' 'a > ■ftilbftitje t0 Situ jtfltt 0GR COMRADE DANIEL LICHTY, ML D. §5558] ■i-'-v'ir?; y OK .'»»». i ■H9HH 3 «• -'>■*' ■■»■ , ; > x • ' ' . , ' * ' asp BPSSB LINCOLN ROOM UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS LIBRARY MEMORIAL the Class of 1901 founded by HARLAN HOYT HORNER and HENRIETTA CALHOUN HORNER Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2012 with funding from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign http://www.archive.org/details/abrahamlincolncoOOIich &tiraimm Htncoln A Comrade's tribute to his Comrade Commander- in-Chief in the war between the States called the Cibil OTiar for the preservation of The Union and the free- dom of all its people. 1861 to 1865, fl. B. by Comrade Daniel Lichty, M. D. Past Surgeon-Major G. L. Nevins Post No. 1, G. A. R. Soldiers' and Sailors' Memorial Hall Rockford, Illinois, U. S. A. J* A Second printing November, 1925. A PERFECT CREED ITH Malice toward None, with Charity for All, with Firmness in the Right, as God gives Us to see the Right, let Us Strive on to Finish the Work we are in, to Bind up the Nations Wounds, to Care for Him who shall have Borne the Battle, and for His Widow and Orphans ; to do All which may Achieve and Cherish a Just and Lasting Peace Among Our- selves and With all Nations. A. Lincoln T IS seriously felt on a theme and occasion like this — as Lincoln himself once beautifully and graphically said when asked to speak in eulogy of Washington: "To add brightness to the sun, or glory to the name of Washington is alike impossible; let none attempt it; in solemn awe pronounce the name and in its naked, deathless splendor leave it shining on." So one feels whose tutelage and service were under Lincoln and during Lincoln's time in the Nation's struggle to test whether a Nation conceived in liberty should survive or perish, whose study of this marvelous character is lost in more and more deserving and admiring wonderment, and rests on in proud patriotic and enduring devotion. So failing to portray a character like this need not humiliate but rather lend to satisfaction if not praise and maybe comfort. The unending procession of events and persons that has passed since the founding of our form of government has been so varied by time, custom, struggle and teaching that the model statesman has been rare and difficult to choose. Certain ideals which we genetically cherished fortu- nately arose from the union of the foreign and native population with which our land was filled; one ideal, one model after another has arisen and again as readily disappeared from prominence in the procession; relent' less Time moved on; men rose and fell like bubbles after ram; out of the storm and the rain came the bud, the sturdy stalk, the full vine, the giant oak whose broad expanding arms embraced the blasts and grew on, and deeply rooted, defied assault and destruction; storm -beaten in infancy and again in adolescence, cyclone swept in 1861 to 1865, it emerged a perennial and eternal forest capable of withstanding avalanche, sea-swell and cataclysm. Rock-rooted, sun-kissed, wind-swept, blizzard-blown and winter-frozen, has grown up this initial government we cherish and the world recognizes exclusively, as THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. North of the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence River, there will be no United States of America; south of the Rio Grande to Popocatepetl can be only a confed- eracy, while from Tehuantepec to Panama the coalition of communities can never expect to rival or anticipate our title; the International Postal Union has officially recognized only our Union, U. S. A., and denied this name or title to any other aspiring aggregation of States in the world. On a calm sea it is easy sailing; with the current any bark, even a chip can float; but we have had troublous times in our history; the experiment whether a government "of the people and by the people and for the people 11 should survive or perish from off the earth, was not to be made without test or tribulation. This republic had to build a basic constitution fitted to its needs and to new environment and high ambitions without a model and without a guide; how well this was done, the regard in which this instrument is held by present civil courts, and domestic and foreign nations, our defense, cohesion, growth, integrity and stability in national equity and comity and the general regard held in international affairs and their legal and amicable adjustment, all attest. When in 1861 to 1865 the great test was thrust upon us, when the virulent conflict was transferred from the fervid forum to the sanguine battlefield, when the shot that was fired on Fort Sumpter that was heard around the world, the world was aroused, and looked on with mingled ques- tionings and suspicions, and we might say of some with sinister greed and satisfaction, "whether a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men were created equal, 11 should survive or not; God in His wisdom had already prepared the Moses who was to lead the Nation to its pinnacle of safety and glory. To make the illustration comparative and impressive, let us liken the Preserver of the union unlike its Founder, unto the Savior of mankind in