
 even debated it in his own mind. 
 
 An inharmonious intellect was as much at war with itself, in 
 his high temple of thought, as an inharmonious state, or country, 
 or kingdom. He saw in the Union under the Declaration of Inde- 
 pendence, the Union of the individual — the harmonious man, 
 capable of self government, subject to no marts dictation, as far 
 as the life, and the freedom to live that life, in the world of justice 
 could be carried. A union of states meant the union of the in- 
 dividual, and neither was open to secession. In the realm of the 
 mind, he acknowledged no allegiance to any power on earth. 
 His Creator was his sole and only King. The union of the states 
 was a symbol to him of the union with God. 
 
 Study him as you may, through his own words, through 
 
Introduction xi 
 
 records of his intimate friends, or through his acts, and you will 
 find no other Lincoln than this. If the times in which he lived 
 brought to light this attribute of justice in all its pure radiance , 
 that does not argue that the times were the cause of it. 'The Union 
 had hundreds of men of far greater educational advantages, far 
 superior culture, far broader experience, and of no less human 
 sympathies — Wendell Phillips, William Lloyd Garrison, John 
 Brown, Stephen A. Douglas, his great rival, Salmon P. Chase, 
 Edwin A. Stanton, and the great Prime Minister, William H. 
 Seward; but none of these had lighted in his soul the lamp of 
 justice. Not one of them could bring himself to love his personal 
 enemy, much less the enemies of his theory of government. Lin- 
 coin proved himself to be so compounded of Love and Justice 
 that he never judged any man. He may have punished because 
 he himself obeyed the law of justice, but he did not cease to love. 
 
 We talk of democracy, but the world has known few democrats 
 — perhaps not more than two. To see every human being as an 
 equal is impossible to any merely academic intelligence. The 
 eyes that look upon men, as the rain falls alike on the just and 
 on the unjust are not subject to the light of libraries. They shine 
 with the light of heaven. No mortal reason can bring a man to 
 this sublime philosophy. Such a state of mind is foolishness to 
 culture. Even religious enthusiasm falls short of this God-like 
 contemplation of the things of this world. But Abraham Lincoln 
 so saw, so felt, so understood. Black or White, bond or free, 
 friend or enemy, he saw them all in love — " Father, for give them, 
 for they know not what they do," speaks out boldly in his every 
 utterance, beams out benignly from his every act. 
 
 The books that have been written in an endeavor adequately to 
 express this man Lincoln, now make a large library; but not one 
 of them, written as they are out of the best heart's love, compares 
 with the man Lincoln, or begins to shine with his illimitable 
 
xii Abraham Lincoln 
 
 personality. Records of him are material. He himself was a liv- 
 ing flame, burning grandly but steadily ', making plain the 
 smallest fibre of any fact to which its rays were directed. Such a 
 man is beyond description. The noblest and most capable minds 
 reach only the borderlands of his clear thought. What matter if 
 his boots were unblacked, or his coat ill-fitting? There was not a 
 stain upon his heart, nor a wrinkle in his soul. His simplest 
 sentence is a thunderbolt; his fiercest anathema a blessing. He 
 walks the land today, a spirit of colossal proportions by which 
 men, measured by their words and acts, are the merest pigmies. 
 
 Lincoln's greatest general never lost a battle, but his general- 
 ship lasted only four years, and was confined to the government 
 and science of war. Lincoln s work began with the cradle and 
 will endure through eternity; his battles were in the highest clouds 
 of human reason, and he too never lost a battle. His foot never 
 took a backward step. His judgment never failed. Neither did 
 his love pale nor his justice repent. 
 
 Look upon that pictured face hanging upon your study wall. 
 Do you not feel a new warm glow in your heart? Do not the 
 mixed reasons in your brain fall into sweet concord? Does not 
 humanity show itself in gentler aspect? Do not personal ambi- 
 tions fade? Do not animosities die away? And is there not some- 
 how born in your whole being a consciousness of harmony and 
 sweet security for the eventual salvation of the peoples of the 
 earth? No other man who ever trod the earth stands as close to 
 the heart of the world as Abraham Lincoln, save He who voiced 
 for all mankind the teaching that was nearest to being exemplified 
 among mortals by this cabin-born son of American pioneers, 
 whose going out from this life wrought not only a Union of the 
 States, but, for that hour of mourning at least, the Union of all 
 the peoples of the earth. 
 
 We need Lincoln Philosophy and Lincoln Spirit today. The 
 
Introduction xiii 
 
 task of making men free was not completed with the abolition of 
 the slavery of the black man. Vast numbers of the human family 
 are yet in bondage. Everywhere there is a tendency to eat the 
 bread earned by the sweat of others. Everywhere there is a lack 
 of the broad spirit of human love and brotherhood, which is the 
 Lincoln gospel. Loyalty to the Constitution — loyalty to the 
 Union — loyalty to our fellowmen — these he would teach us. No 
 man can know Lincoln too well, and no man can know him at 
 all without becoming better for the knowledge. These are in part 
 my reasons for writing this book, but above all I have desired to 
 express my supreme admiration and reverence for Abraham 
 Lincoln, before whom I stand with bowed head. Afar of I have 
 followed him from my earliest childhood, and here, when past 
 middle life, I approach him more intimately , feeling sure that 
 if he were present he would understand and sympathize with me 
 in my desire, bold though it be, to make the world a little better 
 acquainted with him, and thereby give to the world new hope, 
 new aspirations, and a new sense of the brotherhood of man. I 
 tender to you, my readers, in all humility, this book, written out 
 of the love of my heart for that supreme genius — Abraham 
 Lincoln. 
 
 Clark Prescott Bissett. 
 
ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 A Universal Man 
 
Chapter I 
 
 BIMTH 
 
 IT IS early evening in the latter part of October, 1808, 
 four months before Abraham Lincoln, the son of Thomas 
 Lincoln and Nancy Hanks, is to be born.The moon is 
 at its full and through the open cabin door, for it is Indian 
 Summer and the air is balmy, a flood of soft light falls 
 across the puncheon floor and touches the prospective mother 
 as she moves about the cabin, preparing the simple evening 
 meal. Outside in a sycamore tree a mocking bird pours forth 
 a flood of melody. A cricket chirps under the drying boughs 
 in the fireplace. A horned owl punctuates the stillness with 
 its solemn "too-whoo." The rugged pioneer, ax on shoulder, 
 emerges from the forest, returning to his evening meal of 
 coarse bread of corn meal and venison. The rough pine 
 table holds a few cracked dishes, a jug of maple syrup, and 
 the tin cups from which to drink the parched corn coffee, 
 or, if fortune has been favorable, a limited draught of 
 weak tea. Luxuries, there are none. The cloth that covers the 
 table is of some coarse fibre of home weaving, colored to dis- 
 guise the stains with which constant use and wear have 
 marred it. Rough, home-made chairs or stools are drawn up 
 at the board. Distant neighbors drop in to exchange news, 
 stumps supplying the extra seats at the table. 
 There is a picture of George Washington hanging on the 
 
Abraham Lincoln 
 
 wall. The crude fireplace is filled with green branches, the 
 simple attempt at decoration which is the tribute of woman- 
 kind. 
 
 As darkness falls the tallow dips are lighted and while the 
 housewife clears away the remnants of the meal, the men 
 light their pipes and puff the fragrant home-grown tobacco. 
 There is much talk. And what is the subject? Neighborhood 
 gossip? It commences here, but a fugitive slave has been 
 captured somewhere near, and sullen and silent, or weeping 
 and protesting, has been taken back to unrequited toil. One 
 of the visitors is a Constitutionalist and argues the rights of 
 the slave states to their property in Negroes. Then there is 
 heated argument in which the wife joins. Another visitor is 
 an Abolitionist and the conversation takes a sympathetic 
 turn, with carefully proclaimed suggestions from Thomas 
 Lincoln on the right of the Southern planters to be recom- 
 pensed for the property which the flaw in the constitution 
 concedes to them. 
 
 One cannot think of Nancy Hanks Lincoln, with the child 
 of freedom already moving under her heart, agreeing with her 
 husband in this doctrine. We may be sure that the mother-to- 
 be of the future Emancipator scorns the logic of statesmen 
 and places herself squarely on the side of humanity. Her hus- 
 band argues for the rights of free labor as against that of slave 
 labor. The male's duty to himself, to his mate and to his off- 
 spring, the primal animal instinct which runs through all 
 animate creation that has risen to the least level of recogni- 
 tion of duty, prompts him to declare against the dictum that 
 makes his labor cheap because millions of other laborers of 
 another race and color are held in bondage and forced to work 
 for nothing. His sense of competition prompts him to combat 
 the institution of slavery, even while his reverence for gov- 
 
Birth 3 
 
 ernment inspires him to uphold the Constitution of the 
 Fathers of the Republic. For we may be sure that the Decla- 
 ration of Independence was well revered by all the Lincolns 
 from their earliest generation in America. And we may also 
 know from the Biblical names which all the Lincolns be- 
 stowed upon the male children of the family, that the Laws 
 of Moses, the great protest of the Children of Israel against 
 human bondage, and the magnificent struggle of that nation 
 of freedom-lovers to break the chains of slavery and to set up 
 a nation of democracy for themselves, was ingrained in the 
 very nerve and marrow of the Lincoln tribe. 
 
 What will be the mother's thoughts in such a scene? Will 
 not they cluster about the future of her child? Will she not 
 wish the child to be a man? Will not her thoughts see him 
 possessed of a mind for solving these big questions which are 
 forever ringing in her ears? Will not she see him possessed 
 with almost divine attributes which shall not only inspire 
 him to great deeds, but shall give him the heart and soul to 
 sympathize with those oppressed people whose sorrows and 
 longings are often pictured to her with backwoods eloquence; 
 whose sufferings she has often looked upon while powerless to 
 interfere to save the victim, or even to offer consolation or to 
 apply the simple healing remedies her frontier life had taught 
 her to extract from herbs and wildwood barks? 
 
 Is it not likely that this woman, a child of nature, rather 
 delicate in body, sensitive, beautiful in form and feature, and 
 with a well-known love for song and story, especially the 
 sublime song and story of the Old Testament; ... is 
 it not likely that such a nature, approaching motherhood and 
 thrilled night and day with the hope and faith of maternity, 
 in the holy softness of great shadowing trees, the faithful 
 stars filling the upper heavens with their innumerable mes- 
 
4 Abraham Lincoln 
 
 sages of stability, and the great sun by day following his 
 steady course, there where the voices of the storm proclaimed 
 the power of the Spirit, and the soft breath of Spring whis- 
 pered of His enduring love; — is it not likely, I say, that in 
 those long mystical evenings, pregnant with hallowed mem- 
 ories and vibrant with the suppressed emotions of a nation of 
 thirty million souls slowly but surely approaching a tremen- 
 dous crisis in which the bravest sons of all those states should 
 struggle passionately to the death in war; — is it not likely 
 that she should pray that this child might be a son, and that 
 he might be the Moses destined to lead another race out of 
 bondage? 
 
 You have the result of those meditations in the life and 
 actions and work of her son. Unless we are willing to stand by 
 the law of chance and trust our present and future to the cast- 
 ing of the dice by blind fate, we must accept this argument to 
 account for Abraham Lincoln. 
 
 And then one night in February while the strong winds, big 
 with the events of a new spring, wrestled about the little 
 cabin in the deep woods, the child was born. 
 
 What an hour was that for the world ! How far on another 
 course might the Ship of State have been blown, and where 
 might it be drifting today, had that soul in its rugged little 
 body, not come into our world! 
 
 If we were to attribute intelligent power to the planets 
 after the manner of the ancients, we should have to agree 
 that at the birth of Abraham Lincoln, the planet Mars and 
 the planet Venus were both in the ascendant, for never has a 
 spirit come to this earth in which the powers of war and the 
 powers of love were so entwined. But we need not seek 
 beyond the natural divinity of the mother and the rugged and 
 primal nobility of the father and his forebears to cast the 
 
Birth 5 
 
 horoscope of this great world figure. The very time of his con- 
 ception was pregnant with the child of freedom. The newest 
 nation of the earth, itself a child of liberty, born in pain and 
 travail, fought for while yet a helpless babe in the cradle of 
 liberty, was now in the vigorous strength of youth; and while 
 the bloom of adolescence was still hardly more than seen upon 
 its cheeks, was a nation divided against itself. Out of that 
 division and remating was to be born another child of Democ- 
 racy — the Union. 
 
 This tremendous event had its inception about the cradle 
 hewn out of the maple log, in the still, sheltering forest where, 
 more than anywhere else, God moves in a mysterious way 
 His wonders to perform. 
 
Chapter II 
 
 CHILDHOOD 
 
 tA BRAHAM LINCOLN was born February 12, 1809, 
 
 / VI in a desolate region, three miles from Hodgenville, 
 1 mL Kentucky, a place that today would not be given 
 the name of even a settlement, so crude was it in every 
 way, so much it lacked of everything that goes to make for 
 civilization. No, not everything, for there, as in every frontier 
 settlement, or cabin of American pioneers, was the courage, 
 the will, the fearless determination, and the primal virtues of 
 mind and heart that are the warp and woof of all society, and 
 especially of the society of that period of America. 
 
 A strange thing is this coming of a new human being into 
 the world! It would seem that the cradle of a child born for 
 great deeds must be the center of unnumbered forces flowing 
 to it from all the stars of the universe. We believe that all the 
 planets and their stars are connected by invisible lines with 
 all other planets, and that over those invisible rays, vibrant 
 with thrilling action travel waves of sound and those sounds 
 in heavenly harmonies break upon the farthest shores of 
 infinite space. It must certainly follow that a living soul has 
 its subtle connections with other soul forces in the infinitude 
 of God. 
 
 Lincoln, the baby, lying in his rude cradle, sucking his 
 thumbs and gazing with a child's questioning eyes upon a 
 
Childhood 
 
 strange new world, was only one child in a million filling such 
 a place in the evolution of life and its manifestations. Other 
 children were born on that same day, the same hour, one or 
 two at the same moment perhaps. But no child whose history 
 we know had such a heritage of thoughts and feelings, 
 weighted with generations of passion for justice tempered by 
 religious devotion, active and silent, Covenanter, Cavalier 
 and Quaker, as this child, Abraham Lincoln. Not only had his 
 ancestral life been filled with thoughts of universal democracy 
 and active suffering for the principle of it, but the immediate 
 atmosphere wherein he was conceived and brought into the 
 world was colored as the rainbow with the breeding ideas of 
 two great factions at bitter strife, each intent on forcing its 
 particular set of ideas of government on the other, or of going 
 each its separate way in search of those things which each 
 held sacred and necessary to the growth and ultimate happi- 
 ness of man. And these thought forces were sending out 
 wave upon wave into the surrounding ocean of human per- 
 ception and understanding. 
 
 The soul of that tender boy in the father-made cradle, 
 rocked by the foot of a mother who had become imbued with 
 the idea, from association with the Lincoln philosophy, that 
 such labor as made that cradle and built the cabin over her 
 head, and was clearing the primeval forest to make land from 
 which that labor might win independence and untrammeled 
 action for the individual man, was honorable and the soul of 
 that boy was no doubt tuned to receive the thoughts of lib- 
 erty and to deny the thoughts of bondage. 
 
 Sitting with those humble people in that dimly lighted 
 cabin, did no sensitive soul feel the sacred spell of prophetic 
 greatness hovering near? Did no gnarled hand of a primitive 
 seer bending forward from a crude oaken chair rest upon the 
 
8 Abraham Lincoln 
 
 cradle in which lay the sleeping child? Was there no faint 
 whisper wafted to the grey-eyed mother of the great debt that 
 future ages were to bear toward this new comer into the clean 
 and wholesome woods? There lay the immortal Lincoln, he 
 who was to dictate the Emancipation Proclamation, not only 
 of four million African slaves, but of mankind. 
 
 Three great names shine forth in American history and 
 glow with supreme effulgence; Columbus, Washington, Lin- 
 coln. Columbus was European and however great his heart, 
 however lively his sympathies, he could hardly have refrained 
 from passing a man of Lincoln's appearance, had they chanced 
 to meet, with scarce a glance and that glance one of curiosity, 
 if not disdain. His schooling, training and accomplishments 
 had all been in another world, an atmosphere of gentle breed- 
 ing and courtly polish. Lincoln's rugged personality, his plain 
 common sense theories, his loosely fitting garments covering 
 his large angular frame, could but have shocked the stately 
 flowing-robed astronomer, who first saw round the world "in 
 his mind's eye" and in an effort to follow the circle science 
 cast for him alone, first set foot upon the Western Hemi- 
 sphere. So foreign is he in nature to those who finally made 
 settlement in America, and to their children, who hewed out 
 of the savage tenanted wilderness these democratic states, 
 that his spirit is translated into a goddess, and what part of 
 our country is symbolically given to its discoverer is known 
 as Columbia. Although the country was discovered by 
 Columbus, he is, and always will be, as foreign to it as the 
 language he spoke or the robes he wore. 
 
 Washington was born in Virginia, but in a certain sense he 
 was not a native to the soil. He was, indeed, a grand figure in 
 the world; his bearing, his countenance, his manners, and his 
 ideals would have been as much at home in the Roman Re- 
 
Childhood 
 
 public a sin the new fledged democracy his genius brought 
 into life with the confederation of the original states. He, too, 
 would have needed a friendly preparation before an introduc- 
 tion to Lincoln would have brought them into any kind of 
 harmonious equality. 
 
 Lincoln had none of the physical refinements and few of 
 the mental characteristics of either of his predecessors in the 
 building of America. The new world demanded a new kind of 
 human being. Such was Abraham Lincoln, the most pro- 
 nounced type of the race which has come to be known as 
 American. We speak of America as new, although its blood is 
 the blood of all old nations, as its philosophy and its religion 
 is that of all ancient peoples. Lincoln was like America itself; 
 seemingly formed on the plan of its mighty mountain ranges, 
 its rich prairies, its rushing and commanding rivers, its stern- 
 fibred forests, its pronounced seasons, and its ever increasing 
 riches running through all its veins and ever returning in the 
 plenteous and varied products of the soil. Had it been the 
 Creator's design to symbolize the western world in one 
 human being, it may be said with all reverence that the ideal 
 was expressed in seeming perfection in this mighty man. 
 
 The strength, the vigor, the far-extended, unfettered 
 America, — uncharted, unconquered, throbbing with life, now 
 rocked with the passion of unbridled storm, now soft and 
 melancholy with the meditative Indian Summer, but ever 
 new and beautiful, as it was ever august, strange and wooing 
 — this was and is America. This was and is Lincoln. 
 
 And if Lincoln in this large sense was made in the image 
 and likeness of America, he was in a more precious and inti- 
 mate sense an image and likeness of the people he so mar- 
 velously led and held and inspired through such troubled 
 years as no other ruler ever encountered. Literally, Lincoln 
 
10 Abraham Lincoln 
 
 was a man of the people; not only a man of the people of 
 America but of the people of the world, irrespective of race, 
 color or condition. For did not he himself say that he was 
 upholding the cause of freedom for the world, and was he not 
 nobly saving "the last, best hope of earth"? 
 
 Such are the thoughts as in imagination we have sat with 
 crossed legs on the rough stool in the dimly lighted cabin of 
 the Lincolns, our hands lightly resting on the cradle of their 
 boy. And how precious they make every cradle, how sacred 
 the life of every babe that lies therein. For who so wise to 
 know what hand at this moment is rocking the cradle of 
 another great Truth Teller who is to rule or save the world ? 
 Sacrilegious indeed were this projection of imagination to the 
 humble backwoods home of our sainted Lincoln, unwar- 
 ranted beyond measure these free flights into the realm of his 
 unpolluted babyhood, were the mission one of idle curiosity, 
 were the speculations of the God-crowned hours of his nativ- 
 ity born of idle dreams. But we who venerate the name of this 
 great soul have no such feelings in our hearts. We revere this 
 man and the memory of him as much as any "this side of 
 idolatry." Stripped of all wordly vanities we sit with these 
 humble parents in their bare cabin, holding with trembling 
 hands to the hopes of future generations that are slowly germ- 
 inating in the life-drops of that innocent child, about whose 
 gentle slumbers troop unseen the spirits of the fragrant 
 green wood, the spirits of wisdom and truth and benevolence, 
 of wit and mirth, of power and love and unapproachable 
 forgiveness. 
 
 The night is gone. The stars that jewel the treetops dis- 
 appear. Dawn drapes the eastern sky with crimson glories. 
 And looking the clear-eyed father straight in the eyes 
 we pass in silence to the dewy air of the newborn day, our 
 
Childhood 11 
 
 finger tips alive with the memory of that blessed touch upon 
 the cradle of the child whose shoulders are yet to be bowed 
 beneath the weight of marshalled human woe. 
 
 Every woman with her child in her arms is at heart a Ma- 
 donna. This is true even in thickly settled communities where 
 employments are diversified and the mind has many and 
 varied distractions. But on the frontiers of civilization, where 
 the mother and child are pressed closely together for com- 
 panionship and the depths of impenetrable forests and the 
 great silences of nature fill the heart with unusual hopes or 
 strange forebodings, the supreme mystery of birth and 
 motherhood become a thousand times more wonderful and 
 holy. 
 
 Abraham Lincoln had a mother of sweet and gentle pres- 
 ence. Those who knew her as the lovely and imaginative girl, 
 Nancy Hanks, and afterwards as the wife of Thomas Lincoln, 
 speak of her with peculiar admiration and respect. The crude 
 speech of the backwoodsman, when she becomes the subject 
 of his recollections, is softened and refined, like that of one 
 who speaks of a sacred mystery. She was tall in stature, 
 slender, graceful, delicate, retiring, heroic, patient, loving, 
 beautiful; plain to one, to another colored like a wild rose. 
 Gay and smiling always, according to this old neighbor; sad 
 and pensive to another. Out of place among her primitive sur- 
 roundings, this one remembers; a woman born for solitude 
 and brave undertakings, we are assured by another. A woman 
 of little learning but of quick wit, declares a third; she had a 
 good knowledge of books, could read just as if she were talk- 
 ing, and could make a book seem like something alive and its 
 happenings take place before your eyes, another tells us. 
 
 Piece together meager bits of description picked up by 
 industrious Lincoln biographers from the small number of 
 
12 Abraham Lincoln 
 
 people who knew her, and you will get some idea of a rich and 
 elusive, but marvelously blended nature, that gave life to him 
 whose own life was such a puzzling enigma. "No man ever 
 drew his infant life from a purer or more womanly bosom, ,, 
 says J. G. Holland in his "Life of Abraham Lincoln," and this 
 he writes reverently after the most careful and detailed search 
 in every quarter where there could remain the slightest mem- 
 ory of her. 
 
 Were every other evidence lacking, that of the son himself, 
 in his boyhood acts and in his every reference to his mother 
 throughout his life, is yet enough upon which to build the 
 paragon of womanhood. Lincoln had many ways of express- 
 ing his feelings as well as of hiding them, but in the field of 
 truth he stood almost alone among men as having seldom 
 uttered a word that might have a double meaning, or of ever 
 having passed the door of pure sentiment but with uncovered 
 head and hushed and bated breath. And he said, long after 
 the maple leaves that fell upon the mound which marked the 
 first great tragedy of his life had mouldered into dust and 
 sprung again to life above her, "All that I am, or hope to be, 
 I owe to my mother * * * blessings on her memory." 
 
 Thomas Lincoln cleared the forest, stalked deer and wild 
 turkey, worked at his carpenter bench in the stump-infested 
 clearing, a big-chested, hearty, good natured man, stretching 
 his bulk before the log fire at night to repeat droll stories of 
 the day's doings. 
 
 The nearest neighbor was three miles away and the journey 
 thither followed an almost impenetrable trail beset with wild 
 beasts and full of unnamed dangers. Evening visitors were 
 few. The family was much alone. No doubt the boy was 
 often on the parent knee and the brawny hand caressed the 
 tiny baby with a touch as zephyr light, as that with which 
 
Childhood 13 
 
 the mother ran her more delicate fingers over the father's 
 bush of uncropped hair. 
 
 But brave hearts, clear brains, and healthy bodies do not 
 make social intercourse either easy or general in a wilderness 
 spotted by a few scattered clearings. Men and women who 
 are carving out a home on the picket line of that great army 
 of Earth adventurers, who have been born to make the 
 wilderness blossom like the rose, must "have that within 
 that passeth show"; that smouldering fire of self-sufficiency 
 which makes them companions to wood and stream, to moun- 
 tain and valley, to the crude tools that come to fit so closely 
 their strong hands; such are the "home folks" of the isolated 
 cabin that hardly shelters them from the rude blasts of 
 Nature's changing moods. And Thomas Lincoln, knowing 
 nothing of books, and Nancy, his wife, knowing completely 
 those she had, were forced to find the audience for their 
 thoughts and feelings in their children, especially in that 
 small bit of human flesh and blood, the male child so lately 
 come from his Maker that the image and likeness had yet 
 scarce a mark or lineament of this world upon it. 
 
 What dialogues they held in that strange theatre of life to 
 which the one dumb auditor gave quiet heed, let the unfet- 
 tered imagination supply to an equally silent soul. We may be 
 sure they were not idle thoughts to which those two gave 
 voice in the flickering shadows of those early spring evenings, 
 the rough winds of March rocking the treetops to wild har- 
 monies overhead, the crackling back log punctuating the 
 silences, or adding strange little quavers to the low-pitched 
 voice of the woman or the deep growling bass of the man. No 
 author has ever been able to catch the spirit of such conver- 
 sations. They are like the song of the wood thrush that is 
 never uttered except the singer feels himself alone with his 
 
u Abraham Lincoln 
 
 mate and nestlings. And may they not have the same subtle 
 influence on the cooing babe that the bird song has on its 
 offspring, that somehow absorb the vibrations of the song 
 into their own beings and so in time pour it forth again to 
 astonish the listener with rapturous melody? 
 
 Who shall say the babe that nestled between those two 
 primal natures on those evenings of heart communion did not 
 likewise drink in the vibrations of their voices and the wisdom 
 of their honest hearts and tender loves, their hopes and fears 
 for his dim, shadowy future! Perhaps some of those quick 
 answers he delivered with such astonishing appropriateness 
 under stress of a tragic moment in later years were but the 
 echoes of those voices that pleaded for entrance to his un- 
 charted mind in those communal hours. 
 
 March passed and April came with its modest wildwood 
 flowers, May with its plum and wild apple bloom and fra- 
 grance, its ivory-mantled dogwood, the green of the woods 
 above and below, the treetops musically merry with the songs 
 of mating birds, and lively with the flashing of their tireless 
 wings. The long hot days of summer ripened the wild fruits. 
 The frost of fall turned the green leaves red and gold, quick- 
 ened the woodland sounds as it stilled the saps of tree and 
 shrub, ripened the nuts of hickory and walnut, turned the 
 haws a rich purple, and muffled the streams under a soft 
 blanket of fallen verdure. The snows of winter sent the woods- 
 man forth with his axe, its gleaming blade bit into the boles of 
 great trees with the regular swing of a musician's baton, and 
 the voices of the forest had an occasional chorus of the rush of 
 falling monarchs, tearing their way through their still upright 
 brothers to crash in pathetic ruin along the trembling earth. 
 
 So the seasons passed, the days full of homely toil and 
 simple adventure for father and mother Lincoln, the boy 
 
Childhood is 
 
 feeding his growing life on the pure air of the spicy green- 
 wood, his ears forever filled with those wonderful symphonies 
 of nature, the rhythm of them becoming every day a greater 
 force in the beatings of his heart, the veins apulse with his 
 young blood. 
 
 For four years the boy played about the floor of that little 
 cabin home which had been blessed by his coming. He grew 
 strong and lithe, the black hair of his father falling about the 
 gray eyes of his mother, as he crept across the threshold to 
 welcome the return of the woodsman carpenter, or toddled to 
 clasp the outstretched hands of his mother, coaxing him to 
 his early pedestrian journeys along the far-stretched lines of 
 the cabin floor. 
 
 And while the child grew lithe-limbed and active, the 
 father's ambition rose somewhat and by hard toil he cleared 
 another patch of ground in a more fertile region to the north- 
 ward and built a more commodious home of logs, into which 
 the family moved. No doubt the gentle mother cast many a 
 pensive glance back to that home whereto had come her first- 
 born son, and wherein she had nursed him through the dan- 
 gers of isolated childhood. This new land lay low between the 
 hills and was subject to floods by freshets after heavy rains. 
 A child of four in modern life is looked on as but a baby to be 
 nursed with gentle care. But your primitive man-child must 
 be something of an adventurer at four. 
 
 In those three years following the removal to the new 
 home, the neighbors remembered that this boy had already 
 begun to make himself useful in many ways about the farm 
 and workshop. He learned by journeys of discovery into the 
 nearby thickets, the names of plants and flowers, to distin- 
 guish birds by the colors of their plumage and their differing 
 songs. His first alphabet was that of the great book of Nature 
 
16 Abraham Lincoln 
 
 wherein the Creator has writ large for those with minds alive 
 to read as they run. But he learned, too, at his mother's knee, 
 the alphabet of the books of man and so the words of that 
 other sacred volume, writ by command of the same Presence 
 in the language of man's invention. 
 
 Could there have been a better school for one who was 
 finally to be set at the head of a liberty-loving people, to 
 decipher the puzzle of freedom and slavery tied together and 
 knotted as securely as might be by the most subtle and selfish 
 minds of an era of giant intellects in the new America? How 
 those short decisive commands from the old Hebrew law- 
 makers' edicts rooted themselves into his soul-soil, his after 
 days give ample proof. How that young mind, with no dis- 
 tractions of urban life, composed — unknowingly, no doubt, 
 but still composed — those sublime and tender messages from 
 the Sermon on the Mount with the sermon of the sunshine 
 flooding the swaying trees and making silver and golden the 
 ripples of the flowing stream, may be read in every one of 
 those inspired speeches; in every one of the marching state 
 papers; in every single message of love to a stricken mother of 
 a soldier wounded or slain; in every mental blow struck, with 
 the same sharp directness and unswerving aim that made his 
 woodsman's ax the wonder of his fellows. 
 
 It is sacred soil, this infant mind, and so the wise young 
 mother knew and saw that it was sown with perfect seed. It 
 would be well if every mother knew this, and heeded and saw 
 to it that her offspring's mind in the virgin spring of life was 
 sown with seed as truly clean and fine and rich with Christly 
 virtues. Not then would men like Lincoln stand forth in such 
 colossal stature above their fellows, for the race would lift and 
 grow and match him in its height of honest worth. Other 
 things the mother taught her boy: to write, to understand 
 
Childhood 17 
 
 simple arithmetic, but most of all to reason, and to hold fast 
 that which is good. 
 
 The strong fibres and steel sinews of his body he had in- 
 herited from his father; also that simplicity and common 
 sense that gave him such poise and patience that the undis- 
 cerning called him lazy, failing to measure him by his steady 
 and continual achievements against nature, and by his big- 
 souled determination neither to complain of circumstances 
 nor to be weak enough to let fate know his hands were under 
 the anvil. Those were Abraham Lincoln's most pronounced 
 attributes on his man side, patience to toil without complaint 
 or boast, and wisdom to know that all toil, his or others, was 
 worthy of recompense to the toiler. In this much Thomas 
 Lincoln and Abraham were one. Also in the tireless muscles 
 of the flexible body, the powerfully-knit frame, the almost 
 superhuman strength, and, when aroused, the thunderous 
 anger of the lion brought to bay. Few men ever saw Lincoln 
 enraged but those few never forgot it, and forever after he 
 was the subject of their fearful wonderment. This was 
 Thomas Lincoln's contribution to the world's work which his 
 son was to do. 
 
 The mother's was no less important, no less the good and 
 perfect gift for the purpose. Like her, he had a gentle and 
 imaginative mind, a heart quick with endless sympathy, a 
 delicacy of conception poetic in its quality, and an intuition 
 that made him the seer of his age and the prophet of the 
 future of Democracy. 
 
 It took years of trial and the tragedy of a dismembered 
 Nation, wherein brother fought brother and father fought 
 son in hand-to-hand battle to the death, to bring into perfect 
 composition those qualities of his parents which, united, 
 made Abraham Lincoln the great figure of his own short hour 
 
18 Abraham Lincoln 
 
 upon the tragic stage of this life action, wherein we all are 
 "such stuff as dreams are made of," and set him forever as 
 high as the heart of God in the pantheon of immortals. 
 
 What kingly mansion owned such riches as that small Ken- 
 tucky cabin wherein Abraham Lincoln first saw the light, and 
 whereto his mind always reverently turned as to the source of 
 all his worth and greatness? What are crowns and diadems 
 and scepters, courtiers and ladies-in-waiting, thrones and 
 courts, compared to the humble home where Thomas and 
 Nancy lived and brought forth Abraham and gave him such 
 properties of body and mind and heart and soul that he could 
 do the work he did? What is poor or humble or degraded in 
 the picture of those three wonderful human beings seated in 
 that humble cabin before the flickering firelight, the freedom 
 of four million slaves in their hands, and the sublime teaching 
 of manhood and honor and worth for all the future ages in 
 their eyes? 
 
 Cut off the past sharp there at that Kentucky cabin with 
 only those three figures to open the world's story, and what 
 have we sacrificed out of what we really know of honor or 
 justice or love or hope or patience or fruitful action or the 
 despising of all that is mean or worthless or vulgar, in this 
 strange human tragedy which we call life? Man, Woman, 
 Child; Thomas, Nancy, Abraham. The story is written. The 
 stage is set. The drama is enacted. Ring down the curtain. 
 Nothing more is to be said of this drama of humanity, unless 
 it be the epilogue which shall explain what good is yet to come 
 because these three have lived and one has played the leading 
 part in thrusting forth from mortal mind the false and sham, 
 and in bringing in the better light, the true and fine, the 
 noble, sweet and lovely. 
 
 Knob Creek, which was the scene of this early teaching of 
 
Childhood 19 
 
 Nancy's boy, took heavy toll of Thomas Lincoln, and year 
 after year swept over his little clearing to the partial or utter 
 ruin of his crops, and once more the little family pressed on 
 toward the golden West whose promises have ever wooed the 
 pioneer on land as they wooed the adventurer on sea. This 
 time the migration was across the Ohio River and through a 
 dense forest for eighty or ninety miles to the final earthly 
 home of Nancy Hanks Lincoln in an Indiana wilderness. 
 
 Abraham was now seven years old. He was large for his 
 age, healthy with the health of the big out-of-doors. He knew 
 little of the fear of those "ills that flesh is heir to" in the 
 sophisticated beliefs of children who grow up in closely 
 settled communities where disease is often the subject of 
 family gossip, as well as of more or less intelligent study by 
 the heads of the household. The Lincolns were a sturdy race 
 and no doubt a few simple herbs served to medicine their ills, 
 whatever sickness visited them. No record is extant where 
 Lincoln or any of his contemporaries have mentioned any 
 disease ever having attacked the boy, either in childhood or 
 later in life. He seems to have been peculiarly blessed with 
 health, bodily strength, and a fearless spirit. 
 
 It was this fine start in natural growth and development 
 that gave him the almost superhuman strength and endur- 
 ance of after years, especially those five years of almost con- 
 tinuous soul agony of the White House, when sleep, for long 
 periods of time was almost entirely abandoned, while with 
 watchful wakefulness he studied and pondered the problems 
 that threatened the dissolution of the Union, his hand alone 
 holding together the trembling parts, his mind alone com- 
 passing the full significance of the tragedy that was being 
 enacted. Ah, how much the world owed to those pure winds 
 of the Kentucky woods, the deep breath drawn into the lungs 
 
20 Abraham Lincoln 
 
 of the growing boy, filling him with ever renewed vitality as 
 he swung on those long tramps over forest trails! 
 
 Partly by flatboat and partly through the tangled woods 
 the little family, father, mother, Sarah and young Abe made 
 their tortuous way for eighty or ninety miles. Often the trees 
 had to be cut and the underbrush cleared to make way for the 
 wagon with its little load of household goods, the all of this 
 strange caravan of four. Arriving at last in Spencer County, 
 Indiana, with the remnants of his possessions saved from 
 wreck and flood, Thomas Lincoln determined to settle. He 
 seemed to sense with a keen appreciation the meaning of 
 man's place in the universe, as evidenced by the fact that he 
 had placed some distance between himself and the land where 
 a white man's labor was in competition with the unpaid labor 
 of the black man, and where the enunciation of the immortal 
 truth that the laborer, of whatsoever color or race, is worthy 
 of his hire, was frowned upon as vulgar if not, in fact, sedition. 
 
 It is evident from Lincoln's first preserved utterances, that 
 he drank in at the humble hearthstone of his parents the 
 principle of universal brotherhood. It is evident that through- 
 out his tremendous struggles, first for his own individual 
 unionized self and later for the unionized independence of his 
 beloved country, he never had to unlearn a single item of the 
 teachings of his childhood. There is not a record of one word 
 he ever uttered of sorrow for anything he was taught by his 
 parents, or of any of the things he learned from his meagre 
 collection of books. It was as if an All-seeing Eye and an All- 
 directing Hand guided ever in the instructions of his mind 
 and the books that were placed in his hands. The Bible — 
 from that he learned his letters; from that he got his mar- 
 velously terse, vigorous and direct style; also that deep and 
 Solomon-wise manner of reasoning which made him the won- 
 
Childhood 21 
 
 der and the admiration of his fellow lawyers on the old Eighth 
 Circuit in his days of adolescent practice at the Bar; and later 
 the amazement of statesmen, philosophers, orators and cul- 
 tured scribes of all civilized nations. 
 
 Then, too, he drank deep of the old Greek wisdom in the con- 
 densed form of Aesop's Fables, that collection of kohinoors of 
 subtle understanding, in which he, at least, found the sub- 
 stance of a never failing philosophy that served to dispel 
 ignorance and rouse lofty aspirations, alike in the souls of the 
 cultured and the uncultured. There were other books, a few 
 later on, but these were his boyhood's food, and he not only 
 read them faithfully, assiduously, and constantly, but he 
 rephrased them again and again in his own words as a trial of 
 his intelligence and wit and understanding. 
 
 Demosthenes declaiming with pebbles in his mouth to give 
 him rotund utterance is a no more striking figure in the his- 
 tory of oratorical achievement, than that of the boy Lincoln 
 rewording Solomon or Aesop on the shaved back of a wooden 
 shovel with a burnt stick for a pen. The account of the boy 
 Jesus leaving his parents to debate with the Rabbis in the 
 Temple at Jerusalem is no more significant of preparation for 
 His mission than that of Abraham Lincoln for his. At sixteen 
 years we see him rising betimes, doing his chores, and walking 
 seventeen miles to hear Blackburn plead law in a crowded 
 court, sitting all day on a hard stool, dinnerless, drinking in 
 the arguments and absorbing the proceedings of law, and 
 then once more covering the seventeen miles on foot to do his 
 evening chores and creep to his hard bed, to recount again 
 and again the day's proceedings. It is of undisputed record 
 that Lincoln did this, not for one day only, but for all the 
 days in turn, so long as the court term lasted. And he himself 
 testified long afterward that it was this strange tuition which 
 
22 Abraham Lincoln 
 
 gave him the foundations of his law practice, the spur to his 
 indefatigable study of the art of oratory. 
 
 There is much useless lumber in the accounts of Lincoln's 
 childhood, so far as they apply to a penetrating study of his 
 real character, and the principal things by which it was 
 developed and made whole for the high place he occupies 
 among the earth's preferred heroes; but dig among this lum- 
 ber in whatever quarter it lies piled, and you will always come 
 upon a few facts that fit together with such beautiful pre- 
 cision that they are like the two or three witnesses who agree 
 absolutely in any case to prove its justice and certitude. 
 These are the religious vigor of mind in both his parents, and 
 the natural love of truth which possessed them; the unerring 
 judgment of Lincoln's mother as to what was best in litera- 
 ture such as the Bible, Aesop and Robinson Crusoe, and her 
 love of the beauty of holiness, not of creed or doctrine, but 
 the clean holiness of flower and breeze, of the rhythm of 
 winds, the glory of the sunshine and moonlight and the ever 
 clear-eyed stars. There is also the homely humor of the 
 father, his uncomplaining patience, his unworded hope 
 expressed in his methodical journeys toward a state of free- 
 dom and equality, and his kinelike placidity and common- 
 sense. 
 
 Of such universal elements was Abraham Lincoln com- 
 pounded. These attributes fed him in his cradle, enveloped 
 him in his first toddlings across the puncheon floor of the 
 Kentucky cabin, stalked beside him as he stumbled through 
 the swamps and tangled undergrowth, driving the team 
 across that unknown trail into the Indiana country. And 
 when he had passed beyond the personal influence of those 
 great gray eyes filled with mother love and prophetic musing 
 for her stalwart boy, and beyond the home comradeship of 
 
Childhood 23 
 
 that heavy-footed, deep-chested, glinting-eyed father, the 
 spirits of that mother and father still walked beside him, their 
 dual natures still grew together in him, lifted him up, sus- 
 tained and kept him with his hand on the heart of humanity, 
 his feet planted firmly on the great ever-breeding earth, his 
 head among the brave and noble and wise and loving of all 
 countries and of all time. 
 
Chapter III 
 
 BOYHOOD 
 
 WHEN ABRAHAM was nine years old his mother 
 died. An epidemic of "milksickness"carried away- 
 several ofthe scattered population of the frontier 
 settlemen t, which didnot boast even a visiting doctor.For seven 
 days the slender toil-worn woman lingered on the verge of the 
 great mystery, with Sarah, the eldest child of eleven years, 
 and the boy Abraham, her only attendants. Thomas Lincoln, 
 the father, could hardly have spared the time from getting 
 family supplies out of the rugged surroundings, to remain 
 long at her bedside. When she knew the end to be near, Mrs. 
 Lincoln called her two children to her and whispered her final 
 admonitions. She bade them be good to one another, and ex- 
 pressed the hope that they might live, as they had been 
 taught by her, to love their kin and worship God. Placing her 
 hand on Abe's head she told him to be kind to his father and 
 sister. And then they were alone. 
 
 The mother of him who was to be the Liberator of a race 
 paid her debt to nature in the very heart of nature. The 
 weary body was at rest and, let us believe, the soul found 
 ineffable peace and spiritual understanding. The winds in the 
 trees chanted a requiem for her while the majesty of death 
 put its seal upon the sad, sweet face and stilled forever the 
 limbs that had borne the heat and burden of a pioneer 
 existence. 
 
Boyhood 25 
 
 For a year after his loss Thomas Lincoln kept the home 
 and did what he could to fill the place of the departed mother 
 to his children. But no matter how solicitous he may have 
 been for their comfort, his care must have been of the most 
 primitive kind. We are informed that the boy and girl slept 
 on a bed of corn husks and leaves in one corner of the living 
 room. Their clothing was scant and ragged. Their food was 
 the plainest and illy prepared. They ran wild in the woods. 
 Those frequent admonitions to duty and love which the 
 mother had culled from her experience to use for their in- 
 struction, no longer fed their young minds with precious 
 maxims. They were waifs in a wilderness, subject to the 
 thoughts and habits of a community made up of the rude and 
 uncultured. But the great brooding spirit of Nature wrapped 
 them about and poured into their young lives the balm of her 
 immeasurable tenderness. 
 
 It did another thing that had a tremendous influence on 
 the events which were yet in the womb of time. It moved 
 Thomas Lincoln to return to his old Kentucky home and 
 bring back a second mother for his children. Sally Bush John- 
 ston was a widow of some means and Thomas Lincoln had 
 once sought her hand in marriage. He seemed to have found 
 her as lonely in her widowhood as he was in his bereavement. 
 His wooing was brief. The marriage followed hard upon, and 
 with all her household goods they came to the Indiana 
 clearing. 
 
 Sally Bush Lincoln almost immediately changed the crude 
 cabin, which was little more than a bare shelter from the 
 weather, into a home. Under her inspiration Thomas Lincoln 
 set to work to improve the cabin, inside and out, and the little 
 family was soon enjoying the comforts and some of the re- 
 finements of a more mature civilization. 
 
26 Abraham Lincoln 
 
 The new mistress immediately took young Abe to her 
 heart. The settled melancholy, which was a large part of his 
 mother's nature, and which she had bequeathed in even fuller 
 measure to her son, had no place in the homely, motherly 
 heart of the woman who now presided over the destinies of 
 the future Emancipator. She was a practical, commonsense 
 sort, with an inexhaustible capacity for loving and with that 
 clear understanding of others which is an attribute of such 
 love. She seems to have felt from the first that the slender, 
 homely backwoods boy, with his awkward manners, in- 
 quisitive conversation, and, at intervals, sudden bursts of 
 passion which flowed over into utter forgiveness, was des- 
 tined for some great adventure. And whatever she could do to 
 keep his feet in the right path she did unceasingly and whole- 
 heartedly. There is continual evidence that she tried to peer 
 through the clumsy speech into his heart, and prayed that 
 love for him would make her wise to understand aright. How 
 well she succeeded, the words and acts of this remarkable 
 character through all the course of his life give ample proof. 
 Abraham's second mother brought to his instruction and 
 development qualities and virtues which were necessary to 
 supplement those mystical and poetical characteristics be- 
 queathed to him by his first mother, and which, without such 
 addition, might have made him a revolutionary poet but 
 which could never have given to the world the Lincoln we 
 know — the patient, far-seeing, liberty-loving Constitu- 
 tionalist. 
 
