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The Boys' Life of Abraham Lincoln

by Helen Nicolay · English · Gutenberg #1815 · 340,050 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Boys' Life of Abraham Lincoln

Author: Helen Nicolay


        
Release date: July 1, 1999 [eBook #1815]
                Most recently updated: September 21, 2008

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1815

Credits: Produced by Dianne Bean, and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BOYS' LIFE OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN ***




Produced by Dianne Bean





THE BOYS' LIFE OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN

by Helen Nicolay




I. A PRESIDENT'S CHILDHOOD

Abraham Lincoln's forefathers were pioneers--men who left their homes to
open up the wilderness and make the way plain for others to follow them.
For one hundred and seventy years, ever since the first American Lincoln
came from England to Massachusetts in 1638, they had been moving
slowly westward as new settlements were made in the forest. They faced
solitude, privation, and all the dangers and hardships that beset men
who take up their homes where only beasts and wild men have had homes
before; but they continued to press steadily forward, though they lost
fortune and sometimes even life itself, in their westward progress.
Back in Pennsylvania and New Jersey some of the Lincolns had been men of
wealth and influence. In Kentucky, where the future President was born
on February 12, 1809, his parents lived in deep poverty Their home was
a small log cabin of the rudest kind, and nothing seemed more
unlikely than that their child, coming into the world in such humble
surroundings, was destined to be the greatest man of his time. True to
his race, he also was to be a pioneer--not indeed, like his ancestors,
a leader into new woods and unexplored fields, but a pioneer of a nobler
and grander sort, directing the thoughts of men ever toward the right,
and leading the American people, through difficulties and dangers and a
mighty war, to peace and freedom.

The story of this wonderful man begins and ends with a tragedy, for his
grandfather, also named Abraham, was killed by a shot from an Indian's
rifle while peaceably at work with his three sons on the edge of their
frontier clearing. Eighty-one years later the President himself met
death by an assassin's bullet. The murderer of one was a savage of the
forest; the murderer of the other that far more cruel thing, a savage of
civilization.

When the Indian's shot laid the pioneer farmer low, his second son,
Josiah, ran to a neighboring fort for help, and Mordecai, the eldest,
hurried to the cabin for his rifle. Thomas, a child of six years, was
left alone beside the dead body of his father; and as Mordecai snatched
the gun from its resting-place over the door of the cabin, he saw,
to his horror, an Indian in his war-paint, just stooping to seize the
child. Taking quick aim at a medal on the breast of the savage, he
fired, and the Indian fell dead. The little boy, thus released, ran
to the house, where Mordecai, firing through the loopholes, kept the
Indians at bay until help arrived from the fort.

It was this child Thomas who grew up to be the father of President
Abraham Lincoln. After the murder of his father the fortunes of the
little family grew rapidly worse, and doubtless because of poverty, as
well as by reason of the marriage of his older brothers and sisters,
their home was broken up, and Thomas found himself, long before he was
grown, a wandering laboring boy. He lived for a time with an uncle as
his hired servant, and later he learned the trade of carpenter. He grew
to manhood entirely without education, and when he was twenty-eight
years old could neither read nor write. At that time he married Nancy
Hanks, a good-looking young woman of twenty-three, as poor as himself,
but so much better off as to learning that she was able to teach her
husband to sign his own name. Neither of them had any money, but living
cost little on the frontier in those days, and they felt that his trade
would suffice to earn all that they should need. Thomas took his bride
to a tiny house in Elizabethtown, Kentucky, where they lived for about a
year, and where a daughter was born to them.

Then they moved to a small farm thirteen miles from Elizabethtown, which
they bought on credit, the country being yet so new that there were
places to be had for mere promises to pay. Farms obtained on such terms
were usually of very poor quality, and this one of Thomas Lincoln's
was no exception to the rule. A cabin ready to be occupied stood on it,
however; and not far away, hidden in a pretty clump of trees and bushes,
was a fine spring of water, because of which the place was known as
Rock Spring Farm. In the cabin on this farm the future President of the
United States was born on February 12, 1809, and here the first four
years of his life were spent. Then the Lincolns moved to a much bigger
and better farm on Knob Creek, six miles from Hodgensville, which Thomas
Lincoln bought, again on credit, selling the larger part of it soon
afterward to another purchaser. Here they remained until Abraham was
seven years old.

About this early part of his childhood almost nothing is known. He never
talked of these days, even to his most intimate friends. To the pioneer
child a farm offered much that a town lot could not give him--space;
woods to roam in; Knob Creek with its running water and its deep, quiet
pools for a playfellow; berries to be hunted for in summer and nuts in
autumn; while all the year round birds and small animals pattered across
his path to people the solitude in place of human companions. The boy
had few comrades. He wandered about playing his lonesome little games,
and when these were finished returned to the small and cheerless cabin.
Once, when asked what he remembered about the War of 1812 with Great
Britain, he replied: "Only this: I had been fishing one day and had
caught a little fish, which I was taking home. I met a soldier in
the road, and having always been told at home that we must be good to
soldiers, I gave him my fish." It is only a glimpse into his life, but
it shows the solitary, generous child and the patriotic household.

It was while living on this farm that Abraham and his sister Sarah
first began going to A-B-C schools. Their earliest teacher was Zachariah
Riney, who taught near the Lincoln cabin; the next was Caleb Hazel, four
miles away.

In spite of the tragedy that darkened his childhood, Thomas Lincoln
seems to have been a cheery, indolent, good-natured man. By means of a
little farming and occasional jobs at his trade, he managed to supply
his family with the absolutely necessary food and shelter, but he never
got on in the world. He found it much easier to gossip with his friends,
or to dream about rich new lands in the West, than to make a thrifty
living in the place where he happened to be. The blood of the pioneer
was in his veins too--the desire to move westward; and hearing glowing
accounts of the new territory of Indiana, he resolved to go and see it
for himself. His skill as a carpenter made this not only possible but
reasonably cheap, and in the fall of 1816 he built himself a little
flatboat, launched it half a mile from his cabin, at the mouth of Knob
Creek on the waters of the Rolling Fork, and floated on it down that
stream to Salt River, down Salt River to the Ohio, and down the Ohio to
a landing called Thompson's Ferry on the Indiana shore.

Sixteen miles out from the river, near a small stream known as Pigeon
Creek, he found a spot in the forest that suited him; and as his boat
could not be made to float up-stream, he sold it, stored his goods with
an obliging settler, and trudged back to Kentucky, all the way on foot,
to fetch his wife and children--Sarah, who was now nine years old,
and Abraham, seven. This time the journey to Indiana was made with two
horses, used by the mother and children for riding, and to carry their
little camping outfit for the night. The distance from their old home
was, in a straight line, little more than fifty miles, but they had to
go double that distance because of the very few roads it was possible to
follow.

Reaching the Ohio River and crossing to the Indiana shore, Thomas
Lincoln hired a wagon which carried his family and their belongings the
remaining sixteen miles through the forest to the spot he had chosen--a
piece of heavily wooded land, one and a half miles east of what has
since become the village of Gentryville in Spencer County. The lateness
of the autumn made it necessary to put up a shelter as quickly as
possible, and he built what was known on the frontier as a half-faced
camp, about fourteen feet square. This differed from a cabin in that it
was closed on only three sides, being quite open to the weather on the
fourth. A fire was usually made in front of the open side, and thus
the necessity for having a chimney was done away with. Thomas Lincoln
doubtless intended this only for a temporary shelter, and as such it
would have done well enough in pleasant summer weather; but it was a
rude provision against the storms and winds of an Indiana winter. It
shows his want of energy that the family remained housed in this poor
camp for nearly a whole year; but, after all, he must not be too hastily
blamed. He was far from idle. A cabin was doubtless begun, and there
was the very heavy work of clearing away the timber--cutting down large
trees, chopping them into suitable lengths, and rolling them together
into great heaps to be burned, or of splitting them into rails to fence
the small field upon which he managed to raise a patch of corn and other
things during the following summer.

Though only seven years old, Abraham was unusually large and strong for
his age, and he helped his father in all this heavy labor of clearing
the farm. In after years, Mr. Lincoln said that an ax "was put into his
hands at once, and from that till within his twenty-third year he was
almost constantly handling that most useful instrument--less, of course,
in ploughing and harvesting seasons." At first the Lincolns and their
seven or eight neighbors lived in the unbroken forest. They had only the
tools and household goods they brought with them, or such things as they
could fashion with their own hands. There was no sawmill to saw lumber.
The village of Gentryville was not even begun. Breadstuff could be had
only by sending young Abraham seven miles on horseback with a bag of
corn to be ground in a hand grist-mill.

About the time the new cabin was ready relatives and friends followed
from Kentucky, and some of these in turn occupied the half-faced camp.
During the autumn a severe and mysterious sickness broke out in their
little settlement, and a number of people died, among them the mother
of young Abraham. There was no help to be had beyond what the neighbors
could give each other. The nearest doctor lived fully thirty miles away.
There was not even a minister to conduct the funerals. Thomas Lincoln
made the coffins for the dead out of green lumber cut from the forest
trees with a whip-saw, and they were laid to rest in a clearing in the
woods. Months afterward, largely through the efforts of the sorrowing
boy, a preacher who chanced to come that way was induced to hold a
service and preach a sermon over the grave of Mrs. Lincoln.

Her death was indeed a serious blow to her husband and children.
Abraham's sister, Sarah, was only eleven years old, and the tasks and
cares of the little household were altogether too heavy for her years
and experience. Nevertheless they struggled bravely through the winter
and following summer; then in the autumn of 1819 Thomas Lincoln went
back to Kentucky and married Sarah Bush Johnston, whom he had known, and
it is said courted, when she was only Sally Bush. She had married about
the time Lincoln married Nancy Hanks, and her husband had died, leaving
her with three children. She came of a better station in life than
Thomas, and was a woman with an excellent mind as well as a warm and
generous heart. The household goods that she brought with her to the
Lincoln home filled a four-horse wagon, and not only were her own
children well clothed and cared for, but she was able at once to provide
little Abraham and Sarah with comforts to which they had been strangers
during the whole of their young lives. Under her wise management all
jealousy was avoided between the two sets of children; urged on by her
stirring example, Thomas Lincoln supplied the yet unfinished cabin with
floor, door, and windows, and life became more comfortable for all its
inmates, contentment if not happiness reigning in the little home.

The new stepmother quickly became very fond of Abraham, and encouraged
him in every way in her power to study and improve himself. The chances
for this were few enough. Mr. Lincoln has left us a vivid picture of the
situation. "It was," he once wrote, "a wild region, with many bears and
other wild animals still in the woods. There I grew up. There were some
schools, so-called, but no qualification was ever required of a teacher
beyond "readin', writin', and cipherin' to the Rule of Three. If
a straggler supposed to understand Latin happened to sojourn in the
neighborhood, he was looked upon as a wizard."

The school-house was a low cabin of round logs, with split logs or
"puncheons" for a floor, split logs roughly leveled with an ax and set
up on legs for benches, and holes cut out in the logs and the space
filled in with squares of greased paper for window-panes. The main
light came in through the open door. Very often Webster's "Elementary
Spelling-book" was the only text-book. This was the kind of school most
common in the middle West during Mr. Lincoln's boyhood, though already
in some places there were schools of a more pretentious character.
Indeed, back in Kentucky, at the very time that Abraham, a child of six,
was learning his letters from Zachariah Riney, a boy only a year
older was attending a Catholic seminary in the very next county. It is
doubtful if they ever met, but the destinies of the two were strangely
interwoven, for the older boy was Jefferson Davis, who became head of
the Confederate government shortly after Lincoln was elected President
of the United States.

As Abraham had been only seven years old when he left Kentucky, the
little beginnings he learned in the schools kept by Riney and Hazel in
that State must have been very slight, probably only his alphabet, or at
most only three or four pages of Webster's "Elementary Spelling-book."
The multiplication-table was still a mystery to him, and he could read
or write only the words he spelled. His first two years in Indiana seem
to have passed without schooling of any sort, and the school he attended
shortly after coming under the care of his stepmother was of the
simplest kind, for the Pigeon Creek settlement numbered only eight or
ten poor families, and they lived deep in the forest, where, even if
they had had the money for such luxuries, it would have been impossible
to buy books, slates, pens, ink, or paper. It is worthy of note,
however, that in our western country, even under such difficulties, a
school-house was one of the first buildings to rise in every frontier
settlement. Abraham's second school in Indiana was held when he was
fourteen years old, and the third in his seventeenth year. By that time
he had more books and better teachers, but he had to walk four or five
miles to reach them. We know that he learned to write, and was
provided with pen, ink, and a copy-book, and a very small supply of
writing-paper, for copies have been printed of several scraps on which
he carefully wrote down tables of long measure, land measure, and dry
measure, as well as examples in multiplication and compound division,
from his arithmetic. He was never able to go to school again after this
time, and though the instruction he received from his five teachers--two
in Kentucky and three in Indiana--extended over a period of nine years,
it must be remembered that it made up in all less than one twelve-month;
"that the aggregate of all his schooling did not amount to one year."
The fact that he received this instruction, as he himself said, "by
littles," was doubtless an advantage. A lazy or indifferent boy would
of course have forgotten what was taught him at one time before he had
opportunity at another; but Abraham was neither indifferent nor lazy,
and these widely separated fragments of instruction were precious steps
to self-help. He pursued his studies with very unusual purpose and
determination not only to understand them at the moment, but to fix
them firmly in his mind. His early companions all agree that he employed
every spare moment in keeping on with some one of his studies. His
stepmother tells us that "When he came across a passage that struck him,
he would write it down on boards if he had no paper, and keep it there
until he did get paper. Then he would rewrite it, look at it, repeat
it. He had a copy-book, a kind of scrap-book, in which he put down all
things, and thus preserved them." He spent long evenings doing sums on
the fire-shovel. Iron fire-shovels were a rarity among pioneers. Instead
they used a broad, thin clapboard with one end narrowed to a handle,
arranging with this the piles of coals upon the hearth, over which they
set their "skillet" and "oven" to do their cooking. It was on such a
wooden shovel that Abraham worked his sums by the flickering firelight,
making his figures with a piece of charcoal, and, when the shovel was
all covered, taking a drawing-knife and shaving it off clean again.

The hours that he was able to devote to his penmanship, his reading, and
his arithmetic were by no means many; for, save for the short time that
he was actually in school, he was, during all these years, laboring hard
on his father's farm, or hiring his youthful strength to neighbors
who had need of help in the work of field or forest. In pursuit of his
knowledge he was on an up-hill path; yet in spite of all obstacles he
worked his way to so much of an education as placed him far ahead of
his schoolmates and quickly abreast of his various teachers. He borrowed
every book in the neighborhood. The list is a short one: "Robinson
Crusoe," "Aesop's Fables," Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress," Weems's "Life
of Washington," and a "History of the United States." When everything
else had been read, he resolutely began on the "Revised Statutes of
Indiana," which Dave Turnham, the constable, had in daily use, but
permitted him to come to his house and read.

Though so fond of his books; it must not be supposed that he cared only
for work and serious study. He was a social, sunny-tempered lad, as fond
of jokes and fun as he was kindly and industrious. His stepmother said
of him: "I can say, what scarcely one mother in a thousand can say, Abe
never gave me a cross word or look, and never refused... to do anything
I asked him.... I must say.. that Abe was the best boy I ever saw or
expect to see."