this, that the former was of very lowly origin; if some artist'genius should arise duly inspired to paint in words or pigment the birthplace of Abraham Lincoln it would be far more scant and lowly than the stable and the manger in Bethlehem. Abraham Lincoln was born unsheltered; lie lived his life in the open, from birth to death before all the world, and died equally in the open trusting all and fearing none, of a vile assassin's traitorous hand in the public arena where awe and splendor had met to do him homage at the radiant atrium of peace. The biologic law through development and succession from lower to higher forms both physical and psychical is organic; so in human ethics and ethnics, else progress in civilization would be stopped in the jungle; somewhere in the cosmic past in some highly developed nucleus of ante- cedent protoplasm, a molecule must have held a latent germ of wonder and patriotic genius. Abraham Lincoln's parents were the repository and medium of its transmission; whether this inhibition and accretion of organism was within the sojourn of their young virile lives while in the freedom and ambient air of the early earnest Quaker and Mennonites of Pennsylvania in 1688, who were declaimers of freedom, and exhorters against slavery, of whom Whittier wrote, "Who first of all their testimonial gave, Against the oppressor for the outcast slave," is a geneticist's problem. Thus Abraham Lincoln's basal hatred of slavery may have been acquired in the same atmosphere that John Burns and Barbara Fritsche received their famed declarations of freedom. Natural laws are immutable; by a still higher law, beyond human ken arose the perfect man, the Savior of mankind; by this same law developed in the hills of Kentucky and the plains of Illinois the Savior of our Nation; in stature a giant, in humanity, humility and gentleness a woman: in un- fathomed intellect the potential of a god; rough hewn it is true, but of such are made the pillars and temples of modern law and human govern- ment; in no instance is this more marked than in the ideal man and states- man that grew out of Abraham Lincoln; this may have been an atavism of a noble generation passed, of an absorption of environment or the resistless natural pulsings of a new Nation to prove the impending and present dynamics of a young nation's blood. As a statesman he probably appre- ciated more than many or any did before and after him, the full purpose and meaning of his responsibilities as a citizen and officer. Always a student, he early grasped the fundamentals of organic government as few had ever done; his ethics were taken from the tablets of Mount Sinai, his English from Shakespeare and the Bible, and his great common-sense from the knock-about world into which he was born and in which he battled from earliest childhood, through a rather vigorous adolescence to that maturity where he won the merited plaudits of his fellow-countrymen in national convention by his nomination, and later the gift of an election to the presidency of the United States. This election was the winning of his own forceful ideas based on the assertion of an adaptation of scripture to existing politics, that "a house divided against itself cannot stand," that a country could not exist half free and half slave; an idea that his colleagues in politics urged him to relinquish as it would lead to his sure defeat; but he never wavered in this conviction because he knew it was an organic one: that human slavery was wrong, contrary to the laws of human rights and human progress it was invasive of the dominant thought of that day and time, but it was right to him if not politic; his wonderful and unerring foresight told him he was right, and he led grandly and alone and won, and still awaits the rightful recognition and initiative his attitude then attested and now and forever deserves; he kept before him the beacon of the constitution of his government and the ever-appealing and persuading pleading against human slavery; the one he .well knew must be his bulwark of safety in conduct of national affairs as well as of international; the other he knew would be irresistible pleading at the great bar of common humanity in all the civilized world; further than this he believed in the aggregate wisdom as well as in the sympathy of these common people; he put this so graphically that it has become axiomatic, that "you can fool some of the people some of the time, you can fool part of the people part of the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time"; also in another expression attributed to him, that "the Lord must have loved the common people, else why did he make so many of them?" Profoundly and reverently he recognized the ever presence and dominance of a Divine leader in all the affairs of men and state, that he never forgot his fealty thereto; so without precedent or suggestion, in his brief letter to the committee, of acknowledgment and acceptance of the nomination for President by the Republican party, 1860, he begins his letter of acceptance by sincerely imploring Divine aid, and repeats the pleadings to his neighbors at Springfield when about to take his leave for his duties as president of a distracted, convulsed, and already disrupted country, when