 In Herndon's "Life of Lincoln" we have this portrait of 
 the practical side of Sarah Bush Lincoln. Having described 
 the coming of the creaking wagon loaded with its furniture 
 from the Johnston home in Kentucky, and its transfer to the 
 bare interior of the cabin, Herndon goes on to say: 
 
Boyhood 27 
 
 "What effect the new family (Mrs. Johnston had three 
 children by her first husband, John, Sarah and Matilda), 
 their collection of furniture, cooking utensils, and comfort- 
 able bedding must have had on the astonished and mother- 
 less pair, who from the door of Thomas Lincoln's forlorn 
 cabin watched the well-filled wagon as it came creaking 
 through the woods, can better be imagined than described. 
 Surely Sarah and Abe, as the stores and supplies were rolled 
 in through the doorless doorways, must have believed that a 
 golden future awaited them. The presence and smile of a 
 motherly face in the cheerless cabin radiated sunshine into 
 every neglected corner. If the Lincoln mansion did not in 
 every respect correspond to the representations made by its 
 owner to the new Mrs. Lincoln before marriage, the latter 
 gave no expression of disappointment or surprise. With truly 
 womanly courage and zeal she set resolutely to work to make 
 right that which seemed wrong. Her husband was made to 
 put new doors and windows in the cabin. The cracks between 
 the logs were plastered up. A clothes press filled the space be- 
 tween the chimney jamb and the wall, and the mat of corn 
 husks and leaves on which the children had slept in the cor- 
 ner gave way to the comfortable luxuriance of a feather bed. 
 She washed the two orphans and fitted them out in clothes 
 taken from the stores of her own. The work of renovation in 
 and around the cabin continued until even Thomas Lincoln 
 himself, under the general stimulus of the new wife's pres- 
 ence, caught the inspiration and developed signs of intense 
 activity." 
 
 Sarah Bush is described by her granddaughter in after 
 years as "a very tall woman, straight as an Indian, of fair 
 complexion, and was, when I first remember her, very hand- 
 some, sprightly, talkative, and proud. She wore her hair 
 
28 Abraham Lincoln 
 
 curled until gray; was kind hearted and very charitable and 
 also very industrious." 
 
 But notwithstanding her thoroughly practical side, the 
 strain of mysticism, which crops out from almost every per- 
 son who had anything to do with Lincoln's early life, had its 
 controlling seat in this good woman's nature; for does she 
 not say to Herndon after the death of President Lincoln: 
 "I did not want Abe to run for President, and I did not want 
 to see him elected. I was afraid something would happen to 
 him, and when he came down to see me, after he was elected 
 President, I still felt, and my heart told me, that something 
 would befall him, and that I should never see him again." 
 
 From the plain cabin in the Indiana forest Abraham Lin- 
 coln went forth to the first school he ever attended. The 
 teacher was Hazel Dorsey and the school house a mile and a 
 half from the Lincoln farm. He studied assiduously what 
 books he had, and before the firelight in the evening prac- 
 ticed compositions on the back of a wooden shovel, as well 
 as with pieces of chalk on the logs he shaved for the purpose. 
 He had to "knock off" school when there was any work on 
 the farm or in the woods that he could help to do, so that a 
 few months during a year or two in the log school house was 
 all the schooling he got at this time. Then the neighborhood 
 probably concluded it could not afford a school teacher, as 
 for several years we hear no more of Abe's being schooled: or 
 until he was fourteen, when Andrew Crawford taught for a 
 short time, and again when he was seventeen, when he 
 walked four miles to be instructed by one Swasey and be- 
 came proficient in spelling and composed several "composi- 
 tions" which were so highly considered that they were kept 
 in manuscript until they became a part of the history of a 
 Nation's martyr. He is said to have loved his books and 
 
Boyhood 29 
 
 made every effort to master the rudiments of an education. 
 
 Sarah Bush in later life reported that Abe's father thought 
 he wasted too much time over his books when out of school, 
 but that she persuaded him to let the boy read and study at 
 home, and that once reconciled to the unusual thing of a 
 backwoods boy having a real hunger for books, the elder 
 Lincoln encouraged the lad to apply himself to the tasks. 
 So it came to be a rule in the house that when Abe was at his 
 books he was not to be disturbed but left to read until he 
 quit of his own accord. 
 
 Like Shakespeare, with his Horn Book and the Bible, Lin- 
 coln in his school days had very few books, but they were 
 well worth while, the same Bible from which the poet of the 
 purple page drank such deep drafts, a spelling book with its 
 reading lessons culled from classic literature, and some les- 
 sons in arithmetic set down by the teacher. Few fountains, 
 but clear and deep. And in them his thirst for knowledge 
 found ever increasing satisfaction. 
 
 He was as fond of play and of rough and tumble sports as 
 any of the other boys of the neighborhood. He was very 
 much of a boy and liked to exercise a boy's privileges and 
 prerogatives. He worked, too, swinging his ax with the 
 woodsmen of experience. But his hunger for knowledge 
 caused him often to seem to loiter at his tasks. He would stop 
 work in the field to make a stump speech to the other workers 
 or stretch himself on the grass to commit a bit of poetry to 
 memory. This method of getting an education was so much 
 a part of his nature that it continued throughout his life. 
 When he was helping Offut to prepare a flat boat to carry 
 produce to New Orleans, his employer complained of his 
 stolqp moments for study and charged him with being lazy. 
 
 "I can work," replied the gawky Abe. "My father taught 
 me to work, but he did not teach me to love it." 
 
Chapter IV 
 
 YOUTH 
 
 YOUNG ABRAHAM shot up toward physical man- 
 hood with such remarkable rapidity as to cause 
 comment even among the group of frontiersmen 
 who might look for sturdy development among children 
 living altogether in the open. During his eleventh year he 
 gained two inches in height. He grew continually tall and 
 wiry until at the age of seventeen he stood six feet two in his 
 stockings, if he had any, which is doubtful. Buckskin 
 trousers, linsey-woolsey shirt, moccasins and a squirrel-skin 
 cap were his continual wear from childhood. He was always 
 grown out of his clothes so that his long arms and legs pro- 
 truded far beyond the sleeves and legs of his garments. He 
 had a bushy head of coal black hair, rugged features, deep- 
 set eyes, a large mouth, and big hands and feet. His physical 
 strength was prodigious for a boy. He early learned to use it 
 with skill in running and wrestling which made up most of 
 the sports of the rural community. 
 
 But life within this awkward frame had a rhythmical urge 
 and when it was stirred by emotion gave quickness, deftness 
 and a certain wild grace to the otherwise uncouth figure. 
 His nature was gentle and a hereditary melancholy gave a 
 winning sadness to his features which was one of the most 
 noticeable characteristics of his countenance. 
 
Youth 31 
 
 Labor with small return is the lot of pioneers. About him 
 the boy saw men and women slaving from daylight to dark 
 at clearing the forest, or tilling the small bits of land re- 
 claimed from the tangled skirts of wooded hillsides. With 
 few tools and no instruction they worked out their problems 
 of shelter, clothing and the culture of a wilderness. Constant 
 use of those primitive tools made them expert in applying 
 them to their necessities. The woodsman came finally to 
 swing an ax with the accuracy of a practiced swordsman. He 
 could fell a tree and leave no marks upon the separated trunk 
 other than the one smooth wound, cut with the certainty 
 and directness that marks the journey of a surgeon's knife. 
 He could hew to the line, planks for his puncheon floor. His 
 ax and he were inseparable, and the training of muscle and 
 mind to the unison required for so many thousand skillful 
 blows was an education on concentration, such as no college 
 curriculum can supply. 
 
 Abraham learned all these things, not from instruction but 
 from experience. He labored as the bee labors, or the ant, 
 not from love of labor but from the urge of necessity. Labor 
 became to him an element in the creation of a social scheme 
 of things. It was as necessary as breathing to life. And so 
 there came into his heart a realization of man's partnership 
 with Nature in the fields of production; not faint and far 
 away and shadowy, as it must have been, had his knowledge 
 come from reading books alone, but direct and clear, like the 
 stroke of his woodman's ax. 
 
 Such was the labor of the humble pioneer. Across the line 
 from the state in which he lived were other states in which 
 white men labored not at all; states in which labor was con- 
 sidered degrading and where it was done by slaves who saw 
 no beauty or utility in it, but only an escape from punish- 
 
32 Abraham Lincoln 
 
 ment. Across that border, so close that their cocks and dogs 
 might be mutually heard, white men rode in their carriages, 
 or upon their trained horses, followed the hounds while their 
 black slaves sweated to give them delicate food and rich 
 raiment. 
 
 About the crackling log fire of his father's cabin on long 
 winter nights young Lincoln heard stories of the splendor of 
 those southern mansions; their pride and elegance, their 
 worship of ancestry and their scorn of those of their own 
 color who were born to toil and to bear the burden of exist- 
 ence. He heard in those recitals the echo of the blows of the 
 lash upon the backs of human beings, and, as he afterwards 
 said, realized even then that a man who could believe such 
 things were not wrong must have a nature that could see the 
 lash cut into the back of another without feeling it upon 
 his own. 
 
 During these years his reading was enlarged by the addi- 
 tion of such books as" Robinson Crusoe," Bunyan's "Pilgrim's 
 Progress," a "History of the United States," and the "Life 
 of Washington." A Louisville newspaper came into the 
 neighborhood and this he scanned for reports of the world 
 beyond his ken. He scanned the pages of his dog-eared 
 "Arabian Nights" for the pleasure of journeys into the realm 
 of the mythical and legendary. 
 
 The life of labor by white men around him with its 
 drudgery and privations, its elements of actuality and indi- 
 vidual independence, forced into his growing mind compari- 
 sons with that of slave labor. This, together with the clear 
 statements of freedom and justice which enrich the pages of 
 every book he is known to have had in his hands from child- 
 hood to maturity, were woven into the fibres of his being. 
 The records tell of his passion for making addresses to his boy 
 
Youth 33 
 
 playmates upon every possible occasion. Such an evidence of 
 the urge of a boy's mind to utterance presages deep convic- 
 tion, however crude their expression. Macaulay writing 
 poetry at nine, and many other instances of such early de- 
 sires of genius to express itself, go far toward giving us an 
 understanding of Abraham Lincoln's mind at this time. 
 
 As a boy Lincoln recognized the dignity of free labor and 
 the insult to his own nature of American slavery. The feel- 
 ing of personal degradation from such an institution broad- 
 ened and deepened with the years. He ever maintained a 
 positive and unswerving attitude toward the right of every 
 man to the bread which is the product of his own labor. The 
 whole subject is thrown into one compact sentence in one of 
 his replies to Douglas who suggested that Lincoln proposed 
 a social equality of the races. 
 
 "I agree with Judge Douglas," he said, "that he (the 
 Negro) is not my equal in many respects — certainly not in 
 color, perhaps not in moral and intellectual endowments. 
 But in the right to eat the bread, without leave of anybody 
 else, which his hands earn, he is my equal, and the equal of 
 Judge Douglass, and the equal of every living man." 
 
 The question of labor as a political issue was not up in 
 Lincoln's time, as it has been since and as it is now, when it 
 is rapidly becoming the one mighty question, not only of our 
 country but of the whole world. Fundamentally Lincoln 
 founded his whole principle of the rights of man on labor. 
 He said plainly on two public occasions that, "Inasmuch as 
 most good things are produced by labor, it follows that all 
 such things ought to belong to those whose labor has pro- 
 duced them. But it has happened in all ages of the world 
 that some have labored, and others, without labor, have en- 
 joyed a large portion of the fruits. This is wrong and should 
 
34 Abraham Lincoln 
 
 not continue. To secure to each laborer the whole product of 
 his labor as nearly as possible is a worthy object of any good 
 government." 
 
 On his way to the Capitol for his first Inauguration, he was 
 surprised at Cincinnati by a delegation of two thousand 
 German workmen whose spokesman addressed him as the 
 champion of free homesteads, and concluded: 
 
 "We firmly adhere to the principles which directed our 
 votes in your favor. We trust that you, the self-reliant, be- 
 cause self-made man, will uphold the Constitution and the 
 laws against the secret treachery and avowed treason. If to 
 this end you should in turn be in need of men, the German 
 free workingmen, with others, will rise as one man at your 
 call ready to risk their lives in the effort to maintain the 
 victory already won by freedom over slavery." 
 
 In reply Lincoln said: "I deem it my duty to wait until the 
 last moment for the development of the present national 
 difficulties before I express myself decidedly as to what course 
 I shall pursue. I hope, then, not to be false to anything that 
 you expect of me." He agreed then that workingmen are the 
 basis of all government, and that a man's duty is " to improve 
 not only his own condition, but to assist in ameliorating the 
 conditions of mankind." So far as government lands could 
 be disposed of, he was, he said, "in favor of cutting up the 
 wild land into parcels, so that every poor man may have a 
 home." 
 
 In these two speeches he synthesized and vitalized the 
 labor problem; not of the individual, not of the State, not of 
 the separate States, but of the world, universally, just as he 
 had synthesized it in a direct way in the slave question with 
 the declaration that a man was entitled to eat the bread his 
 labor had produced. 
 
Youth 35 
 
 Compare with the broader vision of Lincoln, the labor 
 conditions of today with some labor leaders holding that the 
 separate labor union is a law unto itself, without taking into 
 consideration Lincoln's admonition that a man's duty is " to 
 improve his own condition but also to assist in ameliorating 
 the condition of mankind." 
 
Chapter V 
 
 ANHOOD 
 
 tjk T THE AGE of seventeen Lincoln was the tallest as 
 /vk well as the strongest man, physically, in all the coun- 
 1 jjk-try round. He was equally superior in intellect and 
 passion. He had mastered whatever books had come to 
 his hand, including stray books on the law. He had com- 
 posed an essay on American Government calling attention 
 to the necessity of preserving the Constitution. He had given 
 utterance to a pronouncement on temperance which won the 
 approbation as well as the wonder of a local preacher of re- 
 nown, and which found publication in an Ohio paper. He had 
 managed a ferry boat across the Ohio, which he afterward 
 declared to be the "toughest work a young man could be 
 made to do." The following year he made an excursion into 
 the outer world by way of a flatboat loaded with provisions, 
 down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers to New Orleans, re- 
 turning by steamboat and on foot across country, an adven- 
 ture of some moment among a people to whom a visit from 
 one settlement to another was considered a journey worth 
 recounting. He had felt the magnificence of the Father of 
 Waters as it bore him upon its bosom between its rugged 
 shores and past the far-stretched plantations that bordered 
 its swiftly broadening currents. He had had opportunity of 
 contrasting the humble life of frontier civilization under in- 
 
Manhood 37 
 
 dividual freedom with the busy hum of a metropolitan city 
 where only the few were free and the many were bound to 
 serfdom. 
 
 Of these experiences was born the desire for action inde- 
 pendent of restraint. He longed to strike out into the broad 
 world where he might try for himself those powers which he 
 felt already swelling in his bosom. But his loyalty to the code 
 that bound him to his father until his majority, held him 
 back. In his perplexity, halting between desire and duty, he 
 sought the advice of William Wood, a lawyer by whose per- 
 mission he had nosed among the few law books of which his 
 office boasted. His plan was to get a place on one of the boats 
 plying up and down the river. His lawyer friend. presented 
 the moral duty that rested on him to remain with his father 
 until he could legally strike, out for himself, or until his 
 parent had released him from his filial obligation. He re- 
 turned home seriously determined not to evade the claim 
 from which in a few months he would be finally released. 
 
 And now came to the little group of settlers of the logged- 
 off lands, wooing tales of a country farther west where there 
 were sun-kissed prairies whose splendid soil offered rich re- 
 turns to the husbandman. The call of the setting sun was in 
 the blood of Father Lincoln and in the year of the son's 
 majority the family moved from Indiana to a new home in 
 Macon County, Illinois. All the children had now grown to 
 man's and woman's estate. Two weddings had been cele- 
 brated in the family. Sarah Lincoln, the daughter, had been 
 married to Aaron Grigsby, a young man living in the vicin- 
 ity, and Mrs. Lincoln's daughter had left the Lincoln cabin 
 for a new home. The new families joined in the emigration. 
 Lincoln's sister, Sarah, died two years later in childbirth, 
 the second great grief that came to chasten the heart of the 
 lonely, studious son of the forest. 
 
38 Abraham Lincoln 
 
 From the deep woods of the Indiana home to the broad, 
 verdant prairie lands of central Illinois was a transition which 
 served to give new form and color to young Lincoln's aspira- 
 tions. Here were rolling prairies, gently wooded slopes, clear 
 water courses flashing in the sunlight, and rich soil needing 
 only the plow's shining blade to prepare it for the seeds and 
 fruits of husbandry. Dennis Hanks, a relative of Lincoln's 
 mother, had gone forward to reconnoiter and select the land, 
 and he had chosen a pleasing prospect on which the new 
 home was to be built. Having helped to complete the new 
 cabin and fence in a tract of the farm, Abraham Lincoln, 
 now twenty-one, stepped forth into the freedom he had 
 longed for. Separation from his home people meant a great 
 deal to him. He needed companions. From childhood he had 
 been intermittently retiring and social. Whatever he dis- 
 covered in his reading or play that carried laughter or wisdom 
 in its substance he hastened to deliver with his own inven- 
 tions to his friends. His whole life expressed his hunger for 
 companionship. He read books and practiced recitations in a 
 group of his boyhood friends just as afterwards he composed 
 the Gettysburg Address, on his way to the dedication. 
 
 What close companionship meant to Lincoln is shown in 
 every detail of his history that has been unearthed by his 
 biographers. As a child he sought to know everybody in his 
 neighborhood. The proprietor of the village store was his 
 confidant, the school teacher his friend and adviser, the 
 lawyer his model in speech and action. He learned all the 
 ballads current in the region and recited them over and over 
 to whomsoever would listen and wherever the slightest oppor- 
 tunity presented itself. From half melancholy moments of 
 retirement, or from poring over a school book or one of the 
 few works of the imagination which he knew, he would hurry 
 
Manhood 39 
 
 forth to seek an audience for his literary discoveries. His 
 natural aptitude for mimicry won him warm welcome in any 
 company, young or old. 
 
 And the friends he made he held without effort. 
 
 On each stage of his journey from his Kentucky birthplace 
 to his home in Illinois his faithful attendants are seen by his 
 side, and the procession moves with the directness of a Greek 
 tragedy toward its destined goal. Crude in construction, 
 homely in form, drawn by patient oxen over unbroken trails 
 through a wild, rough country, the creaking wagons that 
 held the few pieces of furniture and farming tools of the 
 Lincolns, the Grigsbys, the Hanks, could they have had the 
 illumination of prophecy, would have been shown as golden 
 chariots drawn by winged steeds directed by the spirit of 
 advancement. It required twenty-one years to move this 
 young Prince of Liberty from Kentucky to Illinois. But at 
 no period of the journey was he without those familiars who, 
 knowingly or unknowingly, bowed to his will and were as 
 faithful and as loyal to this young son of Nature, as ever 
 were courtiers to their best loved prince in the palace of the 
 King. 
 
 Homely indeed in reality those scenes of Lincoln's life from 
 childhood to majority, but strip them of their outward cover- 
 ing and view them in the light of the great events that fol- 
 lowed, grew out of them in fact, and no prince the world has 
 known had such gorgeous clouds trailing about him, nor such 
 great-hearted followers and companions as this awkward 
 youth in his linsey-woolsey shirt and buckskin trousers, who 
 found himself reflected in the hearts of what he was pleased 
 later to call the great plain people. 
 
 Nature builds with patient wisdom. Mountain peaks that 
 influence the air currents; lakes and rivers that bead the con- 
 
40 Abraham Lincoln 
 
 tinents, as well as those heroic figures that star the pages of 
 man's progress, are all monuments to the Supreme intelli- 
 gence of the Everlasting Builder of the Universe, with its 
 endless procession of harmonious wonders. 
 
 To the library student Abraham Lincoln must always seem 
 a baffiing puzzle. But to the divine Psalmist who saw the sun 
 as a bridegroom coming out of his chamber and rejoicing as a 
 strong man to run a race, he would have been accepted for 
 what he was, a universal man brought forth from the womb 
 of time, to fill an appointed place in the still unrevealed 
 Scheme of Things. The Andes and the Sierras were not laid 
 of carved stones with a trowel, but lifted mightily on the 
 wings of fire, amid the roar and tumult of forces that defy 
 the loftiest concepts of the imagination. 
 
 So too, was Abraham Lincoln created. Generations of an- 
 cestral struggle amid the privations and dangers of groups of 
 exiles, forming the foundations of a new civilization, were 
 present at his birth, and the fires that were to cause an 
 upheaval in that young Nation, and from the throes of which 
 it was to emerge to be the loftiest peak of human liberty, 
 threw a lurid light about the toddling footsteps of his 
 childhood. His young life was fed by primal forces stirring in 
 the hearts of those nearest and dearest to him. In plain 
 words and rugged oaths anti-slavery pioneers assailed his 
 ears with protests against an institution which not only held 
 the black men in bondage, but placed the products of free 
 labor and sacrifice in competition with the products of toil 
 that brought no reward to the toilers beyond the life of an ox 
 yoked to the plow and goaded to uttermost exertion. On such 
 food his soul was fed. On such food it grew toward that 
 sublime power and passion which found utterance in the 
 great proclamation which struck the shackles from the limbs 
 
Manhood 41 
 
 of four million slaves and set in motion a wave of liberty 
 which will not cease to spread in the souls of men until there 
 is no longer one bondman left to cry out against the injustice 
 of his fellow man. 
 
 Having grown and developed in this atmosphere of fellow- 
 ship, Lincoln's proposal to go alone into the world must have 
 required considerable determination, no matter how strong 
 the pull toward individual independence may have been. 
 He needed hourly companionship, and such companionship 
 as only those rough, honest friends whom he had known from 
 childhood could supply. Some prophetic whisper in his soul 
 must have informed him that in the work he was to be set to 
 do, he would have to find his strength in himself, for he seems 
 to have cut clear of all his former associates although his first 
 adventures were only a few miles from the paternal cabin. 
 
 He was trying his right to walk alone, and testing his abil- 
 ity to hold a steady pace with unsupported strides. The 
 difficulties he encountered, the disappointments he met with, 
 the failures which must have tried him sorely, and the final 
 tragedy of the great passion that tore his heartstrings up by 
 the roots and threatened reason itself, like furnace fires of 
 suffering, fitted his soul to bear its future burdens, as his boy- 
 hood struggles with physical nature had fitted his body to 
 bear the burdens of a Nation's woes and fight a Nation's 
 battles in the supreme test of democratic government. In the 
 years that followed he used the skill he had acquired from 
 experience in manual labor to supply the necessities of exist- 
 ence. All energies of mind and body beyond this were bent 
 on acquiring knowledge, on winning new followers to take 
 the place of those he had left at the old home, and in cutting 
 away the debris of luxuriance of expression from the state- 
 ments of naked truth, with the keen strokes of his intellect, 
 
42 Abraham Lincoln 
 
 as with the keen blade of his ax he had cut away the luxuri- 
 ance of the forest to bare the soil for husbandry. 
 
 Lincoln's methods for securing the ends he had in view 
 were as original and peculiar to himself as those of Nature. 
 Striking out, he did not hurry to some pretentious settle- 
 ment. He found food for his grazing near by. He did what- 
 ever work came to his hand, and it took him a whole year to 
 reach any sort of permanent home at New Salem. During this 
 time he read whatever books of history, government, ro- 
 mance, or philosophy he could lay hands on and made ora- 
 tions to audiences of unresponsive stumps or whispering 
 groves. 
 
 He made acquaintances which he won into close friend- 
 ships by his adaptability to their personalities and under- 
 standing. He moved among the rough and crude, using their 
 language, accepting their conventions and joining in their 
 sports and amusements. He did not shun evil but was never 
 tainted by it. He taught morals by applying the humors of 
 life to the false estimates of life. He used his physical strength 
 to win first place in the hearts of companies of border ruffians, 
 and followed this advantage to instil in their minds a respect 
 for fundamental truths with penetrating precision. His sym- 
 pathies were as broad and deep as his conceptions of life were 
 clean and wholesome. Wisdom grew with the practice of 
 wisdom. He soon discovered that in a trial of wit as in a trial 
 of strength he had no need to fear any immediate opponent. 
 
 So his reputation grew. And when Denton Offut, a local 
 promoter whose operations extended up and down the Sanga- 
 mon River, having a project on foot to build a flatboat and 
 send a stock of provisions to New Orleans, looked about for 
 some one to be captain of the adventure, he settled on Lin- 
 coln. Lincoln's previous journey to that city for a similar 
 
Manhood 43 
 
 purpose probably led Offut to his choice. With the help of 
 John Hanks and John Johnston, who came to join their 
 former boy companion in the enterprise, these three men, 
 skilled in making much with a few crude tools, completed 
 the boat, made the journey, and returned, the promoter 
 counting a fair profit on his investment. 
 
 It was during this visit to New Orleans that Lincoln is 
 said to have witnessed the public auction of a slave girl. John 
 Hanks furnished Herndon with the following account of it. 
 
 "One morning in our rambles over the city we passed a 
 slave auction. A vigorous and comely 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 
 down the room like a horse to show how she moved, and in 
 order, as the auctioneer said, that 'bidders might easily sat- 
 isfy 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, 'By God, boys, let's get away from this. If ever I get a 
 chance to hit that thing (meaning slavery) I'll hit it hard." 
 
 Returning to St. Louis by boat the party separated, Hanks 
 and Offut going to Springfield while Lincoln and Johnston 
 followed the road to Coles County, Illinois, to which point 
 Thomas Lincoln had moved. Having paid his paternal visit 
 and settled the pretentions of one Daniel Needham, a famous 
 wrestler who challenged the returned boatman to a test of 
 strength, Lincoln made his way again to New Salem. This 
 was in August, 1831. 
 
 A few days after Lincoln's arrival Offut put in an appear- 
 ance with the statement that he had a stock of merchandise 
 on the way from Beardstown. He immediately retained the 
 
44 Abraham Lincoln 
 
 services of Lincoln to assist him in marketing the goods when 
 they should arrive. The young adventurer put in the inter- 
 vening time making himself popular as a story teller, lending 
 ready assistance to any one having a difficult task on hand, 
 and devouring whatever printed matter fell under his observ- 
 ing eye. An election proceeding and Mentor Graham, a school 
 teacher of considerable learning, having the matter in charge, 
 noted Lincoln lingering near and asked him if he could write. 
 
 "I can make a few rabbit tracks," was the good-natured 
 reply. 
 
 He was put to work and proved such a careful and accurate 
 clerk that Graham became interested at once. During the 
 afternoon when things were dragging a little Lincoln enter- 
 tained the voters with stories which proved so palatable to 
 his audience that he was the center of an animated crowd for 
 the entire evening following the counting of the votes. 
 
 A few days later Lincoln was employed by Dr. Nelson, who 
 after the style of the dignitaries of later days, started with 
 his family for Texas in his "private conveyance" — which in 
 this instance was a flatboat, "The Texas. " Lincoln was hired 
 to pilot the vessel through the Illinois River. Arriving at 
 Beardstown the pilot was discharged and returned on foot 
 across the sand hills to New Salem. 
 
 OfFut's merchandise having arrived, Lincoln was placed 
 in charge. A country store in those days was the meeting 
 place of all the male gossips of the village. Lincoln generally 
 had an audience for his quaint fables and striking parables. 
 If they were not basically his own, his original phrasing, art 
 of mimicry and telling gestures made them so. Offut, a man 
 of loud activities, deep potations, but withal warm-hearted 
 and generous, was proud of the abilities of his talented clerk 
 and boasted without stint of his mental and physical prowess. 
 
Manhood 45 
 
 He challenged the world to combat in the name of Lincoln, 
 either in debate or in feats of strength and skill. It is a well- 
 established fact that Lincoln during this period, by the aid 
 of a harness he himself constructed of straps and ropes, lifted 
 a dead weight of 1,999 pounds. 
 
 At Clary's Grove lived a set of boys who were the terror of 
 the entire region. Such groups have ever been the natural 
 product of American frontier settlements. The Clary Grove 
 boys headed by Jack Armstrong took up the boastful chal- 
 lenge of Offut, and proposed a wrestling bout between Arm- 
 strong and Lincoln. Not without protest Lincoln finally 
 agreed to the match. He was now fully matured, stood six 
 feet four in his stockings, and weighed 234 pounds. Arm- 
 strong was bulky and strong as an ox. During the struggle 
 and when Lincoln was getting the best of the tussle, the 
 Clary Grove crowd broke into the ring and attempted foul 
 tactics to save their champion from defeat. This so enraged 
 Lincoln that he caught his antagonist by the throat, lifted 
 him bodily from the ground, shook him like a rag, and flung 
 him prostrate out of the ring. So impressed were the Clary 
 Grove boys with this exhibition of strength and the righteous 
 anger of the young wrestler, that they became at once his 
 advocates. From this time forward Armstrong was his warm 
 friend, and his wife Hannah, and all others of the Clary 
 Grove contingent welcomed the new champion to their circle. 
 They gave him loyal support in all his appeals to the public 
 and when he ran for office discarded their party affiliations 
 to give him their votes. Lincoln appreciated their friendship 
 and support and in after years proved his gratitude by sav- 
 ing one member of the Armstrong family from the gallows. 
 
 But neither the interests of the store nor the seductions of 
 athletic exhibitions could keep the young student from his 
 
46 Abraham Lincoln 
 
 books. His determination to have knowledge was the main- 
 spring of his being. He studied in season and out of season. 
 The store counter supplied him with a place to stretch his 
 long figure, and with a bolt of calico under his head and a 
 book before his face he made the lax hours of trade yield him 
 deep draughts of the best thought of the world. But true to 
 his boyhood habit, he was ever anxious to divide his mental 
 treasures with anyone who happened along. He read books 
 while he walked through the streets. He read them seated on 
 store boxes in the shadow of a building. His library was his 
 armpit and it was seldom without one or more volumes to 
 answer his needs. Following a suggestion of Mentor Graham 
 he hunted up one Vaner who was reputed to own a copy of 
 Kirkham's Grammar, and having secured the coveted vol- 
 ume began diligently to master the science of the English 
 language. He delved into Arithmetic also. And when Offut, 
 in the words of Lincoln, "petered out" and the store passed 
 into other hands, Lincoln continued in New Salem making 
 friends and gaining knowledge and wisdom after his own 
 original fashion. 
 
 In the spring of 1832, New Salem was thrilled with the 
 news that a steamboat was on its way down the Sangamon. 
 The navigability of this river was one of the live questions of 
 the day in that part of the country, and the people of Spring- 
 field and New Salem made great preparations to welcome the 
 coming of Captain Vincent Bogue's "Talisman," as the boat 
 was named, and which the enterprising captain was bringing 
 from Cincinnati. On the day of her arrival all the people 
 round and about New Salem were gathered to make fitting 
 demonstration of joy. The boat tied up at Bogue's mill and 
 there was much cheering, songs, speeches and general rejoic- 
 ing. Lincoln, who with a company of axmen had cleared the 
 
Manhood 47 
 
 branches from over the stream, took advantage of the occa- 
 sion to increase his acquaintance and popularity. And while 
 the steamboat was destined to destruction at the end of the 
 voyage and the navigation of the Sangamon finally aban- 
 doned, the theme served Lincoln for campaign material a 
 year later, when he made his race for a seat in the State 
 Legislature. 
 
Chapter VI 
 
 PURIFYING FIRES 
 
 THE EXCITEMENT occasioned by the arrival and 
 departure of the Talisman had hardly subsided when 
 the Black Hawk War broke out and Lincoln was 
 chosen Captain of a company of volunteers to combat the 
 wily old Indian Chieftain. It was his first official trust and 
 he prized the distinction to its full worth. His company was 
 composed of the Clary Grove boys and others of their ilk, 
 wild young fellows unused to discipline of any kind, and the 
 young and inexperienced captain found them difficult to 
 manage. Through their disregard of law he met the first 
 public humiliation of his career. A number of the recruits one 
 night broke into the quarters of the regular army officers and 
 carried off by stealth a goodly supply of wines and liquors 
 which they drank during the night. Morning found them 
 unable to resume their march. An investigation followed, and 
 their innocent captain was condemned to wear a wooden 
 sword for two days, because of their escapade. What chagrin 
 this undeserved disgrace must have cost the temperamental 
 Lincoln can be imagined, but he bore it with dignified calm 
 however deep his resentment. 
 
 During this campaign Lincoln suffered a second humilia- 
 tion at the hands of Soldier Thompson, who managed to 
 throw him twice in succession. A footrace between the two 
 
Purifying Fires 49 
 
 followed in which Lincoln was also defeated. The overthrow 
 of their Captain champion did not lessen the confidence of 
 his men in him. They gave him obedience and respect in full, 
 something regular army officers were unable to win from 
 them, no matter what the occasion. 
 
 An incident of this campaign of which Lincoln was the 
 central figure, was prophetic of his conduct under many 
 similar but far more trying circumstances later in life. An old 
 Indian, hungry and helpless, strayed into camp. The volun- 
 teers were for killing him at once, notwithstanding the fact 
 that the savage produced a letter from General Cass, recom- 
 mending him for his past kind and faithful services to the 
 Whites. They pilloried him as a spy and were bent on making 
 an example of him. They might have put their threats into 
 execution had not their tall Captain appeared upon the 
 scene. Becoming aware of their purpose, Lincoln, his face 
 swarthy with resolution and rage, interposed between them 
 and their intended victim. Lincoln's determined look and 
 demand that, "It must not be done," obtained obedience. 
 But one of the volunteers, bolder than his fellows, cried out: 
 "This is cowardly on your part, Mr. Lincoln." 
 
 The Captain, towering in lonely power, answered directly: 
 "If any man thinks I am a coward let him test it." And there 
 were none to take up the challenge. 
 
 The grateful Indian was released, and Lincoln's authority 
 established. 
 
 The volunteers were finally discharged and Lincoln, with 
 the others, returned to New Salem just before the state elec- 
 tion. During their campaign against the Indians, the volun- 
 teers had declared Lincoln should be their candidate for the 
 Legislature and he was accordingly presented for that posi- 
 tion by almost the entire community. He had the friendship 
 
50 Abraham Lincoln 
 
 of the neighborhood and the few mishaps of his career as a 
 soldier had only aroused their sympathy. Lincoln allied him- 
 self with the Whig organization and championed its prin- 
 ciples. His opponents were Jackson men. But party lines were 
 not closely drawn in New Salem. The man rather than the 
 Party must have their allegiance. In his first speech of the 
 campaign and just as he was beginning his address, a fight 
 was started. Lincoln, seeing a friend getting worsted in the 
 row, hurried from the platform, grasped the offender and 
 threw him ten feet away. Returning to his station he deliv- 
 ered the following address: 
 
 "Gentlemen and Fellow Citizens: I presume you all know 
 who I am. I am humble Abraham Lincoln. I have been so- 
 licited by many friends to become a candidate for the Legis- 
 lature. My politics are short and sweet like the old woman's 
 dance. I am in favor of a national bank. I am in favor of the 
 internal improvement system and a high protective tariff. 
 These are my sentiments and political principles. If elected I 
 shall be thankful; if not, it will be all the same." 
 
 Here at the threshold of his entrance to public life, occa- 
 sion staged a little drama that symbolizes much that is to 
 come. One hour meditation; the next action and utterance. 
 That was Lincoln, boy and man. At the outset of his career he 
 avowed his principles and except that events broadened and 
 deepened their application, they remained the same to the 
 day of his death. 
 
 Lincoln was a product of his times. Judge Logan who knew 
 him well, gives the following testimony concerning him at 
 this period: 
 
 "He was very tall, gawky, and a rough looking fellow then; 
 his pantaloons didn't meet his shoes by six inches. But after 
 he began speaking I became very much interested in him. He 
 
Purifying Fires 51 
 
 made a very sensible speech. His manner was very much the 
 same as in after life; that is, the same peculiar characteristics 
 were apparent then, though of course in after years he 
 evinced more knowledge and experience. But he had then the 
 same novelty and the same peculiarity in presenting ideas. 
 Hehad thesame individuality that he kept through all his life." 
 
 Early in this campaign Lincoln issued a political circular, 
 his first written address to the public. It contains abundant 
 evidence of close thinking, political sagacity and quaint 
 utterance. It is a sober production expressing thoughts that 
 go straight to the heart. The same lucidity of thought and 
 directness of style, which marks his greatest State Papers, is 
 discernible here. The address deals mainly with the navigabil- 
 ity of the Sangamon River, a subject dear to the hearts of his 
 constituents, and just then materially emphasized by the 
 recent arrival of the steamboat Talisman. 
 
 At this period he proclaimed the doctrine that the repre- 
 sentative of the people should reflect the views of his con- 
 stituency. He advocated legislation against usury. In con- 
 clusion, he maintained that he might be wrong with regard to 
 any or all the subjects he discussed, declaring that it was 
 better only sometimes to be right than to be wrong altogether, 
 and said he was ready to renounce his opinions as soon as he 
 discovered they were erroneous. 
 
 "Every man," he observed, "is said to have his peculiar 
 ambition. Whether this is true or not, I can say for one that I 
 have no other so great as that of being truly esteemed by my 
 fellow men, by rendering myself worthy of their esteem." 
 
 His entire philosophy of life, here and hereafter, might 
 have been expressed in a single line of che homely poem, 
 "Jim Bludsoe" by John Hay: "He never lied and he never 
 flunked, I rekon he never know'd how." 
 
52 Abraham Lincoln 
 
 His appeals were never addressed to reason alone but 
 always to the whole man : reason, sympathy, love. He said at 
 this time, "Should the people in their wisdom see fit to keep 
 me in the background, I have been too familiar with dis- 
 appointment to be very much chagrined." 
 
 Already the shadow of impending tragedy seems to have 
 fallen upon his sensitive soul. Already he was taking up the 
 burden of the fardel-bearing who "grunt and sweat under 
 life's weary load." Already something of the Isaiah in his 
 nature had caused him, at the age of twenty-three, to be 
 christened "Old Abe." 
 
 The results of the election added another to the recent 
 defeats that had followed one another in quick succession. 
 But those who knew him best gave him unalloyed support. 
 Out of a total of 300 votes cast in the Precinct of New Salem, 
 where he was an intimate figure, Lincoln received 277. 
 Politicians noted this popularity among his fellows, and it no 
 doubt proved of value to Lincoln in future political specula- 
 tions, but just then it was a blow upon the heart. How much 
 he felt it was shown, when many years after the public had 
 forgotten it, he gave details of the election and said with 
 ardent pride that it was the only time he had "ever been 
 beaten on a direct vote of the people." 
 
 Lincoln's next step into the field of labor and accumulating 
 knowledge, was as a surveyor. John Calhoun, a stalwart 
 Democrat, selected the young Whig as his assistant, and 
 securing books, Lincoln retired to study. Six weeks applica- 
 tion gave him such mastery of the science that he carried on 
 the work with surprising success and exactitude. He was also 
 made Postmaster at New Salem, a position that gave him 
 opportunities of reading the papers that came to subscribers 
 of the district. He is said to have carried the Postofrice 
 
Purifying Fires 53 
 
 around in his hat. At least he made it a point of being letter 
 carrier to those who were on his surveying routes, and so he 
 became the author as well as the active agent in perhaps the 
 first rural mail route established in this government. With all 
 this activity, Lincoln's apparent leisurely method of doing 
 things increased the impression that he was a lazy man. 
 
 Squire Goodby, a local celebrity, recounts the following 
 incident: 
 
 "The first time I saw Abe with a law book in his hand he 
 was sitting astride Jake Dale's woodpile in New Salem. 
 
 "Says I, 'Abe, what are you studying?' 
 
 "'Law/ says Abe. 
 
 "'Great God Almighty!' I cried, and left him there." 
 
 For three or four years Lincoln continued his New Salem 
 activities, all the time reading law. He wrote deeds and con- 
 tracts and other legal papers at the call of any citizen, and 
 often appeared before the local Justice of the Peace. All this 
 service was free. He was as indefatigable in gaining experi- 
 ence as he was in showing his appreciation of the genuine 
 friendship and support accorded him. Even when he moved 
 to Springfield, his New Salem friends found his counsel ever 
 at their disposal. His door was open to poverty and riches. 
 His study of the law widened his sympathies and his useful- 
 ness. He was building for the future, slowly, solidly, and 
 better than he knew. 
 
 During these years of the pursuit of knowledge under cir- 
 cumstances of the most discouraging kind, Lincoln had 
 accepted every offer made him for work that would keep him 
 in food and clothes. He had clerked in the New Salem stores, 
 been for a time a partner in one of them, and when the 
 business failed, because of the dissolute habits of his partner, 
 refused to take advantage of bankruptcy proceedings and 
 
54 Abraham Lincoln 
 
 gave his note for the future payment of all their obligations. 
 Under a load of poverty and debt, bound by native instincts 
 to integrity and honor, ambitious for preferment, but still 
 unknown outside of the small neighborhood of New Salem, 
 it may well be conceived that the future looked to him a 
 rough and rugged road. 
 
 Lincoln faced his difficulties with uncomplaining fortitude. 
 He proclaimed himself a son of the soil. He shared whatever 
 learning, either of literature or of law that he had acquired, 
 with the humblest of his acquaintances. He was one of the 
 most social souls that God ever made, seeking always an 
 outlet for his emotions in the company of others. 
 
 Ann Rutledge was easily the most attractive girl in New 
 Salem. Her father, James Rutledge, was one of the founders 
 of the town. He was a native of Kentucky, warm-hearted, 
 social, generous and hospitable. Besides himself, his family 
 consisted of nine children, three of whom were born in Ken- 
 tucky. Ann was the third child, a girl of winning personality 
 and with some pretentions to education. Quick of apprehen- 
 sion, industrious, an excellent housekeeper, with a quick wit 
 and great gayety of spirit, she shone with lonely brightness 
 in her crude surroundings. 
 
 It is not known just when Lincoln's natural liking for so 
 responsive a companion grew into love. She had many suitors 
 for her hand. But the humorous, studious, toiling, homely 
 young hero of the town could but have held a warm place in 
 her affections. The only rival Lincoln had to fear was John 
 McNeil, a rather dashing young adventurer from the East. 
 Sometimes she seemed to favor one and sometimes the other 
 of her special admirers. Lincoln's wooing must have been of a 
 homely fashion. He was well aware of his awkward body and 
 homely features. But once his heart was set on an idea he 
 
Purifying Fires 55 
 
 never despaired of finally making it his own. And so he 
 played the cavalier in the primitive way upon every favor- 
 able occasion. 
 
 For a long time it seemed that Lincoln was the favored 
 suitor. Perhaps had he pressed his suit at the proper time his- 
 tory might have been greatly changed; but having no means 
 to support a wife, it is quite certain that Lincoln was not the 
 man to hasten a marriage that might cause distress and 
 privation to the woman of his choice. 
 
 So it came about that the more persistent wooer won the 
 pledge of Ann Rutledge to become his wife. When the village 
 gossips made it known that Ann Rutledge was going to 
 marry McNeil, Lincoln's mournful countenance gave little 
 evidence of the bolt that had pierced his heart. He only re- 
 tired farther into his books, or sought, with bolder recitals to 
 his comrades, to dispel the gloom that was settling over his 
 soul. 
 
 McNeil announced his intention of going East to look after 
 his parents and to bring them back to the settlement. He con- 
 fessed to Ann that he had been living at New Salem under an 
 assumed name, in order to be free from his relatives until he 
 had made enough money to take care of them. He left New 
 Salem for New York State going overland with horse and 
 buggy. And that was the last New Salem heard of him for 
 many months. The plainspoken villagers were not long in 
 declaring that he had played the roving gallant with Ann and 
 deserted her outright. But she would not believe them and 
 remained faithful to the absent lover. 
 
 When Lincoln knew she was much alone and sorrowing, he 
 sought her side and offered his consolations. He told her of 
 his great love for her and asked her to be his wife. But she 
 held firm to her determination to await word from McNeil. At 
 
56 Abraham Lincoln 
 
 last her patience was rewarded. A letter came in which 
 McNeil told of sickness, of rinding his father ill, and of 
 business that held him at the old home. Letters passed 
 between them, hers warm with affection and trust, his grow- 
 ing ever more prosaic and cold. At last she felt herself de- 
 serted and listened once more to Lincoln's pleadings. As the 
 days went by her spirits returned. Her cheeks once more took 
 on their roseate hue, her eyes their old time brightness. But 
 there was a forced gayety in her demeanor which told of a 
 rooted sorrow, a secret grief which no assumed joyousness 
 could disguise. Then she fell ill. For weeks she lingered, con- 
 sumed by fever. Lincoln was not allowed to see her, although 
 she often called his name. At last one day, when she had been 
 unusually insistent to see him, he was admitted. The door 
 was closed and he remained for nearly an hour. 
 
 When he came out there was a deeper grief in his deepset 
 eyes, and his shoulders seemed to bear an invisible burden. 
 What passed between them during that momentous hour 
 never will be known. What confidences, what longings, what 
 bursts of passion, what confessions, only He to Whom the 
 secrets of all hearts are known holds that tragic secret. A few 
 days afterward Ann Rutledge passed away. 
 
 She was buried in Concord Graveyard, some distance from 
 New Salem, and Lincoln was left with a breaking heart to 
 mourn for her who had inspired in him that great passion for 
 which men have thrown away kingdoms and women their 
 very hope of immortality. 
 
 With Ann Rutledge seemed to go out all the life and light 
 of the world for Lincoln. After his last interview with her he 
 changed so rapidly that his friends feared for his reason. One 
 of Mrs. Rutledge's brothers said afterward that the effect 
 upon Lincoln's mind was terrible. "He became plunged in 
 
Purifying Fires 57 
 
 despair. He had fits of mental depression, wandered up and 
 down the river and into the woods communing with himself, a 
 gloomy and distracted soul. To one friend he complained that 
 the thought that the "snows and rains fall upon her grave" 
 filled him with indescribable grief. 
 
 His condition finally became so alarming that his friends 
 consulted together and sent him to the house of a kind 
 friend, Bowlin Green, who lived in a secluded spot behind the 
 hills. Here, says Herndon, he remained for weeks under the 
 watchful eye of his noble friend who gradually brought him 
 back to reason, at least to a realization of his true condition. 
 In the years that followed, Lincoln never forgot the kindness 
 of Green through those weeks of suffering and peril. 
 
 In 1842, when the latter died, and Lincoln was selected by 
 the Masonic Lodge to deliver the funeral oration, he broke 
 down in the midst of his address, his voice choked with deep 
 emotion, he stood for some moments while his lips quivered 
 in the effort to form the words of fervent praise he sought to 
 utter, and the tears ran down his cheeks. Every heart was 
 hushed at the spectacle. After repeated efforts he found it 
 impossible to speak and strode away. 
 
