973»7L63 Hertz, Emanuel 
 
 GH Ulm The many-sided Lincoln - what 
 
 would he do if he were here today? 
 
.N 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS 
 LIBRARY 
 
 presented by 
 
 c. 2 - Emmanuel Hertz 
 
The Many-Sided Lincoln 
 
 What Would He Do Were He 
 Here Today ? 
 
 EMANUEL HERTZ 
 
 AN ADDRESS DELIVERED AT WASHINGTON HEIGHTS CONGREGATION 
 
 FEBRUARY 12, 1926 
 
An edition of 1000 copies of this address has been 
 printed of which this copy is No. 
 
'/ L^. '^ - 
 
 THE MANY-SIDED LINCOLN — WHAT 
 WOULD HE DO WERE HE HERE TODAY? 
 
 By EMANUEL HERTZ 
 
 (An address delivered in honor of the memory of Abraham Lincoln 
 at the Annual Services of the Forum of Washington Heights 
 Congregation in the City of New York on February 12, 1926.) 
 
 |HE whimsical caricaturist who draws an array of studies of 
 possible portraits of Abraham Lincoln by Murillo, Van Dyke, 
 Velasquez, Michael Angelo, Raphael, Hals, Whistler, Millet 
 and Rembrandt, each one after the manner of his age and 
 after the mode then prevalent in his country — if these masters had indeed 
 painted Lincoln — has but exemplified what is happening to the great War 
 President at the hands of novelist-historians, and biographer-poets. They 
 summon up before our gaze an Abraham Lincoln who never lived and 
 who, had he read some of these effusions, would have been puzzled as 
 to who was really the subject of these biographical phantasmagorias. 
 On the theory of producing something new, we have these later-day 
 biographers rhapsodize about Lincoln's extremely prosaic childhood and 
 reenact an Iliad of woe through which he forged his weary way, and 
 this array of authors has drawn out the history of his family for seven 
 generations with a meticulous minuteness rarely lavished upon the scion 
 of an imperial family — while Lincoln himself spoke' of his family's life 
 story as 'The short and simple annals of the poor." But the spirit of 
 piling Ossa on Pelion will not down and by sheer force of volume of 
 research Lincoln is forced into a heraldic Almanac de Gotha of his own. 
 But this wise man of the Civil War era has left an effective antidote to 
 all such futile effort — to make him appear other than he really was. He 
 wrote and he spoke' his philosophy of life, his ideals and theory of gov- 
 ernment, his ideas of right and wrong, his views of the duty of the 
 citizen to his country, and the relationships of man to man, of employer 
 to employee, of commander to common soldier, of President to his 
 Cabinet, to his Congress, to his War Governors, he wrote these thoughts 
 and reflections and duties and rights into his addresses, into his messages 
 and into his lectures and into his letters. Examine an index to his col- 
 lected works — to those which have appeared in print, and you will see 
 lucid expressions of opinion on a multiplicity of subjects. Read the 
 speech or the letter or the message covering any particular subject, and 
 you will find a gem — a nugget of pure gold direct from the heart of 
 
 ymati 
 
Abraham Lincoln. And but for the lamentable lack of study of those 
 precious works, we have seen grow up in the minds of many, a cadaverous- 
 looking charcoal sketch of the great American — with one or two fables or 
 events tacked on to the caricature of what was as noble an apparition 
 when seen in all its remarkable manifestations as is the impression made 
 upon our minds by the undimmed splendors of the rising sun. Close upon 
 those romancers who persist in having the babbling brook, the song of 
 the birds, the whistling of the wind, the glimmer of moonlight on the 
 waves of the rivulet as indispensable parts of the landscape traversed by 
 the youthful Lincoln, are those who profess to find that he has excelled 
 in one, and in only one field of endeavor. These now profess and proceed 
 to demonstrate that this or that particular specialty in which Lincoln 
 excelled, enabled him in after life to solve the problems which he was 
 called upon to cope with. The ignorance and arrogance of this class of 
 biographers and romancers has actually diverted the gaze of the multi- 
 tude from the real character of Lincoln. The reverend homage paid to 
 the printed word simply because it is printed, simply helps along these 
 multitudes of inventions. Every season brings its five- foot bookshelf of 
 Lincoln books and addresses, and they all look distressingly alike in 
 workmanship. 
 
 Why not, in justice to him and all those who ought to know him 
 as he was, go back to the source, the only source of all our reliable in- 
 formation? Why not call upon all who know or have a letter or docu- 
 ment which would shed any light on Lincoln, to produce and publish it? 
 Let us study Abraham Lincoln as he was. Let us hold him up to our 
 children in his real habiliments of body and of mind ? Let us start with 
 the young Lincoln in the Illinois Assembly; let us follow him through 
 five years of legislative life at his desk in the legislature — the desk which 
 is even now looking for a permanent resting place. Let us read the 
 letters, the speeches and the Lyceum addresses of that period. Let us 
 follow him as he studied law from the moment he found a copy of 
 Blackstone at the bottom of the old barrel. Let us follow him as he 
 practiced law for many years and come to know Lincoln the lawyer. 
 Oh, what a wonderful tale — truthful to the letter, can be told about this 
 young champion of deserving causes — this champion of the widow and 
 guardian angel of the orphan — this great and good man who strove for 
 justice, with truth — truth, the seal of God — as his lodestone. He would 
 right a wrong, he would struggle for an unfortunate client — always 
 provided that he was convinced of his honesty and of the justice of his 
 cause. He could not last as the advocate of evil. He withdrew and 
 cleansed himself of the contact with evil. He became the jury lawyer of 
 his day in the State of Illinois. And yet no man ever lived who would have 
 made a better Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. 
 President Taft — who picked and appointed more Judges than any other 
 
'President save only Washington — is authority for this claim, and Senator 
 Beveridge in his immortal life of the great Chief Justice pictures Lincoln 
 as an almost indistinguishable colleague and companion of one for the 
 other. But all of this does not demonstrate that Lincoln was a great 
 lawyer only — a lawyer to the exclusion of all else. It was one of the 
 many occupations thrust upon him by a Divine Providence, preparing 
 him for the greater tasks, for the more exacting ordeals, yet to come. 
 We find another student of the great Commoner studying Lincoln's 
 political activities from his appearance on the platform during his first 
 candidacy for office down to his re-election for the Presidency in 1864. 
 He will examine the newspapers of a quarter of a century in a score of 
 States in order to demonstrate that it was not Lincoln the lawyer, but 
 Lincoln the political leader or statesman who really made the great im- 
 pression on his times. 
 
 An old veteran of the Civil War attempts to demonstrate that the 
 great joint debate was really the climax of his career and he digests the 
 opinions of his contemporaries and of contemporary journals to show 
 that his thesis is the only one that fits the great debater, the great tribune 
 of the common people. 
 
 There are others who were slow to recognize his great worth and 
 who began to see him and know him under the great storm and stress of 
 the Civil War — in that beleagured city — Washington. His dealings with 
 a refractory Congress, his troubles with Northern States, loyal, but slow 
 in respyonding to the call of the Union. His countering the assaults of the 
 disloyal in his own ranks, his warding off blows for misguided friends, 
 his course of education of an entire country — that the Union must be 
 preserved — presented an entirely new theory to the historian of the Civil 
 War. He discovered a figure towering over and above all others around 
 him — a sublime figure under every phase of the cataclysm — a figure heroic, 
 sublime, majestic, holding to the steering wheel of the Union and steering 
 for safety, to victory. This man is reaching the conclusion Seward 
 reached — "We must revise our opinion of this man." We knew him not. 
 We have a great War President — uncanny in his knowledge and ability 
 to cope with so many distracting problems at the same time — there is 
 something superhuman about it all. Stanton, the imperious, is subdued ; 
 Seward, the all- wise is awed; Wells, the faithful is beginning to see a 
 great light. Senators, congressmen, governors, generals unwilling but 
 inevitably, are drawn by the giant magnet of common sense, of thorough- 
 ness of human sympathy — all are drawn on for help, for guidance, for 
 information, for re-heartening, for strength, for faith in the ultimate 
 victory of the Union under its great pilot. Hence the evolution of 
 Lincoln, the statesman, the great War President, the master of men. 
 (What a misnomer to be applied to that humble burden bearer.) 
 