he earnestly asked his assembled fellow-citizens to pray for him, declaring that with their prayers he could accomplish wonders but without them he must ignobly fail; on his perilous way to Washington, in Philadelphia he asks the same divine supplemental aid; by this, he addition- ally gave evidence of his profound belief in a divine plan and a Supreme Ruler, and thus assured his courageous future. At his first inaugural, never a President more reverently took his oath of office and kissed his Bible more sincerely than did Abraham Lincoln; in his inaugural address he repeats his fealty to the faith of his fathers and again appeals for Divine guidance. These contemplations of character alone, bespeak for him a much larger estimate than is usually accorded him; he knew that God's creatures were led by their Creator; so with one hand twined about the common people and the other in the great palm of his Creator he was led and sustained through the time that tried men's souls as they had never been tried before or since in the history of this country. So firm was his faith in individual right, that in one of his ethical addresses speaking of conduct he said, "if the end brings me out wrong ten angels swearing I was right would make no difference. With these basic and exalted standards of his obligations to Right and Country's concept, he gravely and courageously assumed the duties of ours and his high office. With government on such a plane, in such hands, need any citizen of this or any other country or at any time, fear for its safety? His religion was fundamental' in spirit and concepts, so true and practical for his time as to place his belief and interpretation above question. His itinerary to Washington was filled with menace and danger instead of ovation; he had to reach his destination through strategy to avoid conflict and probable death. At the Capitol he was confronted with coldness, indif- ference, and over all a black pall of treason; unprepossessing at first impres- sion, and with a limited acquaintance of the social as well as the diplomatic usages in official circles, he entered upon his executive duties tired, worried yet "grand, gloomy and peculiar, a sceptered hermit, wrapped in the soli- tude of his own originality 1 '; he knew "that as his heart was right, he had the strength of ten men," and his cause must win. To Abraham Lincoln there was no North, no South, no white, no black, no bond but all free; no West, no East, only one country and one flag, the everlasting emblem of liberty in One Union. Employing the awe-inspiring words of General James A. Garfield quoted from scripture to quell the riot' ing mob in New York after the assassination of Lincoln, which could well be applied at the beginning of Lincoln's administration: "Clouds and darkness are around about him. His pavilion is dark waters and thick clouds of the skies. Justice and Judgment are the establishment of his throne. Mercy and Truth shall go before his face; fellow citizens, God reigns and the government at Wash- ington still lives." To Lincoln it must live; in no arc of the clouded horizon was there light. The army and supplies had been dissipated by a designing Secretary of War; the navy sent to distant waters or to the bottom; the treasury looted; the supreme court tainted with blackest treason; messenger boys and tele' graph keymen bought or polluted by the emissaries of those plotting dis- union; assassination hung over him and treason lured him to its lair; pitfalh were prepared for him everywhere by the socalled commissioners, commit- tees, and emissaries; these were presented to him in every conceivable guise, in one's and two's and three's and in throngs; they came from everywhere they came on many missions; from already seceded states, and others plot- ting treason; from timid cities and wavering clergy; their plans, pleas and intrigues were as varied as their egos; poor Lincoln had to penetrate their various guises, seek their ulteriors, lest he be tripped up and be found giving encouragement to the enemy. New pages of history were being rapidly written and as quickly blotted by eager treason's intrigues while Lincoln's name was growing more luminous at the top. Before the eyes of the watching world, in the hearts of his trusting country-men he was holding the trembling pillars of a new nation's destiny and making a new world's history. No man ever had such responsibilities laid on head and heart and hand; he had fought the ambushed Indian on the frontier and knew some of the cunning and treachery of savages; now he had educated traitors conniving 10 against him; here was the plotting of former United States senators and representatives; defeated politicians of his own party, the intrigue of traitors schooled in politique, dyed in treason and determined on secession and plot- ting in word and secret deed the destruction of the Union. The South had arrogated to itself the entire national domain in which to institute slavery; Lincoln had sacredly sworn to preserve the Union, with slavery if so possible, without it, if it must so be. During the campaign and election the socalled abolition party used Lincoln's statement that a nation could not survive half slave and half free, and thus appealed to the higher