 In the field of ambition he had thrice been chastened. In a 
 fateful moment he had met an antagonist who overcame him 
 in feats of physical strength and skill. Through the wild out- 
 lawry of his volunteer followers, he had been disgraced in the 
 eyes of the regular army of the United States, and on his first 
 appeal for the suffrage of his fellowmen, he had been def- 
 initely beaten at the polls. The deeper currents of his life's 
 emotions had thrice been stirred to their depths by the death 
 of women. His boyhood eyes had seen his gentle mother laid 
 in her lonely woodland grave. His companion sister had gone 
 the same dark way. And now death had laid his cold and 
 
58 Abraham Lincoln 
 
 stilling fingers upon her whose worth and beauty had brought 
 him the supreme passion, only to be uprooted, leaving his 
 heart a barren waste of desolation and despair. 
 
 God indeed moves in a mysterious way. In the purifying 
 fires of shattered hopes and woeful separations all the grosser 
 elements of his nature were burned and purged away, and 
 Lincoln emerged from the ordeal with an eye single to the 
 sufferings and woes of mankind. Every man who has accom- 
 plished any great achievement, has first gone down into the 
 Valley of the Shadow of Death. Sorrow, bitterness, defeat, 
 and disaster are the steps by which we climb up to the throne 
 of the Great God. 
 
 How blessed are the troubles of mankind, how upbuilding 
 in individual character are the defeats we meet on Life's high- 
 way! Welcome trouble, welcome defeat, and disaster if they 
 bring to us in fuller measure the understanding of the fact 
 that the joy of life is in giving and the enthusiasm of life is in 
 serving. 
 
 Then, welcome each rebuff 
 
 That turns earth's smoothness rough, 
 
 Each sting that bids nor sit nor stand, but go! 
 Be our joys three-parts pain! 
 
 Strive, and hold cheap the strain; 
 
 I earn, nor account the pang; dare, never grudge the 
 throe! 
 
Chapter VII 
 
 CONQUERING HIMSELF 
 
 THE QUALITIES of sympathy, simplicity, directness 
 of statement and a sort of melancholy good humor 
 which made him a story teller of the first order, made 
 Lincoln the hero of New Salem; and his success as a sur- 
 veyor, and evident love and appreciation of the law, carried 
 his fame to other neighborhoods. 
 
 The Whigs gave him support as one of their candidates for 
 the Legislature of 1 834, and he was elected. During the ses- 
 sion he was content to occupy a modest place, absorbing, as 
 was his wont, knowledge of law making and legislative pro- 
 cedure. He took the measure of his associates and found 
 himself not their inferior in general knowledge and the prac- 
 tice of it. After two scant years of public life he was con- 
 sidered one of the leaders of his Party. No longer waiting 
 on the advice of friends he offered himself as a candidate for 
 renomination. He initiated his campaign with the following 
 political pronouncement: 
 
 "To the Editor of the Journal: In your paper of last Satur- 
 day I see a communication over the signature of 'Many 
 Voters/ in which the candidates who are announced in The 
 Journal are called upon to 'show their hands/ Agreed. Here's 
 mine. 
 
 "I go for all sharing privileges of the Government who 
 
60 Abraham Lincoln 
 
 assist in bearing its burdens. Consequently I go for admitting 
 all Whites to the right of suffrage who pay taxes or bear 
 arms, by no means excluding women. 
 
 "If elected, I shall consider the whole people of Sangamon 
 my constituents, as well those that oppose as those that 
 support me. 
 
 "While acting as their Representative, I shall be governed 
 by their will on all subjects upon which I have the means of 
 knowing what their will is; and upon all others I shall do 
 what my judgment teaches me best to advance their inter- 
 ests. Whether elected or not, I go for distributing the pro- 
 ceeds of the sales of public lands to the several states, to 
 enable our state, in common with others, to dig canals and 
 construct railroads without borrowing money and paying 
 interest on it. 
 
 "If alive on the first Monday in November, I shall vote 
 for Hugh L. White for President. 
 
 " Respectfully, 
 
 A. Lincoln." 
 
 The campaign was hot and strenuous. The prairies saw de- 
 bates as vigorous and important, if not as dignified, as those 
 of the Senate. Early in the campaign Lincoln spoke at Spring- 
 field. Among his auditors was a Mr. Forquer, who had the 
 finest house in Springfield, lately protected by the only 
 lightning rod in that locality. Formerly a Whig, his apostacy 
 was awarded with a lucrative office. He felt Lincoln's strong 
 presentation of the principles of the Whig Party. The recent 
 recruit to the Democratic organization replied to Lincoln in 
 a speech of some argument, but filled with scorn and satire. 
 Lincoln responded, in a manner related by Speed as char- 
 acterized by so great dignity and force that he would never 
 forget the conclusion of that speech. 
 
Conquering Himself 61 
 
 "Mr. Forquer commenced his speech," said Lincoln, "by- 
 announcing that the young man would be taken down. It is 
 for you, fellow citizens, not for me, to say whether I am up 
 or down. The gentleman has seen fit to allude to my being a 
 young man; but he forgets that I am older in years than I am 
 in the tricks and trades of Politicians. I desire to live, and I 
 desire place and distinction, but I would rather die now than, 
 like the gentleman, live to see the day that I would change 
 my politics for an office worth $3,000 a year, and then feel 
 compelled to erect a lightning rod to protect a guilty con- 
 science from an offended God." 
 
 Lincoln did not fling away ambition but ennobled it. With 
 patient footsteps he unrestingly followed the vision of higher 
 place along the road of helpful service to his fellowmen. Years 
 passed, times changed. Events of which he could not have 
 dreamed crowded his stage with giant actors moved by the 
 clashing of tremendous forces of which he was the central 
 figure. His hands held the power of the Nation, but through 
 it all his conduct was governed by these same simple rules 
 he gave at the outset of his career. His words multiplied, his 
 deeds grew many and of first importance, but in the core of 
 each were the seeds of human sympathy and justice. 
 
 Lincoln was now launched upon a public career. He loved 
 popularity and knew how to win it. No public man of any 
 period has shown a more comprehensive knowledge of human 
 nature than Abraham Lincoln. He knew the thoughts of the 
 people of his state better than they knew them. He abhorred 
 sham and pretension and loved to submit it to the revealing 
 light of humorous satire. He was easily re-elected to the 
 Legislature at this time and remained in the House as long 
 as he felt it to be to his advantage, and so long as he felt that 
 his duty to the public demanded it. 
 
62 Abraham Lincoln 
 
 While he was in the Legislature he became an aggressive 
 champion of the Public Improvement Policy, which con- 
 templated great expenditures of state funds for waterways 
 and railroads. Although the day for those improvements had 
 not arrived and the bonds issued by the state for their con- 
 struction became a menace to the conscience of the people 
 who talked seriously of repudiation, the improvements which 
 Lincoln saw in his mind's eye have all come about and are 
 greatly extended today, both by private and public means. 
 Even the canal which the Lincoln group of legislators at 
 Springfield conceived and advocated to connect the Illinois 
 River with Lake Michigan, is now one of the proud boasts of 
 modern engineering and operates just as Lincoln said it 
 would. Financial panics in 1837-38 caused such a deprecia- 
 tion in the Illinois State Bonds that the folly of the previous 
 Legislature was made a campaign issue. But the people re- 
 turned the men who had advocated the public improvements. 
 
 The burning of a negro in St. Louis and the murder of 
 Lovejoy at Alton for his abolition utterances forced all others 
 questions into abeyance, and made it necessary for every 
 man before the public in Illinois to take sides in the contro- 
 versy. 
 
 The State Capitol had been moved to Springfield from 
 Vandalia during the previous session of the Legislature, prin- 
 cipally through the efforts of Lincoln and his followers, 
 known as the "Long Nine" from Sangamon, each of the 
 rugged statesmen measuring above six feet and weighing 
 more than 200 pounds. Lincoln, too, had left his New Salem 
 home for residence at the Capitol. There domiciled with his 
 friend Speed in a room over his store, the law firm of Stuart 
 and Lincoln having been formed, Lincoln soon became as 
 conspicuous a figure in this aristocratic center, as he had been 
 
Conquering Himself 63 
 
 in New Salem, where social life was in a way measured by 
 the opinions of the Clary Grove boys. Here were wealthy 
 families whose heads boasted the best blood of Kentucky and 
 Virginia. Lincoln gives a characteristic picture of the spirit 
 of the city of that day in a private letter, in which he ex- 
 presses a doubt of anyone who could not afford to live in 
 them being satisfied in the surroundings. 
 
 "I am afraid you would not be satisfied," he writes. 
 "There is a great deal of flourishing about in carriages here, 
 which it would be your doom to see without sharing in it." 
 
 No doubt this expresses his own emotions, born of com- 
 paring his humble state with that of the society of which his 
 official position compelled him to be a part. Like Burns and 
 Shakespeare, he had no respect for the outward show of 
 honor or distinction, yet he felt with extreme keenness the 
 insolence of office and the spurns that patient merit of the 
 unworthy takes. 
 
 His complex nature required the spur of some mighty ques- 
 tion of human rights to be aroused to definite action, but 
 when face to face with such a problem his decision was deter- 
 mined and uncompromising. He might lend a ready hand at 
 political "log-rolling" in an affair that promised results in 
 conformity to the demands of his constituents, and wherein 
 the result could have no bearing on the fundamental prin- 
 ciples of right and justice. He might adopt, or even invent, a 
 political situation which would draw his opponents to his 
 support or confound them quite; but let the matter pass over 
 from political expediency to a point where the decision re- 
 quired an application of justice and the welfare of humanity, 
 either singly or in groups, and he would cut away all extran- 
 eous matter, wherever the chips might fall, to present the 
 elemental truth and to uphold it at all hazards. 
 
64 Abraham Lincoln 
 
 It is hard to realize at this distant day and under the 
 present state of Government of the United States, with its 
 generally acknowledged conviction that negro slavery was a 
 colossal mistake from every point of view, the passions 
 aroused in the two decades preceding the Civil War, from the 
 discussion of that question. The year 1837 is the culmination 
 of the first period of Abolitionism in Illinois. The fiery pro- 
 tests of the few advanced liberators of New England had 
 aroused equal passions among the advocates of slavery all 
 along the border line. Illinois was the home of the people from 
 both sections of the country. Emigrants from the Northern 
 Atlantic States and emigrants from Kentucky, Virginia and 
 the Carolinas had banked up at the confluence of the several 
 waterways which emptied into the Mississippi. One portion 
 of the population of this new state, and by far the larger, did 
 not distinguish between the men who stole horses and the 
 men who helped runaway Negroes to safety. Anti-slavery 
 men were regarded as robbers, disturbers of the peace, en- 
 couragers of defiance to the Constitution. The few who stood 
 opposed to this opinion were as passionately radical in their 
 declarations concerning the slave owners. There was a large 
 number of Conservatists who took no part in these contro- 
 versies. They had no sympathy with slavery for the North, 
 but were content to leave it as it was in the states where 
 negro labor was thought to be the only solution to a peculiar 
 state of society which had grown up under it. 
 
 It was not the question of man's freedom to work or not to 
 work, that formed the initial declaration of principles which 
 grew at last into the Emancipation, but the question of man's 
 right to utter his opinions on any subject without molesta- 
 tion. The destruction of the Lovejoy printing plant and the 
 murder of Lovejoy gave vitality to the protest against the 
 
Conquering Himself 65 
 
 restrictions of free speech. This was a subject of universal 
 appeal. It found ready response in every city and hamlet of 
 the land. It madeLovejoy's murder an attempt upon a liberty 
 dearest to the heart of all men. It attacked then, as it attacks 
 today, the very seat and soul of representative government. 
 It proposed then, as it proposes today, to cut out the tongue 
 of Truth and to make dumb the Goddess of Justice. 
 
 Quick to see this weak point in the enemy's attack, the 
 anti-slave forces rallied to the defence of free speech. In the 
 face of an institution demanding mob power and the sacrifice 
 of priceless principles, the Abolitionists performed a whole- 
 some public service in contending that then more than ever, 
 liberty of discussion should be protected, maintained and 
 hallowed. 
 
 In the midst of this trembling of elemental forces presag- 
 ing the mighty upheaval which was to follow, Lincoln sud- 
 denly emerges from a politician with local aims, to a states- 
 man with the Union for a stage, and the universal rights of 
 man for his theme. Those long hours of meditation, those 
 continued humiliations, those years of self abnegation, those 
 shocks of personal grief, those heart pangs for the griefs of 
 others, all blossomed and bore fruit under the tropic heat 
 of a whole Nation aroused to sectional hatred. Not that he 
 was swept off his feet by the surge of that tumultuous sea of 
 uncontrolled passion that surged over the country. He had 
 learned in the school of experience to be master of himself. 
 He had come a long journey from that Kentucky cabin 
 where he was born to this Capitol of sturdy and ambitious 
 Illinois. Not a step of that arduous way but had been hewn 
 through the forest of difficulty. Achieving intellectual 
 power, he had learned to conserve it. Fearful of his own 
 wrath when aroused, he had put a net of steel about his 
 
66 Abraham Lincoln 
 
 emotions. Seeking guidance for his own complex nature, 
 he had found the vision that made the government of other 
 men an action of understanding. 
 
 Now when occasion called, he was ready. The solemnity of 
 the hour summoned heroic utterance. But it must be the 
 utterance of reason inspired by experience, not by passion. 
 Lincoln knew that every attempt upon the part of mankind 
 to suppress ideals by laws or edicts of man, has been and 
 must be a failure. He knew that the hemlock, the tower, the 
 rack, the fagot and the cross had been proved ineffectual to 
 still the voice of Truth. He knew that the only method which 
 can be successfully used to combat any propaganda is the 
 substitution of a new and better ideal. He knew that the 
 laws which the Creator had laid upon the breast of Nature 
 were as enduring as Nature herself; that the judgments of 
 the Lord are true and righteous altogether. He knew that if 
 the Lovejoy murder was to be avenged, it must be through 
 the establishment of the principle of free government, as 
 much for the freedom of the mind as for the body; as much 
 for the owner of the slave as for the slave. 
 
 It was no idle vaunt that had stirred him to the declaration 
 that if ever he had a chance to strike at slavery he would hit 
 it hard. Occasion offered. The time had come. The Legisla- 
 ture of which he was a member, instead of branding the 
 murder of Lovejoy in 1837, ignored the blow thereby struck 
 at mankind — the right of White and Black to utter their 
 convictions — and hastened to pass resolutions of sympathy 
 with slavery. It was Lincoln's opportunity and he embraced 
 it bravely. He was no longer an unknown laborer of an ob- 
 scure settlement. He was widely known and rapidly becom- 
 ing distinguished for his services as a political leader. And 
 with that rare insight into the heart of an event, which never 
 
Conquering Himself 67 
 
 afterward failed him in any great emergency, he spoke the 
 words that put human slavery to the test, not only of morals 
 but of expediency. 
 
 He wrote and introduced a resolution which proclaimed 
 his protest against the House Resolutions. Only one other 
 man of that body signed the protest, Dan Stone, of Sanga- 
 mon, and his daring in following Lincoln in his dissent will 
 save him from the oblivion that has already enshrouded those 
 who voted for the original resolution. The dissenting resolu- 
 tion, spread upon the Records of the House, was the still 
 small voice that finally grew, until it assailed the ears of an 
 aroused Nation: 
 
 "They believe that the institution of slavery is founded on 
 both injustice and bad policy, but that the promulgation of 
 abolition doctrines tends rather to increase than to abate 
 the evil. 
 
 "They believe that the Congress of the United States has 
 the power, under the Constitution, to abolish slavery in the 
 District of Columbia, but that the power ought not to be 
 exercised unless at the request of the people of the District. 
 
 "The difference between these opinions and those con- 
 tained in the said resolutions is their reason for entering this 
 protest. 
 
 "Dan Stone 
 "A. Lincoln 
 * 'Representatives of the County of Sangamon." 
 
 The wisdom of Lincoln was never better exemplified than 
 in these resolutions. He laid down in the first clause the axiom 
 dear to his heart that slavery was wrong; but with it he 
 coupled truth no less vital to the institutions of government, 
 that it was bad policy. Admirable reasoning, superb diplo- 
 macy! Here was "log-rolling" carried to the fourth dimen- 
 
68 Abraham Lincoln 
 
 sion. In two words he cleared the question of slavery of all 
 sentiment and held it up to the gaze of all practical men as a 
 menace to their legitimate ambitions. He did not ask them 
 to sympathize with the Negro. He asked them to consider 
 justice and their own prosperity. And in the third clause he 
 laid down the proposition that the Congress under the Con- 
 stitution had the right to prohibit slavery in the District of 
 Columbia and therefore in all the Territories which were 
 likewise under its rule. It was on this interpretation of the 
 Constitution that he afterwards defeated Douglas, in their 
 great debates. It was on this principle that he finally issued 
 the Proclamation of Emancipation, abolishing slavery. 
 
 Such was the mind of Lincoln when he was twenty-eight; 
 a Daniel come to judgment. Well were it for the Nation today 
 could we see with his eyes, hear with his ears and enter into 
 his understanding. 
 
 It is typical of Lincoln that he kept close to the people, 
 during that troubled period of their transformation from a 
 loosely connected settlement of pioneers breaking up a virgin 
 soil and forming the foundations of a State. The visions of an 
 Illinois netted with railroads and intersected by waterways, 
 by which the rapidly increasing products should find ready 
 transportation to the markets of the world, premature as 
 they were, held first place in the minds and hearts of the 
 citizenry of that day, and they have found their culmination 
 in the achievements of the present hour. He espoused them 
 with the enthusiasm of youth and the measureless hopes of 
 manhood. If sober meditations brought doubt as to the wis- 
 dom of drawing lavishly on the future for financial means 
 with which to inaugurate projects colossal for their day and 
 generation, his belief in the vigor of the people en masse and 
 his knowledge of the inexhaustible riches of the soil, dispelled 
 
Conquering Himself 69 
 
 them. Besides, there was in the very fibres of his nature a 
 strain of determination which forced him to keep his station 
 on a present footing, no matter how unsubstantial and pre- 
 carious, until he had thrown out another foundation to which 
 he might advance with greater security. 
 
 But amid the turmoils of local and state politics, while 
 standing shoulder to shoulder with his colleagues for party 
 measures, and daily gaining a more important and definite 
 place in the estimation of the people through subscribing to 
 their hopes and ambitions, he used his natural gifts of wit 
 and drollery, as well as his growing powers of argument and 
 declamation, to secure for them the things which loomed 
 largest in their speculations. It is not difficult to appreciate 
 the humor he was in when, beset by the numerous difficulties 
 of making his political necessities square with his innate 
 sense of righteousness, he declared that "honest statesman- 
 ship is the employment of individual meanness to the public 
 good." But "in a larger sense" he saw the elements at white 
 heat moving underneath the as yet barely troubled surface 
 of the Nation's thought, and was already selecting his 
 weapon and choosing his ground for action when the trumpet 
 call should come. 
 
 It was now the period of unrest marked by outbreaks of 
 mob law which might well have shocked the order-loving 
 Lincoln. It was pictured by Lovejoy himself just before his 
 murder. Commenting on the murder of the mulatto, Mcin- 
 tosh, Lovejoy says: 
 
 " In Charleston it burns a Convent over the head of defense- 
 less women; in Baltimore it desecrates the Sabbath and works 
 all day in demolishing a private citizen's house; in Vicksburg 
 it hangs up gamblers, three or four in a row; and in St. Louis 
 it forces a man — a hardened wretch, certainly, and one that 
 
70 Abraham Lincoln 
 
 deserved to die — it forces him from beneath the aegis of our 
 Constitution and laws, hurries him to the stake and burns 
 him alive." 
 
 That the reports of these outrages stirred Lincoln to the 
 depths of his being is evident in the formal address he deliv- 
 ered in the Fall of 1839 before the Young Men's Lyceum at 
 Springfield, Illinois. When compared with that of anything 
 he afterward attempted, the style is ornate and overly fanci- 
 ful, but stripped of its adornments, it reveals the same frame 
 work and structure on which all his conclusions were based. 
 
 He pictured the people in peaceful possession of the fairest 
 portion of the earth as regards extent of territory, fertility 
 of soil and salubrity of climate. They were under a govern- 
 ment of political institutions more essentially conducive to 
 the ends of civil and religious liberty than any which history 
 of former times had told. Then sweeping on to the exhibitions 
 of mob violence which had culminated in the Lovejoy mur- 
 der, he denounced the malefactions of the mobs, saying that 
 they pervaded the country from New England to Louisiana, 
 and alike sprang up among the pleasure-hunting masters of 
 Southern slaves and the order-loving citizens of the land of 
 steady habits; that this process went on from gamblers to 
 Negroes, from Negroes to White citizens, and from these to 
 strangers, till dead men were seen literally dangling from the 
 boughs of trees from every roadside. He insisted that should 
 this mob spirit be allowed to rage, the strongest bulwark of 
 any government might effectually be broken down and de- 
 stroyed through losing the attachment of the people. He con- 
 tended that whenever the vicious portion of the population 
 should be permitted with impunity to burn churches, ravage 
 provision stores, throw printing presses into the river, shoot 
 editors, and hang and burn obnoxious persons, this govern- 
 ment could not last. 
 
Conquering Himself 71 
 
 If this picture seems overdrawn today, the times gave 
 warrant for it, especially as it formed the background for his 
 argument for law and order which he hastened to add as an 
 antidote: 
 
 " Let reverence for the law be breathed by every American 
 mother to the lisping babe that prattles on her lap; let it be 
 taught in schools, in seminaries and in colleges; let it be 
 written in primers, spelling books and almanacs; let it be 
 preached from the pulpit, proclaimed in legislative halls, and 
 enforced in the courts of justice. And, in short, let it become 
 the political religion of the Nation, and let the old and the 
 young, the rich and the poor, the grave and the gay of all 
 sexes and tongues and colors and conditions, sacrifice unceas- 
 ingly upon its altars ****** 
 
 "When I so pressingly urge a strict observance of all the 
 laws, let me not be understood as saying there are no bad 
 laws, or that grievances may not arise for the redress of which 
 no legal provisions have been made. I mean to say no such 
 thing. But I do mean to say that although bad laws, if they 
 exist, should be repealed as soon as possible, still, while they 
 continue in force, for the sake of example they should be 
 religiously observed. So also in unprovided cases. If such 
 arise, let proper legal provision be made for them with the 
 least possible delay, but till then, if not too intolerable, be 
 borne with." 
 
 Reverence for the law — that was an article of religion. 
 And the best proof of understanding of the question of obedi- 
 ence to law appears in the fact that what he said concerning 
 it then, fits quite as vitally and completely to the questions 
 of the present hour. Whethe^ the controversy was over a 
 stray animal, the ownership to be established before a Justice 
 of the Peace, or over the ownership of four million men and 
 
72 Abraham Lincoln 
 
 women held in bondage, the principle involved appealed to 
 Lincoln with equal importance. And on that principle he 
 built with such pains and care that it stood finally the assault 
 of the keenest wits, the wisest logicians, and the greatest 
 constitutional lawyers of the Nation. 
 
 Even at this early date Lincoln had evidently set himself 
 to conquer a style that should answer his greatest needs. He 
 adopted a Shakespearean method of dissecting his own nature 
 that he might find fitting terms for defining all natures. Who 
 can doubt that like young Malcolm he found within himself 
 the elements with which to build up this illuminating picture 
 of Genius? 
 
 "Towering genius," he said, "disdains a beaten path. It 
 seeks regions hitherto unexplored. It sees no distinction in 
 adding story to story upon monuments of fame erected to 
 the memory of others. It denies that it is glory enough to 
 serve under any chief. It scorns to tread in the footsteps of 
 any predecessor, however illustrious. It thirsts and burns for 
 distinction; and, if possible, it will have it, whether at the 
 expense of emancipating slaves or enslaving freemen." 
 
 Who can doubt that Lincoln on the threshold of his career, 
 looking into his own heart, saw there the man he might be- 
 come were he to give rein to all the surging emotions of his 
 restive soul? Who shall doubt his horror at the picture? And 
 who shall refuse admiration and reverence to the memory of 
 the man who from such tremendous urgings to a selfish career 
 was able to mould himself anew into one of the greatest of 
 sacrificial martyrs the world has known? Here we can see him 
 in his early manhood, with Titan power fighting and triumph- 
 ing over the brute forces of his being, over his ambition, and 
 towering to the greatness of righteous triumph. 
 
 At this time, too, the forces working at the seat of govern- 
 
Conquering Himself 73 
 
 ment for the dismemberment of the Nation seem to have 
 been revealed to him: 
 
 "Many free countries," he declared, "have lost their lib- 
 erty, and ours may lose hers; but if it shall, let it be my 
 proudest plume, not that I was the last to desert, but that I 
 never deserted her. I know that the great volcano at Wash- 
 ington, aroused and directed by the evil spirit that reigns 
 there, is belching forth the lava of political corruption in a 
 current broad and deep, which is sweeping with frightful 
 velocity over the whole length and breadth of the land, bid- 
 ding fair to leave unscathed no green spot or living thing; 
 while on its bosom are riding like demons on the waves of 
 hell, the imps of that evil spirit, and fiendishly taunting all 
 those that dare resist its destroying course with the helpless- 
 ness of their effort; and, knowing this, I cannot deny that all 
 may be swept away. Broken by it, I, too, may be; bow to it 
 I never will. 
 
 "The probability that we may fall in the struggle ought 
 not to deter us from the support of the cause we believe to 
 be just; it shall not deter me." 
 
 This address made a tremendous impression on his audi- 
 ence. The ready response of his auditors to the somewhat 
 sophomoric heroics of the young patriot's studied periods is 
 incontrovertible proof that they rang true to the spirit of the 
 hour. His friends saw to it that the speech was published in 
 the Sangamon Journal. 
 
 Lincoln here passed from brooding over the needs of his 
 State to brooding over the needs of the Nation. At this mo- 
 mentous hour was born to him that high resolve to stand by 
 the Nation, separate and distinct from any individual phase 
 of its general composition. Pondering deeply upon these fea- 
 tures of the family life which go to make moral nature of 
 
74 Abraham Lincoln 
 
 government, such as universal suffrage, temperance, and 
 slavery, he said that "all such questions must first find lodg- 
 ment with the most enlightened souls who stamp them with 
 their approval. In God's own time they will be organized into 
 law and thus woven into the fabric of our institutions." 
 
 There is proof enough of Lincoln's sympathy with suffer- 
 ing, and his quick response to the call of distress. He detested 
 liquor while sorrowing for the drunkard, and his settled 
 hatred for the institution of slavery was inborn. It was not 
 the injustice of slavery in its constitutional operation that 
 stirred him to protest, but the attempt to override the Con- 
 stitution by the extension of slavery into the Territories 
 against the edicts of the Constitution. And much as he must 
 have suffered in sympathy with Lovejoy and deplored his 
 murder, it was not the crime of murder of a man, so much as 
 the crime against the body of the State, against the funda- 
 mental principle of free speech, that brought him into the 
 forum with eloquent protest and prophetic exclamation. He 
 was a patriot first, holding the body of the State inviolate, 
 and a humanitarian afterwards. And as at this time he 
 looked at the gashes in the robe of Columbia, following the 
 wild strokes of the mob, before he turned to soothe the 
 wounds of the individuals or proclaim their right, so when 
 the Nation was rent by an insurrectionary war, he saw the 
 danger which threatened the Union before all else, and gave 
 his tears, his sympathy, and his great powers to succor the 
 unfortunate and the unhappy only when he had used up 
 every power and every expedient in binding up the Nation's 
 wounds and preparing for its future security. 
 
 Mob law shocked him out of Provincialism into National- 
 ism. He saw the coming danger to the State. The theme of 
 the Great Tragedy which had its initial utterance with the 
 
Conquering Himself 75 
 
 murder of Lovejoy at Alton found its echo in his soul, which 
 would never cease to sound until it should culminate in his 
 own martyrdom in Washington. 
 
Chapter VIII 
 
 IN MARCH, 1837, Lincoln was licensed to practice law. 
 His preparation had been in harmony with all his other 
 activities, looking toward superiority in any accom- 
 plishment. He never studied in a law office, he tells us with 
 becoming modesty. His library had always been his armpit, 
 his study the spot that brought him a moment's leisure. And 
 he had no sooner acquired a bit of knowledge then he put 
 it to the test of expression. Sometimes it was a single boon 
 companion who heard his first phrasing of an idea he had ab- 
 sorbed, sometimes it was a group of the rough Clary Grove 
 boys, sometimes it was merely a group of trees or a less re- 
 sponsive audience of stumps in a logged-off patch of the forest. 
 In New Salem he had embraced every opportunity to ap- 
 pear before the Justice of the Peace to argue the case for 
 some walletless litigant whose rights had been threatened in 
 a minor matter, and it was in this free and untrammeled 
 practice of the art of pleading that he discovered the power 
 of fable applied to morals, and which equipped him with 
 that inexhaustible fund of anecdote with which he was ever 
 fond of illustrating a point of law or revealing a principle. 
 His theory was sound. Later in life he wrote to a student who 
 wished instructions as to how to become a lawyer, emphasiz- 
 ing those virtues that needs must accompany success. His 
 
Lawyer and Legislator 77 
 
 conclusions are purely Lincolnian and reveal the man as the 
 soul of honesty and truth. "There is a vague popular belief 
 that lawyers are necessarily dishonest," he writes. "I say 
 vague, because when we consider to what extent confidence 
 and honors are reposed in and conferred upon lawyers by the 
 people, it appears improbable that their impression of dis- 
 honesty is very distinct or vivid. Yet the impression is com- 
 mon, almost universal. Let no young man choosing the law 
 for a calling for a moment yield to the popular belief. Resolve 
 to be honest at all events; and if in your own judgment you 
 cannot be an honest lawyer, resolve to be honest without 
 being a lawyer. Choose some other occupation, rather than 
 one in the choosing of which you do, in advance, consent to 
 be a knave." 
 
 Lincoln formed a partnership with John T. Stuart, a com- 
 rade in the Blackhawk War, who had gained rather an ex- 
 tensive practice and was at the time just recovering from 
 the effects of a Congressional race in which he had been the 
 loser. He entered upon the practice of law in a community of 
 pioneers hot with the passion of political strife and fearless 
 in its expression of opinion. When arguments failed, fists 
 were used with brutal frequency. During the heated cam- 
 paign of 1838, Douglas and Stuart, candidates for Congress, 
 Herndon tells us, fought like tigers in his father's grocery 
 over a floor that was drenched with slops, and gave up the 
 struggle only when both were exhausted. Then as a fitting 
 curtain to the episode, Mr. Stuart ordered a "barrel of 
 whiskey and wine." 
 
 In the rear end of Speed's store over which Lincoln slept, 
 aspiring candidates for public favor gathered nightly about 
 a big open fireplace and debated with vigor questions of the 
 hour. Campaigns were made personal affairs. Candidates 
 
Abraham Lincoln 
 
 1 
 
 visiting scattered homes of the settlement presented their 
 qualifications for office and the principles of the party they 
 represented to the household, not neglecting to make show 
 of interest in mother and children. Wherever a crowd could 
 be got together politicians appeared to challenge their op- 
 ponents with vigor, if not with courtesy and logic. 
 
 Small wonder that Lincoln, whose love for public speaking 
 had been fostered by practice upon every possible occasion 
 since childhood, should have jumped immediately into this 
 stream of debate and stirred up the waters in no mean way. 
 If the Lincoln legends of those days glow with too much 
 animal fire to please the ears of present day civilization, it 
 should be remembered that he had been trained in a rough 
 school, that his nature was fundamentally human, and that 
 his sympathy for men rather than respect for refinements 
 built up on social conventions, prompted the ready use of 
 that touch of nature which makes the whole world kin. He 
 had an inexhaustible fund of humor and he used it with a 
 free hand where it would count more in carrying his point 
 than all the fine-spun philosophy or glittering show of sand- 
 papered rhetoric. 
 
 Lincoln had an overweening affection for life in all its 
 phases and did not believe anything to be gained by viewing 
 it only on dress parade. Once when Carpenter was executing 
 his well-known picture of the Cabinet, the subject of Shake- 
 speare chanced to come under discussion, and Lincoln re- 
 marked that he could see no good reason for the expurgation 
 of certain passages in the plays when they were presented, 
 feeling that to take away any portion of the expressed life 
 of the time in which they were written was to give a one- 
 sided view of it and to make doubtful of being understood 
 other characters and arguments of the play. But all his con- 
 
Lawyer and Legislator 79 
 
 temporaries join in protesting against the reports that Lin- 
 coln delighted in vulgarity for its own sake. He never told a 
 story or used a colloquialism but he gave it a point which 
 applied immediately and directly to the subject under dis- 
 cussion. As he loved men, so he loved truth, for its own sake. 
 
 If he stripped falsehood and sham of their seductive color- 
 ing by the plain application of the recital of a condensed 
 drama which observation and experience had taught him 
 would prove most effective in establishing a fact in place of 
 an erroneous theory, it was because Nature had equipped 
 him for the race he was to run with every possible addition 
 in mind and body that should make for ultimate triumph in 
 the one great enterprise which he was born to guide, direct, 
 and control to its final consummation. 
 
 Lincoln's first trial of his prowess against Douglas grew 
 out of one of the debates in Speed's store. Douglas had been 
 upholding the principles of the Democratic Party of which 
 he was at that time, as ever afterwards, an ardent adherent. 
 At a heated stage of the controversy Douglas sprang up and 
 declaring that "this store is no place to talk politics" chal- 
 lenged the company to public debate of the question at issue. 
 The affair was arranged, Douglas, Calhoun, Lamborn, and 
 Thomas representing the Democrats; Logan, Baker, Brown- 
 ing, and Lincoln, the Whigs. None of the speeches of the 
 contest attracted unusual notice with the exception of Lin- 
 coln's. So deep was the impression he created that he was 
 asked to furnish his speech to the Sangamon Journal for 
 publication and it afterwards appeared in the columns of that 
 paper. 
 
 In this debate he discovered the flaws in Douglas' char- 
 acter which led him to dodge, cover, and misrepresent facts, 
 but with such subtlety, so much fire and impetuosity as 
 
80 Abraham Lincoln 
 
 easily to deceive even critical observers. Free from sham, 
 Lincoln was merciless in exposing it in others. And his 
 method, adopted at this time in refuting Douglas, he retained 
 and perfected for the great debate more than ten years later, 
 the results of which had an imperishable influence on the 
 destinies of the Nation. At this earlier meeting Lincoln said: 
 
 "Those who heard Mr. Douglas recollect that he indulged 
 himself in a contemptuous expression of pity for me. 'Now 
 he's got me/ thought I. But when he went on to say that 
 five millions of the expenditure of 1838 were payments of 
 the French indemnities, which I knew to be untrue; that five 
 millions had been for the Post Office, which I knew to be 
 untrue; that ten millions had been for the Maine Boundary 
 War, which I not only knew to be untrue but supremely 
 ridiculous also; and when I saw that he was stupid enough to 
 hope that I would permit such groundless and audacious 
 assertions to be unexposed; — I readily consented that, on the 
 score both of veracity and sagacity, the audience would judge 
 whether he or I were the more deserving of the world's 
 contempt." 
 
 Lincoln's methods of fitting himself for legislative duties 
 were no less characteristic and original than those he had 
 used to prepare himself for the law. His first term in the 
 Legislature had been similar to his practice of law before the 
 New Salem Justice. He had studied rather than practiced 
 the arts of legislation. He was nominated to succeed himself 
 in 1838, and elected. At this session he received thirty-eight 
 votes for Speaker. His successful competitor, William L. D. 
 Ewing, the Democratic candidate, received forty-three votes. 
 Besides retaining a place on the Finance Committee where 
 he had served during his first term, Lincoln was assigned to 
 the Committee on Counties. During this term he did what 
 
Lawyer and Legislator 81 
 
 he could to correct the evils that followed the liberal legis- 
 lation on internal improvements in the previous session. He 
 admitted his "share of the responsibility in the present 
 crisis" and finally concluded that he was "no financier " 
 after all. 
 
 No sooner had the legislature adjourned than he an- 
 nounced himself again as a candidate. He had been pursued 
 and villified. His enthusiasm for the internal improvement 
 projects and the succeeding financial disasters, gave his 
 Democratic opponents material which they were not slow to 
 use. But the people believed in him. It was a Presidential 
 year and Lincoln stumped the State for the Whigs and their 
 candidate, Harrison — a campaign founded on the coon-skin 
 cap, the log cabin, and the humble life of the nominee, which 
 had many of the features and something of the defamatory 
 characteristics which were to emphasize his own election to 
 the Presidency, then little more than a decade away. He was 
 selected as an elector on the Harrison ticket for President. 
 In debate he frequently met Douglas, who was already the 
 standard bearer and leading exponent of the Democratic prin- 
 ciples. Neither was adverse to a conflict. After one of these 
 meetings with the Little Giant he was greatly cast down, 
 feeling that he had been worsted. 
 
 "He was very sensitive," John Gillespie, one of his col- 
 leagues on the stump, relates, "where he thought he had 
 failed to meet the expectations of his friends. He was con- 
 scious of his failure, and I never saw any man so much dis- 
 tressed. He begged to be permitted to try again, and was 
 reluctantly indulged: and in the next effort he transcended 
 our highest expectations. I never heard and never expect to 
 hear such a triumphant vindication as he then gave to Whig 
 measures or policy. He never after, to my knowledge fell 
 below himself." 
 
Chapter IX 
 
 INFLUENCE OF MAMY TODD 
 
 THE CAPITAL of Illinois in 1839 was a a verv lively, 
 if a somewhat ' ' rough and ready' ' city. The buildings 
 made little pretensions to archictecture. Unpaved 
 streets were cut deed with ruts and during muddy weather 
 were almost impassable. The population was composed of 
 immigrants from Eastern and Southern States; New Eng- 
 land and Georgia "swapped" dialects to the enrichment 
 of expression, but to the slaughter of the King's Eng- 
 lish. There were as many brands of politics as there were 
 gradations of sentiment between the State of Maine and the 
 Carolinas. The city and all the country round was continually 
 stirred up with "ideas," promising the settlement of con- 
 flicting questions, State and National. Where two or three 
 were gathered together there was sure to be controversial 
 discussion, if not hot words and ready blows. 
 
 Thus the public life of the community, while lacking in 
 social refinements, found an outlet for its speculations and 
 emotions in a limited vocabulary more or less vulgar and 
 profane: and its entertainment, in horse racing, cock fight- 
 ing and feats of physical strength and skill. But the social 
 side of Springfield had its degrees of caste, and there was as 
 much show of aristocracy among the descendants of old 
 families there, as at the National Capital. Statesman and 
 
Influence of Mary Todd 83 
 
 back-country ruffian might rub elbows over the same bar, 
 while they discussed politics or recounted their adventures, 
 with no thought of impropriety; but once the main street 
 was left behind and the region of homes approached, the 
 pride of ancestry and the daintier sense that culture brings, 
 put up a strong, if invisible barrier against the leveling 
 process which is a principal feature among the males of 
 frontier life. Neither there nor anywhere else has womankind 
 ever agreed to Kipling's dictum that, 
 
 The Colonel's lady and Judy O'Grady 
 
 Are sisters under the skin . . . 
 Springfield had its "select circles," into which were admitted 
 none but those upon whom the goddess of respectability had 
 set her distinguishing seal. Fashion looked with as withering 
 scorn upon those who were too poor or too ignorant to follow 
 her decrees in the Capital of Illinois, as she did in New York 
 or London. 
 
 Into this wild, rough prairie town came Miss Mary Todd, 
 nineteen years of age, handsome, piquant, aristocratic, with 
 ready wit, sustained by four years of study in the French 
 school of Mme. Martelli. She came to make her home with 
 her sister, Mrs. Ninan Edwards, whose husband was a rising 
 politician, already in the Legislature and one of the "Long 
 Nine" to which Lincoln belonged, and which had proved 
 powerful enough to capture the Capital for Springfield 
 against all odds. Miss Todd was a Kentuckian, a member of 
 an old and distinguished family. Her family connections, her 
 natural charms of person, her education and refinement, as 
 well as her own delight in social intercourse, soon gave her 
 first place in society circles. Her suitors were as many as she 
 chose to encourage. Among them was Lincoln. Notwith- 
 standing the pronounced differences in their natures, as well 
 
84 Abraham Lincoln 
 
 as in birth and breeding, Miss Todd seems from the first to 
 have recognized Lincoln's intellectual superiority, to have 
 encouraged him above all others. Lincoln proposed for her 
 hand and was accepted. Then, with that strange urge of 
 nature which prompts every woman to try her power over 
 the man she has chosen for her mate, Miss Todd divided her 
 smiles and accepted the cavalier attentions of Lincoln's 
 rivals, among them Douglas. A quarrel followed and the 
 engagement was broken. 
 
 This brought on another of those periods of melancholy to 
 which Lincoln was subject, and during which he gave him- 
 self up to introspection of the most searching kind. There is 
 little evidence to substantiate the conclusions of some biog- 
 raphers, that Lincoln's dejection was as pronounced as that 
 which controlled him during those months following the 
 death of Ann Rutledge. He does not seem to doubt that a 
 proposal on his part for a renewal of the engagement would 
 have been acceptable to Miss Todd. His speculations, re- 
 vealed in letters written to Speed at this time, are those of a 
 mystic who would peer into the future and make sure an 
 act of such moment as this contemplated, would not prove 
 an obstacle to the still unrevealed work he felt himself called 
 to do and for which he was making continual preparation. 
 
 The mood was not unusual to Lincoln. Before every im- 
 portant step he was called upon to make, he may be found 
 retiring into the closet of his soul, there to try conclusions 
 with his hopes, his ambitions, his feelings, before the bar of 
 Wisdom. Questions which men of smaller minds would have 
 decided upon the instant caused Lincoln weeks and some- 
 times months of doubts so dark and deep as to arouse fears 
 for his reason. We know now that those fears were ground- 
 less. Lincoln walked under the shadow of the wings of the 
 
Influence of Mary Todd 85 
 
 Spirit. He listened to the voice of conscience. In those great 
 moments when his work was nearing its close and when a 
 decision meant so much to his cause, which was ever the 
 cause of humanity, with agonies of mind beyond the power 
 of common men to feel, with patience which is the substance 
 of faith, trembling but determined upon the point of action, 
 he waited until the voice for which he listened whispered in 
 his ear and bade him take the step. The step once taken, he 
 went forward without question. His emotions were never so 
 intense as to suspend his observing faculties, and his intellect 
 was rapid enough to keep pace with them and mark their 
 appointed course. 
 
 In a letter to Speed written during the suspension of his 
 engagement to Miss Todd, and in which he warmly con- 
 gratulates his old friend on having won the woman of his 
 choice, he says: "I should be entirely happy but for the 
 never-absent idea that there is one still unhappy whom I 
 have contributed to make so. That kills my soul. I cannot 
 but reproach myself for even wishing to be happy while she 
 is otherwise." 
 
 Three months later in another letter to Speed, Lincoln 
 shows himself once more speculating upon the broken en- 
 gagement. Here he reveals himself, and the struggle between 
 the practical man and the mystic, foreshadows the Lincoln 
 of the White House, when not the fate of two persons, but of 
 hundreds of thousands hung in the balance which he was 
 compelled to hold. In this letter, referring to the engagement 
 he writes: 
 
 "I must gain confidence in my own ability to keep my re- 
 solves when they are made. In that ability I once prided my- 
 self as the only chief gem of my character; that gem I lost, 
 how and where you know too well. I have not regained it; 
 
86 Abraham Lincoln 
 
 and until I do, / cannot trust myself in any matter of import- 
 ance. I believe now that had you understood my case at the 
 time as well as I understood yours afterwards, by the aid you 
 would have given me I should have sailed through clear; but 
 that does not now afford me sufficient confidence to begin 
 that or the like again * * * * I always was superstitious. I 
 believe God made me one of the instruments of bringing 
 Fanny and you together, which union I have no doubt he had 
 foreordained. Whatever He designs He will do for me yet. 'Stand 
 still and see the salvation of the Lord* is my text just now." 
 
 Lincoln's mind had no tendency to neat selections so 
 tempting to the love of order, yet often dangerous to a cor- 
 rect decision in questions of supreme moment. He reasoned 
 from widely scattered events to first cause, and found his 
 solution of every problem that engaged his faculties, within 
 the problem itself. This passion for stripping a subject of all 
 refinement, so that its supporting structure should appear 
 in its primal simplicity, controlled his speculations in the 
 field of love and marriage. He must be satisfied that his 
 conscience would go with his action. Marriage, to his mind, 
 carried with it supreme obligations. He seemed also to have 
 been aware that he was somehow a child of destiny, reserved 
 by Fate for a mission, the purpose of which he was as yet 
 ignorant, but for which he was being intelligently prepared. 
 
 During the estrangement of which he wrote to Speed, and 
 for some months afterward while the couple were preparing 
 to renew the engagement, ghostly apparitions brought days 
 of doubt and despair. But when the matter was finally de- 
 cided and the marriage was being arranged, he put all specu- 
 lation behind him. Providence had given him another help 
 and stay against the coming deluge. The vivacious Mary 
 Todd became the home-making Mary Lincoln. 
 
Influence of Mary Todd 87 
 
 She took upon herself to see that her absent-minded spouse 
 should suffer as little from those periods of abstraction as 
 possible. She kept his home for him. She saw that he had his 
 meals regularly; that he was properly nourished physically; 
 that he was free to pursue his studies; and that neither his 
 friends nor his enemies should lead him into doing anything 
 that would be likely to mar his future. For Mary Lincoln 
 also had her premonitions. She had heard a whisper in her 
 girlhood that she was to be the wife of the President of the 
 United States. She recognized before any one else that Abra- 
 ham Lincoln had the qualities of universal greatness. She 
 was ambitious for his personal honor, as it was just and right 
 that she should be. He was ambitious only for a Cause, and 
 he realized that somehow he was better fitted to present the 
 issues of that Cause than any person who had so far appeared 
 in the arena during the preliminary contests, then being 
 staged, and which were destined to lead to the great trial 
 between Good and Evil that should force the world to stand 
 still and tremble for the outcome. 
 