The leaders of religion are now turning their gaze upon the lonely 
 spokesman of the Union — who speaks in the language of the Prophets, 
 who seems to have sprung from between the pages of the Bible — for 
 does he not use Bible phrases, parables, nuggets of wisdom like the 
 Lawgiver of old ? Did he not see the Union on fire but not destroyed — 
 the bush burning but not destroyed by the fire? Did he not hear the 
 call from amid the flames of the embers which made up the toppling 
 Union — "Go and save the Union?" And did he not answer joyfully, 
 anxiously: "Here am I?" Preacher and teacher, priest and religious 
 leader recognize a kinship between his President and his Prophets and 
 his saints and his martyrs, those who made up the list of those who 
 strove to make man free and independent and enlightened. They begin 
 to recognize a kinship to Abraham, to Moses, to Paul, to Savonarola 
 (what a striking likeness of emaciated profile), to Wyclif, to Cromwell, 
 to Calvin, to William the Silent, whose taking off the little children 
 bewailed as did an entire grief -stricken country bewail the untimely death 
 of his modern replica; and when he was consigned as belonging to the 
 ages — every teacher and preacher of God's Word paid his share in a 
 universal requiem rendered to the martyred hero of the epic called 
 America. 
 
 The stylist and scholar, the student of language who is freer from 
 charlatanism than most people, begins to study the text. He reads Lincoln^s 
 addresses, his messages and his letters. He asks himself where did this 
 man derive his pure English style? How is it that he is so free from the 
 baneful style of political speaker and writer? How brief, how simple, 
 how pure, how clear his thought and his style and his mode of expres- 
 sion? He now tries to find a prototype and he goes far back to ancient 
 Greece and finds in Pericles the only man to whose oration he can com- 
 pare this novel style and Aesop, the only one whose tales resemble Honest 
 Abe's. Few spirits have spoken thus — two or three in all the intervening 
 ages. This man is a great exemplar of English prose style; but hold, 
 some of it reads like blank verse. What a wonderful man is this who 
 in the short space of time mastered the English language within which 
 to clothe these undying ideas and ideals. The literary critic now reads 
 his letters and begins to understand why the newspapermen of his day 
 — and there were giants in that profession in those days, demanded letters 
 from Lincoln on all the many questions and problems of the day— because 
 all read them, all quoted them. He hardly opened his lips but he said 
 something which will not die. Was there ever such another letter- writer ? 
 Letters in which sentiments ran the gamut of all the emotions of a bleed- 
 ing, embattled nation struggling through the darkness to light, through 
 rebellion and treason to victory and union. The Epistles of Lincoln — 
 what an alluring title to some new novelist-historian of a great national 
 hero and martyr ! 
 
 6 
 
And now come the mothers, the heartbroken mothers, the grief- 
 stricken mothers, the tear-blinded mothers, the pale, emaciated, half-crazed 
 mothers, they came to Lincoln, to Mr. Lincoln, to the President — tired, 
 sleepless, exhausted, red-lidded, hollow cheeked, the burden-bearer of 
 humanity, literally dropping under his great burden and faces these 
 mothers, and hears their heartbreaking appeals of impending executions 
 of their boys — the victims of army discipline through the ages — ^and 
 Father Abraham, but lately bereft of his own child — ^melts in sympathy 
 as he hears these heartbroken mothers of the Union plead for their off- 
 spring, and he pardons and he pardons and he pardons until we behold 
 in him the Angel of Mercy at the throne of the Most High pleading for 
 pardon for all. He pardons, while the generals threaten to resign, while 
 Stanton growls over the undermined morale of the army and over shat- 
 tered discipline. "Stanton, is not this boy of more use to the Union on 
 earth than under earth?" — and so we behold the sublime outline of 
 Lincoln, the Pardoner — eclipsing that of the lawyer, of the politician, 
 of the debater, of the legislator, of the statesman, of the executive, of 
 the stylist, of the letterwriter, and for a moment we behold in juxtaposi- 
 tion the two great solemn pictures — Lincoln the Comforter of the mother 
 of the pardoned boy, and Napoleon standing rigid over the sleeping 
 sentinel who awakes and beholds his emperor on guard — and his irrevoca- 
 ble doom pictured in the inexorable features of his emperor ! Choose the 
 picture which appeals more to the universal human heart. 
 
 And so, step by step, we find the pardoner of the young soldier 
 become the pardoner of the entire South — a friend of Jefferson Davis, 
 and of Lee, and of Stephens, whenever they are ready to utter the word — 
 "Union'\ And then his task is done — ^the task for which he lingered an 
 entire lifetime — the task for which he prepared in the country store, in 
 the post office, in the legislature, in the surveyor's office, in the courts, 
 on the hustings, in Congress, in the debate with Douglas, in Cooper 
 Union — the task of grasping the wheel of the Ship of State surrounded 
 by rocks, by wreckers, by lightning — steering clear through the Scylla 
 of secession and the Charybdis of disloyalty in the North — this task done 
 — completely done, and he was no more, for like Enoch, God took him. 
 This many-sided messenger of God sent to right the wrongs of a race — 
 held in subjugation, in defiance of all that was right and of all that 
 was just — indefiance of a higher law that was becoming dominant in 
 the land, although it required a repetition of the ancient plague — that all 
 the first-born of the oppressors would have to be slain before the children 
 of bondage would be let go. 
 
 Let us all repair to the great quarry, his recorded words, his preach- 
 ments, his maxims, and let us complete the great structure, let us gather 
 from all the corners of the globe his written words and complete the 
 
 7 
 
task so well begun. Let us classify all he said and all he preached — 
 and what will result? We will erect a structure to which all the people 
 of the earth can come for guidance and inspiration. Would a political 
 leader seek light and leading let him study the political utterances of our 
 many-sided Lincoln. Would an executive not merely ask himself per- 
 functorily, "What would Lincoln do today?" let him read and have his 
 answer. Would you have patent for loyalty and patriotism let him read 
 Lincoln who declared that he would be the last man to defy the enemies 
 of his country when all others had given up. Would you desire to find 
 a method of exposing a false prophet of a wicked cause — study his joint 
 debate with Douglas. Would you know how to immortahze those who 
 gave up their lives that the Union might live, go with me to Gettysburg — 
 and in solemn silence meditate what he there spoke for eternity. Would 
 you know how to cleanse the Augean stables of a putrid and treasonable 
 administration — see what he did when he displaced the infirm and petulant 
 Buchanan, on the point of surrendering all to the enemies of his country. 
 Would you learn how to manage an administration open to assault from 
 without and from within with those closest to you trying to embroil you 
 in universal war — see what Lincoln did from the moment he came to 
 Washington through the long and weary years of the nerve-wrecking and 
 heart-breaking war. 
 
 Lincoln, the Diplomat! How they would have smiled had someone 
 called him that ten years earlier — divined what the rascally Napoleon 
 was doing with the agents of the Confederacy — Lincoln, the diplomat 
 solved and disposed of the Trent Affair and confounded the conspiracy 
 of Gladstone, Palmerston and Russell to recognize the Confederacy by 
 timing the issuing of his Emancipation Proclamation, not to please 
 Wendell Phillips or Beecher or Greeley, but in time to prevent action 
 by an English Cabinet called for the purpose of recognizing the Con- 
 federacy — he made it clear that taking such action would place Christian 
 England in the position of the advocate and champion of the whipping 
 post, of the auction block and of the Moloch of slavery. Diplomat, 
 indeed, was Lincoln, who picked Dayton for Paris and Sanford at Brus- 
 sels, who gathered all the munitions available on the Continent and 
 Adams for England in time to tell his lordship that releasing the Alabama 
 was war! And on the 117th Anniversary of his birth. Sir Frederick 
 Maurice, one who judged the military events of the Great War with 
 knowledge and keen discernment, finds a great military authority in 
 our great War President who learned the great lesson of War and of 
 warfare in an amazingly short time and from a military standpoint he 
 knew more and understood more than all his civil and military advisors, 
 one who followed understanding^ every great battle from Chancellors- 
 ville and Antietam through Gettysburg and Vicksburg, down to Appomat- 
 tox. Lincoln knew the war map better than his generals and had his 
 
 8 
 
advice been followed on a number of occasions, the war would have been 
 shortened by years. 
 
 But in no capacity does he appear to greater advantage than he does 
 in the White House — the mecca for every human being, either singly or 
 in droves, seeking advice, having a request, an idea, a petition, or a 
 message. What a motley number they were — foreign ministers, war 
 correspondents, governors. Southern sympathizers, generals, soldiers, 
 preachers, teachers, journalists, financiers, the entire army personnel, 
 cabinet officers, senators, political leaders — all came early and often to 
 advise, cajole, petition, harass and annoy the man of many sorrows, the 
 man of many pardons, who was trying in spite of them all, to do the 
 work he was called upon to perform. All of these came and saw and 
 heard for themselves what this many-sided man said and did and accom- 
 plished. A great many of these have in one form or another recorded 
 their impressions of the man, recorded their recollections of how he 
 acquitted himself under the most trying ordeals and all seem to agree 
 that this was no ordinary man. This man, who saw all, who heard all, 
 who endured slander and abuse such as has never been levelled against 
 any one human being — and finally convinced even those of their iniquity 
 — this man who was never found wanting, who was never unprepared — 
 this was indeed no ordinary man. 
 