promptings of humanity for support; it was not Lincoln's intention as president to ever employ either his long cherished sentiments, or his new authority to free the slaves in the South, as he so earnestly wrote in 1862 in open letter to the obstreperous and afterward repentant Horace Greeley, "My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union: if I could save the Union without freeing the slaves 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, I shall do less whenever I shall believe doing more will help the cause, 11 making it very clear even by reiteration that all his soul's desire was to save the Union. As for Lincoln, then, slavery as an institution of the South might have continued to exist until the slower but as sure com- pulsions of a higher humanity than the South was then capable of con' ceiving, would have wiped it off the face of this country. Lincoln's supreme object was to save the Union; the single selfish motive of the South was to destroy the Union. "It is the hatred of small minds ignorant of the world's great truths that hinder its progress." Abraham Lincoln had the seeming, we will say Divine, perspicacity to know and realize this; foresight is one of the greatest evidences of racial supremacy. When Abraham Lincoln in his first inaugural said, addressing himself to the South, "in your hands my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen and not in mine is the momentous issue of the civil war; the government will not assail you; you have no oath registered in Heaven to destroy the Union, while I have a most solemn one to preserve, protect and defend it." He thus clearly interpreted and declared to the South his attitude to duty and 11 theirs to the enormous one of righteous citizenship and the responsibility of civil war that was alone with them. That inaugural address is in itself a Magna Charta without an equal in English literature; if success had not crowned Lincoln's pleadings and efforts in other courts, that address would have exalted him before the tribunal of justice, scholars, statesmen and nations, and crowned him premier of all the great in history. Still, eighty armed men in citizens 1 clothes, ""plain clothes men" had to stand around him during that address to shield him from bodily harm from that alleged south- ern chivalry he was so earnestly admonishing to peace and civic righteous- ness. From the arena of such an inauguration he was hastened along a line of thoroughly equipped military with loaded guns, ostensibly for the pomp of parade, but more exactly for the serious protection of the President from the assassin then already incubating in that throng; thus he was in- gloriously guided to the gloomy executive chamber to assume the responsi- bilities of the government of a country distracted by internal dissensions on the great question then agitating not only this country but humanity, the question of human slavery, the question whether a Nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal should survive or perish from off the face of the earth. In the entire history of the world, pagan and christian, ancient and modern, the deeds and character of Abraham Lincoln stand out so eminently exalted, so conspicuous by his conscientious consecration to duty, to human- ity, that there is no example, no parallel by which to compare him. If prescience and perspicacity were ever exemplified at the portals of an impending and tragic epoch, Abraham Lincoln believed and lived the things before and during the great Civil contest that worked out a glorious culmination either through a Divine directory or the superlative judgment of a great mind, a superman; a mind that amid its primitive environment in childhood, adolescence and maturity, displayed a supreme quality that com- pelled recognition then and since, and amply merits all the admiration we feebly bestow on these occasions. Abraham Lincoln in his humble birth and early self-acquired education and later successful achievements embodies much of the quality we admire 12 as American; he is not only our American ideal, but through his awful trials and his glorious triumphs and his final martyrdom he has rightfully become our American idol! What strange mentor led him to books, where scholarship was un- known, colleges mere phantoms and the public school unborn? What spirit-pilot directed his journey down the Ohio, "the River of Peace, 1 ' down the Mississippi to New Orleans where he saw slaves, humans hewn in ebony, sold to the highest bidder; saw the sacred ties of family sundered by sneers and jests and cruel bargainings; saw sisters sold to the "rice swamps dark and lone," and defiant brothers beaten to submission by the overseer's lash? Though only eighteen years old at the time it awakened in him the threat, may we say prophecy? that, "if I ever get a chance at that accursed thing, 1 ' in provincial blasphemy, he said, "by gad I'll hit it hard," and he did; with the bludgeon of the Proclamation of Emancipation January first 1863 he hit it the fatal blow, and four million slaves were free and the Union saved. What school of ethics in that wild frontier directed his conduct to the merited title accorded him by friend and foe of "Honest old Abe?" Roose- velt's boastful "square deal" of