 Henry B. Rankin in his "Personal Recollections of Abra- 
 ham Lincoln," gives this lively portrait of Mrs. Lincoln as 
 he knew her: "In personal appearance," he says, "Mrs. Lin- 
 coln was not strikingly commanding, nor was she considered 
 handsome. On seeing her for the first time, one would be 
 drawn to closer inspection by something in her features 
 which, though not strictly of a regular or beautiful type, 
 were yet pretty when viewed in connection with her com- 
 plexion, her soft brown hair, and her clear brown eyes that 
 seemed to penetrate to the very soul as she fixed them 
 steadily upon you while speaking. Her husband and she were 
 alike in one particular. Having once met and conversed with 
 either, one would never forget the impression made. Neither 
 was a conventional type. 
 
88 Abraham Lincoln 
 
 "Mrs. Lincoln had a plump rounded figure, and was rather 
 short in stature. Physically, mentally, emotionally she was 
 the extreme opposite of Mr. Lincoln. She was exceedingly 
 sensitive. Her impulsiveness of thought and speech had no 
 need of restraint because her face was always an unerring 
 index and reflection of her passing emotions, even if she had 
 not expressed them in words. She thought quickly, spoke 
 rapidly; and the expression of her face was always in har- 
 mony with her words. At times of deep feeling her words 
 might bring keen pain to persons toward whom she felt 
 kindly * * * Always and everywhere she showed her refine- 
 ment and dignity of character, entirely free from affectation 
 or the putting on of manners for special occasions." 
 
 Speaking of the estrangement and Lincoln's depression 
 during that time, Mr. Rankin says that it was probably 
 aggravated by the opposition of Miss Todd's relatives to 
 their marriage, and by the breaking off of the engagement. 
 This hardly covers the case, because Lincoln's own words to 
 Speed are direct on this subject. It was Lincoln who broke 
 the engagement and he evidently felt that Miss Todd was 
 suffering keenly because of their estrangement, for he accuses 
 himself of being the cause of her suffering. No doubt Lincoln 
 was sensitive to the reflections of Miss Todd's family on his 
 humble parentage and poverty as a barrier to their marriage. 
 In view of this he felt it to be his duty to all parties concerned 
 at that time to release her from her promise. This he had 
 done. However, when time had cleared his mind of the doubts 
 which ever lay in wait to caution him upon the threshold of 
 any great action, he seems to have considered whatever 
 objections her family may have raised as trivial. At least they 
 did not stand in the way of his marriage. Nor can the wisdom 
 of this step be doubted, for Mary Todd gave her husband 
 
Influence of Mary Todd 89 
 
 her whole heart. Henry C. Whitney pays her this sublime 
 tribute: 
 
 "To him she bore four children; with him she sat by the 
 death-bed and stood by the graves of two of them. She re- 
 joiced with him in his successes, she condoled with him in 
 his defeats; and whenever she saw an opportunity for his 
 advancement, she stimulated his ambition to compete for it. 
 They were en rapport in all the higher objects of being; when 
 he was nominated for President his first act was to go home 
 and in person break the glad tidings to her. That the Nation 
 is largely indebted to Mary Todd Lincoln for its autonomy, 
 I do not doubt; to the full measure thereof, only God can 
 know." 
 
 His threatened duel with Shields has sometimes been 
 emphasized as having a bearing upon Lincoln's courtship and 
 marriage with Mary Todd. There is nothing in the plain 
 records of the affair that could connect it in any vital way 
 with this important event. The challenge which James 
 Shields issued grew out of a satirical contribution which Lin- 
 coln made to the Sangamon Journal; but aside from the in- 
 ternal evidence in that paper of Lincoln's powers as a literary 
 humorist, had he been inclined to devote his energies to that 
 field of art, and his firm stand against being coerced by 
 threats in Shields' challenge, which was in harmony with 
 Lincoln's character as time developed it, the duel incident is 
 no more than a side light on the spirit of the times. Shields, 
 who was a Democratic state official and also a man who 
 prided himself on his reputation for chivalry and gallantry, 
 demanded of Lincoln a "full, positive and absolute retraction 
 of all offensive allusions used by you in these communica- 
 tions, in relation to my private character and standing as a 
 man, and an apology for the insults conveyed in them This. 
 
90 Abraham Lincoln 
 
 may prevent consequences which no one will regret more 
 than myself." 
 
 Mr. Lincoln's reply to this communication delivered 
 through General Whiteside who was acting for Shields is 
 characteristic: 
 
 "Fremont, September 17, 1842. 
 "Jas. Shield, Esq., Your note of today was handed me by 
 General Whiteside. In that note you say you have been in- 
 formed, through the medium of the editor of the Journal, 
 that I am the author of certain articles which you deem per- 
 sonally abusive of you; and, without stopping to inquire 
 whether I am really the author, or to point out what is 
 offensive in them, you demand an unqualified retraction of 
 all that is offensive, and then proceed to hint at consequences. 
 
 "Now, Sir, there is in this so much assumption of facts, 
 and so much of menace as to consequences, that I cannot sub- 
 mit to answer that note any further than I have, and to add 
 that the consequences to which I suppose you allude would 
 be a matter of as great regret to me as it possibly could to 
 
 you. 
 
 "Respectfully, 
 
 A. Lincoln" 
 
 There was much friendly interference and great pressure 
 was brought to bear upon Lincoln to confer with Shields 
 further on the matter, but Lincoln stood his ground on the 
 question of "menace" and would listen to no suggestion of 
 compromise or explanation until Shields had himself with- 
 drawn his threats and stated with accuracy his grounds for 
 complaint. This Shields finally did and the affair was 
 dropped. Notwithstanding the situation which for a time 
 seemed to threaten tragic results, there was a humorous 
 feature introduced by Lincoln in his legitimate choice of 
 
Influence of Mary Todd 91 
 
 weapons and grounds, the weapons being cavalry broad- 
 swords and the distance being three paces on either side, a 
 plank separating the combatants, over which neither was to 
 cross without forfeiture of his life, and an added distance of 
 the length of the broadswords. Lincoln stated boldly that he 
 was opposed to dueling under any circumstances and the 
 terms were so suggestive of his bent for the ludicrous, so al- 
 together unusual, as to force entrance into the dispute of 
 comment that could not but put a burlesque complexion on 
 the whole affair. 
 
 The feature of this episode which remains permanent is 
 Lincoln's determined stand against accepting any suggestion 
 of menace, and his willingness, when the menacing suggestion 
 was withdrawn, to make explanation. But even so, the mat- 
 ter served the gossips for many years and Herndon is author- 
 ity for Lincoln's statement to him years afterward that "I 
 did not intend to hurt Shields unless I did so clearly in self- 
 defense. If it had been necessary I could have split him from 
 the crown of his head to the end of his backbone." And Hern- 
 don adds, "When one takes into consideration the conditions 
 of the weapons and position required in his instructions to 
 Dr. Merryman, the boast does not seem impossible. ' ' 
 
 The marriage of Lincoln in no way diminished his love for 
 politics; in fact, it stimulated his zeal in that direction. He 
 had gained the ear of his public and now embraced every 
 opportunity that offered for public discussion of the question 
 of the day. Early in the year 1842 he delivered a carefully 
 prepared lecture on temperance, in the Presbyterian Church 
 in Springfield, which discovered such broad sympathies for 
 the inebriate and such sharp rebuke to professed Christians 
 who stood aloof from them, as to arouse considerable feeling 
 among those who listened to him. Lincoln often said that he 
 
92 Abraham Lincoln 
 
 hated liquor but sympathized with those who became vic- 
 tims of its power. Speaking of certain Christians who ob- 
 jected to the association of drunkards, even with the chance 
 of reforming them, he said: 
 
 "If they (the Christians) believe, as they profess, that 
 Omnipotence condescended to take on Himself the form of 
 sinful man, and as such die an ignominious death, surely they 
 will not refuse submission to the infinitely lesser condescen- 
 sion for the temporal and perhaps eternal salvation of a large 
 and erring and unfortunate class of their fellow-creatures. 
 Nor is the condescension very great. In my judgment such 
 of us as have never fallen victims have been spared more from 
 the absence of appetite than from any mental or moral 
 superiority over those who have. Indeed, I believe if we take 
 habitual drunkards as a class, their heads and their hearts 
 will bear an advantageous comparison with those of any 
 other class." 
 
 It hardly seems possible that such a broad sympathy and 
 clear understanding of human nature, proclaimed at such a 
 time and with such apparent sincerity from the best of mo- 
 tives, could result in anything but conviction. But the effect 
 was otherwise. This utterance cost Lincoln dear enough. It 
 turned numbers of church people against him, saying that in 
 his opening statement he had cast a doubt upon their profes- 
 sions. Lincoln was only giving publicity to the great sym- 
 pathy he had for men in all conditions of life and under all 
 circumstances, and proclaiming for the drunkard at that time 
 the same feeling of brotherhood and the same hope which he 
 proclaimed in later years to the unfortunate of another Race 
 and Color. He was no man for the second-hand errors of 
 indolent or imitative intellects. His was a searching, copious 
 and original mind. Time wrought no revolution, no change 
 
Influence of Mary Todd 93 
 
 in his habits and feelings. All that he had been, he continued 
 to be; all that he had done, he continued to do. Their opera- 
 tion was one of pure addition. 
 
 Lincoln was now associated in law with Stephen T. Logan, 
 a man of fine legal attainments, his former partner, Stuart, 
 having gone to Congress. Logan was a man of method and 
 Lincoln caught from him a desire for more thoroughness in 
 the details of his profession, setting himself to order his work 
 with system and exactitude. The latter quality he persevered 
 in and retained to the day of his death. The former he used 
 as a tool when it suited his purpose. But he could never bring 
 himself to consider time otherwise than a medium for in- 
 spirational effort. He used time as he used clothes, to move 
 about in but not to be ordered after any definite pattern. 
 His pre-vision was too clear to allow him to plod along any 
 beaten path, either setting rules for acquiring knowledge or 
 presenting the fruits of knowledge for necessary ends. He 
 threw aside all the refinements of logic as he threw aside his 
 coat when it was in his way, and probed straight to the heart 
 of any matter he might have in hand. He liked best to bring 
 the meat of his argument to light by an apt story or homely 
 fable. He rejoiced in life and the utterance of it. He sought 
 to convince the whole man — head, heart, and spirit. He 
 cared more to be convincing than brilliant. In law he searched 
 for the elemental qualities, and in politics his methods were 
 the same. His sense of humor was contagious. Even at this 
 early stage of his career he could gather a crowd of a hundred 
 or more upon the street and set them all off into roars of 
 laughter, with no apparent exhaustion of his store of wit 
 and humor. 
 
 We cannot account for Lincoln without considering him 
 the result of a Cause. The impulse which preceded his 
 
94 Abraham Lincoln 
 
 thought was the urge of his time, and took its form and ex- 
 pression from his environment, moderated certainly by his 
 individual genius. Records of all ages which have possessed 
 the qualities of permanence are of themselves proof of this 
 opinion. Shakespeare's declaration that the purpose of dra- 
 matic art is "to hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to Nature; to 
 show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very 
 age and body of the time his form and pressure," is not a bit 
 of fine rhetoric but a deep conviction born of his own experi- 
 ence. With supreme poetical power the dramatist had so 
 often transported himself to other times and other countries, 
 had lived with Roman Senators, had laughed and wept with 
 romantic Venetians, been a Briton at the several periods of 
 England's history, from the mythological period of "Lear" 
 to the latest of his historical plays, and had so often felt in 
 his audience the response to his ideas when they were true 
 to "the very age and body of the time," that he spoke 
 directly out of his own acquired knowledge, as well as with 
 the inspiration of genius. 
 
 That is the nature of the poet. More than any other author 
 Shakespeare functioned upon the very borderland of crea- 
 tion. His ideas fledged and feathered and plumed themselves 
 in the nests he built for them, and ventured forth to try con- 
 clusions with the nature of which they were a part. Lincoln 
 was not born to create but to preserve. His mission was to 
 preserve the Union. His theatre was not a Globe Theatre 
 built by the hand of man, but the great Illinois Prairies, and 
 later the whole United States. Yet he was no less responsive 
 to the environment in which he moved for the perfection of 
 his work, than was Shakespeare. 
 
Chapter X 
 
 IT IS SAFE to say that a sympathetic reading of the best 
 literature of any period of the world's history will re- 
 produce its c 'age and body" in the mind of the reader, 
 no matter in what field of speculation the writer may have 
 worked. In a broad way Nature remains always harmonious. 
 No American Beauty Roses have been discovered among the 
 effects of the cave dweller of the Stone Age. The rosy-cheeked 
 apple of the twentieth century would have been out of keeping 
 with the man of that time. The sour little crab and the small 
 almost colorless flower have kept pace with man, and the 
 cultured woman and the studious philosopher sit down to a 
 table covered with spotless linen with the splendid apple and 
 the beautiful rose to respond to their refined sense of the 
 beautiful. 
 
 The Illinois of Lincoln's day and that of ours have almost 
 as radical differences of complexion as those here noted be- 
 tween the ages of man. Lincoln, himself, was a product of the 
 soil, a wilderness child, and the road he had come from baby- 
 hood in the forest of Kentucky to the Capital of a rapidly 
 developing state was ages long in experience and one which 
 Lincoln must have appreciated, for we find him before he has 
 reached the age of thirty referring to himself as old, and a 
 little later to " these old eyes of mine." His quick response to 
 
96 Abraham Lincoln 
 
 the life about him, and the simplicity of nature which kept 
 him in dress, manners, and speech like one made in the image 
 and likeness of his time and place, gave him unequaled sus- 
 ceptibility to the feelings of his fellows, and that God-like 
 power to present principles and produce convictions in the 
 minds of the wild, the uncultured and the ignorant. 
 
 In 1843 Lincoln made another change of partners, this time 
 selecting William H. Herndon, a man considerably younger 
 than himself but of studious habits and with a growing love 
 of literature. This was because Judge Logan had political 
 aspirations similar to those of Lincoln, as that year they were 
 both candidates for the nomination to Congress. Herndon 
 gives this intimate picture of the formation of his partnership 
 with Lincoln, a partnership which continued without any 
 break as long as Lincoln lived. 
 
 "Lincoln came rushing into my office quarters one morning 
 and with more or less agitation told me he had determined to 
 sever the partnership with Logan. I confess I was surprised 
 when he invited me to become his partner. I was young in the 
 practice and was painfully aware of my want of ability and 
 experience; but when he remarked in his earnest, honest way, 
 ' Billy, I can trust you if you can trust me/ I felt relieved, and 
 accepted his generous proposal. It has always been a matter 
 of pride with me that during our long partnership, continuing 
 on until dissolved by the bullet of the assassin, we never had 
 any personal controversy or disagreement." 
 
 Lincoln's efforts to obtain the congressional nomination in 
 1843 brought out several unique and amusing incidents. He 
 and Edward D. Baker were the Sangamon County aspirants. 
 Baker's long residence, extensive acquaintance, and general 
 popularity served him well in the campaign and at the last 
 moment Lincoln reluctantly withdrew from the field. He 
 
Apostle of Democracy 97 
 
 gives the following account of the situation in a letter to 
 Speed, of date March 24, 1843: 
 
 "We had a meeting of the Whigs of the County here last 
 Monday to appoint delegates to the District Convention, and 
 Baker beat me and got the delegation instructed to go for 
 him. The meeting, in spite of my attempt to decline it, 
 appointed me one of the delegates, so that in getting Baker 
 nominated I shall be fixed a good deal like the fellow who is 
 made groomsman to a man that has cut him out and is 
 marrying his own dear gal." 
 
 The balm for all his wounds Lincoln found in humorous 
 comparisons. A letter at this time to another friend reveals 
 the careful study Lincoln made of his political campaigns and 
 assembles the elements which contributed to the results. The 
 fairness displayed and the utter absence of any feeling of 
 bitterness, or what politicians call revenge, is as apparent 
 here as in those sublime Inaugural Addresses which he after- 
 ward gave to the world: 
 
 "It is truly gratifying to me to learn that while the people 
 of Sangamon have cast me off, my old friends of Menard, 
 who have known me the longest and best, stick to me. It 
 would astonish if not amuse the older citizens to learn that I 
 (a strange, friendless, uneducated, penniless boy, working on 
 a flat-boat at ten dollars per month) have been put down here 
 as a candidate of pride, wealth, and aristocratic family dis- 
 tinction. Yet so, chiefly, it was. There was, too, the strangest 
 combination of church influence against me. Baker is a 
 Campbellite and therefore, I suppose, with few exceptions got 
 all that church. My wife has some relations in the Presby- 
 terian Churches and some with the Episcopalian Churches, 
 and therefore, wherever it would tell, I was set down as 
 either one or the other, while it was everywhere contended 
 
98 Abraham Lincoln 
 
 that no Christian ought to go for me because I belonged to no 
 church, was suspected of being a Deist, and talked about 
 fighting a duel. With all these things Baker, of course, had 
 nothing to do; nor do I complain of them. As to his own 
 Church going for him I think that was right enough; and as 
 to the influences I have spoken of in the others, though they 
 were very strong, it would be grossly unjust to charge that 
 they acted upon them in a body or were very near so. I only 
 mean that those influences levied a tax of considerable per 
 cent throughout the religious controversy." 
 
 Neither Baker nor Lincoln obtained the coveted honor, the 
 Convention, which was held soon after in Pekin, picking 
 another man. Lincoln bore this defeat with manful mag- 
 nanimity. The only feature of it to which he made protest 
 after the Convention was the charge of his so-called "aristo- 
 cratic family distinction." To his friend, James Mathaney, a 
 few days later he protested "vehemently and with great 
 emphasis" that he was anything but aristocratic and proud. 
 
 "Why, Jim," he said, "I am now and always shall be the 
 same Abe Lincoln I was when you first saw me." 
 
 In the campaign of 1844 Lincoln was a Presidential Elector 
 and stumped the State for Clay. The defeat of the gallant and 
 magnetic statesman by Polk was a terrific blow to his follow- 
 ers. Men were never before so enlisted in any man's cause and 
 when the great Whig chieftain went down, his followers suf- 
 fered utter demoralization. It was thought by many to pre- 
 sage the end of popular government. But in the struggle Lin- 
 coln's power as a debater had been developed, his acquaint- 
 ance favorably broadened, and in all political deliberations 
 his influence was considered. In 1846 he was the unanimous 
 choice of the Convention for Congress, Logan having with- 
 drawn in favor of his old law partner. Peter Cartwright, the 
 
Apostle of Democracy 99 
 
 famous Methodist divine, was his Democratic opponent, and 
 a formidable adversary. The campaign was bitterly contested 
 and the charges previously made against Lincoln as a non- 
 believer were forced to the front. Lincoln refused to debate 
 the question of religion, declaring privately that it had no 
 place in the controversy. He trusted to the fairness of the 
 people's judgment on a question of personal belief, and made 
 his appeal on the questions of the day. He was elected by a 
 flattering majority and went to Washington to accumulate 
 further knowledge in legislative matters and to make the 
 acquaintance of men of ability and force in the Nation. 
 
 In Congress Lincoln openly opposed the President on the 
 Mexican War and introduced the famous "Spot Resolutions" 
 by which he was enabled to interrogate the President as to 
 the principles he espoused in that adventure. However, when 
 war was declared, he stood by the Government in voting 
 supplies for the troops; but he did not retire from his position 
 that the President's invasion of foreign soil was unconstitu- 
 tional. On February 15, 1848, he wrote to Herndon: 
 
 "The provision of the Constitution giving the war-making 
 power to Congress was dictated, as I understand it, by the 
 following reasons: Kings had always been involving and im- 
 poverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not 
 always, that the good of the people was the object. This our 
 Convention understood to be the most oppressive of all 
 kingly oppressions and they resolved to so frame the Consti- 
 tution that no man should hold the power of bringing this 
 oppression upon us. But your view, i.e., 'that the President 
 of the United States is the Commander of the Army and 
 Navy; that as such Commander it is his duty, in the absence 
 of Congress, if the country was about to be invaded and 
 armies were organized in Mexico for that purpose, to — if 
 
100 Abraham Lincoln 
 
 necessary — go into the very heart of Mexico and prevent in- 
 vasion/ destroys the whole matter, and places our President 
 where kings have always stood." 
 
 It has been argued many times since, that Lincoln in his 
 Emancipation Proclamation exercised the right he here so 
 plainly condemns, but that argument is erroneous because 
 the President did not declare war or override the Constitu- 
 tion in that act. The Constitution provides that the President 
 being Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy, in time of 
 war may use that power in any way necessary for the suc- 
 cessful prosecution of that war. Lincoln freed the slaves as a 
 measure of necessity during the war, and did not use his pre- 
 rogative as a means of freeing them in times of peace. 
 
 In June of that year Lincoln was a delegate to the Whig 
 Convention which met in Philadelphia and nominated Gen- 
 eral Taylor for President. He thought the nomination a wise 
 one and predicted the election of "Old Rough" in a letter as 
 follows: "In my opinion we shall have a most overwhelming 
 and glorious triumph. One unmistakable sign is that all the 
 odds and ends are with us — barn-burners, native Americans, 
 Tyler men, disappointed office-seeking locofocos, and the 
 Lord knows what not * * * Taylor's nomination takes the 
 locos on the blind side. It turns the war thunder against them. 
 The war is now the gallows of Haman, which they have built 
 for us and on which they're doomed to be hanged them- 
 selves." 
 
 Lincoln was fast learning to judge the pulse of the Nation. 
 His letters at this time reveal a keen political mind. As in a 
 wrestling bout he had practiced to take advantage of all 
 "holds" and thought it right to use all his strength at the 
 proper moment to overthrow his opponent, so in politics he 
 approached a contest with all his senses alert and his whole 
 
Apostle of Democracy 101 
 
 being ready for every advantage. In either case, however, he 
 shunned any advantage that might be gained by crookedness. 
 Always he fought a good fight, while he kept the faith. Let 
 the search be where it will among the voluminous records 
 gathered with patience in every available quarter by lovers of 
 Lincoln, as well as critics, and there cannot be found one 
 instance where he ever acted or counseled political dishonesty. 
 Direct in attack, terrific in battle, generous in conquest, and 
 just in defeat, he made his way from poverty to the Pres- 
 idency, every step a contest with superior forces, every ad- 
 vance a fight against terrific odds, and always an honest man. 
 
 In the lists for political honors he was generally pitted 
 against men who had already won the favor of the public, 
 and who were made favorites and set down to win from the 
 start. He defeated the champion of the Democratic Party 
 decisively, and in turn defeated the champions of his own 
 Party, men who had been head and front of the very move- 
 ment he espoused. But out of all those struggles and fierce 
 contests for distinction, he came with clean hands. His blows 
 cut deep, but left no cankering sores, only honorable scars. 
 His logic triumphed, but only to advance the learning of his 
 opponents. His wisdom revealed the erroneous position of the 
 opposing forces, while at the same time it shone like a kindly 
 sun to make the devastated ground again fertile and produc- 
 tive. Formidable as an antagonist, he was equally generous 
 as a conqueror. The great humanity of the man made it im- 
 possible for those whom he directly opposed to refuse their 
 admiration, even when they were beaten; and all along the 
 path of his advancement stood the ambitious and honorably 
 defeated, as Douglas stood at his first inauguration, proud 
 humbly to serve where they had thought to rule. 
 
 This is history's challenge to those who would class Lincoln 
 
102 Abraham Lincoln 
 
 with scheming politicians and deny him the first order of 
 statesmanship. He conquered his enemies head and heart, 
 and Destiny, for the instrument of his taking off, was forced 
 to go outside the realm of those active in the great political 
 drama, North and South, and employ an instrument removed 
 from either and schooled in the phenomena of passion, to con- 
 summate the mighty tragedy. 
 
 We are far ahead of the chronological record but the view 
 we are taking of this man is not one that can be measured by 
 years nor by single events. The weight of all those years he 
 passed on earth he, himself, seems to have felt at every point 
 of his advance. Twice during his stay in Congress he refers to 
 himself as old. In his letter to Herndon telling of the effect 
 upon him by a speech made by Stephens, of Georgia, he 
 writes almost subconsciously, "My old, withered, dry eyes 
 are full of tears yet." 
 
 Again a few days later to the same correspondent, he de- 
 clares, "I am now one of the old men." 
 
 The often expressed sentiment of those plain people who 
 knew him from boyhood that "Lincoln never seemed to be 
 young from a child," seems in the light of his own unstudied 
 words to have been a reflection of his own primal knowledge 
 of himself. It calls to mind Emerson's transcendent phrase in 
 his letter to Walt Whitman, after reading the first edition of 
 Leaves of Grass: "I greet you at the beginning of a great 
 career, which yet must have had a long foreground some- 
 where, for such a start." 
 
 Lincoln was like Nature, revealing himself so freely, so 
 generously, so fully and with such universal acceptance, that 
 he eludes any attempt to classify him either in character or 
 time. Boswell has made Dr. Johnson one of the best known 
 personalities; Lincoln made himself the best known indivi- 
 
Apostle of Democracy 103 
 
 dual in the annals of time. Johnson with all his seeming can- 
 dor never drew aside the veil of his soul; Lincoln opened the 
 door to his inner temple for all the world to see. 
 
 Lincoln returned to Springfield from his one term in 
 Congress and did his best to elect his old mentor and law 
 partner, Judge Logan, to the seat. Logan was defeated. The 
 Whig Party was disintegrating and the new Republican 
 Party, that was destined to play its mighty part in the 
 Nation, was putting off its swaddling clothes. Lincoln, who 
 was soon to captain the Ship of State upon its voyage of dis- 
 covery into hitherto unexplored regions of human affairs, 
 discouraged any suggestions of his running for office, and 
 gave himself up to the study of the great problem of the ex- 
 tension of slavery now overshadowing the country with its 
 dark wings. On his way home from Washington, following the 
 adjournment of Congress, he had gone through New York 
 and some of the New England States making a number of 
 speeches for Taylor. The impression he created was one of 
 respect for his clear logic and an evident appreciation of his 
 humor. But the people there, used to forensic fire and figure, 
 stately periods and philosophical conclusions, were illy pre- 
 pared to follow so strange and new a presentation of facts; 
 and reporters, to whom the Alleghanies were the boundary 
 line of civilization in the Western Hemisphere, ambitious to 
 excel in caricature, dwelt at great length on his odd personal- 
 ity to the exclusion of the vital matter of his speeches. Never- 
 theless, he made a pronounced impression, hardly recognized 
 at the time, but of such vigorous seed that the harvest a few 
 years later gave returns a hundred fold. 
 
 That Lincoln was already deeply pondering the slave ques- 
 tion is made evident by his remark to Seward following a 
 meeting at Tremont Temple, Boston, where he had listened 
 
104 Abraham Lincoln 
 
 with rapt attention to the New England statesman. That 
 evening while they were together as fellow lodgers at a hotel, 
 Lincoln said, "Governor Seward, I have been thinking 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 more 
 attention to it hereafter than we have been doing." 
 
 Lincoln returned to Illinois and devoted himself to the 
 practice of law as a means of making money — 
 
 "Not for to hide it in a hedge, 
 Nor for a trained attendant, 
 
 But for the glorious privilege 
 Of being independent. " 
 As he had used the ax, the flatboat, the country store, sur- 
 veying, so he used the law, as a means to an end, and that 
 end, the culture of his mind. As he had conquered in each of 
 those several endeavors, so far as they were to be conquered, 
 or had perfected himself in each so far as it served his purpose 
 so now he set himself to conquer the law and perfect himself 
 in it, using it sanely and justly, bringing to it a mind as 
 dramatically logical as iEsop's, and as tenderly humane as 
 Tom Hood's. 
 
 Lincoln had a settled horror of being in debt, either for 
 material supplies or for political favors. If circumstances 
 forced him to accept such obligations he was never content 
 until he had cancelled the obligation, principal and interest. 
 The debts incurred by the firm of Berry and Lincoln in their 
 mercantile venture in New Salem, and for which he held him- 
 self individually responsible, he was some years in liquidat- 
 ing, but he finally paid them to the last farthing. His scrupu- 
 lous adherence to this principle of getting out from under 
 obligations incurred, at the earliest possible moment, helped 
 him immensely in keeping his political slate clean, so that 
 
Apostle of Democracy 105 
 
 when he was finally nominated for the Presidency, there was 
 none to come forward with a just claim to patronage founded 
 on unpaid service to him. With that keen perception of the 
 fundamental characteristics which, possibly because their 
 eyes are not overshadowed so much by refinements and the 
 study of phenomena, and seek the object of their regard in 
 the elements of feeling rather than in the discoveries of 
 reason, ever marks their estimate of a man who stands 
 against the horizon of great events, the people dubbed him 
 "Honest Old Abe." 
 
 Lincoln came back from Washington basically the same 
 but with a broader outlook. Seemingly abandoned by the 
 Whigs for his bold stand in Congress on the Mexican War, 
 and facing possible political obscurity, he was not soured nor 
 cast down. 
 
 Herndon records his impressions of the change. "I could 
 notice a difference in Lincoln's movement as a lawyer from 
 this time forward. He had begun to realize lack of discipline, 
 a want of mental training and method. He now began to 
 study law in earnest. No man had greater power of applica- 
 tion than he. Once fixing his mind on any subject, nothing 
 could interfere with or disturb him. Frequently I would go 
 out on the circuit with him. We stopped usually at little 
 country inns, occupying the same bed. In most cases the beds 
 were too short for him and his feet would hang over the foot- 
 board, thus exposing a limited expanse of shin bone. Placing 
 a candle on a chair at the head of the bed he would read and 
 study for hours. I have known him to study in this position 
 till two o'clock in the morning. Meanwhile, I and the others 
 who chanced to occupy the same room would be safely and 
 soundly asleep. On the circuit in this way he studied Euclid 
 until he would with ease demonstrate all the propositions in 
 
106 Abraham Lincoln 
 
 the six books. How he could maintain his mental equilibrium 
 or concentrate his thoughts on an abstract mathematical 
 proposition while Davis, Logan, Sweet, Edwards and I so 
 industriously and volubly filled the air with our interminable 
 snoring, was a problem none of us could solve." 
 
 But his thirst for knowledge did not dampen his love of 
 life. The lawyers practicing with him were generally men of 
 large attainments and legal acumen. The life of the circuit 
 was in its human side a sort of Canterbury pilgrimage. Over 
 half the year was spent by these lawyers in following the 
 courts to the different counties. The homely inns were sup- 
 plied with common office and bar room. Here the lawyers 
 would gather at night to enter the lists in story-telling con- 
 tests as a relief from the strenuous demands upon their wit 
 and learning in the court room. There was no over-refinement 
 in the progress of the tales they told. The teller proving less 
 than human and dramatic, he was in disgrace. On the other 
 hand, the response to a lively story or a cleverly turned epi- 
 gram was immediate and hearty. Lincoln is proclaimed by all 
 his compeers as having been the most original in conception 
 and dramatic in delivery of any of his rivals in these imagina- 
 tive jousts. His power of mimicry was of the first order. In re- 
 cital he was both stage and actor. His countenance and 
 features seemed to take part in the performance. 
 
 "As he neared the pith or point of the joke or story," said 
 Herndon, "every vestige of seriousness disappeared from his 
 face. His gray eyes sparkled; a smile seemed to gather up, 
 curtain like, the corners of his mouth; his frame quivered 
 with suppressed excitement; and when the point, or 'nub* of 
 the story, as he called it, came, no one's laugh was heartier 
 than his." 
 
 In later years when he was bowed under the woes of a 
 
Apostle of Democracy 107 
 
 Union on the verge of dismemberment, those early creations 
 of humor, with perhaps their "nubs" changed to fit the exi- 
 gencies of the occasion, were often resurrected and played 
 again their part in keeping that mighty heart from breaking. 
 
 The chronicle of those " circuit " days is rich with fables 
 which bear the Lincoln stamp. Henry B. Rankin, a student 
 in the office of Lincoln and Herndon, tells the following 
 characteristic anecdote: 
 
 "Returning from off the circuit once, Lincoln said to Hern- 
 don: 'Billy, I heard a good story while I was up in the 
 
 country. Judge D was complimenting the landlord on 
 
 the excellence of his beef. "I am surprised," he said, "that 
 you have such good beef. You must have to kill a whole crit- 
 ter when you want any." "Yes," said the landlord, "we 
 never kill less than a whole critter." 
 
 Rankin further gives this intimate picture of Lincoln in his 
 law office. "Lincoln's favorite position when unraveling some 
 knotty law point," he says, "was to stretch both of his legs at 
 full length up in a chair in front of him. In this position, with 
 books on a table near by and in his lap, he worked up his case. 
 No matter how deeply interested in his work, if any one came 
 in, he had something humorous or pleasant to say and usually 
 wound up by telling a joke or anecdote. I have heard him 
 relate the same story three times within as many hours to 
 persons who came in at different periods, and every time he 
 laughed as heartily and enjoyed it as if it were a new story. 
 His humor was infectious. I had to laugh because I though it 
 funny that Mr. Lincoln enjoyed a story so repeatedly told. 
 
 "There was no order in the office at all. The firm of Lincoln 
 and Herndon kept no books. They divided their fees without 
 taking any receipts or making any taking any receipts or 
 making any entries on books. One day Mr. Lincoln received 
 
108 Abraham Lincoln 
 
 $5,000 as a fee in a railroad case. He came in and said, 'Well, 
 Billy, here is our fee, sit down and let me divide/ He counted 
 out $2,500 to his partner and gave it to him with as much 
 nonchalance as he would have given a few cents for a paper. 
 Cupidity had no abiding place in his nature." 
 
 It is pleasant to linger over these few years of Lincoln's life 
 when he was free to indulge his fondness for the companion- 
 ship of his associates and expend his inexhaustible fund of 
 good humor to soften the asperities of existence or condole 
 the sorrows of any man who, in any walk of life, seemed to be 
 in need of sympathy or cheer. It was a season of meditation 
 during which he browsed in the fields of experience, his own 
 and others, while he uttered longings and desires of the 
 human heart, got first hand from sympathy with nature. He 
 read Shakespeare, Byron, Burns, the Bible, measuring his 
 thoughts with theirs, and storing up without effort striking 
 figures and metaphors whenever he found that they squared 
 with his own study of the problems of human endeavor. He 
 liked poems that had the complexion of melancholy wedded 
 to the subtle charm of recollection. Oliver Wendell Holmes' 
 "Last Leaf" appealed to him, especially the stanza begin- 
 ning: "And the mossy marble rests." It was during this period 
 that his law partner became possessed of one of the first edi- 
 tions of Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass" Something in the 
 connection of these two great souls, so universally sympathe- 
 tic of humanity and so prophetic of universal democracy, lies 
 deeper than our philosophy. 
 
 Rankin described Lincoln's introduction to the "Good 
 Gray Poet's" poems, as follows: "When Walt Whitman's 
 "Leaves of Grass" was first published in 1855, it was placed 
 on the office table of Herndon. It had been read by several of 
 us and one day discussions hot and extreme had sprung up 
 
Apostle of Democracy 109 
 
 between office students and Mr. Herndon concerning its 
 poetic merit, in which Dr. Bateman engaged with us, having 
 entered from his adjoining office. Later, quite a surprise oc- 
 curred when we found that the Whitman poetry and our dis- 
 cussions had been engaging Lincoln's silent attention. After 
 the rest of us had finished our criticism of some peculiar 
 verses and of Whitman in general, as well as of each other's 
 literary taste and morals in particular, and had resumed our 
 usual duties or had departed, Lincoln, who during the criti- 
 cism had been apparently in the unapproachable depths of 
 one of his glum moods of meditative silence, took up ''Leaves 
 of Grass 1 for his first reading of it. After half an hour or more 
 devoted to it he turned back to the first pages and, to our 
 general surprise, began to read aloud. Other office work was 
 discontinued by us all when he read with sympathetic em- 
 phasis verse after verse. His rendering revealed a charm of 
 new life in Whitman's versification. Save for a few comments 
 on some broad allusions that Lincoln suggested could have 
 been veiled, or left out, he commended the new poet's verses 
 for their virility, freshness, unconventional sentiments, and 
 unique forms of expression, and claimed that Whitman gave 
 promise of a new school of poetry." 
 
 Some years later William Douglas O'Connor, then a young 
 journalist in Washington but later author of a masterly 
 defense of Whitman and a scorching rebuke to Secretary of 
 the Interior Harlan for discharging Whitman from office on 
 account of his poems, records the following incident: 
 
 "I treasure to my latest hour," he writes, "with swelling 
 heart and springing tears, the remembrance of Abraham Lin- 
 coln seeing him (Whitman) for the first time from the window 
 of the East Room of the White House as he passed slowly by, 
 and gazing at him long with that deep eye which read men, 
 
no Abraham Lincoln 
 
 saying in the quaint sweet tone which those who have spoken 
 with him will remember, and with a significant emphasis 
 which type can hardly convey, ' Well, be looks like a MAN. ' " 
 
 Lincoln ministering in the White House to the wounds of a 
 Nation battling for its life, and Whitman in the camps and 
 hospitals about Washington devoting his heart and soul to 
 the wounded of our armies — two supremely lovely souls, on 
 their journey toward their destined goal! What further. 
 Listen to O'Connor again in his estimate of Whitman's 
 poetry: 
 
 "I know of nothing superior to 'Bivouac's Fitful Flame / 
 'Asbes of Soldiers / the ' Spirit wbose Work Is Done, the pre- 
 lude to 'Brum 'Taps, 9 that most mournful and noble of all 
 love songs, ' Out of tbe Rolling Ocean Tbe Crowd,' or ' Out Of 
 Tbe Cradle Endlessly Rocking] ' Elemental Drifts ,' the entire 
 section entitled, 'Song of Myself, the hymn commencing 
 * Splendor of Falling Day,' or the great salute to the French 
 Revolution of '93 entitled, 'France' And if all these were 
 wanting there is a poem in the volume which, if the author 
 had never written another line, would be sufficient to place 
 him among the chief poets of the world. I do not refer to 
 ' Cbanting Tbe Square Deifc,' though that also would be suf- 
 ficient in its incomparable breadth and grandeur of concep- 
 tion and execution to establish the highest poetic reputation, 
 but the strain commemorating the death of the beloved Presi- 
 dent, commencing, 'When lilacs last in the dooryard 
 bloomed/ a poem whose rich and sacred beauty and rapture 
 of tender religious passion, spreading aloft into the sublime, 
 leave it unique and solitary in literature, and will make it the 
 chosen and immortal hymn of Death forever. Emperors 
 might elect to die could their memories be surrounded with 
 such a Requiem, which, next to the grief and love of the 
 
Apostle of Democracy ill 
 
 people, is the grandest and only grand funeral music poured 
 around Lincoln's bier. ,, 
 
 Shall we leave to chance Lincoln's recognition of Whitman 
 as a great poet when all the world was deriding him? — to 
 chance the passing of Whitman before the President who 
 recognized instantly his individual nobility? — to chance the 
 sacrifices both made for humanity and in the name of the 
 Union? — to chance the preparation of Whitman through 
 those four years of woeful experience among the wounded, 
 the maimed, the dying, that he might have his soul attuned 
 to that wonderful chant of Death? Was it chance that gave 
 to those terrific years those two men pre-visioning universal 
 democracy; to one of them to establish it and give his life for 
 it, and to the other to live to sing the Apocalypse of the Re- 
 ligion of Democracy in his perfected "Leaves of Grass"? If 
 this be so, then we may cast to the winds our system of logic 
 as well as our faith in a Creator Whose Intelligence marshals 
 the hosts of heaven and marks the fall of the sparrow. 
 
 Search through all the world and the histories of it and 
 there will be found no other two men beside whom these two 
 are not worthy to stand. Standing side by side there is no dis- 
 paraging thought. They are Democracy. 
 
Chapter XI 
 
 THE HOUSE DIVIDED 
 
 tjk HOUSE divided against itself! People saw it now for 
 
 lj\ the first time. Yet it was no new thing. It had been in 
 1 jJ^L-the Constitution from the first. A declaration of prin- 
 ciples had been promulgated that pronounced all men to be 
 born free, and yet later the same Constitution had accepted a 
 proviso that allowed some men to be chattels. It had given 
 legal sanction to ownership in men in one part of the Union 
 and had prohibited it in another. It had put a ban on the im- 
 portation of men from a foreign country to be sold as slaves, 
 but had not made the sale of slaves born within the states 
 illegal. 
 
 In the Constitutional Convention, it was the plan that 
 New England was to let slavery alone, and we must remem- 
 ber that it was Mason of Virginia who was so enraged and so 
 opposed to slavery, that he arose and delivered one of the 
 most significant speeches heard in the Constitutional Con- 
 vention — the more significant coming from a delegate from a 
 state owning more than a third of all the slaves in the United 
 States. Mason exclaimed: 
 
 "This infernal traffic originated in the avarice of British 
 merchants. The British Government constantly checked the 
 attempts of Virginia to put a stop to it. The present question 
 concerns not the importing states, but the whole Union * * * 
 
The House Divided 113 
 
 Slavery discourages arts and manufactures. The poor despise 
 labor when performed by slaves. They prevent the immigra- 
 tion of Whites, who really enrich and strengthen a country. 
 They produce the most pernicious effects upon manners. 
 Every master of slaves is born a petty tyrant. They bring the 
 judgment of Heaven upon a country. As nations cannot be 
 rewarded or punished in the next world, they must be in this. 
 By an inevitable chain of causes and effects, Providence 
 punishes national sins by national calamities. " 
 
 But a warning of awful calamity to come was not so effec- 
 tive with the majority, as was the desire to frame an instru- 
 ment competent to establish a National Government — and 
 which could be ratified. The compromise was completed by 
 extending the slave importation period to twenty years, and 
 placing a head tax on all slaves imported — and Mason refused 
 to sign the Constitution. 
 
 The Union indivisible hid the seed of divisibility in its 
 original organism. The house was divided against itself pri- 
 marily before the architects had finished drawing the plans. 
 The unforgivable sin had its roots in the birth of the nation. 
 The clear-eyed fathers of the Republic saw this plainly 
 enough and shuddered at the thought of a democracy 
 founded on the primal law of God, a free man, yet retaining 
 in its Constitution an acceptance of a condition which al- 
 lowed one man to bind another after his own ideas of truth 
 and justice, unsupported by, and contrary to, the "Declara- 
 tion" that "all men are created equal" under the benignant 
 smile of Life, which presupposed liberty and the pursuit of 
 happiness. But they also shrank with horror at the prospect 
 of Colonial anarchy. Better a Union with one flaw in its Con- 
 stitution than no Union with all its attendant evils. They 
 acknowledged the conditions which they could not square 
 
114 Abraham Lincoln 
 
 with that ideal of perfection conceived by their genius, and 
 so accepted the Garden of Eden, serpent and all. 
 
 Out of this small dark serpent whose narrow track was 
 hardly observable in the profuse vegetation of the promises 
 of that hour, grew the monster that was at the beginning of 
 the second generation threatening to dismember the Union 
 or swallow it entirely. 
 
 Truth compels the admission that it was the growth of 
 slavery and the arrogance of its demands that caused the 
 widest protest against it. Not the love of virtue but the sense 
 of fear made it apparent to the Nation that the institution of 
 slavery was wrong. A few great souls inspired by a love of 
 truth and a sympathy for the oppressed were willing to tear 
 up the bond that had given security to the Shylock monster 
 in his demand for a pound of flesh, to risk a desecration of the 
 Constitution rather than to agree to its provisions, which 
 allowed the continuance of slavery, but not its extension 
 within, nor the prosecution of the slave trade outside its 
 borders. These were the original Abolitionists whose names 
 are now starred in the skies of human progress, never to fade 
 or to be effaced while men have power to lift their eyes to 
 higher things. But the growing spirit of material prosperity, 
 and the many and tremendous questions born of the Ameri- 
 can Revolution and demanding immediate consideration, 
 overshadowed the slave question in the general mind. Had 
 the slave states been content with the advantages given them 
 by the Constitution and made no demands for wider terri- 
 tory, it is a matter of speculation whether the National con- 
 science would even to this day have demanded its abolition. 
 
 Abraham Lincoln was the first to reveal the National mind 
 to itself. To hold the mirror up to it that it might know itself. 
 
 "The house is divided," he said. 
 
The House Divided 115 
 
 "Oh no," they cried, "it is not so! And if it is, to suggest 
 such a thing is only to increase the passions." 
 
 Lincoln persisted, not only that the house was divided, but 
 that it could not continue permanently in that way. One 
 division would swallow up the other. Either the Nation 
 would be all slave or all free. 
 
 It seems incredible in the light of the present, that in 1854, 
 when Lincoln first gave utterance to the "divided house" 
 prophecy, there was no one of all his associates but warned 
 him against its use. So simple a truth applied with such pre- 
 cision and simplicity to the situation, one might think, 
 would have been universally accepted on both sides of the 
 controversy. Certainly those who were opposed to slavery 
 extension should have grasped it, and used it in the widest 
 possible way. But even the Free Soilers and the Whigs were 
 afraid of the statement. It was applying the knife directly to 
 the sore and they feared the surgeon's remedy more than they 
 feared the disease. Or, as in the case of the Abolitionists, they 
 were willing to cut out the diseased portion even if it took the 
 heart of the Constitution with it. 
 
 So Lincoln stood alone, the one steady glowing fire among 
 all the fitful conflagrations of those rebellious years. In his 
 earliest utterances he logically (as well as humanely and 
 divinely) freed the Negro by refusing to discuss him as a 
 chattel and always referring to him as a man. Either a 
 Negro was an animal, he argued, in which case there was no 
 suggestion of slavery; or he was a man, in which case the 
 question of the right to enslave him was equally illogical and 
 absurd. He stripped the White Man and the Black Man and 
 stood them up before the world demanding judgment on his 
 primal principle of creation. From this standpoint he argued 
 that for one of those men to enslave the other was equally 
 
116 Abraham Lincoln 
 
 degrading to both. He forced the slave question from sophis- 
 tical refinement into the open; from its platform of property- 
 rights and climatic conditions; from its demands for effi- 
 ciency in production, and from its sentimental expressions, — 
 on one side the affection existing between the planter's 
 family and the slaves, on the other the brutal and fiendish 
 acts growing out of a condition which placed one human 
 being an absolute monarch over another with the blacksnake 
 as the final court of appeal. 
 