 And we, the heirs of this great soul, we should dedicate ourselves 
 to the task of rescuing Abraham Lincoln from the hands of his detractors. 
 We, the citizens of the land he died to preserve, owe it to his memory to 
 gather lovingly all the shreds and all the words, all the sayings and all 
 the precepts that fell from his lips wherever recorded and preserved and 
 demand in the name of justice, in the name of fairness, that all the 
 documents, letters, legal papers, inscriptions, passes, comments and 
 speeches in existence anywhere, everywhere, be produced for publication 
 to the end that we niight reproduce the dead leader to our people in all 
 his many-sided endowments with all the multitude of kindnesses, of 
 virtues he displayed, as engraved in the missives which came from his 
 heart to every other wounded heart, to every sorrowing mother, to every 
 war-weary patriot — who asked for and received the treasured words of 
 consolation written in that beautiful script by the hand that was guided 
 by the great immortal soul in the White House. 
 
 And now what would this many-sided Lincoln have done with the 
 problems of the day? is a question which every now and then one of our 
 Lincoln Day orators, one of our statesmen in responsible positions asks. 
 An answer to that question has been attempted a great many times but 
 very few answers have been given in the light of Lincoln's performances. 
 The sad and distressing phase about the whole thing seems to be that 
 
all those who ask the question, not unlike his biographers, studiously 
 refrain from reading Lincoln's speeches and letters. They refrain from 
 studying his political acts and performances. In the light of these we 
 can truthfully state that Lincoln certainly would not divide his followers 
 into patricians and plebeians. Lincoln certainly would not have divided 
 the voters of this country into a fighting organization and into an office- 
 holding organization. The man who would fight the battles of the Re- 
 public; the man who would preach Lincoln's doctrine would not be dis- 
 qualified by his preachment from carrying out Lincoln's policies in office. 
 
 A political leader with Abraham Lincoln was a man to be consid- 
 ered and consulted — Read the letters to Thurlow Weed, to Senator 
 Cameron, to Lyman Trumbull, to Hannibal Hamlin and to a host of 
 others. And it goes without saying that the political party today which 
 practices that sane and practical political principle of Abraham Lincoln's, 
 of having the preachers of political policy become the performers in 
 office, that party succeeds and continues to succeed ; but the party which 
 has one portion do the work of electing and then is made to make way 
 for people unheard of until after election, and who by some necromancy 
 convince or bedevil the appointing power that they, and not the workers, 
 should fill the offices; the party which practices this false political prin- 
 ciple fails at succeeding elections and continues to go down to defeat 
 until it ceases to be a factor ; for it does not deserve to live. 
 
 And when the political leader nowadays asks : "What would Lincoln 
 do if he were here today?" we can tell him that Lincoln would do just 
 that — reward the deserving political worker with political preferment after 
 he had participated and made possible the victory of the party. 
 
 Different panaceas for eliminating corruption in high places received 
 but scant consideration from that direct political descendant of old Samuel 
 Adams who said: ''Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty." And if 
 Lincoln could busy himself with politics every day of the year he could 
 see no reason why others should not do the same thing. Lincoln believed 
 in a trained political party — lieutenants who would not only appreciate 
 the principles the party stood for, but who were trained and prepared to 
 carry out those party principles in such a manner as would result in 
 strengthening the Union. Political volunteers to him were as good and 
 as bad as volimteers in the army who came for thirty or sixty days and 
 whose one thought during their period of volunteering was the anxiety 
 to return home. It was only after the army was drilled and trained and 
 made permanent that victories were made possible. 
 
 And if Lincoln were here today he would preach and practice that 
 only trained political leaders are worth anything in our body politic and 
 that the volunteers of a week or ten days before election, for the purpose 
 
 10 
 
of filling the office, if successful, would make no impression upon that 
 master politician today any more than they would have in his own time. 
 
 The questioner as to what Lincoln would do on different occasions 
 might well be answered by referring him to what Lincoln said and did. 
 His tariff policy was clear and made clear by the tersest and clearest 
 statement — which once more shows the cloudless lucidity of his mind. 
 What would Lincoln have done about National Defence and National 
 participation in international affairs? The answer to the first question 
 when tested by his actual words and deeds can be found in the fact that 
 he organized the greatest army and navy any country ever had up to his 
 day. And the other question, which so many have attempted to answer 
 for him, can easily be answered by anyone who knows what a firm be- 
 liever Lincoln was in the Declaration of Independence, in the policies 
 of Washington and Jefferson and Marshall as to the duties and as to 
 the functions of our country among the nations of the world; and it is 
 little less than sacrilege for anyone to say that Lincoln would have 
 advocated entry of our country into the League of Nations and thus 
 become subordinated and lost in the Babel of voices and vortex of 
 selfish passions which dominate and rule that incongruous institution. 
 Lincoln knew well what the Christian statesmen of England were at- 
 tempting to do with the help of the diplomats of France and the other 
 countries on the Continent. Gladstone and Palmerston and Russell and 
 the vast majority of the English and French intelligencia were ready 
 to gloat over the destruction of the Union, and came within a hair's 
 breadth of realizing their ardent hopes and ambitions. For anyone to 
 say that Father Abraham would have consented to have his country, 
 his United States, have one voice among fifty-two others, one voice 
 against fifty-two others in a league which is represented by an over- 
 whelming majority of peoples — primitive, selfish, under-educated and 
 unprincipled and unscrupulous in their diplomacy — for any man to 
 imagine that Abraham Lincoln would have ever exposed the country for 
 which he fought and died to the ipse dixit of an institution of this kind, 
 sprung into being in the last moments of the expiring Versailles Confer- 
 ence which met in a spirit of revenge, which acted in the spirit of a 
 conqueror over the vanquished, which tried to extract from a conquered 
 foe the penalties of wars and of differences of centuries, has not read 
 and has not understood the words of Abraham Lincoln. Abraham Lincoln, 
 with his immeasurable sympathy, never believed in the principle of voi 
 victis — woe to the conquered — and it was from that atmosphere that the 
 League of Nations sprang. That alone would have made it impossible 
 for a man of the mighty toleration, of the great love, of the great heart 
 of Abraham Lincoln, to participate in any such conference or become a 
 member of the offspring of such a conference. 
 
 11 
 
To anyone who has read his letters and his addresses on recon- 
 struction of the conquered South, to anyone who knows that he had 
 nothing but the hand of fellowship for Lee, for Jefferson Davis, for 
 Benjamin and for Johnson, if they but subscribed to the oath of fealty, 
 it is unthinkable to believe that Lincoln would have become a partner 
 in the bloody military cabals of the Balkan States and their European co- 
 conspirators among the greater powers who control them. 
 
 If Lincoln were alive today and in a position of power, he would 
 prevent the contamination of the United States by union with people 
 who thrive on war, who believe in war, who prepare for war, who pray 
 for war and whose business is war. "Let us beware of military glory," 
 said Lincoln. *'It is a rainbow made of drops of blood. Like the 
 fascination of the serpent, it charms only to destroy.'* He would not 
 have permitted the Union of his country with people who do not beheve 
 in religious toleration and in the equality of man, Lincoln, this bewilder- 
 ingly original genius, had a peculiar method of minding his own affairs 
 and of having the United States mind its own affairs; he would have 
 actually advocated the principle of educating America first and enlighten- 
 ing America first, of saving America first, and of making the people of 
 America respected by being tolerant to the stranger in their midst, before 
 he would move to participate in the business of any other country or 
 any other nation. He would have been adamant on the question of the 
 Monroe Doctrine and would not have thrown it into the ever-boiling 
 cauldron of European politics. This statesman of the masses would have 
 been a mighty helper in the struggle between capital and labor ; he would 
 have been a tower of strength for the oppressed of every nationality. 
 He would have laughed out of existence secret organizations as inimical 
 to our form of government, and would have led them all into the temple 
 of the Union where all are equal, where all have equal opportunity, and 
 he would have pointed to himself as he often did when he said : *T happen 
 temporarily to occupy the White House. I am a living witness that any 
 one of your children may look to come here as my father's child has." — 
 and it might have been his life's work had he been spared from the bullet 
 of the assassin to give every child of this broad land just that opportunity. 
 He would not have made a mockery of the majesty of the law by enforc- 
 ing one law and neglecting others. He would have continued to act with 
 malice towards none and charity to all. Justice, justice shalt thou pursue 
 — would have been Lincoln's policy. Not one-sided justice — not justice 
 directed at one single commandment — enforce all the laws impartially 
 and do not prefer one to the other — for you would then be partial to one 
 class of criminal, more lenient with one than with the other — a policy 
 which ultimately leads to injustice. Practice justice for the sake of 
 justice, and not because of popular acclaim — ''Let us have faith that right 
 makes might and in that faith let us to the end dare to do our duty as 
 we understand it." 
 