He and John Johnston, his stepmother's son, and John Hanks, a relative
of his own mother's, worked barefoot together in the fields, grubbing,
plowing, hoeing, gathering and shucking corn, and taking part, when
occasion offered, in the practical jokes and athletic exercises that
enlivened the hard work of the pioneers. For both work and play Abraham
had one great advantage. He was not only a tall, strong country boy: he
soon grew to be a tall, strong, sinewy man. He early reached the unusual
height of six feet four inches, and his long arms gave him a degree of
power as an axman that few were able to rival. He therefore usually
led his fellows in efforts of muscle as well as of mind. That he could
outrun, outlift, outwrestle his boyish companions, that he could chop
faster, split more rails in a day, carry a heavier log at a "raising,"
or excel the neighborhood champion in any feat of frontier athletics,
was doubtless a matter of pride with him; but stronger than all else was
his eager craving for knowledge. He felt instinctively that the power of
using the mind rather than the muscles was the key to success. He wished
not only to wrestle with the best of them, but to be able to talk like
the preacher, spell and cipher like the school-master, argue like the
lawyer, and write like the editor. Yet he was as far as possible
from being a prig. He was helpful, sympathetic, cheerful. In all the
neighborhood gatherings, when settlers of various ages came together
at corn-huskings or house-raisings, or when mere chance brought half a
dozen of them at the same time to the post-office or the country store,
he was able, according to his years, to add his full share to the gaiety
of the company. By reason of his reading and his excellent memory, he
soon became the best story-teller among his companions; and even
the slight training gained from his studies greatly broadened and
strengthened the strong reasoning faculty with which he had been gifted
by nature. His wit might be mischievous, but it was never malicious, and
his nonsense was never intended to wound or to hurt the feelings. It
is told of him that he added to his fund of jokes and stories humorous
imitations of the sermons of eccentric preachers.

Very likely too much is made of all these boyish pranks. He grew up very
like his fellows. In only one particular did he differ greatly from the
frontier boys around him. He never took any pleasure in hunting. Almost
every youth of the backwoods early became an excellent shot and a
confirmed sportsman. The woods still swarmed with game, and every cabin
depended largely upon this for its supply of food. But to his strength
was added a gentleness which made him shrink from killing or inflicting
pain, and the time the other boys gave to lying in ambush, he preferred
to spend in reading or in efforts at improving his mind.

Only twice during his life in Indiana was the routine of his employment
changed. When he was about sixteen years old he worked for a time for
a man who lived at the mouth of Anderson's Creek, and here part of his
duty was to manage a ferry-boat which carried passengers across the
Ohio River. It was very likely this experience which, three years
later, brought him another. Mr. Gentry, the chief man of the village
of Gentryville that had grown up a mile or so from his father's cabin,
loaded a flatboat on the Ohio River with the produce his store
had collected--corn, flour, pork, bacon, and other miscellaneous
provisions--and putting it in charge of his son Allen Gentry and of
Abraham Lincoln, sent them with it down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers,
to sell its cargo at the plantations of the lower Mississippi, where
sugar and cotton were the principal crops, and where other food supplies
were needed to feed the slaves. No better proof is needed of the
reputation for strength, skill, honesty, and intelligence that this
tall country boy had already won for himself, than that he was chosen
to navigate the flatboat a thousand miles to the "sugar-coast" of the
Mississippi River, sell its load, and bring back the money. Allen Gentry
was supposed to be in command, but from the record of his after life we
may be sure that Abraham did his full share both of work and management.
The elder Gentry paid Lincoln eight dollars a month and his passage
home on a steamboat for this service. The voyage was made successfully,
although not without adventure; for one night, after the boat was tied
up to the shore, the boys were attacked by seven negroes, who came
aboard intending to kill and rob them. There was a lively scrimmage, in
which, though slightly hurt, they managed to beat off their assailants,
and then, hastily cutting their boat adrift, swung out on the stream.
The marauding band little dreamed that they were attacking the man who
in after years was to give their race its freedom; and though the future
was equally hidden from Abraham, it is hard to estimate the vistas of
hope and ambition that this long journey opened to him. It was his first
look into the wide, wide world.




II. CAPTAIN LINCOLN.

By this time the Lincoln homestead was no longer on the frontier. During
the years that passed while Abraham was growing from a child, scarcely
able to wield the ax placed in his hands, into a tall, capable youth,
the line of frontier settlements had been gradually but steadily
pushing on beyond Gentryville toward the Mississippi River. Every summer
canvas-covered moving wagons wound their slow way over new roads into
still newer country; while the older settlers, left behind, watched
their progress with longing eyes. It was almost as if a spell had been
cast over these toil-worn pioneers, making them forget, at sight of such
new ventures, all the hardships they had themselves endured in subduing
the wilderness. At last, on March 1, 1830, when Abraham was just
twenty-one years old, the Lincolns, yielding to this overmastering
frontier impulse to "move" westward, left the old farm in Indiana to
make a new home in Illinois. "Their mode of conveyance was wagons drawn
by ox-teams," Mr. Lincoln wrote in 1860; "and Abraham drove one of the
teams." They settled in Macon County on the north side of the Sangamon
River, about ten miles west of Decatur, where they built a cabin, made
enough rails to fence ten acres of ground, fenced and cultivated the
ground, and raised a crop of corn upon it that first season. It was the
same heavy labor over again that they had endured when they went from
Kentucky to Indiana; but this time the strength and energy of young
Abraham were at hand to inspire and aid his father, and there was no
miserable shivering year of waiting in a half-faced camp before the
family could be suitably housed. They were not to escape hardship,
however. They fell victims to fever and ague, which they had not known
in Indiana, and became greatly discouraged; and the winter after their
arrival proved one of intense cold and suffering for the pioneers, being
known in the history of the State as "the winter of the deep snow."
The severe weather began in the Christmas holidays with a storm of such
fatal suddenness that people who were out of doors had difficulty in
reaching their homes, and not a few perished, their fate remaining
unknown until the melting snows of early spring showed where they had
fallen.

In March, 1831, at the end of this terrible winter, Abraham Lincoln
left his father's cabin to seek his own fortune in the world. It was the
frontier custom for young men to do this when they reached the age of
twenty-one. Abraham was now twenty-two, but had willingly remained
with his people an extra year to give them the benefit of his labor and
strength in making the new home.

He had become acquainted with a man named Offut, a trader and
speculator, who pretended to great business shrewdness, but whose chief
talent lay in boasting of the magnificent things he meant to do. Offut
engaged Abraham, with his stepmother's son, John D. Johnston, and John
Hanks, to take a flatboat from Beardstown, on the Illinois River, to
New Orleans; and all four arranged to meet at Springfield as soon as the
snow should melt.

In March, when the snow finally melted, the country was flooded and
traveling by land was utterly out of the question. The boys, therefore,
bought a large canoe, and in it floated down the Sangamon River to keep
their appointment with Offut. It was in this somewhat unusual way that
Lincoln made his first entry into the town whose name was afterward to
be linked with his own.

Offut was waiting for them, with the discouraging news that he had been
unable to get a flatboat at Beardstown. The young men promptly offered
to make the flatboat, since one was not to be bought; and they set to
work, felling the trees for it on the banks of the stream. Abraham's
father had been a carpenter, so the use of tools was no mystery to him;
and during his trip to New Orleans with Allen Gentry he had learned
enough about flatboats to give him confidence in this task of
shipbuilding. Neither Johnston nor Hanks was gifted with skill or
industry, and it is clear that Lincoln was, from the start, leader of
the party, master of construction, and captain of the craft.

The floods went down rapidly while the boat was building, and when
they tried to sail their new craft it stuck midway across the dam of
Rutledge's mill at New Salem, a village of fifteen or twenty houses not
many miles from their starting-point. With its bow high in air, and its
stern under water, it looked like some ungainly fish trying to fly, or
some bird making an unsuccessful attempt to swim. The voyagers appeared
to have suffered irreparable shipwreck at the very outset of their
venture, and men and women came down from their houses to offer advice
or to make fun of the young boatmen as they waded about in the water,
with trousers rolled very high, seeking a way out of their difficulty.
Lincoln's self-control and good humor proved equal to their banter,
while his engineering skill speedily won their admiration. The amusement
of the onlookers changed to gaping wonder when they saw him deliberately
bore a hole in the bottom of the boat near the bow, after which, fixing
up some kind of derrick, he tipped the boat so that the water she had
taken in at the stern ran out in front, and she floated safely over the
dam. This novel method of bailing a boat by boring a hole in her
bottom fully established his fame at New Salem, and so delighted the
enthusiastic Offut that, on the spot, he engaged its inventor to come
back after the voyage to New Orleans and act as clerk for him in a
store.

The hole plugged up again, and the boat's cargo reloaded, they made the
remainder of the journey in safety. Lincoln returned by steamer from New
Orleans to St. Louis, and from there made his way to New Salem on foot.
He expected to find Offut already established in the new store, but
neither he nor his goods had arrived. While "loafing about," as the
citizens of New Salem expressed it, waiting for him, the newcomer had a
chance to exhibit another of his accomplishments. An election was to
be held, but one of the clerks, being taken suddenly ill, could not be
present. Penmen were not plenty in the little town, and Mentor Graham,
the other election clerk, looking around in perplexity for some one
to fill the vacant place, asked young Lincoln if he knew how to write.
Lincoln answered, in the lazy speech of the country, that he "could
make a few rabbit tracks," and that being deemed quite sufficient, was
immediately sworn in, and set about discharging the duties of his first
office. The way he performed these not only gave general satisfaction,
but greatly interested Mentor Graham, who was the village schoolmaster,
and from that time on proved a most helpful friend to him.

Offut finally arrived with a miscellaneous lot of goods, which Lincoln
opened and put in order, and the storekeeping began. Trade does not seem
to have been brisk, for Offut soon increased his venture by renting the
Rutledge and Cameron mill, on whose historic dam the flatboat had come
to grief. For a while the care of this mill was added to Lincoln's other
duties. He made himself generally useful besides, his old implement, the
ax, not being entirely discarded. We are told that he cut down trees
and split rails enough to make a large hogpen adjoining the mill, a
performance not at all surprising when it is remembered that up to this
time the greater part of his life had been spent in the open air, and
that his still growing muscles must have eagerly welcomed tasks like
this, which gave him once more the exercise that measuring calico and
weighing out groceries failed to supply. Young Lincoln's bodily vigor
stood him in good stead in many ways. In frontier life strength and
athletic skill served as well for popular amusement as for prosaic
toil, and at times, indeed, they were needed for personal defence.
Every community had its champion wrestler, a man of considerable local
importance, in whose success the neighbors took a becoming interest.
There was, not far from New Salem, a settlement called Clary's Grove,
where lived a set of restless, rollicking young backwoodsmen with a
strong liking for frontier athletics and rough practical jokes. Jack
Armstrong was the leader of these, and until Lincoln's arrival had been
the champion wrestler of both Clary's Grove and New Salem. He and his
friends had not the slightest personal grudge against Lincoln; but
hearing the neighborhood talk about the newcomer, and especially Offut's
extravagant praise of his clerk, who, according to Offut's statement,
knew more than any one else in the United States, and could beat the
whole county at running, jumping or "wrastling," they decided that the
time had come to assert themselves, and strove to bring about a trial of
strength between Armstrong and Lincoln. Lincoln, who disapproved of all
this "woolling and pulling," as he called it, and had no desire to come
to blows with his neighbors, put off the encounter as long as possible.
At length even his good temper was powerless to avert it, and the
wrestling-match took place. Jack Armstrong soon found that he had
tackled a man as strong and skilful as himself; and his friends, seeing
him likely to get the worst of it, swarmed to his assistance, almost
succeeding, by tripping and kicking, in getting Lincoln down. At the
unfairness of this Lincoln became suddenly and furiously angry, put
forth his entire strength, lifted the pride of Clary's Grove in his arms
like a child, and holding him high in the air, almost choked the life
out of him. It seemed for a moment as though a general fight must
follow; but even while Lincoln's fierce rage compelled their respect,
his quickly returning self-control won their admiration, and the
crisis was safely passed. Instead of becoming enemies and leaders in a
neighborhood feud, as might have been expected, the two grew to be warm
friends, the affection thus strangely begun lasting through life. They
proved useful to each other in various ways, and years afterward Lincoln
made ample amends for his rough treatment of the other's throat by
saving the neck of Jack Armstrong's son from the halter in a memorable
trial for murder. The Clary's Grove "boys" voted Lincoln "the cleverest
fellow that had ever broke into the settlement," and thereafter took
as much pride in his peaceableness and book-learning as they did in
the rougher and more questionable accomplishments of their discomfited
leader.

Lincoln himself was not so easily satisfied. His mind as well as his
muscles hungered for work, and he confided to Mentor Graham, possibly
with some diffidence, his "notion to study English grammar." Instead of
laughing at him, Graham heartily encouraged the idea, saying it was the
very best thing he could do. With quickened zeal Lincoln announced that
if he had a grammar he would begin at once at this the schoolmaster
was obliged to confess that he knew of no such book in New Salem. He
thought, however, that there might be one at Vaner's, six miles away.
Promptly after breakfast the next morning Lincoln set out in search of
it. He brought the precious volume home in triumph, and with Graham's
occasional help found no difficulty in mastering its contents. Indeed,
it is very likely that he was astonished, and even a bit disappointed,
to find so little mystery in it. He is reported to have said that if
this was a "science," he thought he would like to begin on another one.
In the eyes of the townspeople, however, it was no small achievement,
and added greatly to his reputation as a scholar. There is no record
of any other study commenced at this time, but it is certain that he
profited much by helpful talks with Mentor Graham, and that he borrowed
every book the schoolmaster's scanty library was able to furnish.

Though outwardly uneventful, this period of his life was both happy
and profitable. He was busy at useful labor, was picking up scraps of
schooling, was making friends and learning to prize them at their true
worth; was, in short, developing rapidly from a youth into a young man.
Already he began to feel stirrings of ambition which prompted him to
look beyond his own daily needs toward the larger interests of
his county and his State. An election for members of the Illinois
legislature was to take place in August, 1832. Sangamon County
was entitled to four representatives. Residents of the county over
twenty-one years of age were eligible to election, and audacious as it
might appear, Lincoln determined to be a candidate.

The people of New Salem, like those of all other Western towns, took a
keen interest in politics; "politics" meaning, in that time and place,
not only who was to be President or governor, but concerning itself
with questions which came much closer home to dwellers on the frontier.
"Internal improvements," as they were called--the building of roads and
clearing out of streams so that men and women who lived in remote places
might be able to travel back and forth and carry on trade with the rest
of the world--became a burning question in Illinois. There was great
need of such improvements; and in this need young Lincoln saw his
opportunity.