 It was this universal wisdom which made Lincoln the 
 greatest figure of his time. It was this universal wisdom which 
 so fortified his soul that when he came to lock himself in that 
 little bare room over a grocery store in Springfield to compose 
 his first Inaugural, he confined his selection from a list of 
 books and authorities given him by Herndon, to Henry 
 Clay's great Speech delivered in 1850, Andrew Jackson's 
 Proclamation against Nullification, a copy of the Constitu- 
 tion, and Webster's Reply to Hayne. It is this universal wis- 
 dom that makes his utterances as vital when applied to the 
 present social and political questions as they were when 
 applied to the conditions, but with other phenomena as the 
 result, during his lifetime. 
 
 The destiny that supplied Lincoln with antagonists at 
 every stage of his career who should call forth his best 
 efforts, physical or mental, brought into the same arena the 
 "Little Giant," Stephen A. Douglas. Enthusiastic adherents 
 of opposing parties, they were, for two decades or more, 
 either actively opposed or silently watching and studying 
 each other for the time that each felt sure would again bring 
 them face to face, pleading for public favor. The two met 
 first in the Illinois Legislature in 1834 when Lincoln, looking 
 down upon the then youthful Douglas from his extreme 
 
The House Divided 117 
 
 height, said whimsically, "He is the least man I have ever 
 seen." 
 
 But Douglas gave Lincoln more trouble than all the other 
 men who ever opposed him put together. From the first 
 Douglas' advancement was continual and rapid. He became 
 successively State's Attorney, Member of the Illinois Legis- 
 lature, Registrar of the Land Office at Springfield, Secretary 
 of State for Illinois, Judge of the Supreme Court of that 
 State, Member of Congress and United States Senator. 
 
 Lincoln during the same period had the comparatively 
 meager glory of four terms in the State Legislature and one in 
 the Lower House of Congress. Douglas became the Head and 
 Front of the National Democratic Party; Lincoln went down 
 with the Whigs, with the defeat of Henry Clay, and found 
 his final political home in the Republican Party when it was, 
 as he had said of Douglas, about the least Party one could 
 imagine. The political careers of these two men started at 
 about the same time and place. When Lincoln entered upon 
 his first term in the Illinois Assembly at Vandalia, he met in 
 the lobby the shrewd little Vermonter, four years his junior, 
 who, notwithstanding his extreme youth and briefness of 
 residence in the West, was conducting among the members of 
 the Legislature what proved to be a successful canvass for the 
 office of State's Attorney for the First Judicial District. He 
 became as pronounced in his Democracy as Lincoln was in 
 his Whigism. On opposite sides in the next Assembly, both 
 having been elected to the Legislature in 1836, they clashed 
 from time to time in debate. The antagonism thus started at 
 Vandalia was transferred to Springfield, where within a few 
 months of each other, the young men took up their residence. 
 
 No two men could have been more utterly unlike in char- 
 acter. Lincoln was a worshiper of truth, Douglas delighted 
 
118 Abraham Lincoln 
 
 in sophistry. Lincoln revelled in the humor of a situation; 
 Douglas looked with absolute dislike upon any show of 
 animal spirits. Lincoln was plain, awkward, homely; Douglas 
 was smooth, urbane, polite, dignified. Both were men of 
 superior endowments but cast in such different moulds that 
 they found it impossible to be on the same side of any propo- 
 sition. Douglas respected Lincoln's powers while he pre- 
 tended to ignore them. Lincoln gave equal respect to his 
 rival's talents but, instead of ignoring them, acknowledged 
 them, made a study of them, and when the final test and the 
 supreme struggle came, he knew his man so well that he was 
 able to press his antagonist to the verge of defeat, at the 
 moment, and place him in a position before the country 
 which lost him the prestige won through long years of bril- 
 liant achievement, and sent him two years later to the 
 grave, a broken hearted man. 
 
 Lincoln and Douglas had many debates during the years 
 following their first contest in 1837. They both stumped the 
 State during the campaign that followed. Lincoln lost no op- 
 portunity of speaking from the same platform with Douglas. 
 In one of these debates, Lincoln charged Van Buren with 
 having voted at the New York Constitutional Convention of 
 1 821 for Negro suffrage with a property qualification. Doug- 
 las challenged the statement, whereupon Lincoln drew out 
 Holland's "Life of Van Buren" and proved it. Douglas, 
 cornered, and in a sudden fit of anger, snatched the volume 
 from Lincoln's hand and exclaiming, "Damn such a book!" 
 hurled it into the audience. 
 
 But Douglas had a following in the State which gradually 
 extended to the Nation, until he was the general choice of the 
 "Young Democrats" everywhere for the Presidency. He 
 looked to the Southern States to complete that ambition. The 
 
The House Divided 119 
 
 House was divided, but he did not see it. He saw the sectional 
 differences but shrewdly figured that the people both North 
 and South would welcome the man who should be able to 
 compromise differences and prevent any open outbreak. 
 
 "Not only," says Alonzo Arnold in his wonderful book 
 "Lincoln, Master of Men," "did he support the so-called 
 Compromise of 1850, but he had, at the same time, solemnly 
 reaffirmed the great Missouri Compromise itself. 'It had its 
 origin/ Douglas said, 'in the hearts of all patriotic men who 
 desired to preserve and perpetuate the blessings of our glor- 
 ious Union — an origin akin to that of the Constitution of the 
 United States, conceived in the same spirit of fraternal affec- 
 tion, and calculated to remove forever the danger which 
 seemed to threaten, at some distant day, to sever the social 
 bond of union. All the evidences of public opinion, at that 
 day, seemed to indicate that this compromise had been can- 
 onized in the hearts of the American people, as a sacred thing 
 which no hand would ever be reckless enough to disturb. ,,, 
 
 A few years later Douglas, himself, was guilty of that sac- 
 rilege. When the slave states had got from the Compromise 
 all the advantages and benefits allotted to them in the com- 
 pact, they struck forth swiftly at the compact itself, and 
 Douglas, unable to face the difficulty of his position without 
 surrender, obeyed the mandate of the controlling minds of 
 his Party. He responded to their demands to prove his faith- 
 fulness to them by presenting his Kansas-Nebraska Bill, with 
 its fateful amendment which declared the slavery restrictions 
 of the Compromise "Inoperative and void." 
 
 The spirit of this bill, which annulled the clause of the Con- 
 stitution which prohibited the extension of slavery into any 
 of the Territories of the Union, aroused Lincoln as nothing 
 before had done. He saw in it a menace to every state in the 
 
120 Abraham Lincoln 
 
 Union. He raised his voice in strenuous opposition. Douglas 
 felt the hot wave of indignation sweeping up from the people, 
 and, taking advantage of the State and Congressional elec- 
 tion, hurried home and threw himself into the campaign with 
 all his fire and vigor. He spoke first at Chicago where Lincoln 
 heard him. Next he appeared at Springfield where the State 
 Agricultural Fair was being held. His speech on this occasion, 
 like most of his utterances, was specious but attractive. A 
 tremendous audience heard him and there were evidences of 
 great sympathy for the speaker and his new doctrine of 
 "squatter sovereignty." He must be answered. 
 
 The Anti-Nebraska elements, as if by common consent, 
 assigned the task to his old antagonist, Abraham Lincoln. 
 Douglas seems to have been informed of this fact before he 
 had spoken. With his opening remarks the Senator said: "I 
 will mention that it is understood by some gentlemen that 
 Mr. Lincoln, of this city, is expected to answer me. If this is 
 the understanding, I wish that Mr. Lincoln would step for- 
 ward and let us arrange some plan upon which to carry out 
 this discussion." 
 
 Mr. Lincoln, not being present, did not respond at the 
 time. But on the following day, in the same place and before 
 an equally large assembly, he replied to Senator Douglas in a 
 well considered argument and with such clear reasoning and 
 logic as to arouse the utmost enthusiasm among his support- 
 ers. With a single stroke of genius he cut his way direct to the 
 heart of the question, and laid bare the sophistry of the Sena- 
 tors opposition. His speech was of such a high order that it 
 evoked the praise of even the supporters of Douglas. The 
 Senator was so thoroughly unhorsed that he could not con- 
 tain himself and made frequent interruptions which in no 
 way disconcerted Mr. Lincoln who closed his argument with 
 great simplicity and dignity. 
 
The House Divided 121 
 
 Douglas was to have two hours before supper time to reply 
 but these were used to so little purpose that he closed with a 
 promise to resume in the evening. The audience again as- 
 sembled but the "Little Giant" failed to appear. Neither did 
 he give any explanation at that time or later for his failure to 
 conclude his reply. Lincoln had won the first round in a 
 match that was to continue not only through this canvass 
 but in succeeding ones when the prize at stake would be im- 
 measurably greater, when the audience instead of local would 
 be a national, and when the whole country would devour 
 their words and decide from them one of the most momen- 
 tous questions of the ages. 
 
 Mr. Herndon, who was present when Lincoln delivered 
 this speech, was greatly moved by it. He reports that Lincoln 
 had told him previously in their office conversations, that the 
 time was fast approaching when the social and political dif- 
 ferences between freedom and slavery must be settled. 
 
 "One must overcome the other; postponing the struggle 
 between them will only make it the more deadly in the end. 
 The day of compromise has passed." Lincoln had said to him. 
 "These two great ideas have been kept apart by the most art- 
 ful means. They are like two wild beasts in sight of each 
 other, but chained and held apart. Some day these deadly 
 antagonists will one or the other break its bonds and then the 
 question will be settled." 
 
 Slavery, he maintained, was a great and crying injustice, 
 an enormous National crime. He made the observation that 
 it was "singular that the courts would hold that a man never 
 lost his right to his property that had been stolen from him, 
 but that he instantly lost his right to himself if he was stolen." 
 
 "The Anti-Nebraska Speech made at this time in reply to 
 Douglas," Mr. Herndon wrote at the time, "was the pro- 
 
122 Abraham Lincoln 
 
 foundest in our opinion that Lincoln has made in his whole 
 life. He felt upon his soul the truths burn which he uttered, 
 and all present felt that he was true to his own soul. His feel- 
 ings once or twice swelled within, and came near to stifling 
 his utterance. He quivered with emotion. The whole house 
 was still as death. Fie attacked the Nebraska Bill with un- 
 usual warmth and energy; and all felt that a man of strength 
 was its enemy and that he intended to blast it if he could by 
 strong, manly efforts. He was most successful, and the house 
 approved the glorious triumph of truth by loud and con- 
 tinued huzzas. Douglas felt the sting; the animal within him 
 was aroused, he frequently interrupted Mr. Lincoln. His 
 friends felt that he was crushed by Lincoln's powerful argu- 
 ment, manly logic, and illustrations from nature around us." 
 
 In Mr. Herndon's estimate of this great speech in which 
 Lincoln took his "first step forward" in those seven-league 
 boots he had drawn on to pursue Douglas, the speech which 
 he dramatically made in response to the challenge of the 
 "Little Giant," Lincoln discovered himself to a wider field 
 than he had yet known. 
 
 Horace White, political editor of the Chicago Evening 
 Journal at the time and afterwards representative of the 
 Chicago Tribune in the Lincoln-Douglas Debates, gives a 
 graphic account of the impression made upon him by this 
 address. Writing several years later, he says: 
 
 "I occupied a front seat in the Representatives' Hall in the 
 old State House when Lincoln began to speak. The impres- 
 sion made upon me by the orator was quite overpowering. 
 I had not heard much political speaking up to that time. I 
 have never heard anything since, either by Mr. Lincoln or by 
 anybody, that I would put on a higher plane of oratory. All 
 the strings that play upon the human heart and understand- 
 
The /louse Divided 123 
 
 ing were touched with masterly skill and force, while beyond 
 and above all skill was the overwhelming conviction pressed 
 upon the audience that the speaker himself was charged with 
 an irresistible and inspiring duty to his fellowmen. This con- 
 scientious impulse drove his arguments through the heads of 
 his hearers down to their bosoms, where they made everlast- 
 ing lodgment. I had been nurtured in the Abolitionist faith 
 and was much more radical than Mr. Lincoln himself on any 
 point where slavery was concerned, yet it seemed to me, when 
 this speech was finished, as though I had had a very feeble 
 conception of the wickedness of the Kansas-Nebraska Bill. 
 I was filled, as never before, with the sense of my own duty 
 and responsibility as a citizen toward the aggressions of the 
 slave power." 
 
 At Peoria a few days later, Lincoln and Douglas met again 
 and spoke from the same platform. Again Lincoln shattered 
 his opponents armor and to such a degree that Douglas pro- 
 posed a cessation of hostilities and that they should both go 
 home and speak no more during the campaign. Lincoln 
 agreed and returned to Springfield, but Douglas on his way 
 to Chicago stopped at Princeton and violated the agreement. 
 Lincoln put another mark against the trustworthiness of 
 Douglas. He was getting the accurate measure of the man 
 from whom, he already saw, the Nation had most to fear. 
 Douglas was powerful in argument, the best debater in the 
 Senate, and, as Lincoln discerned, was ready to admit 
 slavery anywhere if by so doing he could gain the Presidency. 
 
 And Lincoln knew that he alone was prepared to check the 
 redoubtable Douglas in his ambitious schemes. 
 
 During those hours of withdrawal from the world when 
 Lincoln was fathoms deep in speculation, a mood on which 
 none of his most intimate friends had the courage to intrude, 
 
124 Abraham Lincoln 
 
 did he dream of himself taking the exalted place Douglas had 
 marked as his own goal? Did he sense his destiny? Were the 
 future woes of the Nation revealed to him ? Was he already in 
 conscious pre-vision bearing those burdens? Who shall say? 
 Whatever he may have believed or dreamed, he kept his own 
 counsel. But he never took his eyes from Douglas nor allowed 
 to slip an opportunity to oppose him. Instead of attacking 
 the Democratic Party for the unholy attempts to push slav- 
 ery into the Territories, he rightly placed it at the door of 
 Douglas. 
 
 It is difficult at this late day to realize the public state of 
 mind in 1856-58. For the first time the terrible problem of 
 slavery, long the secret haunt, became the open battlefield 
 of American politics. In place of the delicate silence, usually 
 enforced by the code of democratic politeness toward the 
 "peculiar institution," the journals, the stumps, exhausted 
 the resources of political eloquence in its attack and defence. 
 The halls of Congress rang with it. The desecration of the 
 Missouri Compromise, the Dred Scott Decision, the Ne- 
 braska Bill, the election of Van Buren, made the South arro- 
 gant. Putting aside fear, they leaped to assurance. They 
 exchanged their dumb feint for loud audacity. Instead of 
 attempting to stop the mouth of New England, the South 
 preferred to speak out for itself and to cane the barehead of 
 senatorial reply. The debate in Congress had arisen, not in 
 concession to Northern rights, but in the service of Southern 
 treachery and aggression — to legalize a breach of public faith 
 and to force the stipulated limits of slavery. Steadily the en- 
 croachments on the Constitution had been made. 
 
 The original ordinance of Congress, "For the government 
 of the Territory of the United States Northwest of the Ohio," 
 closed with the "Unalterable Article": 
 
The House Divided 125 
 
 "There shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude 
 in the said Territory, otherwise than in punishment of crimes 
 whereof the parties shall be duly convicted." 
 
 This article had been displaced by the Compromise of 1820 
 when all the country "which lies north of 36-30 North Lati- 
 tude, excepting only such parts thereof as is included within 
 the limits of the state contemplated by this Act," was pro- 
 scribed to slavery, which left all the territories and new states 
 carved out of the acquisition of Texas and New Mexico to be 
 cultivated by slave labor. The Nebraska Bill gave the people 
 of a territory freedom to decide whether they should enter 
 the Union as a free or a slave state, no matter whether north 
 of the prescribed line or not. Then came the Dred Scott 
 Decision in which the Supreme Court made it legal for an 
 owner of a slave state to take his slave into a free state and 
 hold him there as his property. This brought about the "In- 
 vasion of Kansas" and gave it the name of Bloody Kansas. 
 
 Douglas was the champion of all these measures, a victim 
 to the blindness of ambition which has wrecked the fortunes 
 and blemished the fame of greater Americans than he. And 
 because he was already a formidable candidate for the nomi- 
 nation for President, Lincoln desired his overthrow. 
 
 The Republican Organization came into existence in Illi- 
 nois as a Party at Bloomington, May, 1856. The convention 
 adopted a platform ringing with strong anti-Nebraska senti- 
 ments. "And then and there," says Herndon, "gave the 
 Republican Party its official christening." 
 
 "The Convention having concluded its business, Lincoln, 
 in response to repeated calls, addressed the delegates. He had 
 prepared the speech, prepared it by two years of study and 
 application of the great truths of existence, for the saving of 
 the Union. Mr. Herndon tells us that, compared with all the 
 
126 Abraham Lincoln 
 
 speeches ever delivered by Lincoln, most of which he had 
 heard and all of which he had read, in his opinion the Bloom- 
 ington Speech was the grand effort of Lincoln's life. 
 
 "Heretofore/' writes this biographer, "he simply argued 
 the slavery question on the grounds of policy, — the states- 
 man's grounds — never reaching the question of the radical 
 and the eternal right. Now he was newly baptized and freshly 
 born; he had the fervor of a new convert; the smothered 
 flame broke out; enthusiasms unusual to him blazed up; his 
 eyes were aglow with inspiration; he felt justice; his heart was 
 alive to the right; his sympathies, remarkably deep for him, 
 burst forth, and he stood before the throne of Eternal Right. 
 His speech was full of fire and energy and force; it was logic; 
 it was pathos; it was enthusiasm; it was justice, equity, truth, 
 and right, set ablaze by the divine fires of a soul maddened 
 by the wrong; it was hard, heavy, knotty, gnarly, backed 
 with wrath. I attempted for about fifteen minutes, as was 
 usual with me then, to take notes, but at the end of that time 
 I threw pen and paper away and lived only in the inspiration 
 of the hour. If Mr. Lincoln was six feet four inches high 
 usually, at Bloomington that day he was seven feet, and 
 inspired at that. From that day to the day of his death he 
 stood firm for the right. He felt his great cross, had his great 
 idea, nursed it, kept it, taught it to others, in his fidelity bore 
 witness of it to his death, and finally sealed it with his 
 precious blood." 
 
 Three steps Lincoln had taken, three mighty seven- 
 league steps, by the side of Senator Douglas, and already his 
 glow of truth had cast his tall shadow over his great antag- 
 onist. The speech at Bloomington delivered in May, 1856, 
 had so conquered the minds of reporters that their pencils 
 rested idly in their fingers, their paper lay white and un- 
 
The House Divided 127 
 
 marked before them. The experience detailed by Herndon 
 was the experience of all the newspaper men, even including 
 the editor of the Chicago Tribune, Joseph Medill, the fore- 
 most exponent of the new Republican ideas in the West. The 
 Peoria Speech delivered in October, 1854, had been the sec- 
 ond great step in the Lincoln advance. With his third mighty- 
 stride he placed himself in the fore of all the anti-slavery 
 forces of the time and reached a point in the exposition of the 
 principles of right and justice for all men which surpassed 
 his contemporaries and which not the greatest of them was 
 ever able to approach. 
 
 At Peoria he had said: "I particularly object to the new 
 position which the avowed principle of this Nebraska law 
 gives to slavery in the body politic. I object to it because it 
 assumes there can be moral right in the enslaving of one man 
 by another. I object to it as a dangerous dalliance for a free 
 people, a sad evidence that, feeling over-prosperity, we forget 
 right; that liberty as a principle we have ceased to revere. I 
 object to it because the Fathers of the Republic eschewed and 
 rejected it. The argument of 'necessity' was the only argu- 
 ment they ever admitted in favor of slavery, and so far, and 
 so far only as it carried them, did they ever go. They found 
 the institution existing among us, which they could not help, 
 and they cast the blame on the British King for having per- 
 mitted its introduction. Thus we see the plain, unmistakable 
 spirit of their age towards slavery was hostile to the principle 
 and tolerant only by necessity. But now it is transformed into 
 a sacred right * * * * Henceforth it is to be the chief jewel 
 of the Nation — the very figurehead of the Ship of State. 
 Little by little, but steadily as man's march to the grave, we 
 have been giving up the old for the new faith. Near eighty 
 years ago we began by declaring that all men are created 
 
128 Abraham Lincoln 
 
 equal: but now from the beginning we have run down to the 
 other declaration, that for some men to enslave others is a 
 sacred right of self-government. These principles cannot 
 stand together. They are as opposite as God and Mammon; 
 and whoever holds to the one must despise the other * * * 
 Our Republican robe is soiled and trailed in the dust. Let us 
 purify it. Let us turn and wash it white in the spirit if not in 
 the blood of the Revolution. Let us turn slavery from its 
 claims of moral right, back upon its existing legal rights and 
 its arguments of necessity. Let us return it to the position our 
 fathers gave it, and there let it rest in peace. Let us re-adopt 
 the Declaration of Independence, and with it the practices 
 and policy which harmonize with it. Let North and South, 
 let all Americans, let lovers of liberty everywhere, join in the 
 great and good work. If we do this, we shall not only have 
 saved the Union, but we shall have so saved it as to make and 
 to keep it forever worthy of saving." 
 
 From what exalted height does Lincoln here look down 
 upon a troubled world? There is in this utterance the very 
 substance of love. It is like looking into the bosom of a still 
 deep lake wherein are mirrored the beautiful truths of nature. 
 Nor does it lack power, nor yet the pressure of well-planned 
 attack by an invincible force. His reference to the stand 
 taken by the Fathers of the Republic forced Douglas to call 
 upon those Fathers to give evidence in his behalf. And out of 
 that despairing cry Lincoln wove that masterpiece of histori- 
 cal logic which distinguished his Cooper Institute Speech, the 
 fourth great stride of his seven-league boots, taken in 
 response to the invitation of Douglas at Springfield in 1854, 
 to "please step forward." 
 
 Three years and six months elapsed between the Peoria 
 Speech and the Bloomington Speech. What days of specula- 
 
The House Divided 129 
 
 tion, what nights of brooding over that mighty question, 
 went into the preparation of that matchless oration will never 
 be known! Its utterance not only exposed the Iago-like char- 
 acter of the popular Douglas, but it stripped the clouds from 
 the Temple of Liberty and flooded the whole inner structure 
 with light as from the Throne of God. With one simple refer- 
 ence to slavery made figurative with an age-old parable, he 
 presented the whole slavery question. With consummate art 
 he marshalled the events leading up to the Kansas-Nebraska 
 legislation sponsored by Douglas, analyzed its meaning and 
 discovered its origin and progress. Such a glow shone forth 
 from the presentation of the most familiar of these facts that 
 old campaigners were swallowed up in it and forgot their very 
 existence. The keynote of this speech had been in Lincoln's 
 mind for more than four years. He had used a suggestion of 
 the Biblical phrase in earlier efforts but was persuaded to 
 withhold the argument lest it should wreck the hopes of his 
 Party. But time had matured the idea. Patiently he had pon- 
 dered the declaration. Heartfully he had brooded over it. 
 Faithfully he had scanned it. Reverently he had builded and 
 shaped it. Enough. The time had come. He thundered it forth 
 and the world trembled. 
 
 "A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe that 
 this Government cannot endure permanently, half slave and 
 half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved — I do not 
 expect the house to fall — but I do expect it will cease to be 
 divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other. Either 
 the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, 
 and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that 
 it is in the course of ultimate extinction, or its advocates will 
 push it forward till it shall become alike lawful in all the 
 states, old as well as new, North as well as South." 
 
130 Abraham Lincoln 
 
 Silence fell upon that great audience. A miracle, the blind 
 had eyes and could see. Before them yawned the gulf. Their 
 feet were upon the verge of the awful chasm. A breath might 
 precipitate the catastrophe. Then again the clear, calm 
 tones of the speaker. 
 
 "What now? Have we no tendency to the latter condition? 
 Let any one who doubts, carefully contemplate that now 
 almost legal combination — piece of machinery, so to speak — 
 compounded of the Nebraska doctrine and the Dred Scott 
 Decision. Let him consider not only what work the machinery 
 is adapted to do, and how well adapted; but also let him 
 study the history of its construction, and trace, if he can, or 
 rather fail, if he can, to trace the evidences of design and con- 
 cert of action among its chief architects from the beginning." 
 
 Mr. Lincoln then proceeded to discuss the repeal of the 
 Missouri Compromise, which, every candid man must ac- 
 knowledge, conferred on emigrants to Kansas and Nebraska 
 the right to carry slaves there and hold them in bondage, 
 whereas formerly they had no such right; he alluded to the 
 events which followed that repeal, events in which Judge 
 Douglas* name figured prominently, explaining that he re- 
 ferred to the Dred Scott Decision and the extraordinary 
 means taken to prepare the public mind for that decision; the 
 efforts put forth by President Pierce to make people believe 
 that, in the election of James Buchanan, they had endorsed 
 the doctrine that slavery may exist in the free territories of 
 the Union; the earnest exhortation put forth by President 
 Buchanan to the people to stick to that decision whatever it 
 might be; the close-fitting niche in the Nebraska Bill wherein 
 the right of the people to govern themselves is made "subject 
 to the Constitution of the United States"; the extraordinary 
 haste made by Judge Douglas to give this decision an en- 
 dorsement at the capital of Illinois. 
 
The House Divided 13 1 
 
 "Auxiliary to all this, and working hand in hand with it," 
 continued the speaker, "the Nebraska doctrine, or what is 
 left of it, is to educate and mould public opinion, at least 
 Northern public opinion, not to care whether slavery is voted 
 down or voted up. This shows exactly where we now are and 
 partially, also, where we are tending. 
 
 "It will throw additional light on the latter to go back and 
 run the mind over the string of historical facts already stated. 
 Several things will now appear less dark and mysterious than 
 they did when they were transpiring. The people were to be 
 left 'perfectly free* * * * 'subject only to the Constitution/ 
 What the Constitution had to do with it outsiders could not 
 then see. Plainly enough now, it was an exactly fitted niche 
 for the Dred Scott Decision to afterward come in, and declare 
 the perfect freedom of the people to be just no freedom at all. 
 Why was the amendment, expressly declaring the right of the 
 people, voted down? Plainly enough now, the adoption of it 
 would have spoiled the niche for the Dred Scott Decision. 
 Why was the court decision held up? Why even a senator's 
 individual opinion withheld till after the Presidential elec- 
 tion? Plainly enough now, the speaking out then would have 
 damaged the 'perfectly free' argument upon which the elec- 
 tion was to be carried. Why the outgoing President's felicita- 
 tion on the endorsement? Why the delay of a reargument? 
 Why the incoming President's advance exhortation in favor 
 of the Decision ? These things look like the cautious patting 
 and petting of the spirited horse, preparatory to mounting 
 him, when it is dreaded that he may give the rider a fall. And 
 why the hasty after-endorsement of the Decision by the 
 President and others? 
 
 "We cannot absolutely know that all these exact adapta- 
 tions are the result of pre-concert. But when we see a lot of 
 
132 Abraham Lincoln 
 
 framed timbers, different portions of which we know to have 
 been gotten out at different times and places by different 
 workmen — Stephen, Franklin, Roger, and James, for in- 
 stance — and we see these timbers joined together, and see 
 they exactly made the frame of a house or a mill, all the 
 tenons and mortises exactly fitting, and all the lengths and 
 proportions of the different pieces exactly adapted to their 
 respective places, and not a piece too many or too few, not 
 omitting the scaffolding — or if a single piece be lacking, we 
 see the place in the frame exactly fitted and prepared to 
 bring such piece in — in such case, we find it impossible not to 
 believe that Stephen and Franklin and Roger and James all 
 understood one another from the beginning, and all worked 
 upon a common plan or draft, drawn up before the first blow 
 was struck." 
 
 The orator went on to show the unstable footing of Senator 
 Douglas on his application of the Constitution to his theory 
 of "popular sovereignty." And being aware that a consider- 
 able faction of the Republican Party were willing to forgive 
 Douglas his erroneous position on the slave question if he 
 would come over to them, and that in such case the "Little 
 Giant" might be confident of gaining his Presidential ambi- 
 tions, Lincoln warned the Convention against such action. 
 
 "Senator Douglas," he said, "holds, we know, that a man 
 may rightfully be wiser today than he was yesterday — that 
 he may rightfully change when he finds himself wrong. But 
 can we, for that reason, run ahead, and infer that he will 
 make any particular change, of which he himself has given no 
 intimation? Can we safely base our action upon any such 
 vague inference? 
 
 "Now, as ever, I wish not to misrepresent Judge Douglas' 
 position, question his motives, or do aught that can be per- 
 
The House Divided 133 
 
 sonally offensive to him. Whenever, if ever, he and we can 
 come together on principle, so that our great cause may have 
 assistance from his great ability, I hope to have interposed no 
 adventitious obstacle. But clearly, he is not now with us — he 
 does not pretend to be — he does not promise ever to be. 
 
 "Our cause, then, must be entrusted to, and conducted by, 
 its own undoubted friends, those whose hands are free, whose 
 hearts are in the work, who do care for the results. Two years 
 ago the Republicans of the Nation mustered over thirteen 
 hundred thousand strong. We did this under the single im- 
 pulse of resistance to a common danger, with every external 
 circumstance against us. Of strange, discordant, and even 
 hostile elements, we gathered from the four winds, and 
 formed and fought the battle through, under constant hot 
 fire of a disciplined, proud, pampered enemy. Did we brave 
 all that, to falter now? — now, when that same enemy is 
 wavering, dissevered, and belligerent? The result is not 
 doubtful. We shall not fail — if we stand firm, we shall not 
 fail. Wise counsel may accelerate, or mistake, delay it, but 
 sooner or later the victory is sure to come." 
 
 The champion of human rights had finished his training. 
 He stood ready for action. He had become himself a chal- 
 lenger. His chief opponent was Douglas, also trained to every 
 art of encounter, skilled in attack and defense, famous for a 
 hundred battles won. Would he accept the challenge? Then 
 would come a grapple of giants; the arena a Prairie State, the 
 audience a Nation. — Aye, a world would witness the struggle, 
 and hold its breath in trembling suspense while Freedom, her- 
 self, grew pale lest he who strove to the death for her sweet 
 sake should fail and her fair temple fall to everlasting ruin. 
 
Chapter XII 
 
 THE GMAPPLE OF GIANTS 
 
 IINCOLN'S bold stand taken at Springfield not only 
 made him the logical candidate for the seat in the 
 ^Senate occupied by Douglas, but it made him the 
 people's choice to lead them out of the wilderness of 
 conflicting opinions and passions to stability of government. 
 At the same time it lifted Douglas to the most extreme point 
 of opposition to those ideals. Like the sun breaking through 
 dark clouds, Lincoln's logic shone into the darkest corners 
 and revealed the miasma of the swamps as well as the splen- 
 dor of the upper landscape. 
 
 Douglas and Lincoln at last stood face to face before the 
 people. The Little Giant could no longer pass his antagonist 
 by with petty compliments of his "amiable" qualities or his 
 "intellectual attainment." Towering before him, fired with 
 righteous indignation, dark with fierce determination, trained 
 to the minute by a life-time devotion to principle, rugged of 
 body as of soul, the son of the pioneer advanced upon him, 
 champion of all the weak and downtrodden and enslaved of 
 the world. 
 
 Lincoln knew Douglas to be an orator of winning person- 
 ality, spontaneous in declamation, passionate in invective, 
 lightning in attack, excelling in impromptu reply. He knew 
 him to be quick to seize upon the weakness in an opponent's 
 
The Grapple of Giants 135 
 
 argument, adroit at making the most of the strength of his 
 own, expert in all the wiles and strategies of controversy, un- 
 scrupulous about employing them to confound an adversary 
 or mislead his hearers, the best offhand debater in the Senate 
 during one of its most brilliant epochs. Sumner, Seward, 
 Chase, Everett, Crittenden, Trumbull, Fessenden, Hale, 
 Wilson — Douglas had measured swords with them all and 
 rarely had he retired vanquished. He had gained an almost 
 unbroken record of forensic victories. Swollen with the pride 
 of achievement, recognizing no will but his own, he had come 
 to look upon opposition of any kind with ill-controlled pas- 
 sion. Twelve years in the Senate had led him to regard his 
 seat as peculiarly his own. Such was the man who, in the 
 summer of 1858, Lincoln challenged to debate for his place, 
 not only in the Senate, but for his place as a leader in the 
 Nation. 
 
 Lincoln did not overestimate his own abilities to grapple 
 in a final encounter with the man he had pursued so per- 
 sistently. Not long before he had made admission of how 
 wide a gap lay between them, in a pathetic contrast, and to 
 his own disparagement. 
 
 "Twenty-two years ago," he said, "Judge Douglas and I 
 first became acquainted. We were both young then — he a 
 trifle younger than I. Even then we were both ambitious — I, 
 perhaps, quite as much as he. With me, the race of ambition 
 has been a failure — a flat failure; with him, it has been one of 
 splendid success. His name fills the Nation, and is not un- 
 known in foreign lands." 
 
 Speaking on another occasion of his opponent's more 
 dangerous qualities, Lincoln said: "It is impossible to get the 
 advantage of him. Even if he is worsted, he so bears himself 
 that the people are bewildered and uncertain as to who has 
 the better of it." 
 
136 Abraham Lincoln 
 
 The impossible, then, was what Lincoln was about to 
 undertake. 
 
 Nor did Douglas profess to despise the prowess of the man 
 who had " stepped" into the arena to confront him. When 
 informed at the Capitol by a dispatch that the man who 
 had so persistently opposed him in minor contests had been 
 chosen to run against him for the Senate, he said to the group 
 of Republican representatives gathered about him to hear it 
 read, "Well, gentlemen, you have nominated a very able and 
 honest man." 
 
 At another time he voiced a more vigorous as well as more 
 characteristic opinion: "Of all the damned Whig rascals 
 about Springfield, Abe Lincoln is the ablest and the most 
 honest." 
 
 The contest could no longer be delayed. Douglas rushed 
 from the Capital to Chicago where he made his first attack. 
 His personal following in that city was tremendous. It was 
 on July 9th. He was given a reception fit for an emperor. 
 Crowds blocked the way to the station. He was driven to the 
 Tremont House in a coach drawn by six horses. Banners, 
 bands of music, cannon and fireworks added their various 
 inspiration to the scene. He spoke that night from the bal- 
 cony of the hotel to an immense audience. In the crowd stood 
 Lincoln: silent, dark, imperturbable. There were other 
 speeches over the State by both candidates. Enthusiasm was 
 at fever heat. Douglas upheld his "popular sovereignty" 
 dogma. Lincoln covered a much wider field, proclaiming 
 everywhere the rights of man, but always aiming blows at 
 Douglas as the exponent of all that was dangerous and fateful 
 to the perpetuation of the Union. 
 
 But Lincoln's nature rebelled at this long distance spar- 
 ring. He wanted close contact, to combat his skillful oppon- 
 
The Grapple of Giants 137 
 
 ent face to face, where the blows received and delivered could 
 be witnessed and the force of their impact judged at the 
 moment of exchange. On the 24th of July he sent a direct 
 challenge to Douglas for joint debate. On the 30th, Douglas 
 finally accepted the proposition to "divide time, and address 
 the same audiences," naming seven different places, one in 
 each Congressional District, outside of Chicago and Spring- 
 field, for the meetings. 
 
 The places and dates were: Ottawa, August 21; Freeport, 
 August 27; Jonesboro, September 15; Charleston, September 
 18; Galesburg, October 7; Quincy, October 13; and Alton, 
 October 15. 
 
 "I agree to your suggestion," wrote Douglas, "that we 
 shall alternately open and close the discussion. I will speak 
 at Ottawa one hour, you can reply, occupying an hour and a 
 half, and I will then follow for half an hour. At Freeport you 
 shall open the discussion and speak for one hour, I will follow 
 for an hour and a half, and you can then reply for half an 
 hour. We will alternate in like manner in each successive 
 place." 
 
 To this agreement Lincoln gave his consent, "Although," 
 he wrote, "by the terms as you propose you take four open- 
 ings and closes to my three." 
 
 The blows these giants gave and received can only be 
 appreciated by a thorough study of the speeches. They drew 
 such audiences as were never assembled before or since on 
 such occasions. Their partisans were in a continual frenzy 
 of passion. 
 
 "Never before nor since," says Alonzo Rothschild in his 
 Work on Lincoln, "have two citizens engaged in a series of 
 public discussions which involved questions of equal im- 
 portance. Personal and purely local differences were over- 
 
138 Abraham Lincoln 
 
 shadowed from the very beginning by what the disputants 
 had to say on issues so momentous that they were destined, 
 within a few years, to plunge the country into Civil War. 
 That Lincoln felt the premonition of the coming tragedy, 
 might be gathered from his reference to it in the Quincy 
 debate as 'successive acts of a drama to be enacted not 
 merely in the face of audiences like his, but in the face of the 
 Nation, and to some extent, in the face of the world. "' 
 
 Contest memorable! Over the arena of the Illinois prairies 
 they strove. Now Douglas appeared to prevail, now Lincoln. 
 One page of those two hundred and sixty-three pages in 
 which the debates have been preserved, persuades us that 
 slavery is constitutional, and that each commonwealth 
 should be allowed to have the " institution" or not, as it 
 elects. Turn a leaf and we are convinced that slavery is 
 wrong, and ought, at least, to be restricted. 
 
 Douglas began the debate by treating Lincoln in a jaunty 
 manner, in talking down to him, patronizing him. Sometimes 
 these personal pleasantries carried scarcely concealed sar- 
 casm; sometimes they were merely feints to get out of cor- 
 ners into which the merciless logic of Lincoln had driven him. 
 But the oftener they met the more direct were the blows 
 delivered by Lincoln, arguing, not for himself, but for the 
 eternal right. 
 
 Throughout their earlier debates Douglas, with the art- 
 fulness of which he knew no peer, misrepresented Lincoln's 
 career and misstated his principles, in such a way as to put 
 Lincoln on the defensive. In the first encounter, advantage 
 appeared to rest with the Little Giant. But at the Ottawa 
 meeting, the second on the schedule and where Lincoln had 
 the closing argument, the Champion of the Republicans so 
 beat and cornered and flayed his antagonist that when he 
 
The Grapple of Giants 139 
 
 closed, his admirers caught him up from the platform and 
 bore him on their shoulders to his hotel. This demonstration 
 was not to Lincoln's liking but the crowd would not be 
 denied, and bore him with songs and huzzas through the 
 shouting populace. 
 
 Perhaps this expression of the hearty good will in which he 
 was held by the people gave Lincoln new courage, for when 
 the champions next met at Freeport, Lincoln assumed the 
 offensive and thenceforth, to the end of the series, he fre- 
 quently forced the fighting. Douglas soon learned to respect 
 Lincoln 's skill in give and take on the lower levels of argu- 
 ment and changed his tactics. He became at times belliger- 
 ent, and losing his temper would fall upon his adversary 
 with personalities which Lincoln was not slow to return. 
 Then Douglas would take refuge in protesting. 
 
 At Galesburg the Senator said: "Does Mr. Lincoln wish to 
 push these things to the point of personal difficulties here? 
 I commenced this contest by treating him courteously and 
 kindly; I always spoke of him in words of respect, and in 
 return he sought, and is now seeking, to divert public atten- 
 tion from the enormity of his revolutionary principles by 
 impeaching men's sincerity and integrity, and inviting per- 
 sonal quarrels.' 
 
 Said Lincoln in reply: "I do not understand but what he 
 impeaches my honor, my veracity, and my candor; and be- 
 cause he does this, I do not understand that I am bound, if I 
 see a truthful ground for it, to keep my hands off of him. As 
 soon as I learned that Judge Douglas was disposed to treat 
 me in this way, I signified in one of my speeches that I should 
 be driven to draw upon whatever of humble resources I might 
 have to adopt a new course with him. I was not entirely sure 
 that I should be able to hold my own with him, but I at 
 
140 Abraham Lincoln 
 
 least had the purpose made to do as well as I could upon him; 
 and now I say that I will not be the first to cry, 'Hold'! I 
 think it originated with the Judge, and when he quits, I 
 probably will. But I shall not ask any favors at all. He asks 
 me, or he asks the audience, if I wish to push this matter to a 
 point of personal difficulty. I tell him, No. He did not make a 
 mistake in one of his early speeches when he called me an 
 'amiable* man, though perhaps he did when he called me an 
 'intelligent' man. It really hurts me very much to suppose 
 that I have wronged anybody on earth. I again tell him, No. 
 I very much prefer, when this canvass shall be over, however 
 it may result, that we at least part without any bitter recol- 
 lections of personal difficulties. The Judge, in his concluding 
 speech at Galesburg says that I was pushing this matter to 
 a personal difficulty to avoid the responsibility for the enorm- 
 ity of my principles. I say to the Judge and this audience 
 now, that I will again state our principles as well as I hastily 
 can in all their enormity, and if the Judge hereafter chooses 
 to confine himself to war upon these principles he will prob- 
 ably not find me departing from the same course." 
 
 Lincoln thus made plain his attitude. Assuming the justice 
 of his position, he held it with vigor against argument or 
 abuse, changing weapons when his adversary changed, and 
 evincing no animosity even when he dealt the most telling 
 strokes. But he no longer called upon his humor to lighten 
 the argument. Urged by friends to introduce some of his 
 witty illustrations and humorous anecdotes to gain applause, 
 he replied that the occasion was too serious; the issues too 
 grave. 
 
 "I do not seek applause," he said, "or to amuse the people, 
 but to convince them." 
 
 Close as they stood, evenly matched as they appeared to 
 
The Grapple of Giants 141 
 
 be, they were as far apart as the poles. Douglas was fighting 
 for his own political life; for the culmination of his ambition. 
 He had played a stupendous game and the result yet hung in 
 the balance. Until his recent quarrel with President Bu- 
 chanan, whose attempt to foist upon Kansas a state consti- 
 tution by fraud, force and murder, Douglas could not follow, 
 he had espoused without any conscious qualms those ideas 
 of government which seemed the surest of fulfillment. He 
 had thus kept himself at the head of a great body of citizens, 
 North and South, whose ideals were "big business"; on one 
 side standing for an undisturbed continuation of manu- 
 facturing with paid muscle and brawn as its foundation, on 
 the other the undisturbed continuation of a social "institu- 
 tion" the profits of which were derived from the blood of 
 slaves. He had been the foremost advocate of the legal ex- 
 tension of unpaid labor into the territories and the new 
 states being formed, should the people of those territories 
 and states vote to do it. 
 
 His great intellect, his untiring energy, his wit and his 
 learning, were close to the first order. But underneath was 
 the quicksand of a shifting conscience, which chameleon-like 
 took on the complexion of expediency. In one hand he held 
 the brief composed to defend the right of one man to own 
 another man; in the other the proclamation that men had 
 the right to self-government. Not a Little Giant, but a giant 
 of Herculean proportions he must have been to have kept 
 his place under such circumstances. 
 
 Lincoln, on the contrary, stood in no such case. His house 
 was builded on a rock. Let the tempest rage, it would not be 
 shaken. He had ambition, but it was noble. He desired dis- 
 tinction, but with the respect that should make it dear. He 
 loved life, but it must be life linked with the hopes and aspira- 
 
142 Abraham Lincoln 
 
 tions and successes of all men. And he stood ready to sacrifice 
 all these rather than to accept one single fallacy, no matter 
 how great things it might promise him. 
 
 So they stood and so they fought; one for God's truth, and 
 the other for man 's refinement on that truth. At last, coolly, 
 calmly, determinedly, Lincoln, with one powerful blow drove 
 his antagonist from the false foundation he had laid with 
 such care. He had replied to seven questions prepared by 
 Douglas. In turn he propounded four of his own. One of 
 these was : 
 
 " Can the people of a United States Territory in any lawful 
 way, against the wish of any citizen of the United States, 
 exclude slavery from its limits, prior to the formation of a 
 State Constitution ?" 
 
 The wisdom of this question is apparent now. But all of 
 Lincoln's friends and backers of that time begged him not to 
 submit it. They argued that Douglas would answer it in the 
 affirmative to save his standing in that debate. 
 
 "Let him," was Lincoln's conclusion. "If he does it may 
 make him Senator but he will never be President." 
 
 Douglas did answer in the affirmative. He did save his 
 senatorial toga, but it was the man who put the question, 
 and not the man who answered it, who was inaugurated in 
 Washington, following the next general election. With that 
 answer Douglas slipped off into a quagmire from which he 
 was never able to extricate himself, strive he ever so mightily. 
 He saved his popularity in the North for the time being, but 
 henceforth the South would have none of him. He had to 
 learn the full significance of Lincoln's application of the 
 truth, "A house divided against itself cannot stand." Doug- 
 las was such a house and the division of his principles brought 
 about his ruin, just as a few years later it brought about the 
 
The Grapple of Giants 143 
 
 ruin of all that had been so carefully and shrewdly built upon 
 the policies he had espoused and promulgated and defended. 
 
 And the destiny that shapes our ends with inexorable 
 justice gave to the two men the fruits of their labors — Doug- 
 las was forced to deny his policies and to proclaim those of 
 his lifelong opponent; Lincoln was permitted to establish his 
 policies eternally and to die for them. 
 
 Passing years bring into clearer perspective the momentous 
 issue of that great debate. Beside the fallacies of the man 
 ambitious for his own ends, the virtues of the man ambitious 
 for his country and his race shine with increasing luster. 
 Defeated, cast down from the lofty pinnacle to which he had 
 so arduously climbed, the man ambitious for self came finally 
 to honor the man he had patronized and to stand humbly as 
 his willing disciple in the fierce light that beats upon the 
 office which is the highest gift of the American people. Weak 
 in his attempt to give the slave states a wrong by the ballot, 
 Douglas was yet strong in denying their right to secure the 
 same wrong by the bullet. For the sake of his memory, fate 
 gave him one brief hour in which, with the eloquence and 
 fire of a Cicero, he magnified the glory of the Republic and 
 left a matchless example of his eloquence in his call to arms 
 when the flag of the Union had been torn in the hands of the 
 enemies of universal freedom. 
 