 12 
 
If Lincoln were here today he would not require the consent of an 
 ecumenical conference to give him permission to criticize an unfair 
 law, or a law unfairly enacted. He did not hesitate to criticize the Dred 
 Scott decision in the most rigorous way — he went further; he charged 
 an understanding between the dramatic personae, in no unmistakable 
 manner — see how he flays Taney and Douglas, Pierce and Buchanan. 
 "We cannot absolutely know that these exact adaptations are the result 
 of pre-concert, but when we see a lot of framed timbers, different por- 
 tions of which we know have been gotten out at different times and 
 places, and by different workmen — Stephen, Franklin, Roger and James, 
 for instance; and when we see these timbers joined together, and see 
 they exactly make the frame of a house or a mill, all the tenons and 
 mortices exactly fitting, and all the lengths and proportions of the dif- 
 ferent pieces exactly adapted to their respective places, and not a piece 
 too many or too few, — not omitting even the scaffolding — or if a single 
 piece be lacking, we see the place in the frame exactly fitted and pre- 
 pared to yet bring such pieces in — in such a case we feel 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 com- 
 mon plan or draft drawn before the first blow was struck." If for no 
 other reason, his presence in these days would have been a dispensation, 
 for he would have demonstrated the fallacy which has become a great 
 shibboleth of good citizenship — that a bad law, known to be bad, must 
 be enforced ad nauseam in order to educate a community for its repeal. 
 He did not belong to the class who said : "My country, right or wrong — 
 nevertheless my country." He said: "My country must ever be right, 
 and when wrong must acknowledge that it is wrong and must be set 
 right." — as he did with the Trent Affair, when the entire North fairly 
 howled approval of the Captain's conduct when he seized the Southern 
 commissioners. We cannot imagine Lincoln standing by and knowing 
 that an idea or an enactment or a bill or a law was wrong — and stand 
 idly by and be cowed into worshipping that law. And yet no human 
 being ever breathed who had a greater respect for law. We all know 
 his stand on immigration, how he had not the heart to do aught which 
 would prevent anyone, who fled from persecution or who came here to 
 better his lot, from coming here. He knew nothing of Nordic or South 
 European — all he knew was that one God made us all. Now, some of 
 us have discovered what he said, and how farseeing his immigration 
 policy was may be seen from the united North which fought the Civil 
 War and then the Great War in our own day — the roar of cannon knows 
 no distinction between Hollander, English, French or German descen- 
 dants of our early immigrants ! Some of us still recall the inspired war 
 cartoon showing the fusion of all nationalities in the defense of our 
 country — ^the young men with those unpronounceable names who fought 
 
 13 
 
so nobly and so well. Would he look with favor upon an alien registra- 
 tion law? He certainly would not; he would write another letter to 
 Speed, which would read as follows: 
 
 . Our progress in degeneracy appears to be pretty rapid. 
 As a Nation we began by declaring that 'All men are created free and 
 equal.' We now practically read it: 'AH men are created equal, except 
 negroes.' When Know-nothings get control — 'All men are created equal 
 except negroes, foreigners and Catholics!' When it comes to this, I 
 shall prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence 
 of loving liberty — to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken 
 pure, and without even the base alloy of hypocrisy." 
 
 He would have stamped out religious persecution in every shape as 
 he stamped out sedition and secession. He pleaded for peaceful solution 
 of the overwhelming problem which confronted him — and Lincoln's diffi- 
 culties at that time have never been adequately portrayed — ^and when that 
 failed, and when the blind Southern leaders, bent on secession, became 
 the aggressors, he firmly and unflaggingly saw the War to a successful 
 end. Nor was he diverted from his purpose by other entanglements. 
 "One war at a time," was his slogan; but he was prepared for the next 
 problem the moment the War was over. He would have ended the 
 cowardly attack of sects levelled against their neighbors simply because 
 of religious differences or because of the differences in time of their 
 arrival on these shores. He would have spoken directly and clearly as 
 he did when he delivered his "House divided" speech in spite of the 
 advice of his entire party of advisors and managers who wailed that 
 defeat was certain should he utter those fatal words — which he did utter 
 — and which were heard by an aroused people from coast to coast. His 
 living words about our attitude towards negroes and Catholics just 
 quoted are ample proof of this claim as to what he would have done were 
 he in office today on the underlying problem of toleration. 
 
 He would have been for arbitration, universal in its application ; not 
 arbitration with loaded dice; arbitration such as would insure not only 
 all people of the earth an honest verdict, but which would protect the 
 United States from envious and rapacious claims and plots and schemes 
 of the war-impoverished peoples of the world, whose sole aim in life 
 seems to be the unloading of all the troubles of the world upon our heads. 
 He would have seen that ; he would have understood that ; and he, with 
 his amazing personality would have accomplished what seems to be so 
 hard for us to understand and cope with. 
 
 He would not have permitted the Civil Service to become the Frank- 
 enstein which it has become. "Appoint that man Colonel of the regiment 
 regardless of whether he knows the color of Caesar's hair." — is so 
 
 14 
 
eloquent a commentary as to what he would have done with the entire 
 breed of the reformers of our service — who have reformed and improved 
 it to such a point that they have driven out of political life every up- 
 standing and unbendable mind, so many of whom we met in office in 
 Lincoln's day. He would not have tolerated in our service the introduc- 
 tion of the principle based upon the legend of the visitor's bed in Sodom 
 and Gomorrah — a, bed of one given size — prepared for the unfortunate 
 guest who would sojourn in those then up-to-date municipalities. The 
 Civil Service cuts off his legs if he is too long or stretches his limbs if 
 he is too short. He must fit in this Civil Service bed of Sodom and 
 Gomorrah ; for the Civil Service man has measured the bed and the berth 
 and there is the end. Lincoln would never have subscribed to such a 
 theory. "See and speak to this man." — read many of his comments on 
 petitions for all manner of requests to the government. Nowadays we 
 don't see and we don't speak to anyone — the examination paper as marked 
 and appraised by an omniscient examiner in the absence of the victim, is 
 decisive and final and unappealable. 
 
 Foreign debts? Did we pay our debts of 1776 to France and to 
 the others? Bring forth the records — Lincoln never would have heeded 
 such much prayed for international disavowal of debts ; Lincoln himself 
 paid every dollar of the debts incurred by his drunken partner, although 
 it took him twelve years to do it. Such anxious and premeditated volun- 
 tary bankruptcies of debtors for loans which were borrowed in the name 
 of liberty and for the purpose of achieving freedom from the oppressor 
 and which were promised to be repaid with great solemnity by these 
 countries with interest and with gratitude. So-called gratitude we get, but 
 neither principle nor interest seems to be forthcoming from any of them, 
 excepting from England. But all of them are even now trying to bring 
 us into their League in order not only not to pay what is due to us, but 
 use us as the general messenger and the general utility man, as their 
 overwhelming majority therein might direct. 
 
 We can sum up Lincoln's attitude on all these questions by a single 
 quotation — a complete philosophy of life — his chief concern in life: 
 
 "A struggle for maintaining in the world that form and substance 
 of government whose leading object is to elevate the condition of men, 
 to lift artificial weights from all shoulders, to clear the paths of laudable 
 pursuits for all, to afford all an unfettered start and a fair chance in the 
 race of life." 
 
 And to those who are discontent with limiting the sphere of action 
 of our great Emancipator and are bound to make him a citizen of the 
 world, I have but to say that his resplendent example alone will suffice 
 for those other nations of the world who would have some of his glory 
 
 15 
 
and who would have a share in his great heritage which he left to all 
 the children of men and as of the great Jewish lawgiver of old, we can 
 say of him: 
 
 '* . . . he is more than ours as we are more 
 
 Than yet the world dares dream. His stature grows 
 
 With that illimitable state 
 
 Whose sovereignty ordains no tribute shore, 
 
 And borderland of hate. 
 
 But grounds its justice in the joy it sows. 
 
 His spirit is still a power to emancipate 
 
 Bondage — more base, being more insidious, 
 
 Than serfdom — ^that cries out in the midst of us 
 
 For virtue, born of opportunity. 
 
 And manhood, weighed in honest human worth. 
 
 And freedom, best in labor. He stands forth 
 
 'Mongst nations old — a new-world Abraham, 
 
 The patriarch of peoples still to be . . ." 
 
 16 
 
i 
 
LIBRARY 
 
 OF THE 
 
 I'i'JiVERSlTY OF ILLIf^OIS 
 
 The Many-Sided Lincoln 
 
 What Would He Do Were He 
 Here Today ? 
 