It was by way of the Sangamon River that he entered politics. That
uncertain watercourse had already twice befriended him. He had floated
on it in flood-time from his father's cabin into Springfield. A
few weeks later its rapidly falling waters landed him on the dam at
Rutledge's mill, introducing him effectively if unceremoniously to the
inhabitants of New Salem. Now it was again to play a part in his life,
starting him on a political career that ended only in the White House.
Surely no insignificant stream has had a greater influence on the
history of a famous man. It was a winding and sluggish creek, encumbered
with driftwood and choked by sand-bars; but it flowed through a country
already filled with ambitious settlers, where the roads were atrociously
bad, becoming in rainy seasons wide seas of pasty black mud, and
remaining almost impassable for weeks at a time. After a devious course
the Sangamon found its way into the Illinois River, and that in turn
flowed into the Mississippi. Most of the settlers were too new to the
region to know what a shallow, unprofitable stream the Sangamon really
was, for the deep snows of 183031 and of the following winter had
supplied it with an unusual volume of water. It was natural, therefore,
that they should regard it as the heaven-sent solution of their problem
of travel and traffic with the outside world. If it could only be freed
from driftwood, and its channel straightened a little, they felt sure it
might be used for small steamboats during a large part of the year.

The candidates for the legislature that summer staked their chances of
success on the zeal they showed for "internal improvements." Lincoln
was only twenty-three. He had been in the county barely nine months.
Sangamon County was then considerably larger than the whole State of
Rhode Island, and he was of course familiar with only a small part of it
or its people; but he felt that he did know the river. He had sailed on
it and been shipwrecked by it; he had, moreover, been one of a party of
men and boys, armed with long-handled axes, who went out to chop away
obstructions and meet a small steamer that, a few weeks earlier, had
actually forced its way up from the Illinois River.

Following the usual custom, he announced his candidacy in the local
newspaper in a letter dated March 9, addressed "To the People of
Sangamon County." It was a straightforward, manly statement of his views
on questions of the day, written in as good English as that used by the
average college-bred man of his years. The larger part of it was
devoted to arguments for the improvement of the Sangamon River. Its main
interest for us lies in the frank avowal of his personal ambition that
is contained in the closing paragraph.

"Every man is said to have his peculiar ambition," he wrote. "Whether
it be true or not, I can say, for one, that I have no other so great as
that of being truly esteemed of my fellowmen by rendering myself worthy
of their esteem. How far I shall succeed in gratifying this ambition is
yet to be developed. I am young, and unknown to many of you. 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 exclusively upon the independent voters of the county; 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 background, I have been too
familiar with disappointments to be very much chagrined."

He soon had an opportunity of being useful to his fellow-men, though in
a way very different from the one he was seeking. About four weeks after
he had published his letter "To the People of Sangamon County," news
came that Black Hawk, the veteran war-chief of the Sac Indians, was
heading an expedition to cross the Mississippi River and occupy once
more the lands that had been the home of his people. There was great
excitement among the settlers in Northern Illinois, and the governor
called for six hundred volunteers to take part in a campaign against the
Indians. He met a quick response; and Lincoln, unmindful of what might
become of his campaign for the legislature if he went away, was among
the first to enlist. When his company met on the village green to choose
their officers, three-quarters of the men, to Lincoln's intense surprise
and pleasure, marched over to the spot where he was standing and grouped
themselves around him, signifying in this way their wish to make him
captain. We have his own word for it that no success of his after life
gave him nearly as much satisfaction. On April 21, two days after the
call for volunteers had been printed, the company was organized. A week
later it was mustered into service, becoming part of the Fourth Illinois
Mounted Volunteers, and started at once for the hostile frontier.

Lincoln's soldiering lasted about three months. He was in no battle, but
there was plenty of "roughing it," and occasionally real hardship,
as when the men were obliged to go for three days without food. The
volunteers had not enlisted for any definite length of time, and seeing
no prospect of fighting, they soon became clamorous to return home.
Accordingly his and other companies were mustered out of service on
May 27, at the mouth of Fox River. At the same time the governor, not
wishing to weaken his forces before the arrival of other soldiers to
take their places, called for volunteers to remain twenty days longer.
Lincoln had gone to the frontier to do real service, not for the glory
of being captain. Accordingly, on the day on which he was mustered out
as an officer he re-enlisted, becoming Private Lincoln in Captain Iles's
company of mounted volunteers, sometimes known as the Independent Spy
Battalion. This organization appears to have been very independent
indeed, not under the control of any regiment or brigade, but receiving
orders directly from the commander-in-chief, and having many unusual
privileges, such as freedom from all camp duties, and permission to
draw rations as much and as often as they pleased. After laying down
his official dignity and joining this band of privileged warriors, the
campaign became much more of a holiday for the tall volunteer from New
Salem. He entered with enthusiasm into all the games and athletic
sports with which the soldiers beguiled the tedium of camp, and grew in
popularity from beginning to end of his service. When, at length, the
Independent Spy Battalion was mustered out on June 16, 1832, he started
on the journey home with a merry group of his companions. He and his
messmate, George M. Harrison, had the misfortune to have their horses
stolen the very day before, but Harrison's record says:

"I laughed at our fate, and he joked at it, and we all started of
merrily. The generous men of our company walked and rode by turns with
us, and we fared about equal with the rest. But for this generosity, our
legs would have had to do the better work, for in that day this dreary
route furnished no horses to buy or to steal, and whether on horse or
afoot, we always had company, for many of the horses' backs were too
sore for riding."

Lincoln reached New Salem about the first of August, only ten days
before the election. He had lost nothing in popular esteem by his prompt
enlistment to defend the frontier, and his friends had been doing manful
service for him; but there were by this time thirteen candidates in
the field, with a consequent division of interest. When the votes
were counted, Lincoln was found to be eighth on the list--an excellent
showing when we remember that he was a newcomer in the county, and that
he ran as a Whig, which was the unpopular party. In his own home town of
New Salem only three votes had been cast against him. Flattering as all
this was, the fact remained that he was defeated, and the result of the
election brought him face to face with a very serious question. He was
without means and without employment. Offut had failed and had gone
away. What was he to do next? He thought of putting his strong muscles
to account by learning the blacksmith trade; thought also of trying
to become a lawyer, but feared he could not succeed at that without a
better education. It was the same problem that has confronted millions
of young Americans before and since. In his case there was no question
which he would rather be--the only question was what success he might
reasonably hope for if he tried to study law.

Before his mind was fully made up, chance served to postpone, and in the
end greatly to increase his difficulty. Offut's successors in business,
two brothers named Herndon, had become discouraged, and they offered to
sell out to Lincoln and an acquaintance of his named William F. Berry,
on credit, taking their promissory notes in payment. Lincoln and Berry
could not foresee that the town of New Salem had already lived through
its best days, and was destined to dwindle and grow smaller until it
almost disappeared from the face of the earth. Unduly hopeful, they
accepted the offer, and also bought out, on credit, two other merchants
who were anxious to sell. It is clear that the flattering vote Lincoln
had received at the recent election, and the confidence New Salem felt
in his personal character, alone made these transactions possible, since
not a dollar of actual money changed hands during all this shifting
of ownership. In the long run the people's faith in him was fully
justified; but meantime he suffered years of worry and harassing debt.
Berry proved a worthless partner; the business a sorry failure.
Seeing this, Lincoln and Berry sold out, again on credit, to the Trent
brothers, who soon broke up the store and ran away. Berry also departed
and died; and in the end all the notes came back upon Lincoln for
payment. Of course he had not the money to meet these obligations. He
did the next best thing: he promised to pay as soon as he could, and
remaining where he was, worked hard at whatever he found to do. Most
of his creditors, knowing him to be a man of his word, patiently bided
their time, until, in the course of long years, he paid, with interest,
every cent of what he used to call, in rueful satire upon his own folly,
his "National Debt."




III. LAWYER LINCOLN

Unlucky as Lincoln's attempt at storekeeping had been, it served one
good purpose. Indeed, in a way it may be said to have determined his
whole future career. He had had a hard struggle to decide between
becoming a blacksmith or a lawyer; and when chance seemed to offer a
middle course, and he tried to be a merchant, the wish to study law had
certainly not faded from his mind.

There is a story that while cleaning up the store, he came upon a barrel
which contained, among a lot of forgotten rubbish, some stray volumes
of Blackstone's "Commentaries," and that this lucky find still further
quickened his interest in the law. Whether this tale be true or not it
seems certain that during the time the store was running its downward
course from bad to worse, he devoted a large part of his too abundant
leisure to reading and study of various kinds. People who knew him then
have told how he would lie for hours under a great oak-tree that grew
just outside the store door, poring over his book, and "grinding around
with the shade" as it shifted from north to east.

Lincoln's habit of reading was still further encouraged by his being
appointed postmaster of New Salem on May 7, 1833, an office he held for
about three years--until New Salem grew too small to have a post-office
of its own, and the mail was sent to a neighboring town. The office
was so insignificant that according to popular fable it had no fixed
abiding-place, Lincoln being supposed to carry it about with him in
his hat! It was, however, large enough to bring him a certain amount of
consideration, and, what pleased him still better, plenty of newspapers
to read--newspapers that just then were full of the exciting debates of
Clay and Webster, and other great men in Congress.

The rate of postage on letters was still twenty-five cents, and small as
the earnings of the office undoubtedly were, a little change found
its way now and then into his hands. In the scarcity of money on the
frontier, this had an importance hard for us to realize. A portion of
this money, of course, belonged to the government. That he used only
what was rightfully his own we could be very sure, even if a sequel to
this post office experience were not known which shows his scrupulous
honesty where government funds were concerned. Years later, after he had
become a practising lawyer in Springfield, an agent of the Post-office
Department called upon him in his office one day to collect a balance
due from the New Salem post-office, amounting to about seventeen
dollars. A shade of perplexity passed over his face, and a friend,
sitting by, offered to lend him the money if he did not at the moment
have it with him. Without answering, Lincoln rose, and going to a little
trunk that stood by the wall, opened it and took out the exact sum,
carefully done up in a small package. "I never use any man's money but
my own," he quietly remarked, after the agent had gone.

Soon after he was raised to the dignity of postmaster another piece of
good fortune came in his way. Sangamon County covered a territory some
forty miles long by fifty wide, and almost every citizen in it seemed
intent on buying or selling land, laying out new roads, or locating some
future city. John Calhoun, the county surveyor, therefore, found himself
with far more work than he could personally attend to, and had to
appoint deputies to assist him. Learning the high esteem in which
Lincoln was held by the people of New Salem, he wisely concluded to make
him a deputy, although they differed in politics. It was a flattering
offer, and Lincoln accepted gladly. Of course he knew almost nothing
about surveying, but he got a compass and chain, and, as he tells us,
"studied Flint and Gibson a little, and went at it." The surveyor,
who was a man of talent and education, not only gave Lincoln the
appointment, but, it is said, lent him the book in which to study the
art. Lincoln carried the book to his friend Mentor Graham, and "went at
it" to such purpose that in six weeks he was ready to begin the practice
of his new profession. Like Washington, who, it will be remembered,
followed the same calling in his youth, he became an excellent surveyor.

Lincoln's store had by this time "winked out," to use his own quaint
phrase; and although the surveying and his post-office supplied his
daily needs, they left absolutely nothing toward paying his "National
Debt." Some of his creditors began to get uneasy, and in the latter part
of 1834 a man named Van Bergen, who held one of the Lincoln-Berry notes,
refusing to trust him any longer, had his horse, saddle, and surveying
instruments seized by the sheriff and sold at public auction, thus
sweeping away the means by which, as he said, he "procured bread and
kept soul and body together." Even in this strait his known honesty
proved his salvation. Out of pure friendliness, James Short bought in
the property and gave it back to the young surveyor, allowing him time
to repay.

It took Lincoln seventeen years to get rid of his troublesome "National
Debt," the last instalment not being paid until after his return
from his term of service in Congress at Washington; but it was these
seventeen years of industry, rigid economy, and unflinching fidelity to
his promises that earned for him the title of "Honest Old Abe," which
proved of such inestimable value to himself and his country.

During all this time of trial and disappointment he never lost his
courage, his steady, persevering industry, or his determination to
succeed. He was not too proud to accept any honest employment that
offered itself. He would go into the harvest-field and work there when
other tasks were not pressing, or use his clerkly hand to straighten up
a neglected ledger; and his lively humor, as well as his industry, made
him a welcome guest at any farm-house in the county. Whatever he might
be doing, he was never too busy to help a neighbor. His strong arm was
always at the service of the poor and needy.

Two years after his defeat for the legislature there was another
election. His friends and acquaintances in the county had increased,
and, since he had received such a flattering vote the first time, it was
but natural that he should wish to try again. He began his campaign
in April, giving himself full three months for electioneering. It
was customary in those days for candidates to attend all manner
of neighborhood gatherings--"raisings" of new cabins, horseraces,
shooting-matches, auctions--anything that served to call the settlers
together; and it was social popularity, quite as much as ability to
discuss political questions, that carried weight with such assemblies.
Lincoln, it is needless to say, was in his element. He might be called
upon to act as judge in a horse-race, or to make a speech upon the
Constitution! He could do both. As a laughing peacemaker between two
quarrelsome patriots he had no equal; and as contestant in an impromptu
match at quoit-throwing, or lifting heavy weights, his native tact and
strong arm served him equally well. Candidates also visited farms and
outlying settlements, where they were sometimes unexpectedly called upon
to show their mettle and muscle in more useful labor. One farmer has
recorded how Lincoln "came to my house near Island Grove during harvest.
There were some thirty men in the field. He got his dinner, and went out
in the field where the men were at work. I gave him an introduction, and
the boys said that they could not vote for a man unless he could make a
hand. 'Well, boys,' said he, 'if that is all, I am sure of your votes.'
He took hold of the cradle and led the way all the round with perfect
ease. The boys were satisfied, and I don't think he lost a vote in the
crowd."

Sometimes two or more candidates would meet at such places, and short
speeches would be called for and given, the harvesters throwing down
their scythes meanwhile to listen, and enlivening the occasion with keen
criticisms of the method and logic of the rival orators. Altogether the
campaign was more spirited than that of two years before. Again there
were thirteen candidates for the four places; but this time, when the
election was over, it was found that only one man in the long list had
received more votes than Abraham Lincoln.

Lincoln's election to the legislature of Illinois in August, 1834, marks
the end of the pioneer period of his life. He was done now with the wild
carelessness of the woods, with the rough jollity of Clary's Grove, with
odd jobs for his daily bread--with all the details of frontier poverty.
He continued for years to be a very poor man, harassed by debts he was
constantly laboring to pay, and sometimes absolutely without money:
but from this time on he met and worked with men of wider knowledge
and better-trained minds than those he had known in Gentryville and New
Salem, while the simple social life of Vandalia, where he went to attend
the sessions of the legislature, was more elegant than anything he had
yet seen.

It must be frankly admitted that his success at this election was a most
important event in his life. Another failure might have discouraged
even his hopeful spirit, and sent him to the blacksmith-shop to make
wagon-tires and shoe horses for the balance of his days. With this
flattering vote to his credit, however, he could be very sure that he
had made a wise choice between the forge and the lawyer's desk. At
first he did not come into special notice in the legislature. He wore,
according to the custom of the time, a decent suit of blue jeans, and
was known simply as a rather quiet young man, good-natured and sensible.
Soon people began to realize that he was a man to be reckoned with in
the politics of the county and State. He was reelected in 1836, 1838,
and 1840, and thus for eight years had a full share in shaping the
public laws of Illinois. The Illinois legislature may indeed be called
the school wherein he learned that extraordinary skill and wisdom in
statesmanship which he exhibited in later years. In 1838 and 1840 all
the Whig members of the Illinois House of Representatives gave him their
vote for Speaker, but, the Democrats being in a majority, could not
elect him.