 And we may be sure that in the great forgiving heart of 
 Abraham Lincoln there was only compassion for the man 
 whose fate was so linked with his own, and who came in the 
 end to stand with him on the great question they had de- 
 bated with such power and force, to uphold the principle 
 which he had followed to such immeasurable lengths and 
 would follow to the tragic climax. 
 
Chapter XIII 
 
 FMOM STATE TO NATION 
 
 THE HOUSE-DIVIDED SPEECH made Lincoln at 
 once a national figure. The "step" that Douglas had 
 invited him to take in Springfield four years before 
 had developed into a swinging stride that was carrying 
 him powerfully forward on his destined way. With his 
 utterance, "a house divided against itself cannot stand," he 
 had demonstrated the futility of further compromise with 
 the evil of slavery. The inspired glow of his genius had re- 
 vealed at once the Ship of State on a storm-tossed ocean and 
 the reefs toward which she was being inevitably driven. 
 Study and meditation appeared in clear terms and accentu- 
 ated God-like calm in that great speech. In revealing the 
 mind of the Nation, he had revealed his own. 
 
 That which properly constitutes the life of everyone is a 
 profound secret, says Thoreau. But Lincoln at this time 
 bravely disclosed the depths of his being. He did this with 
 such simple dignity that everyone, everywhere, felt that he 
 had spoken their deeper thoughts, and revealed themselves 
 to themselves and to each other. It was that touch of nature 
 which makes the whole world kin. 
 
 It has been said that the best men do not seem to go 
 contrary to others, but, as if they could afford to travel the 
 same way, they go a parallel but higher course, a sort of 
 
From State to Nation us 
 
 upper road. Does not Lincoln measure up to this standard of 
 the best? He seems never to be going contrary to the course 
 of humanity. He seems always with it, but on a higher level, 
 as pilot and encourager. How kindly he leads; with what 
 compassion he views the struggles of his fellows! Study Lin- 
 coln the least little bit and he becomes at once a familiar. 
 You feel that your entrance to the company of a great lover 
 has stirred the love impulse in your own heart, and humanity 
 becomes of greater moment, is nearer, and compounded of 
 your own virtues, your own infirmities. 
 
 Attempts to refine Lincoln have been no more successful 
 in biography than they were in his lifetime. They are like 
 stripping the coat from the thistle to make it a cornstalk. 
 Lincoln was thoroughly harmonious, a shellbark hickory, 
 sturdy in his individualism. People of all stations recognized 
 his likeness to themselves and followed him spontaneously to 
 attempt the high and noble. 
 
 Lincoln early in life discovered that strong people were 
 v/on by exhibitions of strength. From physical to mental 
 he carried that idea with prime results. As in New Salem he 
 had invented a harness by which he was enabled to lift nearly 
 two thousand pounds, so in his Springfield speech he had 
 woven a harness of logic by which he was enabled to lift the 
 whole weight of the slavery question to the view of all the 
 people, everywhere. 
 
 Students of the time charge to this speech, the defeat of 
 Lincoln as a senatorial candidate. That is mere speculation 
 born, perhaps, from a desire to argue that Lincoln might 
 have been elected. He had unhorsed Douglas with the people, 
 having received a majority of the popular vote, but hold- 
 over Democratic Senators gave his opponent fifty-four votes 
 to the Republicans' forty-six, and by a strict Party vote 
 Douglas was returned to the Senate. 
 
146 Abraham Lincoln 
 
 That this defeat of his high hopes was a hard blow to Lin- 
 coln cannot be disputed. He had said in the great Lincoln- 
 Douglas Debate, "I affect no contempt for the high emi- 
 nence he (Douglas) has reached. If so reached that the op- 
 pressed of my species might have shared with me in the elevation, 
 I would rather stand on that eminence than wear the richest 
 crown that ever pressed a monarch's brow." 
 
 He could not think with patience of lonely grandeur, such 
 as that of Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon. Like Pan he longed 
 to move the baser elements in humanity to freedom and 
 gladness. If he mounted the heights, he longed to take with 
 him the poor slave, the robust backwoodsman, the wild, 
 rough Clary Grove boys, as well as the more refined and 
 favored of humanity. But his temporary defeat for the Sen- 
 ate was a hard blow. 
 
 When a friend, following the election of Douglas asked 
 Lincoln how he felt about it, he replied characteristically, 
 "I am like the boy who stubbed his toe on a root. It hurts 
 too bad to laugh, and I am too big to cry." 
 
 When he had been warned that should he put the question 
 of state sovereignty directly up to Douglas, he might answer 
 it in a way that would result in his being returned to the 
 Senate, Lincoln said: "I am after bigger game. The election 
 of i860 is worth a thousand of this. If he wins by his answer 
 now he can never be President." 
 
 It is not likely that Lincoln thought at this time that he 
 might be the standard bearer of his Party for that great 
 office. He saw clearly, however, that it would be a national 
 catastrophe if a man who had openly declared that he cared 
 not whether slavery were "voted down or up" should be- 
 come the head of a Union; and he was willing to sacrifice his 
 greatest ambition to prevent such a result. 
 
From State to Nation 147 
 
 He must have realized too, as no one else did, that his 
 arguments during the debates and his clear exposition of the 
 situation which confronted the people of the country, had 
 given him distinction beyond the boundaries of his state and 
 that he would have an audience in other states; that the bold 
 challenge he had made would result in his being called to 
 support it generally before the people during the coming 
 Presidential canvass. 
 
 The time had come when he was able, as he had been will- 
 ing long before in that slave mart in New Orleans, to "hit 
 that thing, and hit it hard." Knowing this, he had appeared 
 this time, to challenge Douglas and through him to challenge 
 all the forces of evil, South or North, that should put material 
 success above the rights of man. He asked nothing of the 
 Nation but what he was willing himself to lead in doing. 
 
 The result of the canvass of 1858 had called for material 
 sacrifices as disastrous to his finances as they had been to his 
 political career. The loss of over six months from his business, 
 and the expenses of the canvass, had made a severe drain on 
 his personal income. In this day of million-dollar political 
 backing for those who put on the armor and lead to battle, 
 it is strange to read Lincoln's letter of that time to Norman 
 B. Judd, Chairman of the Republican State Committee, 
 when the books were being balanced. 
 
 "I have been on expenses so long, without earning any- 
 thing," he writes, "that I am absolutely without money now 
 even for household expenses. Still, if you can put in $250, 
 for me towards discharging the debt of the Committee, I will 
 allow it when you and I settle the private matter between us. 
 This, with what I have already paid, with an outstanding 
 note of mine, will exceed my subscription of $500. This, too, 
 is exclusive of my ordinary expenses during the campaign, 
 
148 Abraham Lincoln 
 
 all of which, being added to my loss of time and business, 
 bears pretty heavily upon one no better off than I am. But as 
 I had the post of honor, it is not for me to be over-nice." 
 
 At the time this letter was written, says Herndon, Lin- 
 coln 's property consisted of the house and lot on which he 
 lived, a few law books and some household furniture. He 
 owned a small tract of land in Iowa which yielded him noth- 
 ing, and his annual law practice did not exceed three thou- 
 sand dollars, yet the Party Committee in Chicago were 
 dunning the late standard bearer, who besides the chagrin 
 of his defeat, his own expenses, and the sacrifices of his time, 
 was asked to aid in meeting the general expense of the 
 campaign." 
 
 But however fortune frowned, the Lincoln spirit was not 
 daunted. His thirst for knowledge prompted him during the 
 political lull to write a lecture on Inventions, which he de- 
 livered in several places. Preparations for this lecture sent 
 him to the library, and his habit of nosing among books sup- 
 planted his search for ideas among the groups at the corner 
 grocery and upon the court house steps. The Socratic method 
 was exchanged for that of Bacon. Whether consciously or 
 not, he was preparing himself for supreme leadership. 
 
 The long delayed blow had been struck and there were 
 signs that its echoes were still sounding in the farthest cor- 
 ners. Invitations to take part in the political canvass during 
 the Fall of 1859 came from a half dozen states where elections 
 were to be held. Douglas, fresh from the Senate, had gone to 
 Ohio. In response to the demands of Party friends, Lincoln 
 followed. He delivered telling and impressive speeches at 
 Cincinnati and Columbus, following the Senator at both 
 places. His speeches were published and distributed as cam- 
 paign documents. In December he visited Kansas, speaking 
 
From State to Nation 149 
 
 at Atchison, Troy, Leavenworth, and other towns near the 
 border. His reputation grew. The principles upon which he 
 had founded his arguments against Douglas formed the basis 
 of growing proclamation. 
 
 Having swung so far to the forefront in the intense strug- 
 gle, he began to be talked of in connection with the Republi- 
 can nomination for the Presidency. To be classed with 
 Seward, Chase and other celebrities of the day, must have 
 stimulated the energies of a man far less ambitious for dis- 
 tinction than Abraham Lincoln. Yet he was not done measur- 
 ing his own genius for the task which he saw clearly would 
 be laid upon the shoulders of him who should be elevated to 
 that office. 
 
 To one man who proposed his name, he said, " I beg that 
 you will not give it further mention. Seriously, I do not think 
 I am fit for the Presidency." 
 
 But the people of Illinois had already decided to propose 
 him for the high office, whether he was willing or not. 
 
 In October, 1859, he had received from New York City an 
 invitation to deliver a lecture and he had accepted, notifying 
 the committee that his speech would deal entirely with 
 political questions. He fixed a day in February as the most 
 convenient time. 
 
Chapter XIV 
 
 AT COOPEM INSTITUTE 
 
 MR. LINCOLN'S preparation for his appearance 
 in New York was diligent and exhaustive. His im- 
 mediate efforts covered the records of the facts of 
 theFramers of the Constitution upon every occasion when the 
 subject of slavery was up. But the preparation did not com- 
 mence there. It had comprised the best thoughts and aspira- 
 tions of his whole existence. He had arrived at positive con- 
 viction on those principles which he enunciated with such 
 clarity and force in the Cooper Institute. This may be seen 
 from previous utterances. Speaking at Leavenworth in the 
 fall of the preceding year he addressed the Democrats as 
 follows: 
 
 "But you Democrats are for the Union; and you greatly 
 fear the success of the Republicans would destroy the Union. 
 Why? Do the Republicans declare against the Union? Noth- 
 ing like it. Your own statement of it is that if the Black 
 Republicans elect a President you 'won't stand it.' You will 
 break up the Union. That will be your act, not ours. To 
 justify it you must show that our policy gives you just cause 
 for such desperate action. Can you do that? When you 
 attempt it, you will find that our policy is exactly the policy 
 of the man who made the Union — nothing more, nothing 
 less. Do you really think you are justified to break up the 
 
At Cooper Institute 15 1 
 
 Government rather than have it administered as it was by 
 Washington? If you do, you are very unreasonable, and more 
 reasonable men cannot and will not submit to you. While 
 you elect Presidents, we submit, neither breaking nor at- 
 tempting to break up the Union. If we shall constitutionally 
 elect a President, it will be our duty to see that you also sub- 
 mit. Old John Brown has been executed for treason against a 
 State. We cannot object, even though he agreed with us in 
 thinking slavery wrong. That cannot excuse violence, blood- 
 shed and treason. It could avail him nothing that he might 
 think himself right. So, if we constitutionally elect a Pres- 
 dent, and, thereafter, you undertake to destroy the Union, 
 it will be our duty to deal with you as Old John Brown has 
 been dealt with. We shall try to do our duty. We hope and 
 believe that in no section will a majority so act as to render 
 such extreme measures necessary." 
 
 How far-seeing Lincoln was, is shown here with flawless 
 logic. His sympathies must have been with the impulse of 
 John Brown, but his veneration of the Constitution com- 
 pelled him to condemn his act. Had he done otherwise, he 
 would have had no firm footing for his later decision in judg- 
 ing the acts of the slave states when they performed a like- 
 wise violent act against the Constitution. 
 
 In a speech made at Columbus, Ohio, in answer to Douglas, 
 he addressed himself directly to Kentuckians. After showing 
 them that Douglas was as sincerely and quite as wisely for 
 them as they were for themselves, he told them that they 
 must take Douglas for their Presidential candidate under 
 any circumstances or be defeated, and that it was possible, 
 if they did take him, that they might be beaten. He told 
 them what the opposition proposed to do with them in case 
 it should succeed in the approaching Presidential contest. 
 
152 Abraham Lincoln 
 
 Through it all runs that broad magnanimity which then as at 
 all future stages of the great conflict, marked him as a man 
 with love for men, on whatever side of a controversy they 
 might have cast their lots. Addressing himself directly to the 
 Kentuckians, he said: 
 
 "I will tell you, so far as I am authorized to speak for the 
 opposition, what we mean to do with you. We mean to treat 
 you, as near as we possibly can, as Washington, Jefferson, 
 and Madison treated you. We mean to leave you alone, and 
 in no way to interfere with your institution; to abide by all 
 and every compromise of the Constitution, and, in a word, 
 coming back to the original proposition, to treat you, so far 
 as degenerated men (if we have degenerated) may, according 
 to the examples of those noble fathers, Washington, Jeffer- 
 son and Madison. We mean to remember that you are as good 
 as we; that there is no difference between us, other than the 
 difference of circumstances. We mean to recognize and bear 
 in mind always that you have as good hearts in your bosoms 
 as other people, or as we claim to have, and treat you ac- 
 cordingly. We mean to marry your girls when we have a 
 chance — the white ones, I mean — and I have the honor to 
 inform you that I once did have a chance that way. 
 
 " I have told you what we mean to do. I want to know now, 
 when that thing takes place, what you mean to do. I often 
 hear it intimated that you mean to divide the Union when- 
 ever a Republican or anything like it is selected President of 
 the United States." 
 
 (A Voice): "That is so!" 
 
 "That is so/ one of them says; I wonder if he is a Ken- 
 tuckian?" 
 
 (A Voice): "He is a Douglas man." 
 
 "Well, then, I want to know what you are going to do 
 
At Cooper Institute 153 
 
 with your half of it. Are you going to split the Ohio down 
 through, and push your half off a piece? Or are you going to 
 keep right alongside of us outrageous fellows? Or are you 
 going to build a wall some way between your country and 
 ours, by which that movable property of yours can't come 
 over here any more, to the danger of your losing it? Do you 
 think you can better yourselves on that subject, by leaving 
 us here under no obligation whatever to return those speci- 
 mens of your movable property that come hither? You have 
 divided the Union because we would not do right with you, 
 as you think, upon that subject; when we cease to be under 
 obligations to do anything for you, how much better off do 
 you think you will be? Will you make war upon us and kill 
 us all? Why, gentlemen, I think you are as gallant and as 
 brave men as live; that you fight as bravely in a good cause, 
 man for man, as any other people living; that you have shown 
 yourselves capable of this on various occasions; but man for 
 man you are not better than we are, and there are not so 
 many of you as there are of us. You will never make much of 
 a hand at whipping us. If we were fewer in numbers than 
 you I think you could whip us; if we were equal it would 
 likely be a drawn battle; but being inferior in numbers, you 
 will make nothing by attempting to master us." 
 
 Lincoln never would absolve the men of the South from 
 their blood brotherhood with him and those he represented. 
 He would not concede that they were personal enemies. Their 
 claims that human slavery was right, he did deny, but even 
 then, he was willing to accede to them all that tfre Constitu- 
 tion gave them and trust to time to bring about the final 
 extinction of bondage confined, as it was confined by the 
 Constitution, to the original slave States. He loved men 
 while hating the evil that blinded their eyes to truth and 
 
154 Abraham Lincoln 
 
 justice. This was his most God-like attribute and no man 
 ever walked the earth who had it in superior degree, if there 
 ever was one who equalled it. 
 
 He found his text for his Cooper Institute Speech in an 
 utterance of Senator Douglas the night previous in Colum- 
 bus. Douglas had said that "Our Fathers when they framed 
 the Government under which we live, understood this ques- 
 tion (the question of slavery) just as well, and even better, 
 than we do now." That statement of Douglas* gave Lincoln 
 an opening which he was not slow to grasp and which, when 
 he had exhausted its possibilities before the foremost thinkers 
 and writers of New York City a few months later, left the 
 brilliant aspirant for the Presidency not a leg to stand on. 
 
 As Lincoln sometimes said in his circuit court practice, 
 when he was thoroughly aroused by the tactics of an oppos- 
 ing council, "I am going to skin him," so he proceeded in the 
 present instance. No labor was too severe, and no matter 
 bearing upon the point of what "our fathers" did plan and 
 do upon that momentous question, was too much for him to 
 undertake, nor did he rest until he had every fact bearing 
 upon the question at his finger ends. When he finally took 
 the train for New York, he bore with him a document which 
 was to establish him as the foremost logician of his age, and 
 which was to be a clear deed to the Presidential Chair. 
 
 Lincoln left Springfield on this momentous journey unac- 
 companied by a single friend. So little weight locally attached 
 to his adventure that even the papers did not notice his de- 
 parture. We have no record of his journey. Lonely, unknown 
 to his traveling companions, he made his solitary way. Lonely 
 and unknown he arrived in the great metropolis. No com- 
 mittee waited at the station to do him honor. He registered 
 at the Astor House, a stranger, without one friend to clasp 
 
At Cooper Institute 155 
 
 his hand or smile encouragement to his great undertaking. 
 How he occupied himself before his appearance among the 
 sophisticated and critical, who shall say? What were his 
 musings, his apprehensions, his despairs during those hours 
 of tedious waiting? Only those who have acquainted them- 
 selves with the deep melancholy of his nature can in any way 
 approach. And when he finally stood before the audience, 
 not a single soul of all assembled there was known to him. 
 The trees to whom he spoke in those days of youthful trial 
 of oratory were more intimate and companionable. 
 
 For a report of this meeting and the consideration these 
 new and more critical friends had of him and his speech 
 before and after its delivery, we are indebted to the account 
 written by Charles C. Nott, which was published in 1909 in 
 George Haven Putnam's "Abraham Lincoln: The People's 
 Leader in the Struggle for National Existence. ,, It is a plain 
 unvarnished tale and in the light of later events a deeply 
 pathetic one. Mr. Nott's picture of Lincoln, going from that 
 company of the foremost thinkers of the Nation's metropolis 
 where he had astonished, enthralled and enlightened them, 
 limping along the street with the pain of a new pair of boots, 
 being guided by his one lone companion to a street car and 
 directed where to leave it in order to reach his hotel, — cer- 
 tainly there is no page of fiction offers a stranger or more 
 deeply moving scene. How the descendants of any one of 
 those present would glory today in a statement that one of 
 their ancestors drove Lincoln from Cooper Institute to his 
 hotel. None such appeared. He was the last lone passenger in 
 the street car, grinding over the streets of a city as bare of 
 companions or sympathetic friends to him as the car itself. 
 Mr. Nott himself, does not hesitate to declare his own part in 
 this strange scene of which he writes: 
 
156 Abraham Lincoln 
 
 "The Cooper Institute address is one of the most import- 
 ant addresses ever delivered in the life of this nation, for at 
 an eventful time it changed the course of history. When Mr. 
 Lincoln rose to speak on the evening of February 27, i860, 
 he had held no administrative office; he had endeavored to 
 be appointed Commissioner of Patents, and had failed; he 
 had sought to be elected United States Senator, and had been 
 defeated; he had been a Member of Congress, yet it was not 
 even remembered; he was a lawyer in humble circumstances, 
 persuasive of juries, but had not reached the front rank of 
 the Illinois Bar. The record which Mr. Lincoln himself placed 
 in the Congressional Directory in 1847 rnight still be taken 
 as the record of his public and official life: 
 
 " 'Born February 12th, 1809, in Hardin County, Kentucky. 
 Education defective. Profession a lawyer. Have been a Cap- 
 tain of Volunteers in the Black Hawk War. Postmaster in a 
 very small office. Four times a member of the Illinois Legisla- 
 ture and a Member of the Lower House of Congress.' Was 
 this the record of a man who should be made the head of a 
 nation in troubled times? In the estimation of thoughtful 
 Americans east of the Alleghanies all that they knew of Mr. 
 Lincoln justified them in regarding him as only 'a Western 
 stump orator' — successful, distinguished, but nothing higher 
 than that — a Western stump orator, who had dared to brave 
 one of the strongest men in the Western States, and who had 
 done so with wonderful ability and moral success. When Mr. 
 Lincoln closed his address he had risen to the rank of states- 
 man, and had stamped himself a statesman peculiarly fitted 
 for the exigency of the hour. 
 
 "Mr. William Cullen Bryant presided at the meeting; and 
 a number of the first and ablest citizens of New York were 
 present, among them Horace Greeley. Mr. Greeley was pro- 
 
At Cooper Institute 157 
 
 nounced in his appreciation of the address; it was the ablest, 
 the greatest, the wisest speech that had yet been made; it 
 would reassure the conservative Northerner; it was just what 
 was wanted to conciliate the excited Southerner; it was con- 
 clusive in its argument, and would assure the overthrow of 
 Douglas. Mr. Horace White has recently written: 'I chanced 
 to open the other day his Cooper Institute speech. This is one 
 of the few printed speeches that I did not hear him deliver in 
 person. As I read the concluding pages of that speech, the 
 conflict of opinion that preceded the conflict of arms then 
 sweeping upon the country like an approaching solar eclipse 
 seemed pre-figured like a chapter of the Book of Fate. Here 
 again he was the Old Testament prophet, before whom Hor- 
 ace Greeley bowed his head, saying that he had never listened 
 to a greater speech, although he had heard several of Web- 
 ster's best/ Later, Mr. Greeley became the Leader of the 
 Republican forces opposed to the nomination of Mr. Seward 
 and was instrumental in concentrating those forces upon Mr. 
 Lincoln. Furthermore the great New York press on the fol- 
 lowing morning carried the address to the country, and be- 
 fore Mr. Lincoln left New York he was telegraphed from 
 Connecticut to come and aid in the campaign of the ap- 
 proaching spring election. He went, and when the fateful 
 moment came in the Convention, Connecticut was one of 
 the Eastern States which first broke away from the Seward 
 column and went over to Mr. Lincoln. When Connecticut 
 did this, the die was cast." 
 
 It is difficult for younger generations of Americans to be- 
 lieve that three months before Mr. Lincoln was nominated 
 for the Presidency he was neither appreciated nor known in 
 New York. The fact can be better established by a single 
 incident than by the opinions and assurances of a dozen men. 
 
158 Abraham Lincoln 
 
 "After the address had been delivered, Mr. Lincoln was 
 taken by two members of the Young Men 's Central Repub- 
 lican Union — Mr. Hiram Barney, afterward Collector of the 
 Port of New York, and Mr. Nott, one of the subsequent 
 editors of the address — to their club, The Athenaeum, where 
 a very simple supper was ordered, and five or six Republican 
 members of the club who chanced to be in the building were 
 invited in. The supper was informal — as informal as any- 
 thing could be; the conversation was easy and familiar; the 
 prospects of the Republican Party in the coming struggle 
 were talked over, and so little was it supposed by the gentle- 
 men who had not heard the address that Mr. Lincoln could 
 possibly be a candidate that one of them, Mr. Charles W. 
 Elliott, asked, artlessly: 'Mr. Lincoln, what candidate do 
 you really think would be most likely to carry Illinois?' Mr. 
 Lincoln answered by illustration: 'Illinois is a peculiar State, 
 in three parts. In northern Illinois, Mr. Seward would have 
 a larger majority than I could get. In middle Illinois, I think 
 I could call out a larger vote than Mr. Seward. In southern 
 Illinois, it would make no dirTerence who was the candidate/ 
 This answer was taken to be merely illustrative by every- 
 body except, perhaps, Mr. Barney and Mr. Nott, each of 
 whom, it subsequently appeared, had particularly noted Mr. 
 Lincoln 's reply. 
 
 "The little party broke up. Mr. Lincoln had been cordially 
 received, but certainly had not been flattered. The others 
 shook him by the hand and, as they put on their overcoats, 
 said: "Mr. Nott is going down town and he will show you the 
 way to the Astor House. ,, Mr. Lincoln and Mr. Nott started 
 on foot, but the latter observing that Mr. Lincoln was ap- 
 parently walking with some difficulty, said, "Are you lame, 
 Mr. Lincoln ?" He replied that he had on new boots and they 
 
At Cooper Institute 159 
 
 hurt him. The two gentlemen then boarded a street car. 
 When they reached the place where Mr. Nott would leave 
 the car to go to his home, he shook Mr. Lincoln's hand, and 
 bidding him goodby, told him that this car would carry him 
 to the side door of the Astor House. Mr. Lincoln went on 
 alone, the only occupant of the car. 
 
 "I have often wondered what Mr. Lincoln thought during 
 the remainder of his ride that night to the Astor House," 
 says Mr. Nott. "The Cooper Institute had, owing to a snow- 
 storm, not been full, and its intelligent, respectable, non- 
 partisan audience had not rung out enthusiastic applause 
 like a concourse of Western auditors magnetized by their 
 own enthusiasm. Had the address — the most carefully pre- 
 pared, the most elaborately investigated and demonstrated 
 and verified of all the work of his life — been a failure? But in 
 the matter of quality and ability, if not in quantity and 
 enthusiasm, he had never addressed such an audience; and 
 some of the ablest men in the Northern States had expressed 
 their opinion of the address in terms which left no doubt of 
 the highest appreciation. Did Mr. Lincoln regard the address 
 which he had just delivered to a small and critical audience 
 as a success? Did he have the faintest glimmer of the brilliant 
 effect which was to follow ? Did he feel the loneliness of the 
 situation — the want of his loyal Illinois adherents? Did his 
 sinking heart infer that he was but a speck of humanity to 
 which the great city would never again give a thought? He 
 was a plain man, an ungainly man; unadorned, apparently un- 
 cultivated, showing the awkwardness of self-conscious rustic- 
 ity. His dress that night before a New York audience was the 
 most unbecoming that a fiend's ingenuity could have devised 
 for a tall, gaunt man — a black frock coat, ill-setting and too 
 short for him in the body, skirt, and arms — a rolling collar, 
 
160 Abraham Lincoln 
 
 low-down, disclosing his long, thin, shrivelled throat un- 
 covered and exposed. No man in all New York appeared that 
 night more simple, more unassuming, more modest, more 
 unpretentious, more conscious of his own defects than 
 Abraham Lincoln; and yet we now know that within his 
 soul there burned the fires of an unbounded ambition, 
 sustained by a self-reliance and self-esteem, that bade him fix 
 his gaze upon the very pinnacle of American fame, and aspire 
 to it in a time so troubled that its dangers appalled the soul of 
 every American. What were this man's thoughts when he was 
 left alone? Did a faint shadow of the future rest upon his 
 soul ? Did he feel in some mysterious way that on that night he 
 had crossed the Rubicon of his life-march — that care and 
 trouble and political discord, and slander and misrepre- 
 sentation and ridicule and public responsibilities, such as 
 hardly ever before burdened a conscientious soul, coupled 
 with war and defeat and disaster, were to be thenceforth his 
 portion nearly to his life's end; and that his end was to be 
 a bloody act which would appall the world and send a thrill 
 of horror through the hearts of friends and enemies alike, so 
 that when the woeful tidings came, the bravest of the 
 Southern brave should burst into tears and cry aloud, 'Oh! 
 the unhappy South, the unhappy South/ " 
 
 The impression left on his companion's mind, as he gave a 
 last glance at him in the street car, was that he seemed sad 
 and lonely; and when it was too late, when the car was be- 
 yond call, he blamed himself for not accompanying Mr. Lin- 
 coln to the Astor House — not because he was a distinguished 
 stranger, but because he seemed a sad and lonely man. 
 
 That Lincoln felt himself able to grasp and present with 
 force and understanding the questions then agitating the 
 Nation, has a happy proof in his letter to Mr. Nott, written 
 
At Cooper Institute 161 
 
 in May, i860. The Young Men's Republican Union of New 
 York City were desirous of getting out a fine edition of the 
 Cooper Institute speech, and Mr. Nott was commissioned to 
 write Mr. Lincoln concerning his wishes in the matter. One 
 wonders at the temerity of the young reviewer in suggesting 
 to Abraham Lincoln corrections and emendations in a speech 
 over which he had worked for months, and the material for 
 which, under the vital heat of controversy, he had been a 
 life time in absorbing. Nowhere is Lincoln's magnanimity, 
 coupled with his adamantine firmness, more clearly displayed 
 than in this correspondence. 
 
 69 Wall St., New York, 
 May 23, i860. 
 Dear Sir: 
 
 I enclose copy of your address in New York. 
 
 We (the Young Men's Rep. Union) design to publish a 
 new edition in larger type and better form, with such notes 
 and references as will best attract readers seeking informa- 
 tion. Have you any memoranda of your investigations which 
 you would approve of inserting? 
 
 You and your Western friends, I think, under-rate this 
 speech. It has produced a greater effect here than any other 
 single speech. It is the real platform in the Eastern States, 
 and must carry the conservative element in New York, New 
 Jersey, and Pennsylvania. 
 
 Therefore, I desire that it should be as nearly perfect as 
 may be. Most of the emendations are trivial and do not 
 affect the substance — all are merely suggested for your judg- 
 ment. 
 
 I cannot help adding that this speech is an extraordinary 
 example of condensed English. After some experience in 
 criticising for Reviews, I find hardly anything to touch and 
 
162 Abraham Lincoln 
 
 nothing to omit. It is the only one I know of which I cannot 
 shorten, and — like a good arch — moving one word tumbles 
 a whole sentence down. 
 
 Respectfully, 
 
 Charles C. Nott. 
 To Hon. Abraham Lincoln. 
 
 Springfield, 111., May 31, i860. 
 Charles C. Nott, Esq. 
 My dear Sir: 
 
 Yours of the 23rd, accompanied by a copy of the speech 
 delivered by me at the Cooper Institute, and upon which you 
 have made some notes for emendations, was received some 
 days ago — Of course I would not object to, but would be 
 p eased rather, with a more perfect edition of that speech. 
 
 I did not preserve memoranda of my investigations; and 
 I could not now re-examine, and make notes, without an 
 expenditure of time which I cannot bestow upon it — Some of 
 your notes I do not understand. 
 
 So far as it is intended merely to improve in grammar, and 
 elegance of composition, I am quite agreed; but I do not wish 
 the sense changed, or modified, to a hair's breadth — and you, 
 not having studied the particular points so closely as I have, 
 can not be quite sure that you do not change the sense when 
 you do not intend it — For instance, in a note at bottom of 
 first page, you propose to substitute "Democrats" for 
 "Douglas" — but what I am saying there is true of Douglas, 
 and is not true of "Democrats" generally; so that the pro- 
 posed substitution would be a very considerable blunder — 
 you propose insertion of "residences" though it would do 
 little or no harm, is not at all necessary to the sense I was 
 trying to convey — On page 5 your proposed grammatical 
 change would certainly do no harm — The "impudently 
 
At Cooper Institute 163 
 
 absurd" I stick to — The striking out "he" and inserting 
 "we" turns the sense exactly wrong — The sense is "act as 
 they acted upon that question " — not as they acted generally. 
 
 After considering your proposed changes on page 7, I do 
 not think them material, but I am willing to defer to you in 
 relation to them. 
 
 On page 9, striking out "to us" is probably right — The 
 word "lawyer's" I wish retained. The word "Courts" struck 
 out twice. I wish reduced to "Court" and retained — "Court" 
 as a collection more properly governs the plural "have" as 
 I understand — "the" preceding "Court" in the latter case, 
 must also be retained — The words "quite," "as," and "or" 
 on the same page I wish retained. The italicising, the quota- 
 tion marking, I have no objection to. 
 
 As to the note at bottom, I do not think any too much is 
 admitted — What you propose on page 1 1 is right — I return 
 your copy of the speech, together with one printed here, 
 under my own hasty supervising. That at New York was 
 printed without any supervision by me — If you conclude to 
 publish a new edition, allow me to see the proof-sheets. 
 
 And now thanking you for your very complimentary let- 
 ter, and your interest for me generally, I subscribe myself 
 Your friend and servant, 
 
 A. Lincoln. 
 
 It must have given Lincoln a good hearty laugh to be 
 informed in the footnotes to the speech, when it was finally 
 printed as he had directed, that "No one who has not actu- 
 ally attempted to verify its details can understand the 
 patient research and historical labor which it embodies . . . 
 Neither can anyone who has not travelled over this precise 
 ground appreciate the accuracy of every trivial detail, or the 
 self-denying impartiality with which Mr. Lincoln has turned 
 
164 Abraham Lincoln 
 
 from the testimony of "the Fathers" on the general question 
 of slavery, to present the single question he discusses. From 
 the first line to the last — from his premise to his conclusion, 
 he travels with swift, unerring directness which no logician 
 ever excelled — an argument complete and full, without the 
 affectation of learning, and without the stiffness which usu- 
 ally accompanies dates and details. A single, easy, simple 
 sentence of plain Anglo-Saxon words contains a chapter of 
 history that, in some instances, has taken days of labor to 
 verify and which must have cost the author months of in- 
 vestigation to acquire." 
 
 Lincoln, reading these lines, and remembering how not 
 months but a lifetime of investigation and demonstration 
 had furnished him with those facts, — can one not see the 
 merry twinkle in his eye? 
 
 Following the Cooper Institute speech Lincoln made sev- 
 eral speeches in the East, the report of it having caused tele- 
 graph demands without number. He visited his son Robert 
 at Exeter, New Hampshire, where he was a student at 
 Phillips Academy. He spoke at Providence, Concord, Hart- 
 ford, Meriden, Connecticut, and Bridgeport, Connecticut. 
 He wrote from Exeter, March 4th, i860, to his wife: 
 
 "I have been unable to escape this toil. If I had foreseen 
 it, I think I would not have come East at all. The speech at 
 New York, being within my calculation before I started, 
 went off passably well and gave me no trouble whatever. 
 The difficulty was to make nine others before reading audi- 
 ences who have already seen all my ideas in print." 
 
 This extract, reveals the melancholy side of Lincoln's 
 nature. He could not see, or was not convinced, that his 
 speeches were going to play an important part in making him 
 President. But so it was, as the action of the delegates proved. 
 
At Cooper Institute 165 
 
 It was the Cooper Institute oration, the last composed politi- 
 cal speech Lincoln ever made, that won the East to his sup- 
 port, and gave him the final ascendancy over Mr. Seward, 
 his formidable rival in the convention. The man whom New 
 York had allowed to go a lonely way to his lonely room after 
 his speech, when next he stood in that city one year later, 
 rode in a carriage drawn by four white horses and bowed to 
 the shouting thousands lining the streets. He was the newly 
 elected President of the United States. 
 
Chapter XV 
 
 PRESIDENT OF THE REPUBLIC 
 
 THE REPUBLICAN National Convention, which met 
 in Chicago in May i860, nominated Abraham Lin- 
 coln for President of the United States. His princi- 
 pal opponents for the high office were Seward of New York, 
 and Chase of Ohio. Lincoln was nominated on the third 
 ballot. When the vote was announced the great Wigwam, 
 which had been built to house the convention, became a 
 whirlpool of political emotion, the outer edges of which 
 spread to every loyal state in the Union. The humble rail 
 splitter of Illinois had defeated the famous statesman of 
 New York and the cultured Senator of Ohio, both of whom, 
 as Lincoln himself said, had borne the labor and abuse of 
 initial leadership in the new Party and were entitled to the 
 honor more than he. 
 
 But the delegates who made up that great Convention of 
 protest against oligarchy, had something else in their minds 
 than honors earned and culture acquired. They came up 
 from the country to Chicago, a vigorous, virile citizenry, men 
 of the shop and the farm, the counter, the school and from 
 the bloody plains of Kansas. To them the Wigwam became 
 a holy shrine upon whose altar they were gathered to offer 
 sacrifice to the Goddess of Liberty and Freedom. Seward's 
 "Irrepressible Conflict," and his "Law higher than the Con- 
 
President of the Republic 167 
 
 stitution," shone pale and dim beside Lincoln's flaming "A 
 house divided against itself cannot stand." The declaration 
 of Chase that, Constitution or no Constitution, the slaves 
 should be set free, bold and chivalric as it was, lacked the 
 conviction of Lincoln's sane worship of the Constitution and 
 his declaration that that document formed the only wall 
 against which the Nation could put its back in the coming 
 struggle for existence. Not since the meeting of the Fathers 
 in Independence Hall had men come together with an eye 
 single to the one idea — the sacredness of God's creation in 
 the individual man. 
 
 In Lincoln they recognized a man like themselves, a child 
 of toil, who saw in the bread got by the sweat of the brow the 
 symbol of all dignity to which man might attain, and in the 
 degradation of toil, the serpent that was to strangle all the 
 simplicity and dignity of life. Already they had given him 
 the title of "Honest Abe Lincoln" and it was honesty and 
 not brilliance or culture or senatorial robes to which they 
 turned in that momentous hour. They chose their captain, 
 and in that choice gave added proof that the dictum, "The 
 voice of the people is the voice of God," may be rightly ap- 
 plied to that part of the people who are touched by the spirit 
 of a sublime idea. 
 
 Many careful students of the time have sought to locate 
 the cause of Seward's defeat by Lincoln in that Convention, 
 but they cannot agree among themselves about it. Is it not 
 because they concentrate their gaze upon Seward and Lincoln 
 instead of upon the people? The sophisticated of our day can 
 no more understand why the "great plain people" chose their 
 great plain leader in the hour of their country 's crisis, than 
 could the sophisticated of i860. Seward was everything the 
 sophisticated mind could ask for — a truly great man bound 
 
168 Abraham Lincoln 
 
 heart and soul to the cause of the Union. Chase was no less 
 so. Both had long been in the forefront of the battle out of 
 which had sprung the Republican Party. But sophistication 
 is a flimsy, if elegant, covering for truth, and is licked up with 
 a single flame of genuine passion. Lincoln was the rugged 
 granite which only returned an added glow to the heat of the 
 hour, with its character undisturbed. 
 
 The news was flashed to Springfield that Lincoln had been 
 nominated, and the man most concerned took the dispatch 
 with a steady hand but with a deeper glow in those fathom- 
 less eyes, to "the little woman down the street who would 
 like to hear the news." 
 
 His letter of acceptance is in strong contrast to most of 
 such utterances of record. "Sir," he wrote, addressing the 
 Honorable George Ashum, Chairman of the Convention, " I 
 accept the nomination tendered me by the Convention over 
 which you presided, I am formally apprised in a letter of 
 yourself and others, acting as a Committee of the Convention 
 for that purpose. The declaration of principles which accom- 
 panies your letter meets my approval, and it shall be my care 
 not to violate it or disregard it in any part. Imploring the 
 assistance of Divine Providence, and with due regard to the 
 views and feelings of all who were represented in the Conven- 
 tion, to the rights of all the States and Territories and the 
 people of the Nation, to the inviolability of the Constitution 
 and the perpetual Union, prosperity, and harmony of all, I 
 am most happy to cooperate for the practical success of the 
 principles declared by the Convention." 
 
 Lincoln took no counsel for this utterance. None was 
 needed. The platform adopted by the Convention was not 
 written to conceal thought but to make its purpose clear. 
 The Republican Party was born full-souled and free. It 
 
President of the Republic 169 
 
 sought not clouds but sunshine. The platform, and Lincoln's 
 acceptance of it, are in strong contrast to most of the plat- 
 forms and acceptances of our own time when the wisest is 
 puzzled to find in the mass of big sounding words and in- 
 volved sentences any exact meaning, or any well-defined 
 principles. It will be a happy day for the people when their 
 self-constituted leaders return to the simplicity and direct- 
 ness of Lincoln's nomination. 
 
 The canvass that followed was the personification of in- 
 tensity. Men shouted a great deal but thought a great deal 
 more. The result was a Republican victory. Lincoln was 
 elected President of the United States and the country 
 paused for a brief moment to breathe and take account of its 
 direction. The election returns gave a popular vote to Lin- 
 coln of 1,857,610: Douglas, 1,291,574: Breckenridge, 850,91 1 : 
 Bell, 646,124; in the Electoral College Lincoln received 180 
 votes, Breckenridge 72, Bell 39, and Douglas 12, the lone 
 State of Missouri. 
 
 Having been officially notified of his election, Mr. Lincoln, 
 as Herndon relates, moved his headquarters from the law 
 office of Lincoln and Herndon to a room in the State House 
 Building, and there with his Secretary, John G. Nicolay, he 
 spent the busy days of his campaign. "But he still loved," 
 says his partner, " to come to our office of evenings, and spend 
 an hour with a few choice friends in friendly privacy which 
 was denied him at his public headquarters. These were among 
 the last meetings we had with Lincoln as our friend and fel- 
 low at the Bar; and they are also the most delightful recollec- 
 tions any of us have retained of him." 
 
 Then came the day of Lincoln's departure for Washington. 
 Henry B. Rankin who was present, has described the time 
 passed between Lincoln's election and his departure from 
 
170 Abraham Lincoln 
 
 Springfield with rare sympathy and feeling. He tells us how 
 from his election, November 6, i860, to February n, 1861, 
 Lincoln awaited the ceremony of inauguration. Springfield 
 had become the mecca of admirers, as well as of a horde of 
 office seekers, who thronged around him. Thus before he had 
 assumed the office of state, he felt the burden of a pressure 
 for official recognition, which continued to oppress and dis- 
 tract him to the day of his death. "He passed those trying 
 first months after his election," says the chronicle, "with 
 rare wisdom, patience and tact. Where he could not agree, or 
 wished to parry questions, which no foresight could then 
 safely solve, he became the questioner himself, or sent his 
 caller away with an apt story. No ill-considered promise, no 
 committal on policies to guide his administration, escaped 
 his lips to compromise or tie up his future usefulness. There 
 were no such indiscretions, through inexperience, during 
 these first months when he appeared in national view as the 
 President elect. 
 
 "On the evening of February 10, 1861, he spent his last 
 hours with his partner in the old office of Lincoln and Hern- 
 don. They conferred for the last time on a few unfinished 
 legal affairs, and arranged minor business matters. They re- 
 mained alone until late, passed down the stairway together 
 and along the streets, until near Lincoln 's home, where they 
 parted for the last time in Springfield. 
 
 "The next morning, under a leaden sky, the people as- 
 sembled to bid him farewell at the station, saw Lincoln 
 appear for a brief moment at the rear door of the car. He 
 paused, as if surprised at the sudden burst of applause occa- 
 sioned by his appearance, and removing his hat stepped out 
 on the platform, bowing right and left and remaining silent 
 until the salute ceased. His short address was a great surprise 
 
President of the Republic 171 
 
 to reporters and politicians. In it there was nothing that 
 satisfied their excited expectations. In its delivery there were 
 no gestures. His manner was calm and self-contained, yet his 
 voice was tremulous with suppressed emotions, while strong 
 emphasis marked many words and sentences. The last sen- 
 tence was spoken in lower tones, with a yearning tenderness 
 in his voice, most unusual to him; and, with its closing words, 
 he bowed low, and with firmly compressed lips whose silence 
 meant so much to those who knew him best, turned from his 
 position on the platform and stood at the open door, while 
 the train, just starting, moved slowly bearing him away from 
 us through the cold grey misty haze of rain. Little then we 
 knew how he would return! Thank God for the shortness of 
 human vision; that he who went, and we who remained, could 
 not then discern the appalling future that so darkly hung 
 above and before us all ! 
 
 "These were his farewell words: 
 
 "'My Friends: No one, not in my situation, can appre- 
 ciate my feelings of sadness at this parting. To this place, and 
 the kindness of these people, I owe everything. Here I have 
 lived a quarter of a century, and have passed from a young 
 to an old man. Here my children have been born, and one 
 is buried. I now leave, not knowing when or whether ever I 
 may return, with a task before me greater than that which 
 rested upon Washington. Without the assistance of that 
 Divine Being who ever attended 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 
 commending you, as I hope in your prayers you will com- 
 mend me, I bid you an affectionate farewell.' 
 
 "The train rolled on, leaving the two or three hundred 
 
172 Abraham Lincoln 
 
 people, who had heard this farewell address, disappointed at 
 its simplicity and neither did its publication win for it im- 
 mediately the recognition which has since been accorded it 
 as among the most sublime of intimate expressions that has 
 fallen from the lips of man." 
 
 The journey to Washington was a leisurely one, time hav- 
 ing been allotted for the President-elect to appear and speak 
 to the people along the route. At Westfield, Illinois, Lincoln 
 characteristically descended from the train and taking a little 
 girl in his arms, kissed her. The child was Grace Bedell, who 
 previous to the election had received a lithograph of Lincoln 
 and written to him of her admiration, and having her childish 
 heart moved by the rugged pathos of his features, had sug- 
 gested that if he were to let his whiskers grow his appearance 
 would be improved. "You see," he said, "I have let these 
 whiskers grow for you, Grace," one of the most illuminating 
 incidents of the nature of this most remarkable man. 
 
 In Philadelphia, Lincoln assisted at the ceremonies of un- 
 furling a magnificent new flag, and again declared his deep 
 reverence for the Constitution and the men who had given it 
 to the world. "I am filled with deep emotion at finding my- 
 self in this place," he said, "where were collected together 
 the wisdom, the patriotism, the devotion to principle, from 
 which sprang the institutions under which we live. You have 
 kindly suggested to me that in my hands is the task of restor- 
 ing peace to our distracted country. I can say in return, sir, 
 that all the political sentiments I entertain have been drawn, 
 so far as I have been able to draw them, from the sentiments 
 which originated in and were given to the world from this 
 hall. I have never had a feeling, politically, that did not 
 spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of 
 Independence." 
 