 "By 
 
 EMANUEL HERTZ 
 
 LIBRARY 
 OF THE 
 
 AN ADDRESS DEUVERED AT WASHINGTON HEIGHTS CONGREGATION 
 
 FEBRUARY 12. 1926 
 
MJODMiJ aaai 
 
 STiI3H J3UV1A 
 
 An edition of 1000 copies of this address has been 
 printed of which this copy is No. 
 
 noiTADaaowoD axHDiaH VLOTOvumAV/ ta aaaavkiHa zaaaaoA wa 
 
^H^^^>^ LIBRARY 
 
 - C-ifOp ^ Ifl-^IVERSITY OF JLUHOIS 
 
 THE MANY-SIDED LINCOLN — WHAT 
 WOULD HE DO WERE HE HERE TODAY? 
 
 By EMANUEL HERTZ 
 
 (An address delivered in honor of the memory of Abraham Lincoln 
 at the Annual Services of the Forum of Washington Heights 
 Congregation in the City of New York on February 12, 1926.) 
 
 HE whimsical caricaturist who draws an array of studies of 
 possible portraits of Abraham Lincoln by Murillo, Van Dyke, 
 Velasquez, Michael Angelo, Raphael, Hals, Whistler, Millet 
 and Rembrandt, each one after the manner of his age and 
 after the mode then prevalent in his country — if these masters had indeed 
 painted Lincoln — has but exemplified what is happening to the great ,War 
 President at the hands of novelist-historians, and biographer-poets. They 
 summon up before our gaze an Abraham Lincoln who never lived and 
 who, had he read some of these effusions, would have been puzzled as 
 to who was really the subject of these biographical phantasmagorias. 
 On the theory of producing something new, we have these later-day 
 biographers rhapsodize about Lincoln's extremely prosaic childhood and 
 reenact an Iliad of woe through which he forged his weary way, and 
 this array of authors has drawn out the history of his family for seven 
 generations with a meticulous minuteness rarely lavished upon the scion 
 of an imperial family — while Lincoln himself spoke' of his family's life 
 story as "The short and simple annals of the poor." But the spirit of 
 piling Ossa on Pelion will not down and by sheer force of volume of 
 research Lincoln is forced into a heraldic Almanac de Gotha of his own. 
 But this wise man of the Civil War era has left an effective antidote to 
 all such futile effort — ^to make him appear other than he really was. He 
 wrote and he spokef his philosophy of life, his ideals and theory of gov- 
 ernment, his ideas of right and wrong, his views of the duty of the 
 citizen to his country, and the relationships of man to man, of employer 
 to employee, of commander to common soldier, of President to his 
 Cabinet, to his Congress, to his War Governors, he wrote these thoughts 
 and reflections and duties and rights into his addresses, into his messages 
 and into his lectures and into his letters. Examine an index to his col- 
 lected works — to those which have appeared in print, and you will se^ 
 lucid expressions of opinion on a multiplicity of subjects. Read the 
 speech or the letter or the message covei-ing any particular subject, and 
 you will find a gem — a nugget of pure gold direct from the heart of 
 
 989200 
 
Abraham Lincoln. And but for the lamentable lack of study of those 
 precious works, we have seen grow up in the minds of many, a cadaverous- 
 looking charcoal sketch of the great American — with one or two fables or 
 events tacked on to the caricature of what was as noble an apparition 
 when seen in all its remarkable manifestations as is the impression made 
 upon our minds by the undimmed splendors of the rising sun. Close upon 
 those romancers who persist in having the babbling brook, the song of 
 the birds, the whistling of the wind, the glimmer of moonlight on the 
 waves of the rivulet as indispensable parts of the landscape traversed by 
 the youthful Lincoln, are those who profess to find that he has excelled 
 in one, and in only one field of endeavor. These now profess and proceed 
 to demonstrate that this or that particular specialty in which Lincoln 
 excelled, enabled him in after life to solve the problems which he was 
 called upon to cope with. The ignorance and arrogance of this class of 
 biographers and romancers has actually diverted the gaze of the multi- 
 tude from the real character of Lincoln. The reverend homage paid to 
 the printed word simply because it is printed, simply helps along these 
 multitudes of inventions. Every season brings its five'-foot bookshelf of 
 Lincoln books and addresses, and they all look distressingly alike in 
 workmanship. 
 
 Why not, in justice to him and all those who ought to know him 
 as he was, go back to the source, the only source of all our reliable in- 
 formation? Why not call upon all who know or have a letter or docu- 
 ment which would shed any light on Lincoln, to produce and publish it? 
 Let us study Abraham Lincoln as he was. Let us hold him up to our 
 children in his real habiliments of body and of mind? Let us start with 
 the young Lincoln in the Illinois Assembly; let us follow him through 
 five years of legislative life at his desk in the legislature — the desk which 
 is even now looking for a permanent resting place. Let us read the 
 letters, the speeches and the Lyceum addresses of that period. Let us 
 follow him as he studied law from the moment he found a copy of 
 Blackstone at the bottom of the old barrel. Let us follow him as he 
 practiced law for many years and come to know Lincoln the lawyer. 
 Oh, what a wonderful tale — truthful to the letter, can be told about this 
 young champion of deserving causes — this champion of the widow and 
 guardian angel of the orphan — this great and good man who strove for 
 justice, with truth — truth, the seal of God — as his lodestone. He would 
 right a wrong, he would struggle for an unfortunate client — always 
 provided that he was convinced of his honesty and of the justice of his 
 cause. He could not last as the advocate of evil. He withdrew and 
 cleansed himself of the contact with evil. He became the jury lawyer of 
 his day in the State of Illinois. And yet no man ever lived who would have 
 made a better Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. 
 President Taft — who picked and appointed more Judges than any other 
 
President save only Washington — is authority for this claim, and Senator 
 Beveridge in his immortal life of the great Chief Justice pictures Lincoln 
 as an almost indistinguishable colleague and companion of one for the 
 other. But all of this does not demonstrate that Lincoln was a great 
 lawyer only — a lawyer to the exclusion of all else. It was one of the 
 many occupations thrust upon him by a Divine Providence, preparing 
 him for the greater tasks, for the more exacting ordeals, yet to come. 
 We find another student of the great Commoner studying Lincoln's 
 political activities from his appearance on the platform during his first 
 candidacy for office down to his re-election for the Presidency in 1864. 
 He will examine the newspapers of a quarter of a century in a score of 
 States in order to demonstrate that it was not Lincoln the lawyer, but 
 Lincoln the political leader or statesman who really made the great im- 
 pression on his times. 
 
 An old veteran of the Civil War attempts to demonstrate that the 
 great joint debate was really the climax of his career and he digests the 
 opinions of his contemporaries and of contemporary journals to show 
 that his thesis is the only one that fits the great debater, the great tribune 
 of the common people. 
 
 There are others who were slow to recognize his great worth and 
 who began to see him and know him under the great storm and stress of 
 the Civil War — in that beleagured city — Washington. His dealings with 
 a refractory Congress, his troubles with Northern States, loyal, but slow 
 in responding to the call of the Union. His countering the assaults of the 
 disloyal in his own ranks, his warding off blows for misguided friends, 
 his course of education of an entire country — that the Union must be 
 preserved — presented an entirely new theory to the historian of the Civil 
 War. He discovered a figure towering over and above all others around 
 him — a sublime figure under every phase of the cataclysm — a figure heroic, 
 sublime, majestic, holding to the steering wheel of the Union and steering 
 for safety, to victory. This man is reaching the conclusion Seward 
 reached — "We must revise our opinion of this man." We knew him not. 
 We have a great War President — uncanny in his knowledge and ability 
 to cope with so many distracting problems at the same time — there is 
 something superhuman about it all. Stanton, the imperious, is subdued; 
 Seward, the all- wise is awed ; Wells, the faithful is beginning to see a 
 great light. Senators, congressmen, governors, generals unwilling but 
 inevitably, are drawn by the giant magnet of common sense, of thorough- 
 ness of human sympathy — all are drawn on for help, for guidance, for 
 information, for re-heartening, for strength, for faith in the ultimate 
 victory of the Union under its great pilot. Hence the evolution of 
 Lincoln, the statesman, the great War President, the master of men. 
 (What a misnomer to be applied to that humble burden bearer.) 
 
The leaders of religion are now turning their gaze upon the lonely 
 spokesman of the Union — who speaks in the language of the Prophets, 
 who seems to have sprung from between the pages of the Bible — for 
 does he not use Bible phrases, parables, nuggets of wisdom like the 
 Lawgiver of old? Did he not see the Union on fire but not destroyed — 
 the bush burning but not destroyed by the fire? Did he not hear the 
 call from amid the flames of the embers which made up the toppling 
 Union — "Go and save the Union?" And did he not answer joyfully, 
 anxiously: "Here am I?" Preacher and teacher, priest and religious 
 leader recognize a kinship between his President and his Prophets and 
 his saints and his martyrs, those who made up the list of those who 
 strove to make man free and independent and enlightened. They begin 
 to recognize a kinship to Abraham, to Moses, to Paul, to Savonarola 
 (what a striking likeness of emaciated profile), to Wyclif, to Cromwell, 
 to Calvin, to William the Silent, whose taking off the little children 
 bewailed as did an entire grief -stricken country bewail the untimely death 
 of his modern replica; and when he was consigned as belonging to the 
 ages — every teacher and preacher of God's Word paid his share in a 
 universal requiem rendered to the martyred hero of the epic called 
 America. 
 
