973.7L63 
 B3HUUab 
 
 Hertz, Emanuel. 
 
 Abraham Lincoln and the 
 Lowly • 
 
LINCOLN ROOM 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS 
 LIBRARY 
 
 MEMORIAL 
 
 the Class of 1901 
 
 founded by 
 
 HARLAN HOYT HORNER 
 
 and 
 
 HENRIETTA CALHOUN HORNER 
 
k&t£ 
 
 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 AND THE LOWLY 
 
 'Like His Great Prototype in Egypt, This 
 Modern Moses Ever Went Among the 
 Poor and Lowly" 
 
 By 
 EMANUEL HERTZ 
 
 Reprinted from The Jewish Tribune of February 10, 1928 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 
 in 2012 with funding from 
 
 University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/abrahamlincolnloOOhert 
 
ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
**» B3H4- ■ 
 
 *3 
 
 ABRAHAM LINCOLN AND THE LOWLY 
 
 By EMANUEL HERTZ 
 
 ¥ N the first address delivered when he was a candidate for the 
 •*■ first time for the Illinois Legislature, Lincoln concluded his 
 statement by saying: "I was born, and have ever remained, in 
 the most humble walks of life. I have no wealthy or popular 
 relations or friends to recommend me. My case is thrown ex- 
 clusively upon the independent voters of the country ; and, if. 
 elected, they will have conferred a favor upon me for which I 
 shall be unremitting in my labors to compensate. But, if the 
 good people in their wisdom shall see fit to keep me in the back- 
 ground, I have been too familiar with disappointments to be 
 very much chagrined. " 
 
 From this moment, until the first great victory of his difficult 
 struggle for recognition — his nomination for the Presidency — 
 he always lived and adhered to his constant association and life 
 with the poor, the bereaved, the working mass of his fellows. 
 When asked for a biography for campaign purposes, he re- 
 plied : "The story of my life is the 'short and simple annals of 
 the poor.' ' And these early settlers were poor, indeed. At 
 every point in life up to that moment, his career had been a 
 struggle with adverse circumstances, with poverty, both his own 
 and that of the poor townspeople of Springfield and those he 
 met on the circuit. He lived with them, he sympathized with 
 their problems, he loved the plain people and they loved him and 
 suffered with him through all his trials. He could not help de- 
 tecting — not that he cared — -a sort of patronizing condescension 
 of the leaders of the Eastern and New England elite to the 
 frontiersman of Sangamon County, the pleader of the causes 
 of the poor denizens of the Eighth Circuit, the tribune of these 
 poor country store farmer politicians. His famous, illustrative, 
 
 78741' 
 
quaint stories and droll reminiscences, the very pranks he played 
 upon the so-called better class or wealthier citizens, were ever 
 taken from the lives of the lowly and the experiences of the 
 poor. They were his friends in the early days of his great 
 struggles ; they met him in his grocery store, they were his 
 associates on the farm, they visited his modest law office, they 
 supported him in his campaigns, they sent him to Congress, they 
 crowded the courthouse, the lawns in front of the courthouse 
 when he spoke to them at recess, and they trooped after him 
 during the joint debate which made him famous, and they 
 eagerly followed him on his tour to Washington, and finally 
 greeted his remains on their mournful return, to rest among the 
 neighbors and friends of his early trials and tribulations. 
 
 And wherever he went during the twenty-odd years of his 
 preparation for the Great Adventure — his Presidential Admin- 
 istration — he sought out the plain people, the common people, 
 the artisan, and the children. They flocked to him and his 
 heart was theirs. They did not note his appearance, his looks, 
 his eyes — those marvelous eyes that saw and pierced your soul 
 — those eyes, Lincoln's sad eyes, attracted the innocents every- 
 where. 
 
 And so it was when he came East — to New York — then as 
 now the Gateway to the Continent, the city of wealth and the 
 great mart of Mammon, then as now — when he had concluded 
 and lived through his first great ordeal at Cooper Union — where 
 the "best minds" of the nation took his measure, and reluctantly 
 admitted that a great leader had come upon the scene and had 
 spoken the message of the Union. The poor people devoured 
 the editions of the daily papers which carried his address — and 
 those publications immediately printed and published his re- 
 markable address in pamphlet form — the greatest of its kind 
 ever delivered in New York up to that time — its circulation ran 
 a close race with Uncle Tom's Cabin and the daily prayer book. 
 He found time to visit Plymouth Church and hear Beecher, and 
 
then he walked down to the Mission at Five Points and de- 
 livered a short address to a class of children during the religious 
 exercises. 
 
 "When Sunday morning came I had nowhere to go. Mr. 
 Washburne proposed to take me down to the Five Points Sun- 
 day School. I was very much interested by what I saw. Mr. 
 Pease — the head master of the school — wanted me to speak. 
 Washburne spoke and then I was urged to speak. I told them 
 I did not know anything about talking to Sunday Schools, but 
 Mr. Pease said many of the children were friendless and home- 
 less, and that a few w T ords would do them good. And so I arose 
 to speak — but I didn't know what to say. I remembered that 
 Mr. Pease said they were homeless and friendless, and I 
 thought of the time when I had been pinched by terrible pov- 
 erty. And so I told them that I had been poor ; that I remem- 
 bered when my toes stuck out through my broken shoes in 
 winter ; when my arms were out at the elbows ; when I shivered 
 with the cold. And I told them there was only one rule; that 
 was, always to do the best you can. I told them that I had 
 always tried to do the very best I could and that if they fol- 
 lowed that rule they would get along, somehow. That was 
 about what I said. And when I got through Mr. Pease said it 
 was just the thing they needed. And when the school was dis- 
 missed all the teachers came up and shook hands with me and 
 thanked me, although I did not know that I had been saying 
 anything of any account." 
 