President of the Republic 173 
 
 Rumors of a plot to assassinate the incoming President 
 had gained such credence that Lincoln was that night trans- 
 ferred to another train and accompanied by detectives. The 
 train ran directly through Baltimore to Washington where 
 Mr. Lincoln was met at 6:30 a. m. by Lyman B. Trumbull, 
 and taken to the Willard Hotel. Here he revised his Inaugu- 
 ral Address and listened to suggestions from different politi- 
 cians concerning his proposed Cabinet. On the morning of 
 the 4th of March he rode from his hotel, with Mr. Buchanan, 
 in an open barouche to the Capitol. There upon a square 
 platform that had been built out from the steps of the eastern 
 portico, with benches for distinguished guests on three sides, 
 the customary oath of office was administered by the vener- 
 able Chief Justice Taney. Among the guests was his old rival, 
 Senator Douglas. Lincoln, when he stepped forward to de- 
 liver his address, was embarrassed at finding no place to dis- 
 pose of his hat except on the floor. Douglas, appreciating the 
 situation, came to the rescue of his former antagonist and 
 held the hat until its owner needed it again. 
 
 The imminence of Civil War had swept aside those supre- 
 ficial things which Douglas had once considered essential, and 
 with clear eyes he saw how "true and righteous altogether^ 
 had been the judgments of his great opponent. He listened 
 with close attention to the address, punctuating the passages 
 with appreciative nods, and with as genuine patriotism as 
 that of the man who delivered them. The fiction of his 
 famous compromise was revealed. The Little Giant at that 
 moment had his triumph too. He had conquered himself and 
 willingly he became the humble servitor to a nobler genius. 
 
Chapter XVI 
 
 IN THE WHITE HOUSE 
 
 IINCOLN'S First Inaugural, notwithstanding the deep 
 current of love for all mankind, whatever their dif- 
 ferences, was no more than a feather on the tornado 
 of passion that was sweeping over the country. Neither 
 its frank intimacy nor its lofty idealism found lodgment 
 in the minds of those who were already in arms against 
 the Union. Its sanity awoke no echo in the hearts of the radi- 
 cal wing of the Republican Party, and its declaration express- 
 ing determination to maintain inviolate the rights of the 
 states fell short of the desires of even the most conservative 
 of the masses north of Mason and Dixon's Line. 
 
 His Cabinet to which he had brought such men as Seward, 
 Chase, Cameron, Blair, Bates and Smith, had in its member- 
 ship three Republicans and four Democrats. Only by wise 
 and judicious appeal to their predominating virtues had he 
 induced Seward and Chase to become members of one politi- 
 cal family. Both had been ambitious for the office he held, 
 and neither could comprehend the state of the public mind 
 which had chosen him to represent it in their stead. He had 
 given the portfolio of State to Seward and he had accepted it. 
 Chase, when tendered the office of the Secretary of the Treas- 
 ury, felt his pride rise at being tendered a secondary post by 
 his old political rival, and only Lincoln 's direct appeal to his 
 
In the White House 175 
 
 patriotism and sense of duty in a situation that called for the 
 sacrifice of self upon the altar of the Union, had induced him 
 to agree to serve. Even after Lincoln 's arrival in Washington 
 and before he had been inaugurated, a situation arose which 
 threatened to break the slate Lincoln had prepared with so 
 much sleepless anxiety. Seward's friends waited on Mr. Lin- 
 coln and urged him to withhold the appointment of Chase. 
 This he declined to do. The delegation gloweringly retired. 
 A little later Seward sent a brief and coldly formal note in 
 which he asked "leave to withdraw" the acceptance of his 
 appointment. Such a crisis on the eve of his administration 
 might have caused a stronger man than Lincoln was supposed 
 to be, to change his plans. But the great heart of Lincoln, 
 bound up in his country's honor and his country's peril, coun- 
 selled him wisely. Pondering over the situation for two days, 
 he handed his answer to his Private Secretary, on the morn- 
 ing of his inauguration, with his homely smile and, "I can't 
 afford to let Seward take the first trick." 
 
 The note was brief as that of Seward. Without touching 
 upon the questions at issue, the message expressed a keen 
 desire that Seward should not persist in his purpose. "It is 
 the subject of the most painful solicitude to me," wrote Mr. 
 Lincoln, "and I feel constrained to beg that you will counter- 
 mand the withdrawal. The public interest, I think, demands 
 that you should; and my personal feelings are deeply enlisted 
 in the same direction. Please consider and answer by nine 
 o'clock a. m. tomorrow." 
 
 Unable to withstand such a direct appeal to his higher 
 sense of duty, Seward reconsidered his decision and the next 
 day the cabinet appointments, as originally composed, were 
 submitted to the Senate, "And," flashes Rothschild, "Se- 
 ward's name, like Abou Ben Adhem's, led all the rest." 
 
176 Abraham Lincoln 
 
 It is impossible to conceive at this time with a solidified 
 Union, the disorganized state of the government when Lin- 
 coln was suddenly thrust into the heart of things and given 
 the task of bringing order out of chaos. Sumter was besieged. 
 For months the sympathizers with the resolve of the South 
 to secede had been stripping the government arsenals of 
 arms and munitions. Soldiers trained at Annapolis and West 
 Point had retired and cast their lots with the new Confed- 
 eracy. The treasury was bankrupt. Many of the Senators and 
 Members of the House were disloyal. There was practically 
 no standing army. Officers of the Army and Navy, resigning 
 from the service in large numbers, turned their swords 
 against the Government; treason paralyzed every depart- 
 ment at Washington; civil government buildings, forts, arse- 
 nals, lighthouses, ships, marine hospitals, and navy yards 
 had been seized by the rapidly organized Confederacy. 
 Demoralization North, and impudent assumption of author- 
 ity South, offered hardly a point of vantage for the new ad- 
 ministration to lay hold upon. Proclaimed enemies to the 
 Union gave to the President less anxious hours than the 
 fearful and distracting elements in his own party. Even the 
 Members of his Cabinet looked askance at the tall ungainly 
 stranger from the Illinois prairies, as yet untried in the com- 
 plicated duties of administration. Seward patronized him 
 from the first. He considered himself far more capable of con- 
 ducting the affairs of the Government than his Chief. He 
 could not believe that one with the limited experience in pub- 
 lic affairs, such as he knew Lincoln to have had could manage 
 so tremendous a machine, already racked almost to demoli- 
 tion. Before a month went by, Seward had determined to win 
 the consent of Lincoln to surrender his authority, and to 
 permit him to pilot the Ship of State. He wrote to his wife, 
 
In the White House 177 
 
 "I have assumed a sort of dictatorship for defense; I am 
 laboring night and day, with cities and with states. My hope, 
 rather my confidence, is unabated." 
 
 Seward's activities were such that the opinion gained 
 ground everywhere that Seward, not Lincoln, was the real 
 President. Mrs. Lincoln, ever vigilant for her husband's 
 honor, repeated to him the boast of the Secretary's friends 
 that Seward was the power behind the throne and could rule 
 the President as he willed. Lincoln answered her, "I may not 
 rule myself, but certainly Seward shall not. The only ruler I 
 have is my conscience — following God in it — and these men 
 will have to learn that yet." 
 
 Meanwhile the Confederacy gained headway. Evacuation 
 of Fort Sumter seemed inevitable. Major Anderson reported 
 that his provisions were almost exhausted, that the batteries 
 about the fort had grown so formidable and the post was, in 
 many essentials, so weak, that it became daily less tenable. 
 In a few weeks the garrison would be reduced to starvation. 
 Not less than twenty thousand well diciplined men would be 
 required to succor his decimated command. No such force 
 appearing, Lieutenant General Scott, the Commander-in- 
 Chief, advised the President to order evacuation. Lincoln 
 stood firm. In his Inaugural Address he had declared that 
 "The power confided in me will be used to hold, occupy, and 
 possess the property and places belonging to the Govern- 
 ment." Should he be foresworn at the first threat of danger? 
 He ordered General Scott to hold on. This brought protests 
 from all the Members of his Cabinet except one, Postmaster 
 General Blair, a Democrat of the Jacksonian school. Seward 
 and Chase were both emphatic in their stand to give up the 
 Fort. Still Lincoln refused to order a retreat. 
 
 Lincoln kept his own council, studied the maps, was inde- 
 
178 Abraham Lincoln 
 
 fatigable in his interviews with army men, listened to the 
 advice of his Cabinet, gave every suggestion serious consider- 
 ation, once in a while relieved the intensity of his feelings by 
 a pat story, but surrendered no jot or tittle of his authority. 
 Yet, because he did give courteous attention to their sugges- 
 tions, because he did not openly proclaim his own slowly 
 forming opinions, because he was a big man, big enough to 
 bear his burdens in silence and deal kindly and generously 
 with those who took little care to hide their feelings of 
 superiority, because he did not attempt what he could not 
 perform, but held judgment in abeyance until the hour 
 should be ripe for action, they made false measures of his 
 stature, discounted his powers, doubted his firmness and 
 thought themselves the heroes of the hour. 
 
 Then pondering long on his superiority to the President 
 and impatient with the times, — no doubt urged by his fol- 
 lowers, Seward at last determined to declare openly to the 
 President his entire disapproval of the President's conduct 
 of affairs. In " Some Thoughts for the President's Consider- 
 ation," dated April i, 1861, he declared: 
 
 "First. We are at the end of a month's administration, and 
 yet without a policy, either domestic or foreign. 
 
 "Second. This, however, is not culpable, and we must 
 CHANGE THE QUESTION BEFORE THE PUBLIC 
 FROM ONE UPON SLAVERY OR ABOUT SLAVERY, 
 for a question upon UNION or DISUNION. 
 
 "In other words, from what would be regarded as a Party 
 question, to one of Patriotism or Union. 
 
 "The occupation or evacuation of Fort Sumter, although 
 not in fact a slavery or a Party question is so regarded. Wit- 
 ness the temper manifested by the Republicans in the free 
 states, and even by the Union men in the South. 
 
In the White House 179 
 
 "FOR FOREIGN NATIONS" 
 
 "I would demand explanation from Spain and France, 
 categorically, at once. 
 
 "I would seek explanations from Great Britain and Russia, 
 and send agents into Canada, Mexico, and Central America, 
 to rouse a continental spirit of independence on this continent 
 against European intervention. 
 
 "And, if satisfactory explanations are not received from 
 Spain and France, 
 
 "Would convene Congress and declare war against them. 
 
 " But whatever policy we adopt, there must be an energetic 
 prosecution of it. 
 
 "For this purpose it must be somebody's business to pur- 
 sue and direct it incessantly. 
 
 "Either the President must do it himself, and be all the 
 while active in it or 
 
 "Devolve it on some Member of his Cabinet. Once 
 adopted, debates on it must end, and all agree and abide. 
 
 "It is not my especial province. 
 
 "But I neither seek to evade nor assume responsibility." 
 
 Only a soul imbued with God-like patience could have 
 temperately considered the matter. Lincoln had such a pa- 
 tient soul. He did not accept the summons; neither did he 
 reply in kind. He answered highly, serenely, soberly, gener- 
 ously, but with a firmness, the sublimity of which should 
 have given his Secretary of State a much juster estimate of 
 his Chief. The criticisms of his policies he destroyed by a 
 recital of his deeds. The summons to confer upon Seward 
 absolute authority he answered in these words: 
 
 Executive Mansion, April I, 1861. 
 Hon. W. H. Seward. 
 
 My Dear Sir: Since parting with you I have been considering 
 
180 Abraham Lincoln 
 
 your paper dated this day, and entitled "Some Thoughts for 
 the President's Consideration." The first proposition in it is, 
 "First, We are at the end of a month's administration, and 
 yet without a policy, either domestic or foreign." 
 
 At the beginning of that month, in the Inaugural, I said, 
 "The power confided to me will be used to hold, occupy, and 
 possess the property and places belonging to the Govern- 
 ment, and to collect the duties and imposts." This had your 
 distinct approval at the time; and, taken in connection with 
 the order I immediately gave General Scott, directing him to 
 employ every means in his power to strengthen and hold the 
 forts, comprises the exact domestic policy you now urge, 
 with the single exception that it does not propose to abandon 
 Fort Sumter. 
 
 Again, I do not perceive how the reinforcement of Fort 
 Sumter would be done on a slavery or Party issue, while that 
 of Fort Pickens would be on a more national and patriotic 
 one. 
 
 Upon your closing propositions, that "whatever policy we 
 adopt, there must be an energetic prosecution of it, 
 
 "For this purpose it must be somebody's business to pur- 
 sue and direct it incessantly, 
 
 "Either the President must do it himself, and be all the 
 while active in it, or 
 
 "Devolve it on some Member of his Cabinet. Once 
 adopted, debates on it must end, and all agree and abide." 
 I remark that if this must be done, I must do it. When a 
 general line of policy is adopted, I apprehend there is no 
 danger of its being changed without good reason or continu- 
 ing to be a subject of unnecessary debate; still, upon points 
 arising in its progress I wish, and suppose I am entitled to 
 have, the advice of all the Cabinet. 
 
 Your ob't serv't, A. Lincoln. 
 
In the White House 181 
 
 No one familiar with Mr. Lincoln's character can doubt 
 how he suffered from this expressed belief in his weakness by- 
 one of his closest and most respected advisers. No one can 
 doubt his desire to take advantage of the ammunition his 
 indiscreet Secretary had placed in his hands; but neither can 
 one doubt his greater desire for every assistance he could 
 have from a man of Seward's genius in the hour of the Na- 
 tion's peril. That his magnanimous treatment, while retain- 
 ing his position with flawless honor, was effective, as he must 
 have reasoned it would be, has proof enough in the long and 
 faithful service rendered to Lincoln and the country by 
 Seward and the high place Lincoln grew to have in his affec- 
 tions and esteem. It was not so long after this episode before 
 we find Seward writing to his wife, "Executive skill and vigor 
 are rare qualities. The President is the best of us." 
 
 The President's Cabinet was made up of the strongest men 
 he could name of undoubted loyalty. The fact that he wished 
 to surround himself with superior minds, one would think, 
 should have added to the conviction that he did not fear 
 comparison with the best equipped mentality of his time. 
 Furthermore, he required of each Member of the Cabinet 
 proof of his ability to conduct the affairs of that department 
 in the best possible way, by giving him the utmost liberty 
 compatible with the dignity of his own supreme authority. 
 Instead of inspiring them with confidence in his astuteness, 
 this action fed their vanity while at the same time it con- 
 tributed to their belief that he felt himself unable to lay hold 
 of and handle the complicated affairs of administration. It 
 took many a quiet correction, many humorous fables and 
 not a few abrupt and uncompromising orders from the Presi- 
 dent, laboring under his Atlas load with the world gone 
 wrong, to convince them of his true wisdom and greatness. 
 
182 Abraham Lincoln 
 
 Some of these, Chase most of all, never did appreciate to its 
 full power the master intellect of the new man in the Nation. 
 Having supervision of but one branch of the Government, 
 they could not see it as a whole. Measuring the demands of 
 the hour by the demands of their particular department, they 
 wished the entire orchestra to be tuned to their single reed. 
 It is apparent now that Lincoln alone, of all the great men 
 engaged in the gigantic struggle of saving the Nation, rose to 
 a height where he could look down upon that awful tangle of 
 passion and prejudice and behold with God-like compassion 
 its conflicting elements. Never was man given so great a task 
 with so few means for its accomplishment. Confronted by 
 the swift gathering forces of the Confederacy, rebellion 
 already an accomplished fact, one of the National forts be- 
 sieged and its defenders on the verge of starvation, he had 
 not at his command a force of twenty thousand men, the 
 required estimate to rescue that fort and its beleaguered 
 garrison. Neither troops nor trained men to officer them had 
 he in the field. Neither could he call for volunteers without 
 precipitating civil war. What such a war meant he realized, 
 and he shrank from it with horror. With a heart as tender as 
 that of a mother with her sucking babe at her breast, he 
 recoiled from taking any action that should strew the fertile 
 fields of the Republic with the mangled bodies of her sons. 
 Numberless little men pecked at him for puny offices; politi- 
 cal cables stormed the White House with demands for pat- 
 ronage with which to satisfy henchmen; radicals behind him 
 howled [for an immediate declaration of freedom for the 
 slaves, while conservatives demanded any kind of compro- 
 mise rather than an appeal to arms. His Secretary of State 
 was willing to bring on a war with foreign nations in the hope 
 to consolidate the country against a foreign foe. With no 
 
In the White House 183 
 
 record of public administration to inspire confidence among 
 his colleagues; with no outward show of sophistication, and 
 no inward weakness to counsel abandonment of principle to 
 expediency; without a single confidant to whom he could 
 unburden his overcharged heart; solitary, alone, doubted, 
 traduced, despised, hated, maligned, he stood calm, firm, 
 defiant, as years before in Gentryville he had stood with his 
 back to the wall and with silent lips but flashing eyes had 
 held at bay the milling mob of Clary Grove. 
 
 As in that backwoods drama Lincoln, by the clear knowl- 
 edge of his position in the right, and his unflinching deter- 
 mination to hold his position in the firm faith that the right 
 must finally triumph in any case, had brought those rough 
 contending spirits to subjection and finally to respect and 
 follow him, so by the help of that Divine Providence, to 
 which he had made such reverent appeal on leaving Spring- 
 field, he subjected the warring factions behind him and 
 finally the rebellious factions confronting the nation, until 
 they one and all acknowledged him as not only their superior 
 at every point, but their great lover and the best friend they 
 ever should know. 
 
 During those first weeks of his administration, Lincoln 
 was as a man standing at the verge of a simoon-tossed desert, 
 with a tremendous reservoir behind him, his hand on the 
 lever which could release it, but when the release of the 
 tiniest rivulet would be followed by a deluge which should 
 drown the world. One call for military help would bring on 
 civil war. Silent and solitary, with the awful tragedy of such 
 a civil conflict before him, the son of the Kentucky carpenter 
 pioneer wrestled in his Gethsemane, the agony of a mortal 
 world surging up in his heart, and the discords of a war- 
 mad nation throbbing in his soul. 
 
Chapter XVII 
 
 SAVING THE UNION 
 
 SUMTER FELL and war came. His appeal to the bet- 
 ter nature of his enemies having been unheeded, the 
 President was forced to fight for the Union he had 
 sworn to uphold at all hazards. Congress was not in session 
 and he was compelled to act on his own initiative. He called 
 for volunteers. Everywhere were heard the ominousroll of 
 the drum, the shrill cadence of the fife, and the growing mur- 
 mur of defiance. 
 
 City streets were picturesque with volunteer commands, 
 zouaves, artillery companies, civilian gatherings. Along rural 
 roads in clouds of dust country boys hurried to offer them- 
 selves to the recruiting station. This all over the North. In 
 the seceding slave states where preparation had been going 
 forward for months, the nucleus of a large army was already 
 in solid formation under the instructions of trained officers, 
 educated in the military academies of the Nation. The rights 
 of a State as against the rights of a Nation, were proclaimed 
 and the chivalry of the aristocratic South was pitted against 
 the less spectacular but deeply determined commonalty of 
 the North. The land was dotted with white tents. Mothers of 
 all sections gave tearful blessings to their sons while, like 
 those of ancient Sparta, they bade them "come home with 
 their shields or on them." 
 
Saving the Union 185 
 
 At the Nation's capitol there was hurrying to and fro in 
 strange disordered tumult. The desertion of southern con- 
 gressmen had left the Republicans in control of the Govern- 
 ment, and when Congress assembled it hurried to make legal 
 the President's acts in calling for volunteers and to declare 
 war upon the insurrection that had spread to all the cotton 
 states and was threatening to have the support of the border 
 states. To save if possible these border states to the Union 
 was Mr. Lincoln's pronounced determination. He had called 
 to his Cabinet men representing all factions of those parties 
 which denied the claim of the States' Rights as opposed to 
 the supreme right of the Union. But no two of these factions 
 agreed as to the best way to preserve the Union. Some were 
 for an immediate proclamation freeing the slaves. Some were 
 for allowing slavery to continue, even with its encroachments 
 upon the Territories. Some were for permitting it to exist in 
 the States where it had already been given recognition by the 
 Constitution. 
 
 Among them all, the President was alone in his position to 
 preserve the Union by any or all these means. He had told 
 them that a house divided against itself could not stand, that 
 the Nation could not continue half slave and half free. He had 
 told them, both North and South, that he would not override 
 the Constitution in either case. He had pleaded with them in 
 his sublime Inaugural to recognize their own brotherhood. 
 He had counselled calmness of judgment and patience to 
 work out a peaceful solution of the gigantic problem. His 
 great heart glowed with sympathy for humanity, denying 
 entrance to no section, neither to race, color nor creed. He 
 asked for but one thing — veneration for the Union. Amid the 
 gloom of approaching fratricidal war he alone took up the 
 harp of the Union and " Smote on all the chords with might, 
 
186 Abraham Lincoln 
 
 Smote the chord of self that trembling passed in music out of 
 sight." 
 
 He alone was brave without boasting, patient without 
 pretense, gentle without compromise, stern without detrac- 
 tion, sympathetic without weakness, sad without pessimism, 
 tearful without despair. Other great leaders fixed their eyes 
 on some particular star of their selection moving in the orbit 
 of their beliefs. He alone steered his course by the one fixed 
 star. Because he would not allow his eyes to be blinded by 
 sympathy for one race to the exclusion of all races, he was 
 declared heartless. Because he gave away to his advisors in a 
 thousand minor details, he was charged with weakness. Be- 
 cause he would resign no hair's breadth of his authority in 
 great things, he was labelled stubborn. Because he would not 
 change a general in the field until he had found another who 
 might better fill his place, he was scoffed at as being ignorant 
 of the situation. Because he sought to strengthen the party 
 upon which he must depend for support, he was judged as a 
 scheming politician. Because he would not pull up the roots 
 of his being from the soil of the common people, he was satir- 
 ized as a clown. Because he, like the Man of Nazareth, taught 
 with homely parables the great truths of life, he was frowned 
 on by the cultured and sophisticated. Because he could not 
 bring himself to have shot the volunteers of a newly organ- 
 ized army of civilians who disobeyed stern military rules, he 
 was censured for disorganization and defeats due to the lack 
 of military leadership. Because, like Shakespeare, he made 
 humor the open window to let in reviving sunlight to his 
 overcharged heart, he was sneered at as lacking in apprecia- 
 tion of the dignity of his high office and unappreciative of the 
 seriousness of the hour. Because he forgave his enemies, both 
 for and against the Union, his firmness was doubted and 
 oftentimes his judgment denied. 
 
Saving the Union 187 
 
 This surging sea of criticism and abuse, which made his 
 place unique and difficult beyond that of any other president, 
 and probably beyond that of any man who was ever called to 
 rule a people, gives authority for the conclusion of the fore- 
 most minds of succeeding generations that Abraham Lincoln, 
 judged by his works, is the greatest figure in the drama of 
 Civilization. Accepting all men, he conquered all men. 
 Denied of all while denying none, he lifted all men several 
 notches in the scale of progress and put under their feet a 
 foundation of such everlasting substance that the structure 
 he builded seems destined to become the cornerstone for the 
 temple of universal freedom. 
 
 That the President venerated freedom and hated slavery, 
 goes without saying. His whole life had been devoted to the 
 principle of the one and to exposing the erroneous claims of 
 the other. But he knew, by that marvelous power of intuition 
 which was the natural result of his knowledge of the whole 
 people and sympathy for them, that even the North as a 
 solid whole would not continue the war on the declared pro- 
 position to free the slaves. The leading Members of his Cabi- 
 net, Seward, Chase, and later Stanton, held different views. 
 Horace Greeley believed such a declaration would strengthen 
 the Union cause. Beecher, Sumner, Garrison, Wendell Phil- 
 lips, great orators all, were pronounced in their conviction 
 that the war should be prosecuted with this one end in view. 
 It is evident now that they were all wrong, and that Lincoln 
 was wise as well as good and saw far clearer than they the 
 great danger of such a proceeding. 
 
 His hope of keeping the border states inj the Union was 
 founded on his understanding of human nature. His frequent 
 attempts to gain their consent to gradual emancipation with 
 payment for their slaves, won their confidence and respect 
 
188 Abraham Lincoln 
 
 for his honesty and by these means some of them remained 
 loyal and were immense assets to the cause of the Federal 
 arms. Difficult beyond conception was Lincoln's position 
 during those first years of the Civil War. To keep the North 
 as solidly behind him as possible he sought out their favorites 
 in public life and gave them offices of trust and command. 
 Loyal to his old friends, he advanced them wherever he 
 could, so long as the public service did not suffer. Often it 
 was a man who had been his opponent and who continued to 
 mistrust or despise him that he pushed to the front. 
 
 Among the men whom Lincoln selected for important duty 
 in the western field was Fremont. That the President believed 
 in Fremont's genius for command was not strange. He had 
 been "The Pathfinder" across the great plains and also for 
 the Republican Party as its standard bearer in its first cam- 
 paign as a National Party. Lincoln had stumped the State of 
 Illinois for the hero of the hour and had a warm feeling in his 
 heart for him. He placed the bulk of the western regiments 
 under Fremont's command with headquarters at St. Louis. 
 Fremont could not but know Lincoln's expressed decision 
 to leave the slave question to be settled later while the greater 
 question of saving the Union was on trial. But his abolition 
 leanings and his unwonted ambition to lead, caused him to 
 overlook or to ignore the President's well-defined attitude. 
 Feeling certain of winning a large backing for his act from his 
 admirers all over the country, and anxious to reinstate him- 
 self in the full confidence of the public eye for several costly 
 military blunders, (one of which cost the life of the brave 
 General Lyon), without previous consultation with the Presi- 
 dent or any of his advisers or friends, on August 30, 1861, 
 Fremont wrote and printed, as Commander of the Depart- 
 ment of the West, a proclamation establishing martial law 
 throughout the State of Missouri and announcing that: 
 
Saving the Union 189 
 
 "All persons who shall be taken with arms in their hands 
 within these lines shall be tried by court-martial and if found 
 guilty will be shot. The property, real and personal, of all 
 persons in the State of Missouri who shall take up arms 
 against the United States, or who shall be directly proven to 
 have taken an active part with their enemies in the field, is 
 declared to be confiscated to the public use; and their slaves, 
 if any they have, are hereby declared freemen." 
 
 Having taken grounds so diametrically opposed to the 
 principles of his Chief, it must have occurred to Fremont that 
 his act entitled him to immediate dismissal. Subsequent 
 events give color to the supposition that he courted such a 
 climax with the intention of setting himself up as a rival in 
 authority, possibly with the hope of dictatorship. How far 
 he came from appreciating the wisdom, as well as the pa- 
 tience of Mr. Lincoln, the denouement shows. Instead of 
 exhibiting the righteous anger which he no doubt felt for this 
 reckless misuse of power, President Lincoln corrected like a 
 wise schoolmaster. He immediately wrote the general: 
 
 "My Dear Sir: Two points in your proclamation of August 
 30 gives me some anxiety: First — should you shoot a man, 
 according to the proclamation, the Confederates would very 
 certainly shoot our best men in their hands, in retaliation; 
 and so, man for man, indefinitely. It is, therefore, my order 
 that you allow no man to be shot under the proclamation, 
 without first having my approbation and consent. 
 
 Second — I think there is great danger that the closing 
 paragraph in relation to the confiscation of property and the 
 liberating slaves of traitorous owners, will alarm our southern 
 Union friends and turn them against us; perhaps ruin our 
 rather fair prospects of Kentucky. Allow me therefore, to 
 ask that you will, as of your own motion, modify that para- 
 
190 Abraham Lincoln 
 
 graph so as to conform to the first section of the Act of Con- 
 gress entitled, 'An Act to Confiscate Property Used for In- 
 surrectionary Purposes/ approved August 6, 1861, and a 
 copy of which Act I herewith send you. 
 
 "This letter is written in a spirit of caution and not of 
 censure. I send it by special messenger, in order that it may 
 certainly and speedily reach you." 
 
 So wise and gentle, but withal so firm a rebuke, should 
 have won the hearty cooperation of the impetuous general, 
 but blinded by his passion and with his vanity pushed to its 
 limit by the adulation of friends as blind and prejudiced as 
 he, Fremont wrote in reply: "If I were to retract it of my 
 own accord it would imply that I myself thought it wrong, 
 and that I had acted without the reflection which the gravity 
 of the point demanded." 
 
 Fremont seems not to have realized that, had his action 
 gone unrebuked, the President — after his declaration in his 
 Inaugural, that it was not his intention to disturb any of the 
 Constitutional rights of the states, and his further decision 
 that a state could not secede from the Union but was only 
 dislocated by its insurrection — (that had Mr. Lincoln al- 
 lowed Fremont's order to stand, he) the President would 
 have been subject to the implication of being wrong, and 
 having "acted without the reflection which the gravity of 
 the point demanded." 
 
 Fremont soon after resigned. The President was besieged 
 by the adorers of the dashing 'Pathfinder/ demanding his 
 reinstatement, but the general had lost the confidence of a 
 man who could hold no enmity, even when he had been so 
 wickedly abused. 
 
 The embarrassments under which President Lincoln 
 labored through such acts of ill-considered enthusiasm, were 
 
Saving the Union 191 
 
 not yet over. Don Piatt, who was Chief-of-Staff with General 
 Schenk, stationed at Baltimore, in the absence of his Chief 
 issued an order for General Burney who came there to recruit 
 for a colored regiment, to recruit only slaves. He then sent 
 Burney to that part of Maryland where slaves were thickest. 
 His act was, as he knew, in direct opposition to the principle 
 laid down by the President. He has since confessed that he 
 waited until his superior officer was absent from the camp to 
 issue the order, feeling sure the general would not listen to 
 its being done. Piatt was called to Washington and before 
 the President. 
 
 "I never saw Mr. Lincoln angry but this once," writes 
 Piatt, " and I had no wish to see a second exhibition of his 
 wrath. I do not care to recall the words of Mr. Lincoln. I 
 wrote them out that night, for I was threatened with a 
 shameful dismissal from the service and I intended appealing 
 to the public. They were exceedingly sincere for the President 
 was in a rage. I was not allowed a word in my own defense, 
 and was only permitted to say that I would countermand my 
 order. I was saved cashiering through the interference of 
 Stanton and Chase, and the further fact that a row over such 
 a transaction at that time would be extremely awkward. The 
 President never forgave me. I do not blame him. His great, 
 thoughtful brain saw at that time what has taken years for 
 us to discover and appreciate. He understood the people he 
 held to a death struggle in behalf of the great Republic, and 
 knew that, while the masses would fight to the bitter end in 
 behalf of the Union, they would not kill their own brothers, 
 and spread mourning over the entire land in behalf of the 
 Negro. He therefore kept the cause of Union to the front." 
 
 Out of a similar disregard of the President's position on the 
 institution of slavery as affected by the war, and as the war 
 
192 Abraham Lincoln 
 
 might be affected by it, came the resignation of Secretary- 
 Cameron. In his report as Secretary of War to the annual 
 session of Congress which met in December, 1861, he an- 
 nounced: "If it should be found that the men who have been 
 held by the rebels as slaves are capable of bearing arms and 
 performing efficient military service, it is the right, and may 
 become the duty, of the Government to arm and equip them, 
 and employ their services against the rebels, under proper 
 military regulations, discipline and command." 
 
 "Mr. Nicolay declares that "the President was not pre- 
 pared to permit a member of his Cabinet, without his con- 
 sent, to commit the administration to so radical a policy at 
 that early date. He caused advance copies of the document 
 to be recalled and modified to the simple declaration that 
 fugitive and abandoned slaves, being clearly an important 
 military resource, should not be returned to rebel masters, 
 but withheld from the enemy to be disposed of in future as 
 Congress might deem best." 
 
 Even Members of the Cabinet failed to understand that 
 Lincoln knew the temper of the country, and disposition of 
 the army, and the delicate strands which held the border 
 states to the Union. The President wrote to Hon. George 
 Bancroft, the historian, " I must deal in all due caution with 
 this question, and with the best judgment I can bring to it." 
 
 This caution was abundantly manifested in his annual mes- 
 sage to Congress of December 3, 1861, wherein he wrote: 
 "In considering the policy to be adopted for suppressing the 
 insurrection, I have been anxious and careful that the inevi- 
 table conflict for this purpose shall not degenerate into a 
 violent and remorseless revolutionary struggle. I have, there- 
 fore, in every case, thought it proper to keep the integrity of 
 the Union prominent as the primary object of the contest on 
 
Saving the Union 193 
 
 our part, leaving all questions which are not of vital military 
 importance to the more deliberate action of the Legislature. 
 * * * The Union must be preserved; and hence all indispens- 
 able means must be employed. We should not be in haste to 
 determine that radical and extreme measures, which may 
 reach the loyal as well as the disloyal, are indispensable." 
 
 But neither the Fremont climax, the Piatt episode, the 
 Cameron rebuke, nor this calm, sane declaration of the im- 
 portance of sticking to the one Great Idea could curb the 
 desire of men to rush the goal. General David Hunter, com- 
 manding the Department of the South, issued a military 
 order which declared that: 
 
 " Slavery and martial law in a free country are altogether 
 incompatible; the persons in these free states, Georgia, 
 Florida, and South Carolina, heretofore held as slaves are 
 therefore declared forever free." 
 
 When the news of this proclamation reached the President, 
 he immediately wrote to Secretary Chase, "No commanding 
 general shall do such a thing upon my responsibility, without 
 consulting me." Three days later he published a proclamation 
 declaring Hunter's order entirely unauthorized and void, 
 and adding: "I further make it known that whether it be 
 competent for me, as Commander-in-Chief of the Army and 
 Navy, to declare the slaves of any state or states free, and 
 whether, at any time, in any case, it shall have become a 
 necessity indispensable to the maintenance of the Govern- 
 ment to exercise that supposed power, are questions which, 
 under my responsibility, I reserve to myself, and which I 
 cannot feel justified in leaving to the decision of commanders 
 in the field. These are totally different questions from those 
 of police regulations in armies and camps." 
 
 One after another, blind to the situation as well as to the 
 
194 Abraham Lincoln 
 
 character of the man whose prerogatives they would usurp, 
 he put them in their place, proceeded to undo the mischief 
 of their futile attempts to snatch glory without achievement, 
 and continued on his way. He allowed great liberties in little 
 things, but none at all when there was the least attempt to 
 usurp executive power. His responsibilities were enormous. 
 To balance it enormous power was necessary. He was jealous 
 of that power and reserved it for himself. With like distinct 
 reservation of executive power and equally plain announce- 
 ment of the contingency which would justify its exercise, was 
 coupled a renewal of his plan and offer of compensated 
 abolishment, supplemented by a powerful appeal to the 
 public opinion of the border states. 
 
 "I do not argue," continued the proclamation, "I beseech 
 you to make the arguments for yourselves. You cannot, if 
 you would, be blind to the signs of the times. I beg of you a 
 calm and enlarged consideration of them, ranging, if it may 
 be, far above personal and partisan politics. This proposal 
 makes common cause for a common object, casting no re- 
 proaches upon any. It acts not the Pharisee. The change it 
 contemplates would come gently as the dews from heaven, 
 not rending or wrecking anything. Will you not embrace it? 
 So much good has not been done, by one effort, in all past 
 time, as in the providence of God it is now your high privilege 
 to do. May the vast future not have to lament that you have 
 neglected it." 
 
 With such words as these of heavenly sweetness and such 
 inherent power, Lincoln strove to compass the desired end. 
 While others threw a few sticks together in an effort to build 
 a monument to their fame, he ignored fame and built a sub- 
 stantial bridge across which four million serfs should safely 
 walk to freedom and manhood. He knew that if the Northern 
 Armies were finally victorious, slavery was dead. 
 
Saving the Union 195 
 
 In another appeal to the border states some weeks later 
 (the President) after proposing that they proceed to legislate 
 for slavery compensation, closed with these words: 
 
 "If the war continues long, as it must if the object (to save 
 the Union) be not sooner attained, the institution in your 
 states will be extinguished by mere friction and abrasion — by 
 the mere incidents of the war. It will be gone, and you will 
 have nothing valuable in lieu of it. Much of its value is gone 
 already. How much better for you and for your people to 
 take steps which at once shorten the war and secure substan- 
 tial compensation for that which is sure to be wholly lost in 
 any other event. How much better to save this money which 
 else we sink forever in the war ***** Our common 
 country is in great peril, demanding the loftiest views and 
 boldest action to bring speedy relief. Once relieved, its form 
 of government is saved to the world, its beloved history and 
 cherished memories are vindicated, and its happy future 
 fully assured and rendered inconceivably grand. To you, 
 more than to any others, the privilege is given to assure that 
 happiness and swell that grandeur, and to link your own 
 names forever therewith." 
 
 The sentiment of the border states being divided, no action 
 was taken. It was at this time that Mr. Lincoln decided that 
 he must, at no distant day, as he expressed it, "play my last 
 card." Here are his own words on the subject. In the summer 
 of 1862 he told F. B. Carpenter, the artist, "It had got to be. 
 Things had gone from bad to worse, until I felt that we had 
 reached the end of our rope on the plan of operations we had 
 been pursuing; that we had about played our last card, and 
 must change our tactics, or lose the game. I now determined 
 upon the adoption of the emancipation policy; and without 
 consultation with, or knowledge of, the Cabinet, I prepared 
 
196 Abraham Lincoln 
 
 the original draft of the proclamation, and after much 
 anxious thought called a Cabinet meeting upon the subject. 
 All were present excepting Mr. Blair, the Postmaster Gen- 
 eral, who was absent at the opening of the discussion, but 
 came in subsequently. I said to the Cabinet that I had re- 
 solved upon this step, and had not called them together to 
 ask their advice, but to lay the subject matter of the procla- 
 mation before them, suggestions of which would be in order 
 after they had heard it." 
 
 It was on July 22, 1862, that the President read to his Cab- 
 inet the draft of his final proclamation, which, after a formal 
 warning against continuing the rebellion, was in the following 
 words : 
 
 "And I hereby make known that it is my purpose, upon 
 the next meeting of Congress, to again recommend the adop- 
 tion of a practical measure for tendering pecuniary aid to the 
 free choice or rejection of any and all states which may then 
 be recognizing and practically sustaining the authority of the 
 United States, and which may then have voluntarily 
 adopted, or thereafter may voluntarily adopt, gradual abol- 
 ishment of slavery within such State or States; that the 
 object is to practically restore, thenceforward to be main- 
 tained, the constitutional relation between the general gov- 
 ernment and each and all the States, do order and declare 
 that on the first day of January, in the year of Our Lord One 
 Thousand Eight Hundred and Sixty-Three, all persons held 
 as slaves within any State or States within the constitutional 
 authority of the United States shall not then be practically 
 recognized, submitted to, and maintained, shall then, thence- 
 forward, and forever be free." 
 
 The Cabinet expressed divers opinions. Blair thought it 
 would cost the administration the fall election. Chase pre- 
 
Saving the Union 197 
 
 ferred that emancipation should be proclaimed by command- 
 ers in the several military districts. Seward, approving the 
 measure, suggested that it be postponed until it could be 
 given to the country supported by a military success, instead 
 of issuing it, as would be the case then, upon the greatest dis- 
 aster of the war. Mr. Lincoln's recital continues: "The wis- 
 dom of the view of the Secretary of State struck me with very 
 great force. It was an aspect of the case that in all my thought 
 upon the subject, I had entirely overlooked. The result was I 
 put the draft proclamation aside, as you do your sketch for a 
 picture, waiting for victory." 
 
 While the President waited for the favorable moment he 
 was assailed most bitterly on every hand. Misrepresentation 
 by opposition newspapers he could afford to overlook, but 
 when Horace Greeley printed in the New York Tribune an 
 "open letter" ostentatiously addressed to Mr. Lincoln, full 
 of unjust censure, all based on the general accusation that 
 the President and many army officers as well, were neglecting 
 their duty under pro-slavery influences and sentiments, Mr. 
 Lincoln replied at once: 
 
 Executive Mansion, 
 
 August 22, 1862, 
 Hon. Horace Greeley, 
 Dear Sir: 
 
 I have just read yours of the nineteenth, addressed to 
 myself through the New York Tribune. If there be in it any 
 statements or assumptions of fact which I may know to be 
 erroneous, I do not, now and here, controvert them. If there 
 be in it any inferences which I may believe to be falsely 
 drawn, I do not, now and here, argue against them. If there 
 be perceptible in it an impatient and dictatorial tone, I waive 
 it in deference to an old friend whose heart I have always 
 supposed to be right. 
 
198 Abraham Lincoln 
 
 As to the policy I "seem to be pursuing," as you say, I 
 have not meant to leave any one in doubt. 
 
 I would save the Union. I would save it the shortest way 
 under the Constitution. The sooner the national authority 
 can be restored, the nearer the Union will be " true Union as 
 it was." If there be those who would not save the Union 
 unless they could, at the same time save slavery, I do not 
 agree with them. If there be those who would not save the 
 Union unless they could, at the same time, destroy slavery, I 
 do not agree with them. My paramount object in this 
 struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to 
 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 forbear be- 
 cause I do not believe it would help to save the Union. I shall 
 do less whenever I shall believe what I am doing hurts the 
 cause, and I shall do more whenever I shall believe doing 
 more will help the cause. I shall try to correct errors when 
 shown to be errors, and I shall adopt new views as fast as 
 they shall appear to be true views. 
 
 I have here stated my purpose according to my view of 
 official duty; and I intend no modification of my oft- 
 expressed personal wish that all men everywhere could be 
 free. 
 
 Yours, 
 
 A. Lincoln. 
 
 With the desired proclamation in his desk and the desire in 
 his heart to publish it, he was forced by the danger of the 
 situation to accept the pressure and abuse from radicals 
 
Saving the Union 199 
 
 everywhere. On September 13, he was visited by an influen- 
 tial deputation from the religious denominations of Chicago, 
 urging him to issue at once a proclamation of universal 
 emancipation. Courteously, but with an understanding of 
 the matter and with a knowledge of his previous action and 
 his future intentions, he answered them with true Lincoln 
 wisdom, his argument being one of his direct, unanswerable 
 statements. 
 
 "I am approached," he said, "with most opposite opinions 
 and advice, and that by religious men, who are equally cer- 
 tain that they represented the Divine Will. I am sure that 
 either the one or the other class is mistaken in that belief, 
 and perhaps, in some respects, both. I hope it will not be 
 irreverent for me to say that if it is probable that God would 
 reveal His Will to others on a point so connected with my 
 duty, it might be supposed He would reveal it directly to 
 me. * * * What good would a proclamation of emancipation 
 from me do, especially as we are now situated? I do not want 
 to issue a document that the whole world will see must neces- 
 sarily be inoperative, like the Pope's bull against the comet. 
 * * * I view this matter as a practical war measure, to be 
 decided on according to the advantages or disadvantages it 
 may offer to the suppression of the rebellion." 
 
 Four days after this interview the battle of Antietam was 
 fought, and when after a few days of uncertainty it was ascer- 
 tained that it could be reasonably claimed a Union victory, 
 the President resolved to carry out his long mature purpose. 
 
 Lincoln came at last to the Emancipation Proclamation, 
 came to it by such well lighted roads, and with such high and 
 holy steps that, in his own words it came as "gently as the 
 dews from heaven, not rending or wrecking anything." It 
 came to be irrevocably joined to the Union which its promul- 
 
200 Abraham Lincoln 
 
 gation at an earlier date might have destroyed. It came after 
 Lincoln had long striven to show the owners of slaves an 
 easier way, a way which as he told them would have given to 
 them the undying glory that will forever crown the brow and 
 illumine his name as the Great Emancipator. 
 
Chapter XVIII 
 
 BED FIELDS OF WAE 
 
 IN THE SPRING of *6i the wrinkled front of war was to 
 be smoothed in three months. But it was not so. Before 
 a year went by there were under arms, North and South, 
 at least half a million men. General McClellan with the Ar- 
 my of the Potomac commanded the largest army that the world 
 had ever seen, more than 200,000 men reporting for duty. 
 Union generals in other departments had armies of from 20,000 
 to 30,000 men and these sometimes were joined in battle under 
 their separate commanders forming a force of upwards of 
 100,000. 
 
 Besides these great armies there was good fighting going on 
 all the way from the Atlantic seaboard to the foothills of the 
 Rockies. Cavalry brigades acting almost independently 
 fought heroic engagements. Wild riders from the great plains, 
 an entire regiment mounted on white horses sweeping down 
 from the plateaus of Colorado to clash in sabre encounters 
 with Quantrel and his equally wild and adventurous riders 
 from the field of Missouri and the far stretched prairies of 
 Texas; detachments of both North and South fighting back 
 and forth across the border throughout Missouri; Indian regi- 
 ments recruited in the Indian Territory for both sides dashing 
 into the barbarous conflict; all this gave a romantic color to 
 the fringe of the struggle outside the great armies assembled 
 
202 Abraham Lincoln 
 
 and assembling from the Mississippi to the plains before 
 Washington. 
 
 While McClellan, with a Napoleon's ambition to win the 
 war with one stupendous battle in the Peninsula, was calling 
 for more men and more men to make success certain when he 
 should move, Grant, with untrained troops formed of regi- 
 ments from Iowa, Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan, Indiana and 
 Ohio — not soldiers, merely, but patriots one and all — with 
 dogged determination drove forward, taking Fort Henry and 
 Fort Donnelson, Pittsburg Landing, and, finally investing 
 Vicksburg, roused the Nation to cheering enthusiasm with 
 his unconditional surrender demands, in reply to requests for 
 an armistice. 
 
 A West Pointer with a record of cool bravery and ability 
 in the Mexican War as a Lieutenant, Grant found little en- 
 couragement from the politicians in Illinois when from a 
 small tannery at Galena he offered his services to the Union. 
 Finally given a commission as Colonel of Volunteers by the 
 Governor of Illinois, he drilled his men and got into action 
 without delay. He moved on like some ponderable substance 
 propelled by its own weight until after his capture of Don- 
 nelson, when Lincoln recognized his energy and indomitable 
 courage and made him a Major General of Volunteers. Under 
 Halleck, who had command of the Department of Missouri, 
 he won his battles. Halleck took credit to himself for the 
 territory and forts gained, and Grant, close mouthed, grim, 
 taciturn, asked for no promotion but only for victories. 
 
 Before Washington, lay McClellan 's own army of 200,000 
 well-fed, well-equipped, perfectly drilled soldiers, fretting for 
 action. Action came, but so manipulated under division com- 
 manders jealous for preferment and willing only to win when 
 they, and not their brother generals should be credited with 
 
Red Fields of War 203 
 
 victory, that successful engagements were allowed to lapse 
 into drawn battles or general defeats. Out of this tangled 
 skein of selfish ambitions, with General McClellan himself 
 the chief offender, grew up that strange controversy between 
 the General-in-Chief of all the Armies and the Administra- 
 tion which, as is well seen today, prolonged the war and cost 
 the Nation immeasurable blood and treasure. 
 