 The stylist and scholar, the student of language who is freer from 
 charlatanism than most people, begins to study the text. He reads Lincoln's 
 addresses, his messages and his letters. He asks himself where did this 
 man derive his pure English style ? How is it that he is so free from the 
 baneful style of political speaker and writer? How brief, how simple, 
 how pure, how clear his thought and his style and his mode of expres- 
 sion? He now tries to find a prototype and he goes far back to ancient 
 Greece and finds in Pericles the only man to whose oration he can com- 
 pare this novel style and Aesop, the only one whose tales resemble Honest 
 Abe's. Few spirits have spoken thus — two or three in all the intervening 
 ages. This man is a great exemplar of English prose style; but hold, 
 some of it reads like blank verse. What a wonderful man is this who 
 in the short space of time mastered the English language within which 
 to clothe these undying ideas and ideals. The literary critic now reads 
 his letters and begins to understand why the newspapermen of his day 
 — and there were giants in that profession in those days, demanded letters 
 from Lincoln on all the many questions and problems of the day — because 
 all read them, all quoted them. He hardly opened his lips but he said 
 something which will not die. Was there ever such another letter-writer ? 
 Letters in which sentiments ran the gamut of all the emotions of a bleed- 
 ing, embattled nation struggling through the darkness to light, through 
 rebellion and treason to victory and union. The Epistles of Lincoln — 
 what an alluring title to some new novelist-historian of a great national 
 hero and martyr ! 
 
 6 
 
And now come the mothers, the heartbr^ajcpn |T)pt!^r^^j j^h^^pgliji^- 
 stricken mothers, the tear-bhnded mothers, the PA^e, ei^gi;s^t^4vM^Ut^^^f^ 
 mothers, they came to Lincoln, to Mr. Lincoln,-^ tg^j^ ^?jp^^^f5^-^^ir€|4> 
 sleepless, exhausted, red-lidded, hollow cheeked/, {t}iiftj;bi^cJp9ri^>^^§l'jF.9^ 
 humanity, literally dropping under his great burdfapoiMd fe©??-V^h^^ 
 mothers, and hears their heartbreaking appeals oic^vfiT^^^pg ^^^<^^\gp^ 
 of their boys — the victims of army discipline thp^glj^^jtli^v/age^s^TT^i^ 
 Father Abraham, but lately bereft of his own chil(}Tr0!^l?dl^/v6)fllffifl^lfcy 
 as he hears these heartbroken mothers of the Uniov^tHl^drfMs^h^Vd^' 
 spring, and he pardons and he pardons and he pardQ^i^Q^i^t^loA^^iJI^^J^pljd 
 in him the Angel of Mercy at the throne of the Most[>IJjgl| gl^e^jdi^J^tfef 
 pardon for all. He pardons, while the generals threat^^/j^p-^tf^^y ^W^^ 
 Stanton growls over the undermined morale of the arrqj^. w4e>W^^fn^h?ik 
 tered discipline. "Stanton, is not this boy of more use jt%|)^-,^^^%(5)^ 
 earth than under earth?" — and so we behold the subli^[^j^^ji|^^j5^ 
 Lincoln, the Pardoner — eclipsing that of the lawyer, of ^fee f^Jj^gi^, 
 of the debater, of the legislator, of the statesman, of th^3p:fj^jutfi]tr.f0^jqif 
 the stylist, of the letterwriter, and for a moment we behol^ ii^jj^j^tgpfiSji- 
 tion the two great solemn pictures — Lincoln the Comforter of^^y^i^jtl^l- 
 of the pardoned boy, and Napoleon standing rigid over fj^r&leepiu^ 
 sentinel who awakes and beholds his emperor on guard — and higjj-revo.Gja,!- 
 ble doom pictured in the inexorable features of his emperor ! Choose the 
 
 picture which appeals more to the universal human heart. .', , „ 
 
 ^ ^^ lid ballBD 
 
 And so, step by step, we find the pardoner of the young:-' feoM^ 
 become the pardoner of the entire South — a friend of Jeffersoft 'Da'i^si, 
 and of Lee, and of Stephens, whenever they are ready to utter the i^oM^ 
 "Union". And then his task is done — the task for which he linge^M^Uh 
 entire lifetime — the task for which he prepared in the country stof^, 'Mi 
 the post office, in the legislature, in the surveyor's office, in the couft^, 
 on the hustings, in Congress, in the debate with Douglas, in C66p&r 
 Union — the task of grasping the wheel of the Ship of State surrourtd^ 
 by rocks, by wreckers, by lightning — steering clear through the Sc^lfe 
 of secession and the Charybdis of disloyalty in the North — this task doftfe 
 — completely done, and he was no more, for like Enoch, God took hiM. 
 This many-sided messenger of God sent to right the wrongs of a race— 
 held in subjugation, in defiance of all that was right and of all that 
 was just — indefiance of a higher law that was becoming dominant in 
 the land, although it required a repetition of the ancient plague — that all 
 the first-born of the oppressors would have to be slain before the children 
 of bondage would be let go. 
 
 Let us all repair to the great quarry, his recorded words, his preach- 
 ments, his maxims, and let us complete the great structure, let us gather 
 from all the comers of the globe his written words and complete the 
 
 7 
 
task so well begun. Let us classify all he said and all he preached — 
 and what will result? We will erect a structure to which all the people 
 of the earth can come for guidance and inspiration. Would a political 
 leader seek light and leading let him study the political utterances of our 
 many-sided Lincoln. Would an executive not merely ask himself per- 
 functorily, "What would Lincoln do today?" let him read and have his 
 answer. Would you have patent for loyalty and patriotism let him read 
 Lincoln who declared that he would be the last man to defy the enemies 
 of his country when all others had given up. Would you desire to find 
 a method of exposing a false prophet of a wicked cause — study his joint 
 debate with Douglas. Would you know how to immortalize those who 
 gave up their lives that the Union might live, go with me to Gettysburg — 
 and in solemn silence meditate what he there spoke for eternity. Would 
 you know how to cleanse the Augean stables of a putrid and treasonable 
 administration — see what he did when he displaced the infirm and petulant 
 Buchanan, on the point of surrendering all to the enemies of his country. 
 Would you learn how to manage an administration open to assault from 
 without and from within with those closest to you trying to embroil you 
 in universal war — see what Lincoln did from the moment he came to 
 Washington through the long and weary years of the nerve- wrecking and 
 heart-breaking war. 
 
 Lincoln, the Diplomat! How they would have smiled had someone 
 called him that ten years earlier — divined what the rascally Napoleon 
 was doing with the agents of the Confederacy — Lincoln, the diplomat 
 solved and disposed of the Trent Affair and confounded the conspiracy 
 of Gladstone, Palmerston and Russell to recognize the Confederacy by 
 timing the issuing of his Emancipation Proclamation, not to please 
 Wendell Phillips or Beecher or Greeley, but in time to prevent action 
 by an English Cabinet called for the purpose of recognizing the Con- 
 federacy — he made it clear that taking such action would place Christian 
 England in the position of the advocate and champion of the whipping 
 post, of the auction block and of the Moloch of slavery. Diplomat, 
 indeed, was Lincoln, who picked Dayton for Paris and Sanford at Brus- 
 sels, who gathered all the munitions available on the Continent and 
 Adams for England in time to tell his lordship that releasing the Alabama 
 was war! And on the 117th Anniversary of his birth. Sir Frederick 
 Maurice, one who judged the military events of the Great War with 
 knowledge and keen discernment, finds a great military authority in 
 our great War President who learned the great lesson of War and of 
 warfare in an amazingly short time and from a military standpoint he 
 knew more and understood more than all his civil and military advisors, 
 one who followed understanding^ every great battle from Chancellors- 
 ville and Antietam through Gettysburg and Vicksburg, down to Appomat- 
 tox. Lincoln knew the war map better than his generals and had his 
 
 8 
 
advice been followed on a number of occasions, the war would have been 
 shortened by years. 
 
 But in no capacity does he appear to greater advantage than he does 
 in the White House — the mecca for every human being, either singly or 
 in droves, seeking advice, having a request, an idea, a petition, or a 
 message. What a motley number they were — foreign ministers, war 
 correspondents, governors. Southern sympathizers, generals, soldiers, 
 preachers, teachers, journalists, financiers, the entire army personnel, 
 cabinet officers, senators, political leaders — all came early and often to 
 advise, cajole, petition, harass and annoy the man of many sorrows, the 
 man of many pardons, who was trying in spite of them all, to do the 
 work he was called upon to perform. All of these came and saw and 
 heard for themselves what this many-sided man said and did and accom- 
 plished. A great many of these have in one form or another recorded 
 their impressions of the man, recorded their recollections of how he 
 acquitted himself under the most trying ordeals and all seem to agree 
 that this was no ordinary man. This man, who saw all, who heard all, 
 who endured slander and abuse such as has never been levelled against 
 any one human being — and finally convinced even those of their iniquity 
 — this man who was never found wanting, who was never unprepared — 
 this was indeed no ordinary man. 
 