 And so Lincoln greeted the nation with his famous address 
 on the Bowery, for Cooper Union then, as now, is at the head 
 of this old thoroughfare, and finished his visit by a stroll down 
 to the Five Points Mission. Like his great prototype in Egypt, 
 who went out to seek his brethren who were being worked to 
 death by the Pharaoh of Antiquity, so this modern Moses ever 
 went among the poor, the lowly, to see his brothers struggling 
 with slavery, with poverty, with ignorance and with temptation. 
 
And he never appeared to better advantage than he did when 
 among his own — he was ill at ease in fine clothes. Douglas, 
 acquainted with the niceties of the practices of good society, 
 who excelled in the social graces, had to come to his assistance 
 when about to deliver his first inaugural, which spelled life or 
 death to the Union. But oh, how happy and at home he felt 
 among the poor and lowly of all classes. He was never happier 
 in all his trying and unhappy career than when almost crushed 
 by the droves of the poor blacks when walking through the 
 streets of Richmond — just taken by his victorious army. He 
 was most at home in the open, under the trees. Said the 
 scholarly and aristocratic Sumner to the polished Frenchman, 
 Laugel : "Come, I will show you a modern Saint Louis dis- 
 pensing justice under a tree/' He needed no gilded palaces of 
 justice, no formidable edifice — anywhere, everywhere, under 
 all circumstances, at all times, at midnight, early in the morning, 
 while shaving, while consuming his frugal meal, he was on the 
 qui vive to do justice, to help his fellowman, to stop a court- 
 martial sentence, to hear the plea of a heartbroken mother — on 
 one occasion in Yiddish, a language he did not understand — to 
 greet a neighbor, to encourage a departing regiment, to get the 
 news from the War Office whether the condemned man still 
 lived, whether his boys in the Virginia marshes were still 
 struggling to maintain the law hallowed by the lives of the 
 fathers, who had fought on a thousand battlefields. 
 
 Every man, every woman, every child, every petitioner, who 
 came and took his place in that unending line, sooner or later 
 reached Father Abraham and was heard. Hence the stately 
 and scholarly gentlemen who preceded him in office — Polk and 
 Fillmore and Pierce and Buchanan — fairly shrivel into insig- 
 nificance beside this colossus of a man, with a heart which beat 
 for all, with a heart that went out to all, with a religious soul 
 which prayed for all, with a Herculean frame which strove and 
 labored for all — rich and poor alike. His rare, impatient out- 
 
 8 
 
breaks always came when the representatives of wealth made 
 unreasonable demands to the detriment of or in preference to 
 all the people. "If New York wants a battleship, its people 
 are sufficiently wealthy to buy one/' he advised. To the banker 
 who protested against our entry into war with the South, by 
 reason of cessation of trade and for fear that he would thus 
 cause grass to grow in the streets of our cities, he replied : "I 
 registered an oath in heaven to protect and preserve this Union 
 and to maintain it against all manner of assault, even if we 
 must go to war — let the grass grow where it will." 
 
 I might multiply example and incident and story to show 
 how his life was one constant contact with the common people. 
 "God Almighty must love the common people or he would not 
 have made so many of them," he is reported to have said. 
 While a great many sayings attributed to him have proved 
 apocryphal, this one is certainly in line with his whole mode of 
 life to be genuine. His favorite hymn, too, is one that leans to 
 the vast majority of religious folk, "Why Should the Spirit of 
 Mortal Be Proud" and that gem of Oliver Wendell Holmes, 
 "The Last Leaf." Always and ever, the serious, the sad side 
 of life was his portion ; his hard struggle with poverty, with 
 adversity, with the tolls of death, with an at times unhappy 
 home life, and with the terrible ordeal which was his during 
 two years of calamitous warfare, coupled with great loss of 
 life, until the turn of the tide at Vicksburg and at Gettysburg. 
 It seems as if the Divinity ever chooses for His instruments the 
 shepherds who toil with their flocks, the son of the miner to 
 publish His word and reform a corrupt religious hierarchy, the 
 poor lens maker to illuminate a backward generation, the poor 
 Genoese sailor to discover new continents, the poor mechanic 
 to invent the steam engine, the poor rail-splitter to free a race 
 and stabilize a democracy. No! the bankers, the merchant 
 princes, the conquerors, the great money lenders — have played 
 but a poor roll in the history of the world. Call the roll of the 
 centuries from antiquity to the present day and you find the 
 
resplendent tomb of the Pharaoh is all that is left of might and 
 prowess and wealth, but the frail ill-fed and poorly clad Gandhi 
 leads the millions of his fellows in India. You will find Alex- 
 ander and Caesar, brilliant in their fight for auotcracy, but how 
 hollow when compared with the eternal and everlasting results 
 of the achievements of a tongue-tied Moses and an humble 
 Lincoln — the first class worked for self, the second for others ; 
 the first have become dim memories of warning, the second are 
 immortal and live in the hearts of grateful succeeding genera- 
 tions. 
 
 10 
 
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS-URBANA 
 
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