His campaign expenses were small enough to suit the most exacting. It is
recorded that at one time some of the leading Whigs made up a purse of
two hundred dollars to pay his personal expenses. After the election he
returned the sum of $199.25, with the request that it be given back to
the subscribers. "I did not need the money," he explained. "I made
the canvass on my own horse; my entertainment, being at the houses of
friends, cost me nothing; and my only outlay was seventy-five cents for
a barrel of cider, which some farm-hands insisted I should treat them
to."

One act of his while a member of the legislature requires special
mention because of the great events of his after-life. Even at that
early date, nearly a quarter of a century before the beginning of the
Civil War, slavery was proving a cause of much trouble and ill-will. The
"abolitionists," as the people were called who wished the slaves to
be free, and the "pro-slavery" men, who approved of keeping them in
bondage, had already come to wordy war. Illinois was a free State, but
many of its people preferred slavery, and took every opportunity of
making their wishes known. In 1837 the legislature passed a set of
resolutions "highly disapproving abolition societies." Lincoln and five
others voted against it; but, not content with this, Lincoln also drew
up a paper protesting against the passage of such a resolution and
stating his views on slavery. They were not extreme views. Though
declaring slavery to be an evil, he did not insist that the black people
ought to be set free. But so strong was the popular feeling against
anything approaching "abolitionism" that only one man out of the five
who voted against the resolution had the courage to sign this protest
with him. Lincoln was young, poor, and in need of all the good-will at
his command. Nobody could have blamed him for leaving it unwritten; yet
he felt the wrong of slavery so keenly that he could not keep silent
merely because the views he held happened to be unpopular; and this
protest, signed by him and Dan Stone, has come down to us, the first
notable public act in the great career that made his name immortal.

During the eight years that he was in the legislature he had been
working away at the law. Even before his first election his friend John
T. Stuart, who had been major of volunteers in the Black Hawk War
while Lincoln was captain, and who, like Lincoln, had reenlisted in the
Independent Spy Battalion, had given him hearty encouragement. Stuart
was now practising law in. Springfield. After the campaign was over,
Lincoln borrowed the necessary books of Stuart, and entered upon the
study in good earnest. According to his own statement, "he studied with
nobody. ... In the autumn of 1836 he obtained a law license, and on
April 15, 1837, removed to Springfield and commenced the practice, his
old friend Stuart taking him into partnership."

Lincoln had already endeared himself to the people of Springfield by
championing a project they had much at heart--the removal of the State
capital from Vandalia to their own town. This was accomplished, largely
through his efforts, about the time he went to Springfield to live.
This change from New Salem, a village of fifteen or twenty houses, to a
"city" of two thousand inhabitants, placed him once more in striking new
relations as to dress, manners, and society. Yet, as in the case of
his removal from his father's cabin to New Salem six years earlier, the
change was not so startling as would at first appear. In spite of its
larger population and its ambition as the new State capital, Springfield
was at that time in many ways no great improvement upon New Salem. It
had no public buildings, its streets and sidewalks were still unpaved,
and business of all kinds was laboring under the burden of hard times.

As for himself, although he now owned a license to practise law, it was
still a question how well he would succeed--whether his rugged mind and
firm purpose could win him the livelihood he desired, or whether, after
all, he would be forced to turn his strong muscles to account in earning
his daily bread. Usually so hopeful, there were times when he was
greatly depressed. His friend William Butler relates how, as they were
riding together on horseback from Vandalia to Springfield at the close
of a session of the legislature, Lincoln, in one of these gloomy moods,
told him of the almost hopeless prospect that lay immediately before
him. The session was over, his salary was all drawn, the money all
spent; he had no work, and did not know where to turn to earn even a
week's board. Butler bade him be of good cheer, and, kind practical
friend that he was, took him and his belongings to his own home, keeping
him there for a time as his guest. His most intimate friend of those
days, Joshua F. Speed, tells us that soon after riding into the new
capital on a borrowed horse, with all his earthly possessions packed
in a pair of saddle-bags, Lincoln entered the store owned by Speed,
the saddle-bags over his arm, to ask the price of a single bed with
its necessary coverings and pillows. His question being answered, he
remarked that very likely that was cheap enough, but, small as the price
was, he was unable to pay it; adding that if Speed was willing to credit
him until Christmas, and his experiment as a lawyer proved a success, he
would pay then. "If I fail in this," he said sadly, "I do not know that
I can ever pay you." Speed thought he had never seen such a sorrowful
face. He suggested that instead of going into debt, Lincoln might share
his own roomy quarters over the store, assuring him that if he chose
to accept the offer, he would be very welcome. "Where is your room?"
Lincoln asked quickly. "Upstairs," and the young merchant pointed to a
flight of winding steps leading from the store to the room overhead.

Lincoln picked up the saddle-bags, went upstairs, set them down on the
floor, and reappeared a moment later, beaming with pleasure. "Well,
Speed," he exclaimed, "I am moved!" It is seldom that heartier, truer
friendships come to a man than came to Lincoln in the course of his
life. On the other hand, no one ever deserved better of his fellow-men
than he did; and it is pleasant to know that such brotherly aid as
Butler and Speed were able to give him, offered in all sincerity and
accepted in a spirit that left no sense of galling obligation on either
side, helped the young lawyer over present difficulties and made it
possible for him to keep on in the career he had marked out for himself.

The lawyer who works his way up from a five-dollar fee in a suit before
a justice of the peace, to a five-thousand-dollar fee before the Supreme
Court of his State, has a long and hard path to climb. Lincoln
climbed this path for twenty-five years, with industry, perseverance,
patience--above all, with that self-control and keen sense of right and
wrong which always clearly traced the dividing line between his duty to
his client and his duty to society and truth. His perfect frankness
of statement assured him the confidence of judge and jury in every
argument. His habit of fully admitting the weak points in his case
gained him their close attention to his strong ones, and when clients
brought him questionable cases his advice was always not to bring suit.

"Yes," he once said to a man who offered him such a case; "there is
no reasonable doubt but that I can gain your case for you. I can set a
whole neighborhood at loggerheads; I can distress a widowed mother
and her six fatherless children, and thereby gain for you six hundred
dollars, which rightfully belongs, it appears to me, as much to them as
it does to you. I shall not take your case, but I will give you a little
advice for nothing. You seem a sprightly, energetic man. I would advise
you to try your hand at making six hundred dollars in some other way."

He would have nothing to do with the "tricks" of the profession, though
he met these readily enough when practised by others. He never knowingly
undertook a case in which justice was on the side of his opponent. That
same inconvenient honesty which prompted him, in his store-keeping
days, to close the shop and go in search of a woman he had innocently
defrauded of a few ounces of tea while weighing out her groceries, made
it impossible for him to do his best with a poor case. "Swett," he once
exclaimed, turning suddenly to his associate, "the man is guilty; you
defend him--I can't," and gave up his share of a large fee.

After his death some notes were found, written in his own hand, that had
evidently been intended for a little lecture or talk to law students.
They set forth forcibly, in a few words, his idea of what a lawyer ought
to be and to do. He earnestly commends diligence in study, and, after
diligence, promptness in keeping up the work. "As a general rule, never
take your whole fee in advance," he says, "nor any more than a small
retainer. When fully paid beforehand you are more than a common mortal
if you can feel the same interest in the case as if something were still
in prospect for you as well as for your client." Speech-making should
be practised and cultivated. "It is the lawyer's avenue to the public.
However able and faithful he may be in other respects, people are slow
to bring him business if he cannot make a speech. And yet, there is
not a more fatal error to young lawyers than relying too much on
speech-making. If any one, upon his rare powers of speaking, shall claim
an exemption from the drudgery of the law, his case is a failure
in advance." Discourage going to law. "Persuade your neighbors to
compromise whenever you can. Point out to them how the nominal winner
is often a real loser--in fees, expenses, and waste of time. As a
peacemaker the lawyer has a superior opportunity of being a good man.
There will still be business enough." "There is a vague popular belief
that lawyers are necessarily dishonest. Let no young man choosing the
law for a calling for a moment yield to the popular belief. Resolve to
be honest at all events; and if, in your own judgment, you cannot be an
honest lawyer, resolve to be honest without being a lawyer. Choose some
other occupation rather than one in the choosing of which you do, in
advance, consent to be a knave."

While becoming a lawyer, Lincoln still remained a politician. In those
early days in the West, the two occupations went hand in hand, almost
of necessity. Laws had to be newly made to fit the needs of the new
settlements, and therefore a large proportion of lawyers was sent to
the State legislature. In the summer these same lawyers went about the
State, practising before the circuit courts, Illinois being divided into
what were called judicial circuits, each taking in several counties,
and sometimes covering territory more than a hundred miles square.
Springfield and the neighboring towns were in the eighth judicial
circuit. Twice a year the circuit judge traveled from one county-seat to
another, the lawyers who had business before the court following also.
As newspapers were neither plentiful nor widely read, members of the
legislature were often called upon, while on these journeys, to explain
the laws they had helped to make during the previous winter, and
thus became the political teachers of the people. They had to be well
informed and watchful. When, like Mr. Lincoln, they were witty, and had
a fund of interesting stories besides, they were sure of a welcome and
a hearing in the courtroom, or in the social gatherings that roused the
various little towns during "court-week" into a liveliness quite put of
the common. The tavern would be crowded to its utmost--the judge having
the best room, and the lawyers being put in what was left, late comers
being lucky to find even a sleeping-place on the floor. When not
occupied in court, or preparing cases for the morrow, they would sit
in the public room, or carry their chairs out on the sidewalk in front,
exchanging stories and anecdotes, or pieces of political wisdom, while
men from the town and surrounding farms, dropping in on one pretext or
another, found excuse to linger and join in the talk. At meal-times the
judge presided at the head of the long hotel table, on which the food
was abundant if not always wholesome, and around which lawyers, jurors,
witnesses, prisoners out on bail, and the men who drove the teams,
gathered in friendly equality. Stories of what Mr. Lincoln did and said
on the eighth judicial circuit are still quoted almost with the force
of law; for in this close companionship men came to know each other
thoroughly, and were judged at their true value professionally, as well
as for their power to entertain.

It was only in worldly wealth that Lincoln was poor. He could hold his
own with the best on the eighth judicial circuit, or anywhere else
in the State. He made friends wherever he went. In politics, in
daily conversation, in his work as a lawyer, his life was gradually
broadening. Slowly but surely, too, his gifts as an attractive public
speaker were becoming known. In 1837 he wrote and delivered an able
address before the Young Men's Lyceum of Springfield. In December, 1839,
Stephen A. Douglas, the most brilliant of the young Democrats then in
Springfield, challenged the young Whigs of the town to a tournament of
political speech-making, in which Lincoln bore a full and successful
share.

The man who could not pay a week's board bill was again elected to the
legislature, was invited to public banquets and toasted by name, became
a popular speaker, moved in the best society of the new capital, and
made, as his friends and neighbors declared, a brilliant marriage.




IV. CONGRESSMAN LINCOLN

Hopeful and cheerful as he ordinarily seemed, there was in Mr. Lincoln's
disposition a strain of deep melancholy. This was not peculiar to him
alone, for the pioneers as a race were somber rather than gay. Their
lives had been passed for generations under the most trying physical
conditions, near malaria-infested streams, and where they breathed the
poison of decaying vegetation. Insufficient shelter, storms, the cold of
winter, savage enemies, and the cruel labor that killed off all but the
hardiest of them, had at the same time killed the happy-go-lucky gaiety
of an easier form of life. They were thoughtful, watchful, wary; capable
indeed of wild merriment: but it has been said that although a pioneer
might laugh, he could not easily be made to smile. Lincoln's mind was
unusually sound and sane and normal. He had a cheerful, wholesome, sunny
nature, yet he had inherited the strongest traits of the pioneers,
and there was in him, moreover, much of the poet, with a poet's great
capacity for joy and pain. It is not strange that as he developed into
manhood, especially when his deeper nature began to feel the stirrings
of ambition and of love, these seasons of depression and gloom came upon
him with overwhelming force.

During his childhood he had known few women, save his mother, and that
kind, God-fearing woman his stepmother, who did so much to make his
childhood hopeful and happy. No man ever honored women more truly than
did Abraham Lincoln; while all the qualities that caused men to like
him--his strength, his ambition, his kindliness--served equally to make
him a favorite with them. In the years of his young manhood three women
greatly occupied his thoughts. The first was the slender, fair-haired
Ann Rutledge, whom he very likely saw for the first time as she stood
with the group of mocking people on the river-bank, near her father's
mill, the day Lincoln's flatboat stuck on the dam at New Salem. It was
her death, two years before he went to live at Springfield, that brought
on the first attack of melancholy of which we know, causing him such
deep grief that for a time his friends feared his sorrow might drive him
insane.

Another friend was Mary Owens, a Kentucky girl, very different from
the gentle, blue-eyed Ann Rutledge, but worthy in every way of a man's
affections. She had visited her sister in New Salem several years
before, and Lincoln remembered her as a tall, handsome, well-educated
young woman, who could be serious as well as gay, and who was considered
wealthy. In the autumn of 1836, her sister, Mrs. Able, then about to
start on a visit to Kentucky, jokingly offered to bring Mary back if
Lincoln would promise to marry her. He, also in jest, agreed to do so.
Much to his astonishment, he learned, a few months later, that she had
actually returned with Mrs. Able, and his sensitive conscience made him
feel that the jest had turned into real earnest, and that he was in
duty bound to keep his promise if she wished him to do so. They had both
changed since they last met; neither proved quite pleasing to the other,
yet an odd sort of courtship was kept up, until, some time after Lincoln
went to live in Springfield, Miss Owens put an end to the affair by
refusing him courteously but firmly. Meantime he lived through much
unhappiness and uncertainty of spirit, and made up his mind "never
again to think of marrying": a resolution which he kept--until another
Kentucky girl drove it from his thoughts.

Springfield had by this time become very lively and enterprising. There
was a deal of "flourishing around in carriages," as Lincoln wrote Miss
Owens, and business and politics and society all played an active part
in the life of the little town. The meetings of the legislature brought
to the new capital a group of young men of unusual talent and ability.
There was friendly rivalry between them, and party disputes ran high,
but social good-humor prevailed, and the presence of these brilliant
young people, later to become famous as Presidential candidates, cabinet
ministers, senators, congressmen, orators, and battle heroes, lent
to the social gatherings of Springfield a zest rarely found in larger
places.

Into the midst of this gaiety came Mary Todd of Kentucky, twenty-one
years old, handsome, accomplished and witty--a dashing and fascinating
figure in dress and conversation. She was the sister of Mrs. Ninian
W. Edwards, whose husband was a prominent Whig member of the
legislature--one of the "Long Nine," as these men were known. Their
added height was said to be fifty-five feet, and they easily made up in
influence what they lacked in numbers. Lincoln was the "tallest" of them
all in body and in mind, and although as poor as a church mouse, was
quite as welcome anywhere as the men who wore ruffled shirts and could
carry gold watches. Miss Todd soon singled out and held the admiration
of such of the Springfield beaux as pleased her somewhat wilful fancy,
and Lincoln, being much at the Edwards house, found himself, almost
before he knew it, entangled in a new love-affair. In the course of a
twelvemonth he was engaged to marry her, but something, nobody knows
what or how, happened to break the engagement, and to plunge him again
in a very sea of wretchedness. Nor is it necessary that we should know
about it further than that a great trouble came upon him, which he bore
nobly, after his kind. Few men have had his stern sense of duty, his
tenderness of heart, his conscience, so easy toward others, so merciless
toward himself. The trouble preyed upon his mind until he could think
of nothing else. He became unable to attend to business, or to take any
part in the life around him. Fearing for his reason as well as for his
health if this continued, his good friend Joshua F. Speed carried him
off, whether he wished or no, for a visit to his own home in Kentucky.
Here they stayed for some time, and Lincoln grew much better, returning
to Springfield about midsummer, almost his old self, though far from
happy.