 Lincoln, the civilian from the Illinois prairies, with no mili- 
 tary training beyond that of a Captain of a few volunteers in 
 the Black Hawk War, now Commander-in-Chief of all the 
 Union Armies, was the rock against which beat the storm of 
 criticism for McClellan *s refusal to move his army until he 
 should have a force so large as to overwhelm the enemy. 
 This criticism also came from officers and soldiers in the field 
 who had somehow come to look upon McClellan as the one 
 military genius of war. Backed by this unaccountable wor- 
 ship of the soldiers, McClellan grew every day more arrogant 
 and felt his gorge rise with every suggestion of the President 
 that he move upon the enemy. His troops were so numerous, 
 so altogether fit, and had such stores of arms and supplies, 
 that Lincoln's patience was tried to the limit to see them 
 inactive in their miles of white tents before the Capitol, 
 while the Southern Armies ravaged the fair fields of Mary- 
 land, Pennsylvania, and sometimes threatened Washington. 
 At one time, despairing of getting McClellan to use the 
 magnificent army which the country had freely given him, 
 Lincoln said: 
 
 "If McClellan is not going to use his army I should like to 
 borrow it for a little while." 
 
 Could he have done so, there is no doubt now of the practi- 
 cal use to which he would have put it. Not being able to take 
 the army himself, and knowing of no other military man in 
 
204 Abraham Lincoln 
 
 the service sufficiently equipped with experience and the 
 confidence of the country with which to replace him, the 
 President was compelled to support the picturesque McClel- 
 lan against the attacks of Congress. As often as the demand 
 was made of the President to take supreme command away 
 from Little Mack, just so often he interrogated the critics 
 with, "Very well, but who would you put in his place ?" 
 
 The answer was never more definite than, "Oh, anybody, 
 but get rid of him." 
 
 McClellan was a genius for organization. He took the raw 
 recruits from the farms and shops and speedily made them 
 into legions which showed on dress parade with the best 
 troops that any military nation had ever known. They were 
 not dress parade soldiers either, as was proved whenever they 
 had an opportunity to get into action. Lee, Johnson, Beau- 
 regard, when they brought their armies in front of those 
 volunteers won no secure victory. They found their northern 
 brothers as brave, active, patient, sturdy and self-sacrificing 
 in the field as the most chivalric of the Southern Armies. 
 McClellan had made an army of splendid proportions from 
 the men given him, just as the southern generals had made 
 such armies of the men recruited from the cotton and border 
 states. They were Americans all, and gave such accounts of 
 themselves upon every battle field of the war as to make them 
 heroes of the first order in the pages of history. 
 
 What the Army of the Potomac lacked was a Commander 
 who could take the army from McClellan and use it with 
 courage and skill. Lincoln's fable, recited to Grant when he 
 finally gave him command of all the Union Armies, is the 
 most illuminating criticism of McClellan that has been 
 offered in all the volumes that have been written pro and con 
 concerning that unfortunate general. 
 
Red Fields of War 205 
 
 "Once," said Lincoln, "the animals were threatened with 
 other animals led by a dragon of some kind. They had no 
 leader and called for someone to step forward and take com- 
 mand. The monkey offered himself with the proviso that 
 they should lengthen his tail. This was done and he went 
 forth but soon returned to say that his tail was not yet long 
 enough. They gave him more tail and he went forth again 
 with the same result. He kept calling for more tail which was 
 furnished him until at last the tail grew so long and heavy 
 that he could not handle it on the ground and it had to be 
 wrapped about his neck. Then he found himself so weighted 
 down that he could not move at all." 
 
 McClellan got his immense army but had not the genius to 
 command it to any degree of concerted action. He lacked the 
 confidence in himself and the determination to conquer 
 against odds, which are among the chief attributes of a great 
 commander. In his attempt to argue himself out of this state 
 of mind he began by crediting his opponents with superior 
 forces. The more he was urged to advance the more he re- 
 sorted to this excuse. He was always going to move, was 
 always on the point of winning a great victory, but was never 
 quite ready because he was outnumbered by the enemy, the 
 weather was not propitious, he needed extra guns of a kind 
 not to be had immediately. His reiteration of these erroneous 
 statements finally convinced his officers and men that they 
 were true and he thus kept their worship, when in fact, had 
 they known the truth, they would have lost confidence in him. 
 
 While the armies in the West were winning, and the armies 
 of the East were fighting indecisive battles, Farragut ran the 
 blockade at New Orleans and with his brave sailors captured 
 the city. Other adventurous commanders ran the blockades 
 on the Mississippi, until the river was open from its source 
 
206 Abraham Lincoln 
 
 to the sea with the exception of the fortified forts at Vicks- 
 burg, which were considered impregnable by the Confed- 
 eracy. Lincoln, with the eyes of a seer, his heart bleeding in 
 sympathy with the mangled and dead on a hundred battle- 
 fields, saw all, heard all, deliberated sanely on all that was 
 transpiring over that tremendous amphitheatre, the largest 
 battlefield the world up to that time, had known. He found 
 time from the stress and strain of administration affairs, 
 from the press of political appointment, from the intrigues 
 of ambition, and from the pleas of distracted relatives for 
 their wounded, imprisoned, or saddest of all, deserters con- 
 demned to be shot, to become familiar with the movements 
 of the armies everywhere, and the country over which they 
 were acting or likely to act. He learned the personal qualifica- 
 tions of officers, big and little, and was, before the end of the 
 second year of the war, so proficient in his task of mastering 
 the military situation, that he did not hesitate to offer plans 
 of attack and defense to the most astute commander. He saw 
 that the states were kept informed of the needs of the gov- 
 ernment, and when opportunity presented itself, discussed 
 with citizens from distant points, the issues of the war, speak- 
 ing with simplicity, and displaying deep sympathy with the 
 hopes and aspirations of the people. He did not remove him- 
 self from the masses by dress, manner, speech or reasoning. 
 His letters to politicians, were wise, with the wisdom gained 
 in those old Illinois political contests, and his evident pride 
 in bodily strength and his delight in hearty humor strength- 
 ened the chords that bound him to the great pulsing heart of 
 common humanity, as these same qualities had made him 
 the loved and respected companion of the pioneers of Gentry- 
 ville. Always the kingdom he sought to conquer was the 
 human heart. 
 
Red Fields of War 207 
 
 To appreciate Lincoln truly he must be conceived at the 
 outset as the Universal Man. In early life, the companion of 
 the coarse and vulgar, he was ever gentle and considerate, 
 able to handle pitch without being defiled. In the White 
 House occupying the highest office in the greatest of modern 
 nations, surrounded by sophistication of every degree, he 
 never became sophisticated. Given unprecedented power he 
 used it with malice toward none, charity for all. Bitterly used 
 and persecuted, he returned no bitterness, resorted to no 
 persecution. Wiser than the wisest, firmer than the firmest, 
 gentler than the gentlest, plainer than the plainest; un- 
 matched in humor, unwearied in patience, neither deceived 
 by pretension nor flattered by servility; meeting prince and 
 plebeian upon the same lofty height of equality in heart and 
 soul, respecting the opinions of others, but holding firmly to 
 his own, slow to wrath but terrible in judgment. He moved 
 in the National cataclysm like the central figure in a Greek 
 Tragedy, at once the companion and the ruling spirit of the 
 groping folk struggling on in the galling harness of destiny 
 to some well-appointed end. 
 
 Philosophers, psychics, mystics have written volumes to 
 prove the universality of life and man's closeknit brother- 
 hood with all nature's phenomena. But it was not the study 
 of abstruse doctrine that prompted the boy Lincoln, when 
 the family were emigrating to Indiana, to return through the 
 icy waters of a river to bring across a dog that had been left 
 shivering on the hither shore; or to leave his horse when rid- 
 ing the circuit to pull a hog from a quagmire and set it free 
 on firm ground; or to stop in a crowd on the street of Gentry, 
 ville where a drunkard was being made sport of, to soften 
 the hearts of the practical jokers with a fable and to walk 
 away, when their good humor was established, with the vie- 
 
208 Abraham Lincoln 
 
 tim of their thoughtlessness for his companion. It was not a 
 study of doctrine or creed that prompted him to throw his 
 long arm affectionately over the shoulder of the angry Secre- 
 tary of the Treasury and pace slowly up and down the room 
 in silence until the indomitable will of Chase had melted in 
 the warmth of his Chief's undoubted affection. It was Lin- 
 coln's own large appreciation of the truths the seers in all 
 ages had proclaimed, that prompted his acts of sympathy, 
 acts recorded in hundreds by those who witnessed them or 
 were the subjects of them, and which made him faithful 
 disciples of such great men as Douglas, Seward, Chase, Stan- 
 ton, in parliamentary life, and of Grant, Sherman, Halleck, 
 Butler in the field, and of Walt Whitman in the realm of the 
 soul. 
 
 It was his large sympathy with the life of all created things 
 that inspired his divine utterance, "In the right to eat the 
 bread his hands have earned, the Negro is my equal, and the 
 equal of Judge Douglas or of any man." It was this large, 
 clear understanding of the sacredness of life, and the weak- 
 ness as well as the strength of the human will, that made him 
 so ready to save the soldier boy who had fallen asleep on 
 guard or even deserted on the field of battle. He despised 
 cowardice. He appreciated courage. But he knew men. He 
 knew that one who would, under certain circumstances, fail 
 to live up to his highest conception of duty, under different 
 circumstances might rise above it. He knew the necessity of 
 Divine support, because he found himself so often in need 
 of it, so often tempted beyond his own human powers, and he 
 acknowledged his indebtedness to such help and guidance in 
 every state document and in every letter of sympathy and 
 condolence written to others in affliction. Into his own inti- 
 mate life there were crowded from childhood experiences of 
 
JRed Fields of War 209 
 
 tragic depth and fateful sequence. And in those dark hours 
 when the red fields of battle swam before his eyes, and while 
 his heart was wrung with pity and horror, in a darkened 
 chamber of the White House, bearing the fears and woes of a 
 great Nation, he walked through the valley of shadow by 
 the side of his son and playmate, and the tears that dimmed 
 his eyes for the griefs of others were mingled with the grief 
 of his own irremedial loss. 
 
 Yet withal he never faltered. He faced National and in- 
 dividual crises with a courage and fortitude that made him 
 colossal in the eyes of those who stood near him during those 
 awful days. Nicolay, his Private Secretary, says that he bore 
 a front so brave and a spirit so sublime that even the Mem- 
 bers of his Cabinet who were most often with him were in- 
 spired with his calm and grew in faith to be finer and truer 
 men. He seems never to have forgotten that as head of the 
 Nation, his mission was to hold up to all those associated 
 with him in the great fight the light of loyalty to that cause 
 which he conceived to be the cause of humanity. Whether it 
 was a backwoods delegation come to shake hands with their 
 old friend and neighbor, a Rachel weeping for her children, 
 a group of politicians, an army council, a Cabinet meeting, 
 or a wounded soldier on a hospital cot, he bore himself like a 
 leader whose powers were centered in one supreme endeavor. 
 Nor did he find fault with fate, no matter how he might be 
 flaunted. He bore with the frailties and vanities of others, 
 either civil or military, without complaint and with no wish 
 to return upon them. Whatever the offense, he was not 
 offended. 
 
 On one occasion General McClellan kept him waiting in 
 the anteroom of his headquarters for nearly an hour after the 
 President had sent in his card, and coming out finally excused 
 
210 Abraham Lincoln 
 
 himself as having some immediate duty to perform and went 
 away leaving the President without an interview. A corre- 
 spondent who was witness to this lack of breeding and show 
 of insubordination on the part of the General to his Chief, 
 exclaimed with heat: 
 
 "How can you put up with it?" 
 
 Lincoln said quietly, "I'll hold Mack's horse for him if 
 only he will win battles." 
 
 Lincoln was as brave physically as he was spiritually. 
 General Butler gives an account of Lincoln's visit to his 
 headquarters. The President desired to ride along the lines 
 and see the soldiers. 
 
 " I happened to have a very tall, easy-riding, pacing horse 
 and as the President was rather long-legged I tendered him 
 the use of it while I rode beside him on a pony. He was 
 dressed as was his custom, in a black suit, and tall silk hat. 
 As there rode on the other side of him at first Mr. Fox, the 
 Assistant Secretary of the Navy, who was not more than five 
 feet six, Mr. Lincoln stood out as the central figure of the 
 group. When we got to the line of intrenchments, from which 
 the line of rebel pickets was not more than 300 yards, he 
 towered high above the works, and as we came to the several 
 encampments the boys all turned out and cheered lustily. 
 The enemy's attention was directed to the performance, and 
 with the glass it could be plainly seen that the eyes of their 
 officers were fastened upon Lincoln. 
 
 " c Let us ride on the side next to the enemy, Mr. President,' 
 said Butler. You are in fair rifle shot of them and they may 
 open fire; and they must know you, being the only person 
 not in uniform, and the cheering of the troops directs their 
 attention to you.' 
 
 "'Oh, no/ he said, laughing, 'the Commander-in-Chief 
 
Red Fields of War 211 
 
 of the Army must not show any cowardice in the presence of 
 his soldiers, whatever he may feel/ 
 
 "And he insisted upon riding the whole six miles, which 
 was about the length of my intrenchments, in that position." 
 
 Having finished the ride the President turned off to visit 
 the hospitals, and General Butler recounts how the President 
 passed through all the wards, "stopping and speaking very 
 kindly to some of the poor fellows as they lay on their cots 
 and occasionally administering words of commendation to 
 the ward master. Sometimes when reaching a patient who 
 showed much suffering, the President's eyes would glisten 
 with tears. The effect of his presence upon those sick men 
 was wonderful and his visit did great good, for there was no 
 medicine which could equal the cheerfulness he so largely 
 inspired." 
 
 General Butler accompanied the President to Fort Monroe 
 where they had dinner. The General, noticing that the Presi- 
 dent was preoccupied and ate little of the good dinner pro- 
 vided, said, "I hope you are not unwell; you do not eat, Mr. 
 President?" 
 
 "I am well enough," was the reply, "but would to God 
 this dinner or provisions like it were with our poor prisoners 
 in Andersonville." 
 
 Butler was a strict disciplinarian and had several argu- 
 ments with the President, who, he says, frequently com- 
 muted sentences of death. One day Butler took a record of a 
 court martial wherein he had approved a sentence of death 
 but upon reflection wished to have the sentence revoked. He 
 called upon the President, laid the record down before him, 
 and in a few words explained it. The President looked up and 
 said: "You asking me to pardon some poor fellow! Give me 
 that pen." 
 
212 Abraham Lincoln 
 
 "And," concludes Butler, "in less time than I can tell it 
 the pardon was ordered without further investigation. " 
 
 Mr. Lincoln found time to console many people to whom 
 the war brought its personal tragedy. Among the rarest and 
 dearest of these is a letter written to Mrs. Bixby, rare for its 
 excellence as a prose composition, and dear, not only to the 
 one to whom it is addressed but to all the world for its perfect 
 expression of thought and feeling. He wrote: 
 
 "Dear Madam: I have been shown in the files of the War 
 Department a statement of the Adjutant General of Massa- 
 chusetts that you are the mother of five sons who have died 
 gloriously on the field of battle. I feel how weak and fruitless 
 must be any words of mine which 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 
 that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your 
 bereavement and leave you only the cherished memory of 
 the loved and lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours 
 to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom. 
 Yours very sincerely and respectfully, 
 
 Abraham Lincoln." 
 
 The war ground on. North and South poured their best 
 manhood into the ever-depleting ranks. Field after field, 
 hotly contested, revealed heroism born of the American spirit 
 not unsurpassed by the heroism of the days of ancient Greece. 
 Great armies swung back and forth through the valleys be- 
 tween Washington and Richmond. Those of the Confederacy 
 under the general command of Lee with skilled and heroic 
 lieutenants supporting him and all acting in concert, had one 
 end in view — to win decisively on some great battlefield with 
 the hope of opening a way to the Capital of the Union. The 
 
Ifed Fields of Way 213 
 
 armies of the North under McClellan, considerably out- 
 numbering the enemy, lacked the unity of leadership which 
 made the Confederate troops so formidable. They also 
 labored under the disadvantage of being on the defensive 
 most of the time. McClellan had no superior in making an 
 army fit, but was denied the vision to contemplate actions 
 en masse with superior calmness and the moral courage to 
 stake all on a single important engagement. The dogged 
 determination of Grant in the West finally put Vicksburg 
 under siege. When it fell, The Father of Waters, as Lincoln 
 said, once more flowed unobstructed to the sea, and the 
 President summoned the new star in the military skies to 
 Washington and gave him command of all the Union troops 
 with orders to take Richmond. Meanwhile Meade won the 
 great battle of Gettysburg and made the Capital safe from 
 invasion. McClellan's Peninsular Campaign was abandoned 
 and Grant set about the overthrow of Lee by a direct move- 
 ment toward Richmond, the Capital of the Confederacy. 
 
 In the White House Lincoln and his Cabinet Members 
 carried on the Civil Government, supplied the never ceasing 
 call for men and the money, two millions a day, for their 
 equipment and support. Another election was approaching 
 and ambitious men looked with eager eyes on the Presiden- 
 tial Chair. Secretary Chase had already inaugurated a cam- 
 paign for the nomination. When Lincoln's advisers re- 
 proached him for keeping a man in his Cabinet who was 
 using his office for political ends in competition with his 
 Chief, the President replied that Chase was a big man, bigger 
 by half than any man he had ever known, and if the people 
 wanted his Secretary of the Treasury for President, they 
 should have him. All he asked of Chase was his best en- 
 deavors to save the Union. That having been accomplished 
 other things would adjust themselves. 
 
214 Abraham Lincoln 
 
 Not that Lincoln did not desire re-election. He had given 
 his whole soul to the task of saving the Republic for the 
 people. The end was now certain. The preponderance of men 
 and means in the United States, with such a military machine 
 as had at last been built up and got under way, must cer- 
 tainly crush the forces of the Confederacy now reduced to the 
 last extremities for money, supplies and munitions, and so 
 shut off from the world by a perfect blockade that recogni- 
 tion from any foreign power was despaired of. But the heroic 
 spirit of the South had lost none of its fire and determination. 
 It still glowed with all the zeal for its mistaken ideal that in 
 '6i had swept it into rebellion. Love of home gave ever 
 renewed strength to its troops and caused their hearts to 
 swell with hot pride and resentment against the approach of 
 an invading army. As Lincoln had said in his Cincinnati 
 speech before his election, the sons of the South and the sons 
 of the North were equally brave and chivalrous. The side 
 that could count the greatest numbers must win in the end. 
 But the victors would have conquered a foe equally brave, 
 equally generous, equally fertile in expedients — their brother 
 Americans. 
 
 It was this deep, sympathetic understanding of the noble- 
 ness of American character that inspired those magnificent 
 Inaugurals, and those many brave appeals to the men of the 
 South to meditate upon the issue, to put aside passion and 
 deliberate. " Come and let us reason together," was the sub- 
 stance of his every utterance to the men of the South. But 
 when at last there was no longer any hope for reconciliation, 
 when both sides had mustered the largest armies of history 
 and were joined in a death grapple on many bloody fields, he 
 believed in striking blows of force, and like the skilled 
 wrestler he was, to follow up every advantage gained in at- 
 
Red Fields of War 215 
 
 tack. He respected his antagonist as much or more than 
 McClellan had, but unlike McClellan he did not overrate his 
 enemy's prowess nor underrate his own. 
 
 It was his cultivated judgment that helped him mightily 
 in weighing the chances for success, both in the field of war 
 and the field of administration. Whether it were Lee or 
 Beauregard or Stonewall Jackson he was facing, or Fre- 
 mont or McClellan or Chase who were gathering their forces 
 to secure their ascendancy and his own defeat, he measured 
 their qualities, their characters, their abilities, the justice of 
 their cause for or against his own, and stood his ground, alert, 
 active, receptive, calm with a sense of superior power born 
 of the clear knowledge that he was in the right and that his 
 training for such contests had been going on since first he 
 toddled a barefoot child over the puncheon floor of the cabin 
 and listened to the simple but lofty teachings of his gentle 
 mother. 
 
 And still the war ground on. Grant, hanging on the flanks 
 of Lee's withdrawing army, forced the only general of the 
 era worthy to oppose him slowly backward until the fall of 
 Richmond was easily prophesied. Sherman started from 
 Atlanta on his famous march to the sea. 
 
 When a crowd about the Capitol asked the President, 
 "What news from Sherman ?" 
 
 The President replied, "We have no recent advices. We 
 know where he went in but we cannot tell where he is going 
 to come out," — one of those happy truths that causes the 
 gloomy spirits of a crowd to disperse and in their stead the 
 smiles of hope appear. 
 
 The battlefield of Gettysburg was dedicated as a soldier's 
 burying ground and the President delivered on that occasion 
 the greatest historic document and most heartfelt song of 
 
216 Abraham Lincoln 
 
 sacrificial heroism and call to perseverance in the right, com- 
 pressed into the smallest compass, that has ever stamped the 
 pages of Literature. 
 
 The election of '64 came and the sad faced man in the 
 White House was given the assurance which must have been 
 doubly sweet to his over troubled heart, that the Great Plain 
 People believed in him, respected him, loved him, and under- 
 stood him to have fought for them, to be still fighting for 
 them, and through them for all the great plain people of the 
 world. Men who had been heroes of the hour, Chase, Mc- 
 Clellan, Fremont, men whom he had signally honored and 
 trusted, but who were not of that large-souled nature to 
 understand him nor the people whom he loved and trusted, 
 found too late that those people whose natures they failed to 
 sound had the broader vision; they found themselves set 
 gently aside. The people not forgetting their worth and many 
 achievements but measuring them by the worth and achieve- 
 ments of Lincoln, had found them wanting in those qualities 
 of nobility which proclaimed his greatness. So they gave him 
 their suffrages, unanimous at nomination and by tremendous 
 majorities at the election. He had been faithful, not only in 
 great things, but in little things, they said. Let him complete 
 the work. 
 
 His second Inaugural attained the highest point in Lin- 
 coln's genius for expressing universal truths and at the same 
 time revealed that the demands of a terrible war with all its 
 hardening influences and fearful responsibilities, had not 
 hardened his heart but had softened it and filled it to over- 
 flowing with love for his fellowmen. "With malice toward 
 none, with charity for all" — so he stood and so he spoke, not 
 words of sublimity and beauty only, but words out of the 
 depths of his being, the revelation of himself to all mankind. 
 
Red Fields of War 217 
 
 He revealed himself on November 9th in answer to a sere- 
 nade: "I am thankful to God for this approval of the people; 
 but, while deeply grateful for this mark of their confidence in 
 me, if I know my heart, my gratitude is free from any taint 
 of personal triumph. I do not impugn the motives of any one 
 opposed to me. It is no pleasure to me to triumph over any 
 one, but I give thanks to the Almighty for this evidence of the 
 people's resolution to stand by free government and the 
 rights of humanity." 
 
 Again on November 10th, he responds: "It has long been a 
 grave question whether any government, not too strong for 
 the liberties of its people, can be strong enough to maintain 
 its existence in great emergencies. On this point the present 
 rebellion brought our Republic to a severe test, and a presi- 
 dential election occurring in regular course during the rebel- 
 lion, added not a little to the strain. 
 
 "If the loyal people united were put to the utmost of their 
 strength by the rebellion, must they not fail when divided 
 and partially paralyzed by a political war among themselves ? 
 But the election was a necessity. We cannot have free govern- 
 ment without elections; and if the rebellion could force us to 
 forego or postpone a national election, it might fairly claim 
 to have already conquered and ruined us. The strife of the 
 election is but human nature practically applied to the facts 
 of the case. What has occurred in this case must ever recur in 
 similar cases. Human nature will not change. In any future 
 great national trial, compared with the men of this, we shall 
 have as weak and as strong, as silly and as wise, as bad and as 
 good. Let us, therefore, study the incidents of this as philos- 
 ophy to learn wisdom from, and none of them as wrongs to be 
 revenged. But the election, along with its incidental and un- 
 desirable strife, has done good too. It has demonstrated that 
 
218 
 
 Abraham Lincoln 
 
 a peopled government can sustain a national election in the 
 midst of a great civil war. Until now, it has not been known to 
 the world that this is a possibility. It shows also, how sound 
 and how strong we still are. It shows that, even among can- 
 didates of the same Party, he who is most devoted to the 
 Union and most opposed to treason can receive most of the 
 people's votes. It shows, also, to the extent yet unknown, 
 that we have more men now than we had when the war 
 began. Gold is good in its place, but living, brave, patriotic 
 men are better than gold. 
 
 "But the rebellion continues, and now that the election is 
 over, may not all having a common interest reunite in a com- 
 mon effort to save our common country? For my own part, I 
 have striven and shall strive to avoid placing any obstacle in 
 the way. So long as I have been here I have not willingly 
 planted a thorn in any man's bosom. While I am deeply sen- 
 sible to the high compliment of a re-election, and duly grateful 
 as I trust, to Almighty God for having directed my country- 
 men to a right conclusion, as I think, for their own good, it 
 adds nothing to my satisfaction that any other man may be 
 disappointed or pained by the result. 
 
 "May I ask those who have not differed from me to join 
 with me in this same spirit towards those who have? And now 
 let me close by asking three hearty cheers for our brave 
 soldiers and seamen and their gallant and skillful commanders. " 
 
 Richmond fell. At Appomattox, under the famous apple 
 tree, Lee surrendered to Grant and received in return the 
 grandest benison ever bestowed by a conqueror on a fallen 
 foe! "Let us have peace." 
 
 Lincoln visited the Capital of the fallen Confederacy, not 
 as a conquering hero bringing chains of servitude and humili- 
 ation but as a man of mercy appearing to soothe the fears and 
 
Kfid Fields of War 219 
 
 quell the anguish of breaking hearts. Correspondents accom- 
 panying the President's party tell of Lincoln's remarkable 
 simplicity, his sad, fatherly bearing as he viewed the wreck 
 and devastation of the beautiful old city, but most of all of 
 the overflowing adoration of the Negroes who crowded about 
 "Massa Linkum," shouting "Glory! Glory!" "Bress de 
 Lord! Bress de Lord!" 
 
 Their Moses who had led them out of the wilderness was 
 before them. The tropical exuberance of their joy knew no 
 bounds. They were drunk with ecstasy. They leaped and ran 
 for joy, like the lame man healed by the Nazarene, and with 
 far more reason. They kissed one another, hugged their 
 nearest fellow to their hearts, surging in groups about the 
 tall, sad man contemplating them with a countenance of 
 spiritual tenderness. 
 
 Charles Carleton Coffin tells of one old Negro wearing a 
 few rags, "whose white, crisp hair appeared through his 
 crownless straw hat," who lifted the hat, bared his head, 
 kneeled upon the ground, clasped his hands and cried, "May 
 de good Lord bress and keep you safe, Massa President 
 Linkum." Mr. Lincoln lifted his own hat and bowed to the 
 old man. The moisture gathered in his eyes. He brushed the 
 tears away and the procession moved on. 
 
 With such scenes frequently occurring, the President con- 
 cluded his visit. He had received the fullest measure of return 
 for his life-long devotion to the liberty of man, the unmeas- 
 ured blessings of those humble freemen. His work was done. 
 A few days and the news of his assassination spread like a 
 dark cloud over all the land. A world halted to lay tribute on 
 his grave. The Captain of the Army of Human Rights had 
 departed. The world was hushed and still. 
 
Chapter XIX 
 
 HUMANITY is ever bound to a mighty struggle for 
 the preservation of those ideals it has won from its 
 grosser passions through the action of its God-like 
 attributes. History records nothing but the initial scenes and 
 the culminating climaxes in this endless drama. It has its play- 
 ful humors, its periods of peaceful advance, its brief hours of 
 joy and bliss, its wars of passion and its sublime, if solemn, 
 closes. The Seasons seem to have been instituted divinely for 
 the instruction of man so that he may be kept to the task of 
 bringing back from the Winter of destruction, the bloom of 
 Spring, the Summer of development, and the Fall of fruitage. 
 From its point of vantage above these phenomena of Nature, 
 humanity may see its own struggle mirrored and take council 
 of that Book of Life to persevere under all circumstances, 
 confident that if Nature can redeem herself from seeming 
 annual death and destruction, man, given not only superior 
 powers of strength and resistance, but a rational ability to 
 use his faculties in his own much higher field of the seasons 
 of the mind, can also redeem himself. 
 
 But mankind, like nature in its physical aspects, needs and 
 must have help and guidance from some Superior Intelligence 
 to be led upon a higher way to greater usefulness and beauty. 
 The rose has been glorified by the application of principles 
 
Lincoln a Present Power 221 
 
 to its primal nature, principles discovered and developed by- 
 man's powers of rational comparison and application of laws 
 inherent in the constitution of the rose itself. This is as true 
 in the animal as in the floral kingdom. In another direction 
 man has applied the discovery of these principles so that he 
 has captured and made his servants those higher and still 
 little known so-called finer forces. Man stands on a middle 
 ground, in close sympathy with the living forms of nature, 
 from the molecule of animal life and the tiny seed in vege- 
 table life, to the comrade that walks at his elbow and is cog- 
 nizant of the feelings of himself and others. He is also on the 
 borderland of the mysterious, dealing with those elements 
 that constitute the hidden forces of the universe. The former 
 he develops to higher forms of existence, the latter he lays 
 hold of and harnesses to assist him in his endeavors to make a 
 better and a more beautiful world. 
 
 Man has ideas, hopes and aspirations for himself and his 
 race. But he is ever developing, not a perfectly developed 
 being. He finds himself everywhere in need of a guide to ad- 
 vancement. As yet he is able to see but as through a glass 
 darkly. Often he imagines himself pursuing a road that will 
 lead to happiness for himself and others, only to discover 
 that he has been following a blind trail which leads into a 
 cave of gloom, or at least into the house of disappointment. 
 Individually, or as groups or nations, this is the record from 
 ancient Egypt until the present hour. But as out of fruit cul- 
 tivation there comes at times a superior and individual type, 
 conforming in all ways to its ancestral family, but of finer 
 flavor and more delicate substance than has hitherto been 
 known, so with the family of man, there occasionally emerges 
 from the mass a being of superior mould, with keener appre- 
 ciation of the things of life and greater powers of leadership. 
 
222 Abraham Lincoln 
 
 If he be gifted with those qualities which make for greatness 
 alone, he may rise to eminence, but his works may be detri- 
 mental to the general advancement of mankind and he may 
 leave the world, having contributed little or nothing to its 
 happiness. If he is good as well as great, then he proves a 
 blessing, and his thoughts and acts become inspirations to all 
 who may come after him. 
 
 Abraham Lincoln may be said to have been born good and 
 great. He can hardly be accounted for in any other way. He 
 saw the light on the borderline between the free and slave 
 states. His youthful ears were assailed by the arguments of 
 men of both parties. He grew to manhood in the same envi- 
 ronment. From the time he was old enough to reason at all, 
 until he gave up his life on the altar of truth and justice, he 
 was beset by difficulties which must have appalled a soul not 
 great in itself. He had none of the advantages of the univer- 
 sities, or of private instructors whose studies had taken them 
 to the heights of larger speculation. His companions were 
 rude and uncultured. He met with defeat and disappoint- 
 ment at the outset of every endeavor to find a firm footing 
 for rational thought and action. Yet out of each of these 
 defeats, he gained the sweets of victory. Out of adversity he 
 drew the milk upon which his hungry mind and soul fed, and 
 so found strength for other endeavors. Never was man tried 
 more frequently and under greater difficulties. Never did 
 man face those trials with greater courage and equanimity. 
 Never was man more continually offered the easiest way. 
 And never was man less inclined to succumb to the tempta- 
 tion to be satisfied with the life of his careless fellows, nor 
 more ambitious to rise and to lift them with him to the 
 heights. 
 
 That he did rise, that he did lift, not only the companions 
 
Lincoln a Present Power 223 
 
 of his days, but the broader life of the Nation, and finally the 
 life of the whole world, none will deny. That he came to the 
 world with a soul already prepared for the work, those who 
 will, may doubt, but that from his first act to his last he was 
 governed by such a soul, cannot in reason be denied. 
 
 What was Lincoln's work and how did he accomplish it? 
 Was it to free the slaves ? Was it to save the Union ? Was it 
 not rather to demonstrate to his own time, and to all time, 
 the dignity of manhood, the supreme duty of man to his fel- 
 lows? In his strong arms he gathered all races of men and all 
 classes of men. King or commoner, he took them to his 
 bosom. In his great heart he gave them a home and the food 
 of love. He hated injustice and institutions and conventions 
 founded on injustice. He saw no beauty in silken robes 
 bought with the sweat of unpaid labor. He saw no glory in a 
 throne on which sat a monarch who ate the bread of his toil- 
 ing subjects and gave them a stone. He saw no religion in the 
 pulpit where eternal salvation was proclaimed, and present 
 oppression upheld and practiced. He saw no delicacy in the 
 dainty hand on which shone the jewels dug from a mine by 
 serfs scourged to their tasks. He saw no permanency in politi- 
 cal institutions which did not consider first of all and finally 
 the laborer by whose product the institution was sustained. 
 He hated cant and hypocrisy. He despised delicacy that was 
 indelicate, refinement which coarsened the refiner, pity that 
 degraded the subject of pity, and sophistry that proclaimed 
 a principle for wrong, equal to the principle for right. He 
 hated wrong with the healthy hatred of a great intelligence 
 trained in a thousand fierce encounters to depend upon itself. 
 Injustice he denied any place in the scheme of life. Yet intol- 
 erance was not an element in his nature. It was requisite to 
 his reasoning, not rooted in it. Love was the keynote of his 
 
224 Abraham Lincoln 
 
 being. He could not live without love. He could not pass a 
 day without some touch of hand, some glance of eye, some 
 gesture, which might convey his sympathy for a companion, 
 a friend, or it might be a stranger who his lively sense of sor- 
 row told him was in need of such friendly ministration. His 
 compassion did not rest with the individual but shone forth 
 like the sun upon the whole world. 
 
 This universal sympathy made Lincoln the great exemplar 
 of Democracy. Right with him was not a principle composed 
 by man, but the fundamental corner stone in the temple of 
 God. To him, loyalty to truth meant loyalty to God. If a man 
 were not honest, how could he approach the Throne of 
 Honesty? If a man were not loving how could he kneel before 
 the Throne of Love? If a man were not just how could he 
 pray for justice? If a man were not loyal, how could he believe 
 in loyalty or hope to profit by it? 
 
 Loyalty to Truth in all things, that was Lincoln's ruling 
 motive. The urge of a great ideal was ever active in his heart, 
 crowding his brain and glowing from his eyes. Loyal to him- 
 self, loyal to his family, loyal to man, loyal to the Union, 
 loyal to God. 
 
 Living under the Constitution of the United States, his 
 unblemished loyalty prompted him to adhere firmly to every 
 tenet of that instrument. Convinced that freedom was the 
 God-given right of every man, he was yet willing to leave 
 slavery in those states where the Constitution had left it; but 
 he fought with all his power against introducing it into the 
 Territories from which the Constitution had excluded it. Im- 
 bued with the idea that good is permanent and evil tem- 
 porary, he held that slavery confined to the original slave 
 states must perish of its own volition. But when the time 
 came for a choice as to emancipating the slaves by the 
 
Lincoln a Present Power 225 
 
 authority granted him under the Constitution as Comman- 
 der-in-Chief of the United States Army in time of war, he 
 embraced it, and issued a document richer in blessings to the 
 human race than the Constitution itself. 
 
 Lincoln was loyal to the Constitution of the Government. 
 He was honest in his interpretation of it, and the destiny that 
 shapes our ends made him the author of another proclama- 
 tion of freedom of higher import still. Groups of men as- 
 sembled to compose the Magna Charta, the Declaration of 
 Independence, and the Constitution of the United States. 
 Lincoln alone, without advice, conceived, brought forth and 
 established the Emancipation Proclamation, the religion of 
 free labor, a document of such inherent force as to crowd out 
 the lie in the Declaration confirmed in the Constitution 
 which, while proclaimed all men born free and equal, yet 
 made provision for the ownership of men in the states where 
 slavery already existed. Then sounding a still loftier note, he 
 gave voice to the Gettysburg Address which proclaims the 
 freedom of all men, high and low, rich and poor, White, Red 
 and Black, from the shackles of selfishness, leading them to 
 move like gods in a world of universal helpfulness. 
 
 Of all those who have achieved distinction by the popular 
 vote of the people, Lincoln is in himself the best example of 
 freedom. Men generally are owned by their material posses- 
 sions or by their desires for sensual gratification. Lincoln, 
 reared among people whose principal ambition was to own 
 land, invested his meager savings in books and found in the 
 pages of Epictetus, himself a Greek slave, the proclamation 
 of freedom in his own will to do right, which no bodily torture 
 could force him to resign, and which the hands of man could 
 never touch or defile. He early saw that men who set their 
 minds on the accumulation of riches have already resigned 
 
226 Abraham Lincoln 
 
 their wills to a master. He stood by his will to do right, to 
 proclaim justice, to delight in knowledge and the companion- 
 ship of men. He refused to believe in the power of material 
 things to add to his stature as a man. His clothing was of the 
 plainest and owed no form to fashion. He ate and slept 
 according to the needs of nature, not to tickle the palate with 
 dainty food or to wallow in downy luxury. In the most stren- 
 uous months at the White House he went to live in the Old 
 Sailors' Home, because comparison of the elegance of the 
 Presidential Mansion, with the bare discomforts of the 
 camps and marches, and the cruel starvation of Anderson- 
 ville, made sick his sympathetic soul. He would not yield his 
 freedom of individuality to the conventions of his high office. 
 At times he discussed grave matters of state with Members 
 of his Cabinet, with Congressmen, Senators, and Foreign 
 Diplomats, in faded dressing gown and slippers, his native 
 dignity unimpaired. Stripped to a single garment, Abraham 
 Lincoln would still have been the richest man of his time, as 
 rich as any man of any time, because he steadfastly refused 
 to allow his soul to be bound, although by so doing he might 
 win the whole world. 
 
 "The tyrant," said Epictetus, "may crush my limbs. Has 
 he touched my will ? He may cut my head from my shoulders. 
 Has he taken anything from me?" So Lincoln. His eyes were 
 fixed on the things of the spirit and toward them he made his 
 way, no matter how thorny or rugged the path. He remained 
 free to this because he refused to become a slave to anything 
 that smelled of morality. With Socrates, he could say to 
 those who would master him, "You can do anything you like 
 with me if you can lay hold on me." 
 
 What boy, however humbly born, however pinched by 
 poverty, however environed by ignorance and grossness, but 
 
Lincoln a Present Power 227 
 
 may be inspired by Lincoln to set his feet upon an upward 
 road and persevere to the end? To win he has only to adopt 
 Lincoln's attitude toward life; possibly not to win in the eyes 
 of the world, but in the eyes of his own soul under whose 
 steady gaze he must stand continually, every day and every 
 hour, for judgment. King, philosopher, statesman, scientist, 
 mechanic, farmer, street sweeper, every individual may 
 declare his freedom and demonstrate it after the manner of 
 Abraham Lincoln, by resolving to have full partnership with 
 the result of his toil, extracting from such partnership the full 
 measure of its meaning as a projection of the creative im- 
 pulse, and of its still larger meaning in its bearing on the 
 whole life of the world. 
 
 Chips that flew from the blows of his woodman's ax 
 became winged messengers, pregnant with ideas, on voyages 
 of discovery, as full of meaning to him as the voyage of 
 Columbus over uncharted seas. The logs he hewed were 
 alive with the sentiments of the home of which they were to 
 become an integral part. The flatboat he constructed was rich 
 with promises of knowledge to be gained. He made of his 
 merchandise in the little country store a couch on which he 
 rested to drink in the wisdom of the "glory that was Greece 
 and the grandeur that was Rome. ,, He was always a free man 
 and came and went on journeys over the earth, and into the 
 hearts of men, with as strong a flight and as direct a course 
 as the migrating denizens of the air on their annual journeys. 
 
 Today, the Union that Lincoln loved and did so much to 
 preserve, is again on the borders of division, with the same 
 class consciousness appearing under a different guise, but 
 scarcely less threatening than that which brought on the 
 struggle of '61-65. Men in great numbers have surrendered 
 their freedom of will to do right, to their disposition to accu- 
 
228 Abraham Lincoln 
 
 mulate material things. Men of superb intelligence, captain- 
 ing corporate industries, like McClellan with his army before 
 Washington, are ever greedy for the enlargement of the thing 
 they control, but more and more showing to the people their 
 inability to move their colossal machine to any degree of 
 harmony or public advantage. Labor unions founded on the 
 principle of general brotherhood, have likewise become like 
 the ambition of McClellan, always crying for more guns, 
 more munitions, more rations, and better equipment but 
 turning them to no constructive account. Between these two 
 great groups, highly organized, glowering upon each other 
 with growing apprehension, are the Great Plain People who 
 are hardly considered in the problem. 
 
 What would Lincoln say to this state of affairs, were he to 
 return to contemplate it? Would not his wisdom and univer- 
 sal sympathy for all men prompt him to appeal once more for 
 patience and meditation? Would he not proclaim again his 
 belief in the people, his scorn of class consciousness? Would 
 he not plead with men to lift their eyes above material pos- 
 sessions, to draw inspiration from the sun that shines and the 
 rains that fall alike on rich and poor, cultured and ignorant? 
 Would he not point to the past and cite the evidence of his- 
 tory to prove that all men are free until they enslave them- 
 selves in an attempt to enslave others? Would he not show 
 how sympathy and understanding among men result in 
 peace and plenty, while bigotry and pride result in war and 
 destruction ? 
 
 Lincoln, above and beyond all men, would teach these con- 
 tending forces that the joy of life is in giving, the enthusiasm 
 of life is in serving, and the highest glory which can be 
 reached by man is the attainment of absolute self-abnega- 
 tion; until at last he shall be lifted to that lofty tableland of 
 
Lincoln a Present Power 229 
 
 universal brotherhood where buying and selling, work and 
 wages, shall have been converted into the Divine Sacraments 
 of human fellowship, where men shall not be enemies, but 
 brothers — where class consciousness shall disappear, and the 
 universal hymn of humanity shall be, "with malice toward 
 none and charity for all!" 
 
 Lincoln demanded of government what he demanded of 
 himself, first and last, that it should be true to itself. He 
 wore the robe of state so easily that critics thought him care- 
 less of his high office. The reverse was true. He was so in 
 harmony with it, that he recognized its nature beyond and 
 above any convention, and hid himself in the heart of it. He 
 sought for the highest, the most perfect ideal of government, 
 and to that ideal he gave absolute loyalty. The ideals of 
 Union were those set out in the Declaration of Independence 
 and adopted in the Constitution. From those ideals he suf- 
 fered no appeal unless it should be to that higher universal 
 and eternal truth inherent in the universe itself; nor did he 
 rest in the degree of perfection attained, but strove for per- 
 fection itself. He smiled at the anxieties of narrow minds over 
 material possessions, knowing the ephemeral character of 
 such things compared with the permanency of the possessions 
 of mind and soul. Selfishness, greed, lust for gain, were 
 strangers to him. A government in which such passions 
 should play a part was government not of freedom but of 
 tyranny, enslaving the ruler as well as the ruled. 
 
 Contemplating the journey made with Lincoln from his 
 native cabin in the Kentucky woods to his final taking ofT in 
 the hour of what will always seem to the clouded eyes of 
 humanity as the hour of the country's greatest need of him, 
 reviewing that journey so filled with world achievements and 
 pregnant with world problems, one stands with bowed head 
 
230 Abraham Lincoln 
 
 and hushed breath before the supreme modesty and simplic- 
 ity of the man, as unobtrusive as the mountains or the sea, as 
 natural as the sun or the procession of the planets. It is his 
 great simplicity, his loyalty to ideals, his fidelity to truth at 
 every point of his career, that makes him today, and will 
 make him always, the inspiration for the democracy of man- 
 hood, and that stamp him the leaven in the loaf of human life 
 that will finally leaven the whole. Before him creeds, race 
 prejudices, narrowing conventions and caste selfishness are 
 shamed out of existence and the realities appear. 
 
 Pilate questioned Jesus: "What is truth?" His answer was 
 silence. But not so on a more fitting occasion when the Son of 
 the Carpenter of Nazareth declared, "I am the Way and the 
 Truth and the Life." And again he said, "It is the truth that 
 makes men free." 
 
 This has been the proclamation of every universal soul who 
 has demonstrated his utterance by his life, — Moses, Isaiah, 
 Socrates, Epictetus, Buddha, Confucius, Shakespeare, Cer- 
 vantes, Whitman — put them all before Pilate and let him 
 question them, as he did Jesus of Nazareth, and their answers 
 will be silence. But to those who understand they will say, 
 "I am the Truth," with the qualifying addition of Lincoln's 
 humbleness, "As God gives me to see the Truth." All these 
 great souls have been equally emphatic in the declaration 
 that it is truth, loved and lived and clung to through evil and 
 good report, in success and defeat, in blazing sunlight or 
 darkest gloom, that makes men free. The lives of these men 
 illuminate the absorbing reality that to know the truth is to 
 know that all men are equal in the sight of God. 
 
 Lincoln stands with this limited group of the world's great 
 Truth Tellers, men whose characters glow with love, — A 
 UNIVERSAL MAN. 
 
 FAULTS ESCAPED 
 
 Page 9, line 1, 'a sin' to as in 
 
 Page 107, line 27, 'though' to thought 
 
 Page 107, next to last line, omit or making any taking any receipts 
 
 Page 125, line 15, omit fifth word, state 
 
 Page 162, line 14, first word should read pleased 
 
*§ Of this book one hundred 
 and twenty-five copies have 
 been printed on Old Stratford 
 paper. Copy No. 4^ C? * 
 

 
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