today, is only the far and dim echo of Lincoln's pioneer "fair play" of half a century ago To lessen the sufferings that war begets, Lincoln led the world. Not often is his name associated with the world-wide humane fundamentals of the Red Cross; such service is not within spirit or deed, neither is it denied politicians or statesmen. Abraham Lincoln's innate humanity radiated to every useful sphere of man's endeavor; he would make a rose grow where ' war's thistles had thrived. That he would rescue a cruelly winged bird or spend weary nights with wounded soldiers, foe or friend; prepare a military order as radiant as the Red Cross and as enduring as the Rock of Ages; hence, his title and recognition as primate of the fundamentals of the now world- wide Red Cross' sacred service: he merits and deserves a place in the com- pany of Him who went about the Syrian hills doing good and casting evil out. The atrocities that prevailed in the war between France and Austria in 1859 were brought to light after the battle of Solferino, by a Swiss doctor, 13 Henry Durant; this doctor was endeavoring to awaken interest in Europe that would ameliorate conditions of war and it is claimed was the initial author of the now famous Red Cross movement; the Red Cross Association was founded in Geneva, Switzerland in 1864. Lincoln visited Petersburgh, Va., after that unfortunate battle June, 1864, walking over the bloody field he came upon the doctors in their improvised hospital tents or under God's canopy; he stopped a moment to view their skilled and bloody work; he saw bleeding wounds kindly staunched; he grieved to see the quivering arms and legs in grewsome piles, some still moving in the reflexes of their awful wounds; he heard the cries and groans of the wounded waiting, and saw the pallor of shock and death of the dying; he saw the wist for mother in their paling eyes; his great heart was moved and he exclaimed "and this is war, the trade of barbarism!" then turning to his staff surrounding him, he said "gentlemen is there no way this awful thing can be stopped?" His great heart was moved he returned to the White house, his Golgotha to rest, but instead he wrestled with frightful dreams and grewsome visions of the battlefields and hospitals: he arose and walked the floor in sorrow and deep study; he sat at his desk and formulated his great earnest plea and order for the amelioration of conditions of battle and their awful after' math; fully realizing the importance of such a paper at the tribunal of the then troubled world he engaged Francis Lieber, Dean of Law at Columbia University, New York, to arrange his deep and troubled thoughts into legal and forceful phrases and composition; this was then issued as "General orders" to all commanding officers urging their aid for the early amelioration of conditions of wounded and suffering during and after all battles. These "orders" exercised a powerful influence upon the entire world; they were later the basis of the work of the Conference of Brussels in 1874, and through this conference became the fundamental text of the convention concerning the laws of war adopted by the Hague Conference of 1900 and that was perfected and adopted in 1907. This code of Abraham Lincoln's antedated the creation of the Red Cross organization of the world, as one of the great humanities, and proves again and anew his remarkable per- spicacity, and his unerring and early mercy in all threatening or present afflictions; he desired to be not only the emancipator but the savior of his fellow men. The many little stories told of his tender-heartedness to birds 14 and animals, his humanity, his affection for children, all bespeak for him the great "charity" for which he is so universally beloved; he had more just and generous pardons in his great heart than any ruler, ever known and gave them discreetly. Another example of Lincoln's reliance and foresight rarely recognized or spoken of, for which he hardly receives the credit it deserves and which still affects the educators and the education of our youth, is, for the form of education first called "agricultural, 11 the schools first so promulgated as "State schools 11 for the industrial masses, but which have since become the great State Universities, were only made possible as early as they were by Lincoln's courageous and erudite interpretation of the constitution and his signing the law that had been passed under the preceding administrations of Presidents Taylor and Buchanan, both acknowledged superior constitu- tional interpreters, but which neither of these preceding presidents had the understanding, the faith, or the courage to interpret so they could or would sign the law. That law gave the vast areas of land whose accumulated wealth has made the State Universities of the Great West the proud institu- tions of their respective communities; the president of the University of Illinois characterized the grant as the most opulent, eloquent, and "grandiose 11 endowment ever made in the history of education 11 ; proving proud monuments in these states; equally they should be loud proclaimers of Abraham Lincoln's intuition and his innate love of learning, the desired thing that was denied him, but that he made possible to us by his