An affair that helped to bring the lovers together again is so out of
keeping with the rest of his life, that it would deserve mention for
that reason, if for no other. This is nothing less than Lincoln's first
and only duel. It happened that James Shields, afterward a general in
two wars and a senator from two States, was at that time auditor of the
State of Illinois, with his office at Springfield. He was a Democrat,
and an Irishman by birth, with an Irishman's quick temper and readiness
to take offense. He had given orders about collecting certain taxes
which displeased the Whigs, and shortly after Lincoln came back from
Kentucky a series of humorous letters ridiculing the auditor and his
order appeared in the Springfield paper, to the great amusement of the
townspeople and the fury of Shields. These letters were dated from the
"Lost Townships," and were supposed to be written by a farmer's widow
signing herself "Aunt Rebecca." The real writers were Miss Todd and a
clever friend, who undertook them more for the purpose of poking fun at
Shields than for party effect. In framing the political part of
their attack, they had found it necessary to consult Lincoln, and he
obligingly set them a pattern by writing the first letter himself.

Shields sent to the editor of the paper to find out the name of the real
"Rebecca." The editor, as in duty bound, consulted Lincoln, and was told
to give Lincoln's name, but not to mention the ladies. Shields then sent
Lincoln an angry challenge; and Lincoln, who considered the whole affair
ridiculous, and would willingly have explained his part in it if Shields
had made a gentlemanly inquiry, chose as weapons "broadswords of the
largest size," and named as conditions of the duel that a plank ten feet
long be firmly fixed on edge in the ground, as a line over which neither
combatant was to pass his foot upon forfeit of his life. Next, lines
were to be drawn upon the ground on each side of the plank, parallel
with it, at the distance of the whole length of the sword and three feet
additional. The passing of his own line by either man was to be deemed a
surrender of the fight.

It is easy to see from these conditions that Lincoln refused to consider
the matter seriously, and determined to treat it as absurdly as it
deserved. He and Shields, and their respective seconds, with the
broadswords, hurried away to an island in the Mississippi River,
opposite Alton; but long before the plank was set up, or swords were
drawn, mutual friends took the matter out of the hands of the seconds,
and declared a settlement of the difficulty.

The affair created much talk and merriment in Springfield, but Lincoln
found in it more than comedy. By means of it he and Miss Todd were again
brought together in friendly interviews, and on November 4, they were
married at the house of Mr. Edwards. Four children were born of this
marriage: Robert Todd Lincoln, August 1, 1843; Edward Baker Lincoln,
March 10, 1846; William Wallace Lincoln, December 21, 1850; and Thomas
Lincoln, April 4, 1853. Edward died while a baby; William, in the White
House, February 20, 1862; Thomas in Chicago, July 15, 1871; and the
mother, Mary Lincoln, in Springfield, July 16, 1882. Robert Lincoln was
graduated from Harvard during the Civil War, serving afterward on the
staff of General Grant. He has since been Secretary of War and Minister
to England, and has held many other important positions of trust.

His wedding over, Lincoln took up again the practical routine of daily
life. He and his bride were so poor that they could not make the visit
to Kentucky that both would so much have enjoyed. They could not even
set up a little home of their own. "We are not keeping house," he wrote
to a friend, "but boarding at the Globe Tavern," where, he added, their
room and board only cost them four dollars a week. His "National Debt"
of the old New Salem days was not yet all paid off, and patiently and
resolutely he went on practising the economy he had learned in the hard
school of experience.

Lincoln's law partnership with John T. Stuart had lasted four years.
Then Stuart was elected to Congress, and another one was formed with
Judge Stephen T. Logan. It was a well-timed and important change. Stuart
had always cared more for politics than for law. With Logan law was the
main object, and under his guidance and encouragement Lincoln entered
upon the study and practical work of his profession in a more serious
spirit than ever before. His interest in politics continued, however,
and in truth his practice at that time was so small as to leave ample
time for both. Stuart had been twice elected to Congress, and very
naturally Lincoln, who served his party quite as faithfully, and was
fully as well known, hoped for a similar honor. He had profited greatly
by the companionship and friendly rivalry of the talented young men of
Springfield, but their talent made the prize he wished the harder to
gain. Twice he was disappointed, the nomination going to other men; but
in May, 1846, he was nominated, and in August of the same year elected,
to the Thirtieth Congress. He had the distinction of being the only Whig
member from his State, the other Illinois congressmen at that time all
being Democrats; but he proved no exception to the general rule that a
man rarely comes into notice during his first term in the National House
of Representatives. A new member has much to learn, even when, like
Lincoln, long service in a State legislature has taught him how the
business of making laws is carried on. He must find out what has been
done and is likely to be done on a multitude of subjects new to him,
must make the acquaintance of his fellow-members, must visit the
departments of government almost daily to look after the interests of
people from his State and congressional district. Legally he is elected
for a term of two years. Practically a session of five or six months
during the first year, and of three months during the second, further
reduce his opportunities more than one-half.

Lincoln did not attempt to shine forth in debate, either by a stinging
retort, or burst of inspired eloquence. He went about his task quietly
and earnestly, performing his share of duty with industry and a hearty
admiration for the ability of better-known members. "I just take my
pen," he wrote enthusiastically to a friend after listening to a speech
which pleased him much, "to say that Mr. Stephens, of Georgia, is a
little slim, pale-faced consumptive man, with a voice like Logan's, has
just concluded the very best speech of an hour's length I ever heard. My
old withered, dry eyes are full of tears yet."

During the first session of his term Lincoln made three long speeches,
carefully prepared and written out beforehand. He was neither elated
nor dismayed at the result. "As to speech-making," he wrote William H.
Herndon, who had now become his law partner, "I find speaking here and
elsewhere about the same thing. I was about as badly scared, and no
worse, as I am when I speak in court."

The next year he made no set speeches, but in addition to the usual work
of a congressman occupied himself with a bill that had for its object
the purchase and freeing of all slaves in the District of Columbia.
Slavery was not only lawful at the national capital at that time: there
was, to quote Mr. Lincoln's own graphic words, "in view from the windows
of the Capitol a sort of negro livery-stable, where droves of negroes
were collected, temporarily kept, and finally taken to Southern markets,
precisely like droves of horses."

To Lincoln and to other people who disapproved of slavery, the idea of
human beings held in bondage under the very shadow of the dome of the
Capitol seemed indeed a bitter mockery. As has already been stated, he
did not then believe Congress had the right to interfere with slavery in
States that chose to have it; but in the District of Columbia the power
of Congress was supreme, and the matter was entirely different. His
bill provided that the Federal Government should pay full value to the
slave-holders of the District for all slaves in their possession,
and should at once free the older ones. The younger ones were to be
apprenticed for a term of years, in order to make them self-supporting,
after which they also were to receive their freedom. The bill was very
carefully thought out, and had the approval of residents of the District
who held the most varied views upon slavery; but good as it was, the
measure was never allowed to come to a vote, and Lincoln went back to
Springfield, at the end of his term, feeling doubtless that his efforts
in behalf of the slaves had been all in vain.

While in Washington he lived very simply and quietly, taking little part
in the social life of the city, though cordially liked by all who made
his acquaintance. An inmate of the modest boarding-house where he had
rooms has told of the cheery atmosphere he seemed to bring with him into
the common dining-room, where political arguments were apt to run high.
He never appeared anxious to insist upon his own views; and when others,
less considerate, forced matters until the talk threatened to become too
furious, he would interrupt with an anecdote or a story that cleared the
air and ended the discussion in a general laugh. Sometimes for exercise
he would go into a bowling-alley close by, entering into the game with
great zest, and accepting defeat and victory with equal good-nature. By
the time he had finished a little circle would be gathered around him,
enjoying his enjoyment, and laughing at his quaint expressions and
sallies of wit.

His gift for jest and story-telling has become traditional. Indeed,
almost every good story that has been invented within a hundred years
has been laid at his door. As a matter of fact, though he was fond of
telling them, and told them well, he told comparatively few of the
number that have been credited to him. He had a wonderful memory, and a
fine power of making his hearers see the scene he wished to depict; but
the final charm of his stories lay in their aptness, and in the kindly
humor that left no sting behind it.

During his term in Congress the Presidential campaign of 1848 came on.
Lincoln took an active part in the nomination and election of General
Zachary Taylor--"Old Rough and Ready," as he was called--making speeches
in Maryland and Massachusetts, as well as in his own home district of
Illinois. Two letters that he wrote during this campaign have special
interest for young readers, for they show the sympathetic encouragement
he gave to young men anxious to make a place and a name for themselves
in American politics.

"Now as to the young men," he wrote. "You must not wait to be brought
forward by the older men. For instance, do you suppose that I should
ever have got into notice if I had waited to be hunted up and pushed
forward by older men? You young men get together and form a 'Rough and
Ready' club, and have regular meetings and speeches.... Let every one
play the part he can play best--some speak, some sing, and all 'holler.'
Your meetings will be of evenings; the older men, and the women, will go
to hear you; so that it will not only contribute to the election of
'Old Zach,' but will be an interesting pastime, and improving to the
intellectual faculties of all engaged."

In another letter, answering a young friend who complained of being
neglected, he said:

"Nothing could afford me more satisfaction than to learn that you and
others of my young friends at home are doing battle in the contest and
taking a stand far above any I have ever been able to reach.... I
cannot conceive that other old men feel differently. Of course I cannot
demonstrate what I say; but I was young once, and I am sure I was never
ungenerously thrust back. I hardly know what to say. The way for a young
man to rise is to improve himself every way he can, never suspecting
that anybody wishes to hinder him. Allow me to assure you that suspicion
and jealousy never did help any man in any situation. There may
sometimes be ungenerous attempts to keep a young man down; and they will
succeed, too, if he allows his mind to be diverted from its true channel
to brood over the attempted injury. Cast about and see if this feeling
has not injured every person you have ever known to fall into it."

He was about forty years old when he wrote this letter. By some people
that is not considered a very great age; but he doubtless felt himself
immensely older, as he was infinitely wiser, than his petulant young
correspondent.

General Taylor was triumphantly elected, and it then became Lincoln's
duty, as Whig member of Congress from Illinois, to recommend certain
persons to fill government offices in that State. He did this after
he returned to Springfield, for his term in Congress ended on March 4,
1849, the day that General Taylor became President. The letters that he
sent to Washington when forwarding the papers and applications of people
who wished appointment were both characteristic and amusing; for in his
desire not to mislead or to do injustice to any man, they were very apt
to say more in favor of the men he did not wish to see appointed than in
recommendation of his own particular candidates.

This absolute and impartial fairness to friend and foe alike was one of
his strongest traits, governing every action of his life. If it had not
been for this, he might possibly have enjoyed another term in Congress,
for there had been talk of reelecting him. In spite of his confession to
Speed that "being elected to Congress, though I am very grateful to our
friends for having done it, has not pleased me as much as I expected,"
this must have been flattering. But there were many able young men
in Springfield who coveted the honor, and they had entered into an
agreement among themselves that each would be content with a single
term. Lincoln of course remained faithful to this promise. His strict
keeping of promises caused him also to lose an appointment from
President Taylor as Commissioner of the General Land Office, which might
easily have been his, but for which he had agreed to recommend some
other Illinois man. A few weeks later the President offered to make him
governor of the new Territory of Oregon. This attracted him much more
than the other office had done, but he declined because his wife was
unwilling to live in a place so far away.

His career in Congress, while adding little to his fame at the time,
proved of great advantage to him in after life, for it gave him a close
knowledge of the workings of the Federal Government, and brought him
into contact with political leaders from all parts of the Union.




V. THE CHAMPION OF FREEDOM

For four or five years after his return from Congress, Lincoln remained
in Springfield, working industriously at his profession. He was offered
a law partnership in Chicago, but declined on the ground that his health
would not stand the confinement of a great city. His business increased
in volume and importance as the months went by; and it was during this
time that he engaged in what is perhaps the most dramatic as well as the
best known of all his law cases--his defense of Jack Armstrong's son on
a charge of murder. A knot of young men had quarreled one night on
the outskirts of a camp-meeting, one was killed, and suspicion pointed
strongly toward young Armstrong as the murderer. Lincoln, for old
friendship's sake, offered to defend him--an offer most gratefully
accepted by his family. The principal witness swore that he had seen
young Armstrong strike the fatal blow--had seen him distinctly by the
light of a bright moon. Lincoln made him repeat the statement until it
seemed as if he were sealing the death-warrant of the prisoner. Then
Lincoln began his address to the jury. He was not there as a hired
attorney, he told them, but because of friendship. He told of his old
relations with Jack Armstrong, of the kindness the prisoner's mother had
shown him in New Salem, how he had himself rocked the prisoner to sleep
when the latter was a little child. Then he reviewed the testimony,
pointing out how completely everything depended on the statements
of this one witness; and ended by proving beyond question that his
testimony was false, since, according to the almanac, which he produced
in court and showed to judge and jury, THERE WAS NO MOON IN THE SKY
THAT NIGHT at the hour the murder was committed. The jury brought in a
verdict of "Not guilty," and the prisoner was discharged.

Lincoln was always strong with a jury. He knew how to handle men, and
he had a direct way of going to the heart of things. He had, moreover,
unusual powers of mental discipline. It was after his return from
Congress, when he had long been acknowledged one of the foremost lawyers
of the State, that he made up his mind he lacked the power of close and
sustained reasoning, and set himself like a schoolboy to study works of
logic and mathematics to remedy the defect. At this time he committed to
memory six books of the propositions of Euclid; and, as always, he was
an eager reader on many subjects, striving in this way to make up for
the lack of education he had had as a boy. He was always interested in
mechanical principles and their workings, and in May, 1849, patented a
device for lifting vessels over shoals, which had evidently been dormant
in his mind since the days of his early Mississippi River experiences.
The little model of a boat, whittled out with his own hand, that he sent
to the Patent Office when he filed his application, is still shown to
visitors, though the invention itself failed to bring about any change
in steamboat architecture.

In work and study time slipped away. He was the same cheery companion as
of old, much sought after by his friends, but now more often to be found
in his office surrounded by law-books and papers than had been the case
before his term in Congress. His interest in politics seemed almost
to have ceased when, in 1854, something happened to rouse that and his
sense of right and justice as they had never been roused before. This
was the repeal of the "Missouri Compromise," a law passed by Congress
in the year 1820, allowing Missouri to enter the Union as a slave State,
but positively forbidding slavery in all other territory of the United
States lying north of latitude 36 degrees 30 minutes, which was the
southern boundary-line of Missouri.