 And we, the heirs of this great soul, we should dedicate ourselves 
 to the task of rescuing Abraham Lincoln from the hands of his detractors. 
 We, the citizens of the land he died to preserve, owe it to his memory to 
 gather lovingly all the shreds and all the words, all the sayings and all 
 the precepts that fell from his lips wherever recorded and preserved and 
 demand in the name of justice, in the name of fairness, that all the 
 documents, letters, legal papers, inscriptions, passes, comments and 
 speeches in existence anywhere, everywhere, be produced for publication 
 to the end that we might reproduce the dead leader to our people in all 
 his many-sided endowments with all the multitude of kindnesses, of 
 virtues he displayed, as engraved in the missives which came from his 
 heart to every other wounded heart, to every sorrowing mother, to every 
 war-weary patriot — who asked for and received the treasured words of 
 consolation written in that beautiful script by the hand that was guided 
 by the great immortal soul in the White House. 
 
 And now what would this many-sided Lincoln have done with the 
 problems of the day? is a question which every now and then one of our 
 Lincoln Day orators, one of our statesmen in responsible positions asks. 
 An answer to that question has been attempted a great many times but 
 very few answers have been given in the light of Lincoln's performances. 
 The sad and distressing phase about the whole thing seems to be that 
 
all those who ask the question, not unlike his biographers, studiously 
 refrain from reading Lincoln's speeches and letters. They refrain from 
 studying his political acts and performances. In the light of these we 
 can truthfully state that Lincoln certainly would not divide his followers 
 into patricians and plebeians. Lincoln certainly would not have divided 
 the voters of this country into a fighting organization and into an office- 
 holding organization. The man who would fight the battles of the Re- 
 public; the man who would preach Lincoln's doctrine would not be dis- 
 qualified by his preachment from carrying out Lincoln's policies in office. 
 
 A political leader with Abraham Lincoln was a man to be consid- 
 ered and consulted — Read the letters to Thurlow Weed, to Senator 
 Cameron, to Lyman Trumbull, to Hannibal Hamlin and to a host of 
 others. And it goes without saying that the political party today which 
 practices that sane and practical political principle of Abraham Lincoln's, 
 of having the preachers of political policy become the performers in 
 office, that party succeeds and continues to succeed ; but the party which 
 has one portion do the work of electing and then is made to make way 
 for people unheard of until after election, and who by some necromancy 
 convince or bedevil the appointing power that they, and not the workers, 
 should fill the offices; the party which practices this false political prin- 
 ciple fails at succeeding elections and continues to go down to defeat 
 until it ceases to be a factor; for it does not deserve to live. 
 
 And when the political leader nowadays asks : ''What would Lincoln 
 do if he were here today?" we can tell him that Lincoln would do just 
 that — reward the deserving political worker with political preferment after 
 he had participated and made possible the victory of the party. 
 
 Different panaceas for eliminating corruption in high places received 
 but scant consideration from that direct political descendant of old Samuel 
 Adams who said: "Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty." And if 
 Lincoln could busy himself with politics every day of the year he could 
 see no reason why others should not do the same thing. Lincoln believed 
 in a trained political party — lieutenants who would not only appreciate 
 the principles the party stood for, but who were trained and prepared to 
 carry out those party principles in such a manner as would result in 
 strengthening the Union. Political volunteers to him were as good and 
 as bad as volunteers in the army who came for thirty or sixty days and 
 whose one thought during their period of volunteering was the anxiety 
 to return home. It was only after the army was drilled and trained and 
 made permanent that victories were made possible. 
 
 And if Lincoln were here today he would preach and practice that 
 only trained political leaders are worth anything in our body politic and 
 that the volunteers of a week or ten days before election, for the purpose 
 
 10 
 
of filling the office, if successful, would make no impression upon that 
 master politician today any more than they would have in his own time. 
 
 The questioner as to what Lincoln would do on different occasions 
 might well be answered by referring him to what Lincoln said and did. 
 His tariff policy was clear and made clear by the tersest and clearest 
 statement — which once more shows the cloudless lucidity of his mind. 
 What would Lincoln have done about National Defence and National 
 participation in international affairs? The answer to the first question 
 when tested by his actual words and deeds can be found in the fact that 
 he organized the greatest army and navy any country ever had up to his 
 day. And the other question, which so many have attempted to answer 
 for him, can easily be answered by anyone who knows what a firm be- 
 liever Lincoln was in the Declaration of Independence, in the policies 
 of Washington and Jefferson and Marshall as to the duties and as to 
 the functions of our country among the nations of the world; and it is 
 little less than sacrilege for anyone to say that Lincoln would have 
 advocated entry of our country into the League of Nations and thus 
 become subordinated and lost in the Babel of voices and vortex of 
 selfish passions which dominate and rule that incongruous institution. 
 Lincoln knew well what the Christian statesmen of England were at- 
 tempting to do with the help of the diplomats of France and the other 
 countries on the Continent. Gladstone and Palmerston and Russell and 
 the vast majority of the English and French intelligencia were ready 
 to gloat over the destruction of the Union, and came within a hair's 
 breadth of realizing their ardent hopes and ambitions. For anyone to 
 say that Father Abraham would have consented to have his country, 
 his United States, have one voice among fifty-two others, one voice 
 against fifty-two others in a league which is represented by an over- 
 whelming majority of peoples — primitive, selfish, under-educated and 
 unprincipled and unscrupulous in their diplomacy — for any man to 
 imagine that Abraham Lincoln would have ever exposed the country for 
 which he fought and died to the ipse dixit of an institution of this kind, 
 sprung into being in the last moments of the expiring Versailles Confer- 
 ence which met in a spirit of revenge, which acted in the spirit of a 
 conqueror over the vanquished, which tried to extract from a conquered 
 foe the penalties of wars and of differences of centuries, has not read 
 and has not understood the words of Abraham Lincoln. Abraham Lincoln, 
 with his immeasurable sympathy, never believed in the principle of voi 
 victis — woe to the conquered — and it was from that atmosphere that the 
 League of Nations sprang. That alone would have made it impossible 
 for a man of the mighty toleration, of the great love, of the great heart 
 of Abraham Lincoln, to participate in any such conference or become a 
 member of the offspring of such a conference. 
 
 11 
 
To anyone who has read his letters and his addresses on recon- 
 struction of the conquered South, to anyone who knows that he had 
 nothing but the hand of fellowship for Lee, for Jefferson Davis, for 
 Benjamin and for Johnson, if they but subscribed to the oath of fealty, 
 it is unthinkable to believe that Lincoln would have become a partner 
 in the bloody military cabals of the Balkan States and their European co- 
 conspirators among the greater powers who control them. 
 
 If Lincoln were alive today and in a position of power, he would 
 prevent the contamination of the United States by union with people 
 who thrive on war, who believe in war, who prepare for war, who pray 
 for war and whose business is war. "Let us beware of military glory," 
 said Lincoln. "It is a rainbow made of drops of blood. Like the 
 fascination of the serpent, it charms only to destroy.'* He would not 
 have permitted the Union of his country with people who do not believe 
 in religious toleration and in the equality of man, Lincoln, this bewilder- 
 ingly original genius, had a peculiar method of minding his own affairs 
 and of having the United States mind its own affairs; he would have 
 actually advocated the principle of educating America first and enlighten- 
 ing America first, of saving America first, and of making the people of 
 America respected by being tolerant to the stranger in their midst, before 
 he would move to participate in the business of any other country or 
 any other nation. He would have been adamant on the question of the 
 Monroe Doctrine and would not have thrown it into the ever-boiling 
 cauldron of European politics. This statesman of the masses would have 
 been a mighty helper in the struggle between capital and labor ; he would 
 have been a tower of strength for the oppressed of every nationality. 
 He would have laughed out of existence secret organizations as inimical 
 to our form of government, and would have led them all into the temple 
 of the Union where all are equal, where all have equal opportunity, and 
 he would have pointed to himself as he often did when he said : "I happen 
 temporarily to occupy the White House. I am a living witness that any 
 one of your children may look to come here as my father's child has." — 
 and it might have been his life's work had he been spared from the bullet 
 of the assassin to give every child of this broad land just that opportunity. 
 He would not have made a mockery of the majesty of the law by enforc- 
 ing one law and neglecting others. He would have continued to act with 
 malice towards none and charity to all. Justice, justice shalt thou pursue 
 — would have been Lincoln's policy. Not one-sided justice — not justice 
 directed at one single commandment — enforce all the laws impartially 
 and do not prefer one to the other — for you would then be partial to one 
 class of criminal, more lenient with one than with the other — a policy 
 which ultimately leads to injustice. Practice justice for the sake of 
 justice, and not because of popular acclaim — "Let us have faith that right 
 makes might and in that faith let us to the end dare to do our duty as 
 we understand it." 
 