untiring study and fundamental knowledge of the constitution, in behalf of others. Further he had such an exalted appreciation of Science, that he successfully urged Congress in 1863 to enact a measure that established the National Academy of Science, the first scientific association in history ever invoked to cope against shot and shell and gas and internal combustion, to defeat an enemy. A greater fundamental study of constitutional as well as international law in which subsequent history affirms again his force and accuracy, was in the so-called "Trent affair 11 ; the stopping of the English cruiser Trent and the removal therefrom of the persons of the two confederate commissioners, Mason and Slidell, and their return to this country against their protests 15 and the remonstrances of the English government; this was a critical and crucial period in the history of the Civil war and the Nation. England made vehement and very serious protest against the act, going so far as to send an armed fleet near the harbor of New York; a crisis was pending; to avoid a conflict just at that critical period, the commissioners were re- leased, but the "Right of Seizure 1 ' was maintained by Lincoln and our right and protest was so filed and remained a subject of international dispute until 1909 when through an enactment by a Maritime tribunal in which ten of the leading maritime powers of the world participated, the contention of the United States delegates was sustained, Lincoln's long suspended and much discussed claim to the "right of seizure 11 prevailed, and Lincoln the "rail-splitter, 11 Lincoln the "Illinois giant, 11 had again confounded the "wise men of the East 11 and proved an innate perspicacity and patriotism far above his contemporaries. Thus five great epoch-making questions were met and adjusted then or since to the World's and Time's approval, in all of which Lincoln led nobly: the Emancipation proclamation, liberty's weapon; the codification and issuing as "General orders 11 by the Com- mander in Chief of the Armies and Navies. Instructions and rules for the humane guidance of armies and navies in the field, later sanctioned and adopted for the world's service by the Red Cross at the Hague Confer- ence. The Land Grant act that made possible the great educational move- ment of the western states. Lincoln's persistence in the "right of seizure" of Commissioners Mason and Slidell as contrabands of war in the Trent affair. A creed and a religion "with malice toward none" the world can adopt for universal conduct, all stupendous world's history-epoch-making subjects, any one of which singly, would amply crown any ordinary individual's lifetime and be a proud legacy to leave family and history. It is deplored that writers and speakers have so complacently permitted the ugly impress of the early vicious cartoonist as to Lincoln's face and form to prevail without greater protest; his political enemies in campaigns remained passive, while his secession foes exaggerated form and feature to their own base soul's delight; horns and cloven hoofs were given him in the South and their preponderating illiterates and impressionable "poor trash" believed it; their ribald artists and not nature gave him the "shaggy 16 brow" and "bearded base," the "corded hands" and "gnarled face." Lon- don's jesting journal "Puck," maligned and lampooned poor Lincoln with ecstatic envy, but later craved for it through the press and page, as craven as words could, the pardon of the world. It was my privilege to have seen Lincoln, but only in the repose of death, when life's fitful fever was over; it was after he had crossed the valleys and mountains, and the roll of muffled drum and toll of bell had come to the lakes and the great bosom of the West; it was at Cleveland, Ohio, where his body lay in regal state, in that fair city's central square; sombre clouds in sadness veiled the sky; from morn till night mist filled the air and deeper mist flowed in myriad eyes that passed four abreast, two on each side of the bier all day long; stern guards allowed no linger- ing over the placid face and massive form. It was said Old Glory wrapped the casket and that roses and laurel wreathed the head and that lilies lay in abundance at his feet; but I saw only the classic mould of brow and face, and cherish this only; it accords so well with that which sculptor Leonard Volk preserved in the death-mask, that is recognized by artists and sculptors as a model face, and is the copy used by all. That this image lingers with me is a pleasure and is beautiful, impressive and inspir- ing; it lends itself to the character that shone and triumphed through it, and will live in enduring bronze and marble when the cartoonist's vile copy, with its maker, will have passed to merited oblivion. Here lay my Father Abraham Lincoln. I was his spared sacrifice offer- ing; I had gone at my country's call with four brothers, five of one family, all a patriotic mother's dedication at their birth, all a father's offering at his country's call. Would my emotions at that majestic presence and at that sacred bier be less than earnest offering of Life and service? The unimpeachable camera has preserved his features, and portrays him as well favored as men of his age, in any