Up to that time the Southern States, where slavery was lawful, had been
as wealthy and quite as powerful in politics as the Northern or free
States. The great unoccupied territory lying to the west, which, in
years to come, was sure to be filled with people and made into new
States, lay, however, mostly north of 36 degrees 30 minutes; and it was
easy to see that as new free States came one after the other into the
Union the importance of the South must grow less and less, because there
was little or no territory left out of which slave States could be
made to offset them. The South therefore had been anxious to have the
Missouri Compromise repealed.

The people of the North, on the other hand, were not all wise or
disinterested in their way of attacking slavery. As always happens,
self-interest and moral purpose mingled on both sides; but, as a whole,
it may be said that they wished to get rid of slavery because they felt
it to be wrong, and totally out of place in a country devoted to freedom
and liberty. The quarrel between them was as old as the nation, and it
had been gaining steadily in intensity. At first only a few persons in
each section had been really interested. By the year 1850 it had come
to be a question of much greater moment, and during the ten years that
followed was to increase in bitterness until it absorbed the thoughts of
the entire people, and plunged the country into a terrible civil war.

Abraham Lincoln had grown to manhood while the question was gaining in
importance. As a youth, during his flatboat voyages to New Orleans he
had seen negroes chained and beaten, and the injustice of slavery had
been stamped upon his soul. The uprightness of his mind abhorred a
system that kept men in bondage merely because they happened to be
black. The intensity of his feeling on the subject had made him a Whig
when, as a friendless boy, he lived in a town where Whig ideas were much
in disfavor. The same feeling, growing stronger as he grew older, had
inspired the Lincoln-Stone protest and the bill to free the slaves in
the District of Columbia, and had caused him to vote at least forty
times against slavery in one form or another during his short term in
Congress. The repeal of the Missouri Compromise, throwing open once more
to slavery a vast amount of territory from which it had been shut out,
could not fail to move him deeply. His sense of justice and his strong
powers of reasoning were equally stirred, and from that time until
slavery came to its end through his own act, he gave his time and all
his energies to the cause of freedom.

Two points served to make the repeal of the Missouri Compromise of
special interest to Lincoln. The first was personal, in that the man who
championed the measure, and whose influence in Congress alone made it
possible, was Senator Stephen A. Douglas, who had been his neighbor in
Illinois for many years.

The second was deeper. He realized that the struggle meant much more
than the freedom or bondage of a few million black men: that it was in
reality a struggle for the central idea of our American republic--the
statement in our Declaration of Independence that "all men are created
equal." He made no public speeches until autumn, but in the meantime
studied the question with great care, both as to its past history and
present state. When he did speak it was with a force and power that
startled Douglas and, it is said, brought him privately to Lincoln with
the proposition that neither of them should address a public meeting
again until after the next election.

Douglas was a man of great ambition as well as of unusual political
skill. Until recently he had been heartily in favor of keeping slavery
out of the Northwest Territory; but he had set his heart upon being
President of the United States, and he thought that he saw a chance of
this if he helped the South to repeal the Missouri Compromise, and thus
gained its gratitude and its votes. Without hesitation he plunged into
the work and labored successfully to overthrow this law of more than
thirty years' standing.

Lincoln's speech against the repeal had made a deep impression in
Illinois, where he was at once recognized as the people's spokesman
in the cause of freedom. His statements were so clear, his language so
eloquent, the stand he took so just, that all had to acknowledge his
power. He did not then, nor for many years afterward, say that the
slaves ought to be immediately set free. What he did insist upon was
that slavery was wrong, and that it must not be allowed to spread into
territory already free; but that, gradually, in ways lawful and just to
masters and slaves alike, the country should strive to get rid of it in
places where it already existed. He never let his hearers lose sight of
the great underlying moral fact. "Slavery," he said, "is founded in the
selfishness of man's nature; opposition to it in his love of justice."
Even Senator Douglas was not prepared to admit that slavery was right.
He knew that if he said that he could never be President, for the whole
North would rise against him. He wished to please both sides, so he
argued that it was not a question for him or for the Federal Government
to decide, but one which each State and Territory must settle for
itself. In answer to this plea of his that it was not a matter
of morals, but of "State rights"--a mere matter of local
self-government--Mr. Lincoln replied, "When the white man governs
himself that is self-government; but when he governs himself and
also governs another man, that is more than self-government--that is
despotism."

It was on these opposing grounds that the two men took their stand for
the battle of argument and principle that was to continue for years,
to outgrow the bounds of the State, to focus the attention of the whole
country upon them, and, in the end, to have far-reaching consequences
of which neither at that time dreamed. At first the field appeared
much narrower, though even then the reward was a large one. Lincoln had
entered the contest with no thought of political gain; but it happened
that a new United States senator from Illinois had to be chosen
about that time. Senators are not voted for by the people, but by the
legislatures of their respective States and as a first result of all
this discussion about the right or wrong of slavery it was found that
the Illinois legislature, instead of having its usual large Democratic
majority, was almost evenly divided. Lincoln seemed the most likely
candidate; and he would have undoubtedly been chosen senator, had not
five men, whose votes were absolutely necessary, stoutly refused to
vote for a Whig, no matter what his views upon slavery might be. Keeping
stubbornly aloof, they cast their ballots time after time for Lyman
Trumbull, who was a Democrat, although as strongly opposed to slavery as
Lincoln himself.

A term of six years in the United States Senate must have seemed a large
prize to Lincoln just then--possibly the largest he might ever hope to
gain; and it must have been a hard trial to feel it so near and then
see it slipping away from him. He did what few men would have had
the courage or the unselfishness to do. Putting aside all personal
considerations, and intent only on making sure of an added vote against
slavery in the Senate, he begged his friends to cease voting for him and
to unite with those five Democrats to elect Trumbull.

"I regret my defeat moderately," he wrote to a sympathizing friend, "but
I am not nervous about it." Yet it must have been particularly trying to
know that with forty-five votes in his favor, and only five men standing
between him and success, he had been forced to give up his own chances
and help elect the very man who had defeated him.

The voters of Illinois were quick to realize the sacrifice he had made.
The five stubborn men became his most devoted personal followers; and
his action at this time did much to bring about a great political change
in the State. All over the country old party lines were beginning to
break up and re-form themselves on this one question of slavery. Keeping
its old name, the Democratic party became the party in favor of slavery,
while the Northern Whigs and all those Democrats who objected to slavery
joined in what became known as the Republican party. It was at a great
mass convention held in Bloomington in May, 1856, that the Republican
party of Illinois took final shape; and it was here that Lincoln made
the wonderful address which has become famous in party history as his
"lost speech." There had been much enthusiasm. Favorite speakers had
already made stirring addresses that had been listened to with eagerness
and heartily applauded; but hardly a man moved from his seat until
Lincoln should be heard. It was he who had given up the chance of being
senator to help on the cause of freedom. He alone had successfully
answered Douglas. Every one felt the fitness of his making the closing
speech--and right nobly did he honor the demand. The spell of the hour
was visibly upon him. Standing upon the platform before the members of
the convention, his tall figure drawn up to its full height, his head
thrown back, and his voice ringing with earnestness, he denounced the
evil they had to fight in a speech whose force and power carried his
hearers by storm, ending with a brilliant appeal to all who loved
liberty and justice to

  Come as the winds come when forests are rended;
  Come as the waves come when navies are stranded;

and unite with the Republican party against this great wrong.

The audience rose and answered him with cheer upon cheer. Then, after
the excitement had died down, it was found that neither a full report
nor even trustworthy notes of his speech had been taken. The sweep and
magnetism of his oratory had carried everything before it--even the
reporters had forgotten their duty, and their pencils had fallen idle.
So it happened that the speech as a whole was lost. Mr. Lincoln himself
could never recall what he had said; but the hundreds who heard him
never forgot the scene or the lifting inspiration of his words.

Three weeks later the first national convention of the Republican party
was held. John C. Fremont was nominated for President, and Lincoln
received over a hundred votes for Vice-President, but fortunately, as it
proved, was not selected, the honor falling to William L. Dayton of
New Jersey. The Democratic candidate for President that year was James
Buchanan, "a Northern man with Southern principles," very strongly in
favor of slavery. Lincoln took an active part in the campaign against
him, making more than fifty speeches in Illinois and the adjoining
States. The Democrats triumphed, and Buchanan was elected President;
but Lincoln was not discouraged, for the new Republican party had shown
unexpected strength throughout the North. Indeed, Lincoln was seldom
discouraged. He had an abiding faith that the people would in the long
run vote wisely; and the cheerful hope he was able to inspire in his
followers was always a strong point in his leadership.

In 1858, two years after this, another election took place in Illinois,
on which the choice of a United States senator depended. This time
it was the term of Stephen A. Douglas that was drawing to a close. He
greatly desired reelection. There was but one man in the State who could
hope to rival him, and with a single voice the Republicans of Illinois
called upon Lincoln to oppose him. Douglas was indeed an opponent not to
be despised. His friends and followers called him the "Little Giant."
He was plausible, popular, quick-witted, had winning manners, was most
skilful in the use of words, both to convince his hearers and, at times,
to hide his real meaning. He and Lincoln were old antagonists. They had
first met in the far-away Vandalia days of the Illinois legislature. In
Springfield, Douglas had been the leader of the young Democrats, while
Lincoln had been leader of the younger Whigs. Their rivalry had not
always been confined to politics, for gossip asserted that Douglas had
been one of Miss Todd's more favored suitors. Douglas in those days had
no great opinion of the tall young lawyer; while Lincoln is said to have
described Douglas as "the least man I ever saw"--although that referred
to his rival's small stature and boyish figure, not to his mental
qualities. Douglas was not only ambitious to be President: he had staked
everything on the repeal of the Missouri Compromise and his statement
that this question of slavery was one that every State and Territory
must settle for itself, but with which the Federal Government had
nothing to do. Unfortunately, his own party no longer agreed with him.
Since Buchanan had become President the Democrats had advanced their
ground. They now claimed that while a State might properly say whether
or not it would tolerate slavery, slavery ought to be lawful in all the
Territories, no matter whether their people liked it or not.

A famous law case, called the Dred Scott case, lately decided by the
Supreme Court of the United States, went far toward making this really
the law of the land. In its decision the court positively stated that
neither Congress nor a territorial legislature had power to keep slavery
out of any United States Territory. This decision placed Senator Douglas
in a most curious position. It justified him in repealing the Missouri
Compromise, but at the same time it absolutely denied his statement that
the people of a Territory had a right to settle the slavery question to
suit themselves. Being a clever juggler with words, he explained away
the difference by saying that a master might have a perfect right to his
slave in a Territory, and yet that right could do him no good unless
it were protected by laws in force where his slave happened to be.
Such laws depended entirely on the will of the people living in
the Territory, and so, after all, they had the deciding voice. This
reasoning brought upon him the displeasure of President Buchanan and all
the Democrats who believed as he did, and Douglas found himself forced
either to deny what he had already told the voters of Illinois, or to
begin a quarrel with the President. He chose the latter, well knowing
that to lose his reelection to the Senate at this time would end his
political career. His fame as well as his quarrel with the President
served to draw immense crowds to his meetings when he returned to
Illinois and began speech-making, and his followers so inspired these
meetings with their enthusiasm that for a time it seemed as though all
real discussion would be swallowed up in noise and shouting.

Mr. Lincoln, acting on the advice of his leading friends, sent Douglas a
challenge to joint debate. Douglas accepted, though not very willingly;
and it was agreed that they should address the same meetings at seven
towns in the State, on dates extending through August, September, and
October. The terms were that one should speak an hour in opening, the
other an hour and a half in reply, and the first again have half an hour
to close. Douglas was to open the meeting at one place, Lincoln at the
next.

It was indeed a memorable contest. Douglas, the most skilled and
plausible speaker in the Democratic party, was battling for his
political life. He used every art, every resource, at his command.
Opposed to him was a veritable giant in stature--a man whose qualities
of mind and of body were as different from those of the "Little
Giant"--as could well be imagined. Lincoln was direct, forceful,
logical, and filled with a purpose as lofty as his sense of right and
justice was strong. He cared much for the senatorship, but he cared far
more to right the wrong of slavery, and to warn people of the peril
that menaced the land. Already in June he had made a speech that greatly
impressed his hearers. "A house divided against itself cannot stand,"
he told them. "I believe this government cannot endure permanently half
slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved, I do not
expect the house to fall--but I do expect it will cease to be divided.
It will become all one thing or all the other"; and he went on to say
that there was grave danger it might become all slave. He showed how,
little by little, slavery had been gaining ground, until all it lacked
now was another Supreme Court decision to make it alike lawful in all
the States, North as well as South. The warning came home to the people
of the North with startling force, and thereafter all eyes were fixed
upon the senatorial campaign in Illinois.

The battle continued for nearly three months. Besides the seven great
joint debates, each man spoke daily, sometimes two or three times a day,
at meetings of his own. Once before their audiences, Douglas's dignity
as a senator afforded him no advantage, Lincoln's popularity gave
him little help. Face to face with the followers of each, gathered
in immense numbers and alert with jealous watchfulness, there was no
escaping the rigid test of skill in argument and truth in principle. The
processions and banners, the music and fireworks, of both parties were
stilled and forgotten while the people listened to the three hours'
battle of mind against mind.

Northern Illinois had been peopled largely from the free States, and
southern Illinois from the slave States; thus the feeling about slavery
in the two parts was very different. To take advantage of this, Douglas,
in the very first debate, which took place at Ottawa, in northern
Illinois, asked Lincoln seven questions, hoping to make him answer in a
way that would be unpopular farther south. In the second debate Lincoln
replied to these very frankly, and in his turn asked Douglas four
questions, the second of which was whether, in Douglas's opinion, the
people of any Territory could, in any lawful way, against the wish of
any citizen of the United States, bar out slavery before that Territory
became a State. Mr. Lincoln had long and carefully studied the meaning
and effect of this question. If Douglas said, "No," he would please
Buchanan and the administration Democrats, but at the cost of denying
his own words. If he said, "Yes," he would make enemies of every
Democrat in the South. Lincoln's friends all advised against asking the
question. They felt sure that Douglas would answer, "Yes," and that this
would win him his election. "If you ask it, you can never be senator,"
they told Lincoln. "Gentlemen," he replied, "I am killing larger game.
If Douglas answers he can never be President, and the battle of 1860 is
worth a hundred of this."

Both prophecies were fulfilled. Douglas answered as was expected; and
though, in actual numbers, the Republicans of Illinois cast more votes
than the Democrats, a legislature was chosen that rejected him to the
Senate. Two years later, Lincoln, who in 1858 had not the remotest
dream of such a thing, found himself the successful candidate of the
Republican party for President of the United States.

To see how little Lincoln expected such an outcome it is only necessary
to glance at the letters he wrote to friends at the end of his campaign
against Douglas. Referring to the election to be held two years later,
he said, "In that day I shall fight in the ranks, but I shall be in no
one's way for any of the places." To another correspondent he expressed
himself even more frankly: "Of course I wished, but I did not much
expect, a better result... . I am glad I made the late race. It gave me
a hearing on the great and durable question of the age, which I could
have had in no other way; and though I now sink out of view and shall
be forgotten, I believe I have made some marks which will tell for the
cause of civil liberty long after I am gone."