 12 
 
If Lincoln were here today he would not require the consent of an 
 ecumenical conference to give him permission to criticize an unfair 
 law, or a law unfairly enacted. He did not hesitate to criticize the Dred 
 Scott decision in the most rigorous way — he went further; he charged 
 an understanding between the dramatic personae, in no unmistakable 
 manner — see how he flays Taney and Douglas, Pierce and Buchanan. 
 "We cannot absolutely know that these exact adaptations are the result 
 of pre-concert, but when we see a lot of framed timbers, different por- 
 tions of which we know have been gotten out at different times and 
 places, and by different workmen — Stephen, Franklin, Roger and James, 
 for instance; and when we see these timbers joined together, and see 
 they exactly make the frame of a house or a mill, all the tenons and 
 mortices exactly fitting, and all the lengths and proportions of the dif- 
 ferent pieces exactly adapted to their respective places, and not a piece 
 too many or too few, — not omitting even the scaffolding — or if a single 
 piece be lacking, we see the place in the frame exactly fitted and pre- 
 pared to yet bring such pieces in — in such a case we feel 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 com- 
 mon plan or draft drawn before the first blow was struck." If for no 
 other reason, his presence in these days would have been a disp>ensation, 
 for he would have demonstrated the fallacy which has become a great 
 shibboleth of good citizenship — that a bad law, known to be bad, must 
 be enforced ad nauseam in order to educate a community for its repeal. 
 He did not belong to the class who said : "My country, right or wrong — 
 nevertheless my country." He said : "My country must ever be right, 
 and when wrong must acknowledge that it is wrong and must be set 
 right." — as he did with the Trent Affair, when the entire North fairly 
 howled approval of the Captain's conduct when he seized the Southern 
 commissioners. We cannot imagine Lincoln standing by and knowing 
 that an idea or an enactment or a bill or a law was wrong — and stand 
 idly by and be cowed into worshipping that law. And yet no human 
 being ever breathed who had a greater respect for law. We all know 
 his stand on immigration, how he had not the heart to do aught which 
 would prevent anyone, who fled from persecution or who came here to 
 better his lot, from coming here. He knew nothing of Nordic or South 
 European — all he knew was that one God made us all. Now, some of 
 us have discovered what he said, and how farseeing his immigration 
 policy was may be seen from the united North which fought the Civil 
 War and then the Great War in our own day — the roar of cannon knows 
 no distinction between Hollander, English, French or German descen- 
 dants of our early immigrants ! Some of us still recall the inspired war 
 cartoon showing the fusion of all nationalities in the defense of our 
 country — ^the young men with those unpronounceable names who fought 
 
 13 
 
so nobly and so well. Would he look with favor upon an alien registra- 
 tion law? He certainly would not; he would write another letter to 
 Speed, which would read as follows : 
 
 . Our progress in degeneracy appears to be pretty rapid. 
 As a Nation we began by declaring that 'AH men are created free and 
 equal.' We now practically read it: 'AH men are created equal, except 
 negroes.' When Know-nothings get control — 'All men are created equal 
 except negroes, foreigners and Catholics!' When it comes to this, I 
 shall prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence 
 of loving liberty — to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken 
 pure, and without even the base alloy of hypocrisy." 
 
 He would have stamped out religious persecution in every shape as 
 he stamped out sedition and secession. He pleaded for peaceful solution 
 of the overwhelming problem which confronted him — and Lincoln's diffi- 
 culties at that time have never been adequately portrayed — and when that 
 failed, and when the blind Southern leaders, bent on secession, became 
 the aggressors, he firmly and unflaggingly saw the War to a successful 
 end. Nor was he diverted from his purpose by other entanglements. 
 "One war at a time," was his slogan; but he was prepared for the next 
 problem the moment the War was over. He would have ended the 
 cowardly attack of sects levelled against their neighbors simply because 
 of religious differences or because of the differences in time of their 
 arrival on these shores. He would have spoken directly and clearly as 
 he did when he delivered his ''House divided" speech in spite of the 
 advice of his entire party of advisors and managers who wailed that 
 defeat was certain should he utter those fatal words — which he did utter 
 — and which were heard by an aroused people from coast to coast. His 
 living words about our attitude towards negroes and Catholics just 
 quoted are ample proof of this claim as to what he would have done were 
 he in office today on the underlying problem of toleration. 
 
 He would have been for arbitration, universal in its application ; not 
 arbitration with loaded dice; arbitration such as would insure not only 
 all people of the earth an honest verdict, but which would protect the 
 United States from envious and rapacious claims and plots and schemes 
 of the war-impoverished peoples of the world, whose sole aim in life 
 seems to be the unloading of all the troubles of the world upon our heads. 
 He would have seen that ; he would have understood that ; and he, with 
 his amazing personality would have accomplished what seems to be so 
 hard for us to understand and cope with. 
 
 He would not have permitted the Civil Service to become the Frank- 
 enstein which it has become. "Appoint that man Colonel of the regiment 
 regardless of whether he knows the color of Caesar's hair." — is so 
 
 14 
 
eloquent a commentary as to what he would have done with the entire 
 breed of the reformers of our service — who have reformed and improved 
 it to such a point that they have driven out of political life every up- 
 standing and unbendable mind, so many of whom we met in office in 
 Lincoln's day. He would not have tolerated in our service the introduc- 
 tion of the principle based upon the legend of the visitor's bed in Sodom 
 and Gomorrah — a. bed of one given size — prepared for the unfortunate 
 guest who would sojourn in those then up-to-date municipalities. The 
 Civil Service cuts off his legs if he is too long or stretches his limbs if 
 he is too short. He must fit in this Civil Service bed of Sodom and 
 Gomorrah ; for the Civil Service man has measured the bed and the berth 
 and there is the end. Lincoln would never have subscribed to such a 
 theory. "See and speak to this man." — read many of his comments on 
 petitions for all manner of requests to the government. Nowadays we 
 don't see and we don't speak to anyone — the examination paper as marked 
 and appraised by an omniscient examiner in the absence of the victim, is 
 decisive and final and unappealable. 
 
 Foreign debts? Did we pay our debts of 1776 to France and to 
 the others? Bring forth the records — Lincoln never would have heeded 
 such much prayed for international disavowal of debts ; Lincoln himself 
 paid every dollar of the debts incurred by his drunken partner, although 
 it took him twelve years to do it. Such anxious and premeditated volun- 
 tary bankruptcies of debtors for loans which were borrowed in the name 
 of liberty and for the purpose of achieving freedom from the oppressor 
 and which were promised to be repaid with great solemnity by these 
 countries with interest and with gratitude. So-called gratitude we get, but 
 neither principle nor interest seems to be forthcoming from any of them, 
 excepting from England. But all of them are even now trying to bring 
 us into their League in order not only not to pay what is due to us, but 
 use us as the general messenger and the general utility man, as their 
 overwhelming majority therein might direct. 
 
 We can sum up Lincoln's attitude on all these questions by a single 
 quotation — a complete philosophy of life — his chief concern in life: 
 
 "A struggle for maintaining in the world that form and substance 
 of government whose leading object is to elevate the condition of men, 
 to lift artificial weights from all shoulders, to clear the paths of laudable 
 pursuits for all, to afford all an unfettered start and a fair chance in the 
 race of life." 
 
 And to those who are discontent with limiting the sphere of action 
 of our great Emancipator and are bound to make him a citizen of the 
 world, I have but to say that his resplendent example alone will suffice 
 for those other nations of the world who would have some of his glory 
 
 15 
 
and who would have a share in his great heritage which he left to all 
 the children of men and as of the great Jewish lawgiver of old, we can 
 say of Jiim: 
 
 " . . . he is more than ours as we are more 
 
 Than yet the world dares dream. His stature grows 
 
 With that illimitable state 
 
 Whose sovereignty ordains no tribute shore, 
 
 And borderland of hate. 
 
 But grounds its justice in the joy it sows. 
 
 His spirit is still a power to emancipate 
 
 Bondage — more base, being more insidious, 
 
 Than serfdom — that cries out in the midst of us 
 
 For virtue, born of opportunity. 
 
 And manhood, weighed in honest human worth. 
 
 And freedom, best in labor. He stands forth 
 
 *Mongst nations old — a new-world Abraham, 
 
 The patriarch of peoples still to be . . ." 
 
 16 
 
3 0112 031819631 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS-URBANA 
 
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 THE MANY-SIDED LINCOLN NY 
 
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