calling, without accessories of regalia and environment; the photograph at the age of 35 or 40 owned by his son, Robert T. Lincoln, certainly is without defect in form or line; another photograph owned by C. F. Gunther of Chicago is described by no other words than beautiful, and any man not a dilletante would be 17 proud to wear it. Either makes him a "peasant prince, a masterpiece of God." The statue of Abraham Lincoln by Saint Gaudens in Lincoln Park, Chicago, gives him a shapely head and form; that by Weinman in Boston, Mass., and its replica in Madison, Wisconsin, are things of beauty and grandeur to cherish forever; in these statues it would seem as though the serious and perplexed sculptors had laid aside their moulding tools, their rules and calipers, and let their chisels be guided by the gods, while they solved a figure of majestic loveliness, standing beneath Heaven's eter- nal sun and on Liberty's eternal pedestal, memorials of both, and worthy tribute to the subject. The mold of Lincoln's hand forms a plaster cast holding a humble broomstick instead of a classic cestus, and is regarded by anatomists and artists as a model hand of a man or Marathon, a classic in every curve and angle; its replica is in nearly every artist's studio for copy and it is not "knotty, gaunt or gnarled." Let us forget Lincoln cartooned by southern enemies and lampooned by envious England; he was and to us is beautiful; "Honest old Abe" to us and our successors is our physical, intellectual and ethical idol; a man without a model and without a self; as stern Edwin Stanton, his Secretary of War, said when he saw the last quiver leave his wounded body, "Now he belongs to the ages." But first he belongs to us, the Grand Army of the Republic, because he was our "Commander-in-Chief" and because he was OUR "Father Abraham" and we were his "Boys in Blue"; we came at his call, five times three-hundred-thousand strong; "we rallied from the hillside, we gathered from the plain, shouting the battle cry of freedom," and with him freed a race and saved the Union; he belongs to us, the Grand Army of the Republic, and after us he belongs in the CABINET OF THE IMMORTALS. 18 ADDRESS BY PRESIDENT LINCOLN At the Dedication of THE GETTYSBURG NATIONAL CEMETERY November 19, 1863 Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any other nation so conceived and so dedi- cated can long endure. We are met on a great battle- field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow — this ground. The brave men, living and dead — who struggled here, have conse- crated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather to be dedicated here to the un- finished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth. Chronology of Lincoln's Life 1806 — Marriage of Thomas Lincoln and Nancy Hanks, June 12, Washington County, Kentucky. 1809 — Born Feb. 12, Hardin (now La Rue) County, Kentucky. 1816 — Family removed to Perry County, Indiana. 1818 — Death of Abraham's mother, Nancy Hanks Lincoln. 1819 — Second marriage of Thomas Lincoln; married Sally Bush Johnson, Dec. 2, at Elizabethtown, Kentucky. 1830 — Lincoln family removed to Illinois, locating in Macon County. 1831 — Abraham located at New Salem. 1832 — Abraham a Captain in the Black Hawk War. 183 3 — Appointed postmaster at New Salem. 1834 — Abraham a Surveyor. First election to the Legislature. 1835 — Love romance with Anne Rutledge. 1836 — Second election to the Legislature. 1837 — Licensed to practice law. 1838 — Third election to the Legislature. 1840 — Presidential Elector on Harrison ticket. Fourth election to the Legislature. 1842 — Married Nov. 4 to Mary Todd. "Duel" with General Shields. 1843— Birth of Robert Todd Lincoln, Aug. 1. 1846 — Elected to Congress. Birth of Edward Baker Lincoln, March 10. 1848 — Delegate to the Philadelphia National Convention. 1850 — Birth of William Wallace Lincoln, Dec. 2. 1853 — Birth of Thomas Lincoln, April 4. 1856 — Assists in formation of Republican party. 1858 — Joint debate with Stephen A. Douglas. Defeated for the United States Senate. 1860 — Nominated and elected to the Presidency. 1861 — Inaugurated as President, March 4. 1863 — Issued Emancipation Proclamation. 1864 — Reelected to the Presidency. 1865 — Assassinated by J. Wilkes Booth, April 14. Died April 15. Remains interred at Springfield, 111., May 4. The Grand Army of the Republic "No child can be born into it ; no procla- mation of President, edict of King or Czar can command admission ; no Univer- sity or institution of learning can issue a diploma authorizing its holder to enter ; no act of Congress or Parliament secures recognition ; the wealth of a Vanderbilt cannot purchase the position ; its doors swing open only upon the presentation of a bit of paper, torn, worn, begrimed it may be, which certifies to an Honorable dis- charge from the Armies or Navies of the Nation during the war against the Rebel- lion, " and, unlike any other Association, no "new blood" can come in ; there are no growing ranks from which recruits can be drawn into the Grand Army of the Re- public. With the consummation of Peace through Victory its rolls were closed for- ever. s . - ,«-••.■:••■< [ € ;■'■ -■ s. C c 1 1 SB w , c ^.^>^.. JaPw*WW JTUMg^am |W #j HBHHHBeHHP *j<\J&:ss 7 ML, J /i-*