But he was not to "sink out of view and be forgotten." Douglas himself
contributed not a little toward keeping his name before the public; for
shortly after their contest was ended the reelected senator started on
a trip through the South to set himself right again with the Southern
voters, and in every speech that he made he referred to Lincoln as the
champion of "abolitionism." In this way the people were not allowed to
forget the stand Lincoln had taken, and during the year 1859 they came
to look upon him as the one man who could be relied on at all times to
answer Douglas and Douglas's arguments.

In the autumn of that year Lincoln was asked to speak in Ohio, where
Douglas was again referring to him by name. In December he was invited
to address meetings in various towns in Kansas, and early in 1860 he
made a speech in New York that raised him suddenly and unquestionably to
the position of a national leader.

It was delivered in the hall of Cooper Institute, on the evening of
February 27, 1860, before an audience of men and women remarkable for
their culture, wealth and influence.

Mr. Lincoln's name and words had filled so large a space in the Eastern
newspapers of late, that his listeners were very eager to see and hear
this rising Western politician. The West, even at that late day, was
very imperfectly understood by the East. It was looked upon as a land
of bowie-knives and pistols, of steamboat explosions, of mobs, of wild
speculation and wilder adventure. What, then, would be the type, the
character, the language of this speaker? How would he impress the great
editor Horace Greeley, who sat among the invited guests; David Dudley
Field, the great lawyer, who escorted him to the platform; William
Cullen Bryant, the great poet, who presided over the meeting?

The audience quickly forgot these questioning doubts. They had but
time to note Mr. Lincoln's unusual height, his rugged, strongly marked
features, the clear ring of his high-pitched voice, the commanding
earnestness of his manner. Then they became completely absorbed in what
he was saying. He began quietly, soberly, almost as if he were arguing
a case before a court. In his entire address he uttered neither an
anecdote nor a jest. If any of his hearers came expecting the style or
manner of the Western stump-speaker, they met novelty of an unlooked-for
kind; for such was the apt choice of words, the simple strength of
his reasoning, the fairness of every point he made, the force of every
conclusion he drew, that his listeners followed him, spellbound. He
spoke on the subject that he had so thoroughly mastered and that was now
uppermost in men's minds--the right or wrong of slavery. He laid bare
the complaints and demands of the Southern leaders, pointed out the
injustice of their threat to break up the Union if their claims were not
granted, stated forcibly the stand taken by the Republican party, and
brought his speech to a close with the short and telling appeal:

"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."

The attention with which it was followed, the applause that greeted
its telling points, and the enthusiasm of the Republican journals next
morning showed that Lincoln's Cooper Institute speech had taken New York
by storm. It was printed in full in four of the leading daily papers of
the city, and immediately reprinted in pamphlet form. From New York Mr.
Lincoln made a tour of speech-making through several of the New England
States, where he was given a hearty welcome, and listened to with an
eagerness that showed a marked result at the spring elections. The
interest of the working-men who heard these addresses was equaled,
perhaps excelled, by the pleased surprise of college professors and men
of letters when they found that the style and method of this self-taught
popular Western orator would stand the test of their most searching
professional criticism.

One other audience he had during this trip, if we may trust report,
which, while neither as learned as the college professors, nor perhaps
as critical as the factory-men, was quite as hard to please, and
the winning of whose approval shows another side of this great and
many-sided man. A teacher in a Sunday-school in the Five Points district
of New York, at that time one of the worst parts of the city, has told
how, one morning, a tall, thin, unusual-looking man entered and sat
quietly listening to the exercises. His face showed such genuine
interest that he was asked if he would like to speak to the children.
Accepting the invitation with evident pleasure, he stepped forward and
began a simple address that quickly charmed the roomful of youngsters
into silence. His language was singularly beautiful, his voice musical
with deep feeling. The faces of his little listeners drooped into sad
earnestness at his words of warning, and brightened again when he spoke
of cheerful promises. "Go on! Oh, do go on!" they begged when at last
he tried to stop. As he left the room somebody asked his name. "Abraham
Lincoln, from Illinois," was the courteous reply.




VI. THE NEW PRESIDENT

Lincoln's great skill and wisdom in his debate with Douglas turned
the eyes of the whole country upon him; and the force and logic of
his Cooper Institute speech convinced every one that in him they had
discovered a new national leader. He began to be mentioned as a possible
candidate for President in the election which was to take place that
fall to choose a successor to President Buchanan. Indeed, quite a year
earlier, an editor in Illinois had written to him asking permission to
announce him as a candidate in his newspaper. At that time Lincoln had
refused, thanking him for the compliment, but adding modestly: "I must
in candor say that I do not think myself fit for the Presidency."
About Christmas time, 1859, however, a number of his stanchest Illinois
friends urged him to let them use his name, and he consented, not so
much in the hope of being chosen, as of perhaps receiving the nomination
for Vice-President, or at least of making a show of strength that would
aid him at some future time to become senator. The man most talked
about as the probable Republican candidate for President was William H.
Seward, who was United States senator from New York, and had also been
governor of that State.

The political unrest continued. Slavery was still the most absorbing
topic, and it was upon their stand for or against slavery that all the
Presidential candidates were chosen. The pretensions and demands of the
Southern leaders had by this time passed into threats. They declared
roundly that they would take their States out of the Union if slavery
were not quickly made lawful all over the country, or in case a "Black
Republican" President should be elected. The Democrats, unable to agree
among themselves, split into two sections, the Northerners nominating
Stephen A. Douglas for President, while delegates who had come to their
National Convention from what were called the Cotton States chose John
C. Breckinridge. A few men who had belonged to the old Whig party, but
felt themselves unable to join the Republicans or either faction of the
Democrats, met elsewhere and nominated John Bell.

This breaking up of their political enemies into three distinct camps
greatly cheered the Republicans, and when their National Convention came
together in Chicago on May 16, 1860, its members were filled with the
most eager enthusiasm. Its meetings were held in a huge temporary wooden
building called the Wigwam, so large that 10,000 people could easily
assemble in it to watch the proceedings. Few conventions have shown such
depth of feeling. Not only the delegates on the central platform, but
even the spectators seemed impressed with the fact that they were taking
part in a great historical event. The first two days were taken up
in seating delegates, adopting a "platform" or statement of party
principles, and in other necessary routine matters. On the third day,
however, it was certain that balloting would begin, and crowds hurried
to the Wigwam in a fever of curiosity. The New York men, sure that
Seward would be the choice of the convention, marched there in a body,
with music and banners. The friends of Lincoln arrived before them, and
while not making so much noise or show, were doing good work for their
favorite. The long nominating speeches of later years had not then come
into fashion. "I take the liberty," simply said Mr. Evarts of New York,
"to name as a candidate to be nominated by this convention for the
office of President of the United States, William H. Seward," and at Mr.
Seward's name a burst of applause broke forth, so long and loud that
it seemed fairly to shake the great building. Mr. Judd, of Illinois,
performed the same office of friendship for Mr. Lincoln, and the
tremendous cheering that rose from the throats of his friends echoed
and dashed itself against the sides of the Wigwam, died down, and began
anew, until the noise that had been made by Seward's admirers dwindled
to comparative feebleness. Again and again these contests of lungs
and enthusiasm were repeated as other names were presented to the
convention.

At last the voting began. Two names stood out beyond all the rest on the
very first ballot--Seward's and Lincoln's. The second ballot showed that
Seward had lost votes while Lincoln had gained them. The third ballot
was begun in almost painful suspense, delegates and spectators keeping
count upon their tally-sheets with nervous fingers. It was found that
Lincoln had gained still more, and now only needed one and a half votes
to receive the nomination. Suddenly the Wigwam became as still as a
church. Everybody leaned forward to see who would break the spell. A man
sprang upon a chair and reported a change of four votes to Lincoln. Then
a teller shouted a name toward the skylight, and the boom of a cannon
from the roof announced the nomination and started the cheering down the
long Chicago streets; while inside delegation after delegation changed
its votes to the victor in a whirlwind of hurrahs. That same afternoon
the convention finished its labors by nominating Hannibal Hamlin
of Maine for Vice-President, and adjourned--the delegates, speeding
homeward on the night trains, realizing by the bonfires and cheering
crowds at every little station that a memorable Presidential campaign
was already begun.

During this campaign there were, then, four Presidential candidates in
the field. In the order of strength shown at the election they were:

1. The Republican party, whose "platform," or statement of party
principles, declared that slavery was wrong, and that its further spread
should be prevented. Its candidates were Abraham Lincoln of Illinois for
President, and Hannibal Hamlin of Maine for Vice-President.

2. The Douglas wing of the Democratic party, which declared that it did
not pretend to decide whether slavery was right or wrong, and proposed
to allow the people of each State and Territory to choose for themselves
whether they would or would not have it. Its candidates were Stephen A.
Douglas of Illinois for President, and Herschel V. Johnson of Georgia
for Vice-President.

3. The Buchanan wing of the Democratic party, which declared that
slavery was right, and whose policy was to extend it, and to make new
slave States. Its candidates were John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky for
President, and Joseph Lane of Oregon for Vice-President.

4. The Constitutional Union party, which ignored slavery in its
platform, declaring that it recognized no political principles other
than "the Constitution of the country, the Union of the States, and the
enforcement of the laws." Its candidates were John Bell of Tennessee for
President, and Edward Everett of Massachusetts for Vice-President.

In enthusiasm the Republicans quickly took the lead. "Wide Awake" clubs
of young men, wearing caps and capes of glazed oilcloth to protect their
clothing from the dripping oil of their torches, gathered in torchlight
processions miles in length. Fence rails, supposed to have been made by
Lincoln in his youth, were set up in party headquarters and trimmed
with flowers and lighted tapers. Lincoln was called the "Rail-splitter
Candidate," and this telling name, added to the equally telling "Honest
Old Abe," by which he had long been known in Illinois, furnished country
and city campaign orators with a powerful appeal to the sympathy and
trust of the working-people of the United States. Men and women read in
newspaper and pamphlet biographies the story of his humble beginnings:
how he had risen by simple, earnest work and native genius, first to
fame and leadership in his own State, and then to fame and leadership
in the nation; and these titles quickly grew to be much more than mere
party nicknames--to stand for a faith and trust destined to play no
small part in the history of the next few years.

After the nominations were made Douglas went on a tour of speech-making
through the South. Lincoln, on the contrary, stayed quietly at home in
Springfield. His personal habits and surroundings varied little during
the whole of this campaign summer. Naturally he gave up active law
practice, leaving his office in charge of his partner, William H.
Herndon. He spent the time during the usual business hours of each day
in the governor's room of the State-house at Springfield, attended only
by his private secretary, Mr. Nicolay. Friends and strangers alike were
able to visit him freely and without ceremony, and few went away without
being impressed by the sincere frankness of his manner and conversation.

All sorts of people came to see him: those from far-away States, East
and West, as well as those from nearer home. Politicians came to ask
him for future favors, and many whose only motives were friendliness or
curiosity called to express their good wishes and take the Republican
candidate by the hand.

He wrote no public letters, and he made no speeches beyond a few words
of thanks and greeting to passing street parades. Even the strictly
private letters in which he gave his advice on points in the campaign
were not more than a dozen in number; but all through the long summer,
while welcoming his throngs of visitors, listening to the tales of old
settlers, making friends of strangers, and binding old friends closer
by his ready sympathy, Mr. Lincoln watched political developments very
closely, not merely to note the progress of his own chances, but with
an anxious view to the future in case he should be elected. Beyond
the ever-changing circle of friendly faces near him he saw the growing
unrest and anger of the South, and doubtless felt the uncertainty of
many good people in the North, who questioned the power of this untried
Western man to guide the country through the coming perils.

Never over-confident of his own powers, his mind must at times have
been full of misgivings; but it was only on the night of the election,
November 6, 1860, when, sitting alone with the operators in the little
telegraph-office at Springfield, he read the messages of Republican
victory that fell from the wires until convinced of his election, that
the overwhelming, almost crushing weight of his coming duties and
responsibilities fell upon him. In that hour, grappling resolutely and
alone with the problem before him, he completed what was really the
first act of his Presidency--the choice of his cabinet, of the men who
were to aid him. People who doubted the will or the wisdom of their
Rail-splitter Candidate need have had no fear. A weak man would have
chosen this little band of counselors--the Secretary of State, the
Secretary of the Treasury, and the half-dozen others who were to stand
closest to him and to be at the head of the great departments of the
government--from among his personal friends. A man uncertain of his own
power would have taken care that no other man of strong nature with a
great following of his own should be there to dispute his authority.
Lincoln did the very opposite. He had a sincere belief in public
opinion, and a deep respect for the popular will. In this case he felt
that no men represented that popular will so truly as those whose names
had been considered by the Republican National Convention in its choice
of a candidate for President. So, instead of gathering about him his
friends, he selected his most powerful rivals in the Republican party.
William H. Seward, of New York, was to be his Secretary of State; Salmon
P. Chase, of Ohio, his Secretary of the Treasury; Simon Cameron, of
Pennsylvania, his Secretary of War; Edward Bates, of Missouri, his
Attorney-General. The names of all of these men had been before the
Convention. Each one had hoped to be President in his stead. For the
other three members of his Cabinet he had to look elsewhere. Gideon
Welles, of Connecticut, for Secretary of the Navy; Montgomery Blair, of
Maryland, for Postmaster-General; and Caleb B. Smith, of Indiana, for
Secretary of the Interior, were finally chosen. When people complained,
as they sometimes did, that by this arrangement the cabinet consisted of
four men who had been Democrats in the old days, and only three who had
been Whigs, Lincoln smiled his wise, humorous smile and answered that he
himself had been a Whig, and would always be there to make matters even.
It is not likely that this exact list was in his mind on the night of
the November election; but the principal names in it most certainly
were. To some of these gentlemen he offered their appointments by
letter. Others he asked to visit him in Springfield to talk the matter
over. Much delay and some misunderstanding occurred before the list was
finally completed: but when he sent it to the Senate, on the day after
his inauguration, it was practically the one he had in his mind from the
beginning.

A President is elected by popular vote early in November, but he is not
inaugurated until the following fourth of March. Until the day of his
inauguration, when he takes the oath of office and begins to discharge
his duties, he is not only not President--he has no more power in the
affairs of the Government than the humblest private citizen. It is easy
to imagine the anxieties and misgivings that beset Mr. Lincoln during
the four long months that lay between his election and his inauguration.
True to their threats never to endure the rule of a "Black Republican"
President, the Cotton States one after the other withdrew their senators
and representatives from Congress, passed what they called "Ordinances
of Secession," and declared themselves to be no longer a part of the
United States. One after another, too, army and navy officers stationed
in the Southern States gave up to the Southern leaders in this movement
the forts, navy-yards, arsenals, mints, ships, and other government
property under their charge. President Buchanan, in whose hands alone
rested the power to punish these traitors and avenge their insults to
the government he had sworn to protect and defend, showed no disposition
to do so; and Lincoln, looking on with a heavy heart, was unable
to interfere in any way. No matter how anxiously he might watch the
developments at Washington or in the Cotton States, no matter what
appeals might be made to him, no action of any kind was possible on his
part.

The only bit of cheer that came to him and other Union men during this
anxious season of waiting, was in the conduct of Major Robert Anderson
at Charleston Harbor, who, instead of following the example of other
officers who were proving unfaithful, boldly defied the Southern
"secessionists," and moving his little handful of soldiers into the
harbor fort best fitted for defense, prepared to hold out against them
until help could reach him from Washington.

In February the leaders of the Southern people met at Montgomery,
Alabama, adopted a Constitution, and set up a government which they
called the Confederate States of America, electing Jefferson Davis,
of Mississippi, President, and Alexander H. Stephens, of Georgia,
Vice-President. Stephens was the "little, slim pale-faced consumptive
man" whose speech in Congress had won Lincoln's admiration years before.
Davis had been the child who began his schooling so near to Lincoln in
Kentucky. He had had a far different career. Good fortune had carried
him to West Point, into the Mexican War, into the cabinet of President
Franklin Pierce, and twice into the Senate. He had had money, high
office, the best education his country could give him--everything, it
seemed, that had been denied to Lincoln. Now the two men were the
chosen heads of two great opposing factions, one bent on destroying the
government that had treated him so kindly; the other, for whom it had
done so little, willing to lay down his life in its defense.

It must not be supposed that Lincoln remained idle during these four
months of waiting. Besides completing his cabinet, and receiving his
many visitors, he devoted himself to writing his inaugural address,
withdrawing himself for some hours each day to a quiet room over the
store of his brother-in-law, where he could think and write undisturbed.
The newspaper correspondents who had gathered at Springfield, though
alert for every item of news, and especially anxious for a sight of his
inaugural address, seeing him every day as usual, got not the slightest
hint of what he was doing.

Mr. Lincoln started on his journey to Washington on February 11,
1861 two days after Jefferson Davis had been elected President of the
Confederate States of America. He went on a special train, accompanied
by Mrs. Lincoln and their three children, his two private secretaries,
and about a dozen personal friends. Mr. Seward had suggested that
because of the unsettled condition of public affairs it would be better
for the President-elect to come a week earlier; but Mr. Lincoln allowed
himself only time comfortably to fill the engagements he had made to
visit the State capitals and principal cities that lay on his way, to
which he had been invited by State and town officials, regardless of
party. The morning on which he left Springfield was dismal and stormy,
but fully a thousand of his friends and neighbors assembled to bid him
farewell. The weather seemed to add to the gloom and depression of their
spirits, and the leave-taking was one of subdued anxiety, almost of
solemnity. Mr. Lincoln took his stand in the waiting-room while his
friends filed past him, often merely pressing his hand in silent
emotion. The arrival of the rushing train broke in upon this ceremony,
and the crowd closed about the car into which the President-elect and
his party made their way. Just as they were starting, when the conductor
had his hand upon the bell-rope, Mr. Lincoln stepped out upon the front
platform and made the following brief and pathetic address. It was the
last time his voice was to be heard in the city which had so long been
his home:

"My Friends: No one not in my situation can appreciate my feeling of
sadness at this parting. To this place and the kindness of these people
I owe everything. Here I have lived a quarter of a century, and have
passed from a young to an old man. Here my children have been born,
and one is buried. I now leave, not knowing when or whether ever I
may return, with a task before me greater than that which rested
upon Washington. Without the assistance of that Divine Being who ever
attended him, I cannot succeed. With that assistance I cannot fail.
Trusting in Him who can go with me, and remain with you, and be
everywhere for good, let us confidently hope that all will yet be well.
To His care commending you, as I hope in your prayers you will commend
me, I bid you an affectionate farewell."

The conductor gave the signal, the train rolled slowly out of the
station, and the journey to Washington was begun. It was a remarkable
progress. At almost every station, even the smallest, crowds had
gathered to catch a glimpse of the face of the President-elect, or
at least to see the flying train. At the larger stopping-places
these crowds swelled to thousands, and in the great cities to almost
unmanageable throngs. Everywhere there were calls for Mr. Lincoln, and
if he showed himself; for a speech. Whenever there was time, he would
go to the rear platform of the car and bow as the train moved away, or
utter a few words of thanks and greeting. At the capitals of Indiana,
Ohio, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, and in the cities of
Cincinnati, Cleveland, Buffalo, New York, and Philadelphia, halts of
one or two days were made, the time being filled with formal visits and
addresses to each house of the legislature, street processions, large
evening receptions, and other ceremonies.

Party foes as well as party friends made up these expectant crowds.
Every eye was eager, every ear strained, to get some hint of the
thoughts and purposes of the man who was to be the guide and head of the
nation in the crisis that every one now knew to be upon the country, but
the course and end of which the wisest could not foresee. In spite of
all the cheers and the enthusiasm, there was also an under-current of
anxiety for his personal safety, for the South had openly boasted that
Lincoln would never live to be inaugurated President. He himself paid no
heed to such warnings; but the railroad officials, and others who were
responsible for his journey, had detectives on watch at different points
to report any suspicious happenings. Nothing occurred to change the
program already agreed upon until the party reached Philadelphia; but
there Mr. Lincoln was met by Frederick W. Seward, the son of his future
Secretary of State, with an important message from his father. A
plot had been discovered to do violence to, and perhaps kill, the
President-elect as he passed through the city of Baltimore. Mr. Seward
and General Scott, the venerable hero of the Mexican War, who was now at
the head of the army, begged him to run no risk, but to alter his plans
so that a portion of his party might pass through Baltimore by a night
train without previous notice. The seriousness of the warning was
doubled by the fact that Mr. Lincoln had just been told of a similar,
if not exactly the same, danger, by a Chicago detective employed in
Baltimore by one of the great railroad companies. Two such warnings,
coming from entirely different sources, could not be disregarded;
for however much Mr. Lincoln might dislike to change his plans for so
shadowy a danger, his duty to the people who had elected him forbade
his running any unnecessary risk. Accordingly, after fulfilling all
his engagements in Philadelphia and Harrisburg on February 22, he and a
single companion took a night train, passed quietly through Baltimore,
and arrived in Washington about daylight on the morning of February 23.
This action called forth much talk, ranging from the highest praise to
ridicule and blame. A reckless newspaper reporter telegraphed all over
the country the absurd story that he had traveled disguised in a Scotch
cap and a long military cloak. There was, of course, not a word of truth
in the absurd tale. The rest of the party followed Mr. Lincoln at
the time originally planned. They saw great crowds in the streets of
Baltimore, but there was now no occasion for violence.

In the week that passed between his arrival and the day of his
inauguration Mr. Lincoln exchanged the customary visits of ceremony with
President Buchanan, his cabinet, the Supreme Court, the two houses of
Congress, and other dignitaries.

Careful preparations for the inauguration had been made under the
personal direction of General Scott, who held the small military force
in the city ready instantly to suppress any attempt to disturb the peace
and quiet of the day.

On the morning of the fourth of March President Buchanan and Citizen
Lincoln, the outgoing and incoming heads of the government, rode side by
side in a carriage from the Executive Mansion, or White House, as it
is more commonly called, to the Capitol, escorted by an imposing
procession; and at noon a great throng of people heard Mr. Lincoln read
his inaugural address as he stood on the east portico of the Capitol,
surrounded by all the high officials of the government. Senator Douglas,
his unsuccessful rival, standing not an arm's length away from him,
courteously held his hat during the ceremony. A cheer greeted him as he
finished his address. Then the Chief Justice arose, the clerk opened his
Bible, and Mr. Lincoln, laying his hand upon the book, pronounced the
oath:

"I, Abraham Lincoln, do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute
the office of President of the United States, and will, to the best of
my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United
States."

Amid the thundering of cannon and the applause of all the spectators,
President Lincoln and Citizen Buchanan again entered their carriage and
drove back from the Capitol to the Executive Mansion, on the threshold
of which Mr. Buchanan, warmly shaking the hand of his successor,
expressed his wishes for the personal happiness of the new President,
and for the national peace and prosperity.




VII. LINCOLN AND THE WAR

It is one thing to be elected President of the United States,--that
means triumph, honor, power: it is quite another thing to perform the
duties of President,--for that means labor, disappointment, difficulty,
even danger. Many a man envied Abraham Lincoln when, in the stately pomp
of inauguration and with the plaudits of the spectators ringing about
him, he took the oath of office which for four years transforms an
American citizen into the ruler of these United States. Such envy would
have been changed to deepest sympathy if they could have known what lay
before him. After the music and cannon were dumb, after the flags were
all furled and the cheering crowds had vanished, the shadows of war fell
about the Executive Mansion, and its new occupant remained face to face
with his heavy task--a task which, as he had truly said in his speech at
Springfield, was greater than that which rested upon Washington.

Then, as never before, he must have realized the peril of the nation,
with its credit gone, its laws defied, its flag insulted. The South
had carried out its threat, and seven million Americans were in revolt
against the idea that "all men are created equal," while twenty million
other Americans were bent upon defending that idea. For the moment both
sides had paused to see how the new President would treat this attempt
at secession. It must be constantly borne in mind that the rebellion in
the Southern States with which Mr. Lincoln had to deal was not a sudden
revolution, but a conspiracy of slow growth and long planning. As one
of its actors frankly admitted, it was "not an event of a day. It is not
anything produced by Mr. Lincoln's election.... It is a matter which has
been gathering head for thirty years." Its main object, it must also
be remembered, was the spread of slavery. Alexander H. Stephens, in
a speech made shortly after he became the Confederate Vice-President,
openly proclaimed slavery to be the "corner-stone" of the new
government. For years it had been the dream of southern leaders to
make the Ohio River the northern boundary of a great slave empire, with
everything lying to the south of that, even the countries of South and
Central America, as parts of their system. Though this dream was never
to be realized, the Confederacy finally came to number eleven States
(Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, South Carolina, North Carolina,
Florida, Texas, Arkansas, Tennessee, Virginia and Georgia), and to cover
a territory of more than 750,000 square miles--larger than England,
Scotland, Ireland, France, Spain, Germany and Switzerland put together,
with a coast line 3,500 miles long, and a land frontier of over 7,000
miles.

President Buchanan's timidity and want of spirit had alone made this
great rebellion possible, for although it had been "gathering head for
thirty years" it was only within the last few months that it had come to
acts of open treason and rebellion. President Buchanan had opportunity
and ample power to crush it when the conspirators first began to show
their hands. Instead he wavered, and delayed, while they grew bold
under his lack of decision, imagining that they would have a bloodless
victory, and even boasting that they would take Washington for their
capital; or, if the new President should thwart them and make them
fight, that they would capture Philadelphia and dictate the peace they
wanted from Independence Hall.

By the time Mr. Lincoln came into office the conspiracy had grown beyond
control by any means then in the hands of a President, though men on
both sides still vainly hoped that the troubles of the country might
be settled without fighting. Mr. Lincoln especially wished to make very
sure that if it ever came to a matter of war, the fault should not lie
with the North.

In his inaugural address he had told the South that he would use the
power confided to him to hold and occupy the places belonging to the
Government, and to collect the taxes; but beyond what might be necessary
for these objects, he would not use force among the people anywhere. His
peaceful policy was already harder to follow than he realized. Before
he had been President twenty-four hours word came from Major Anderson,
still defying the conspirators from Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor,
that his little garrison was short of food, and must speedily surrender
unless help reached them. The rebels had for weeks been building
batteries to attack the fort, and with Anderson's report came the
written opinions of his officers that it would require an army of 20,000
men to relieve it. They might as well have asked for twenty thousand
archangels, for at that time the entire army of the United States
numbered but 17,113 men, and these were doing duty, not only in the
Southern and Eastern States, but were protecting settlers from Indians
on the great western frontier, and guarding the long Canadian and
Mexican boundaries as well. Yet Anderson and his men could not be left
to their fate without even an attempt to help them, though some of the
high military and naval officers hastily called into council by the
new President advised this course. It was finally decided to notify the
Confederates that a ship carrying food, but no soldiers, would be sent
to his relief. If they chose to fire upon that it would be plainly the
South, and not the North, that began the war.

Days went on, and by the middle of April the Confederate government
found itself forced to a fatal choice. Either it must begin war, or
allow the rebellion to collapse. All its claims to independence were
denied; the commissioner it sent to Washington on the pretense that they
were agents of a foreign country were politely refused a hearing, yet
not one angry word, or provoking threat, or a single harmful act had
come from the "Black Republican" President. In his inaugural he had
promised the people of the South peace and protection, and offered them
the benefit of the mails. Even now, all he proposed to do was to send
bread to Anderson and his hungry soldiers. His prudent policy placed
them where, as he had told them, they could have no war unless they
themselves chose to begin it.

They did choose to begin it. The rebellion was the work of ambitious
men, who had no mind to stop at that late day and see their labor go for
nothing. The officer in charge of their batteries was ordered to open
fire on Fort Sumter if Anderson refused to surrender; and in the dim
light of dawn on April 12, 1861, just as the outline of Fort Sumter
began to show itself against a brightening sky, the shot that opened the
Civil War rose from a rebel battery and made its slow and graceful curve
upon Sumter. Soon all the batteries were in action, and the fort was
replying with a will. Anderson held out for a day and a half, until his
cartridges were all used up, his flagstaff had been shot away, and the
wooden buildings inside the fort were on fire. Then, as the ships with
supplies had not yet arrived, and he had neither food nor ammunition, he
was forced to surrender.

The news of the firing upon Fort Sumter changed the mood of the country
as if by magic. By deliberate act of the Confederate government its
attempt at peaceable secession had been changed to active war. The
Confederates gained Fort Sumter, but in doing so they roused the
patriotism of the North to a firm resolve that this insult to the flag
should be redressed, and that the unrighteous experiment of a rival
government founded upon slavery as its "cornerstone," should never
succeed. In one of his speeches on the journey to Washington Mr. Lincoln
had said that devoted as he was to peace, it might become necessary to
"put the foot down firmly." That time had now come. On April 15, the day
after the fall of Fort Sumter, all the newspapers of the country printed
the President's call to arms, ordering out 75,000 militia for three
months, and directing Congress to meet in special session on July 4,
1861. The North rallied instantly to the support of the Government, and
offered him twice the number of soldiers he asked for.

Nothing more clearly shows the difference between President Lincoln and
President Buchanan than the way in which the two men met the acts of the
Southern Rebellion. President Buchanan temporized and delayed when he
had plenty of power. President Lincoln, without a moment's hesitation
accepted the great and unusual responsibility thrust upon him, and at
once issued orders for buying ships, moving troops, advancing money
to Committees of Safety, and for other military and naval measures for
which at the moment he had no express authority from Congress. As soon
as Congress came together on July 4, he sent a message explaining his
action, saying: "It became necessary for me to choose whether, using
only the existing means.... which Congress had provided, I should let
the Government fall at once into ruin, or whether availing myself of the
broader powers conferred by the Constitution in cases of insurrection,
I would make an effort to save it with all its blessings for the present
age and for posterity." Congress, it is needless to say, not only
approved all that he had done, but gave him practically unlimited powers
for dealing with the rebellion in future.

It soon became evident that no matter how ready and willing to fight for
their country the 75,000 volunteers might be, they could not hope to put
down the rebellion, because the time for which they had enlisted would
be almost over before they could receive the training necessary to
change them from valiant citizens into good soldiers. Another call was
therefore issued, this time for men to serve three years or during the
war, and also for a large number of sailors to man the new ships that
the Government was straining every nerve to buy, build and otherwise
make ready.

More important, however, than soldiers trained or untrained, was the
united will of the people of the North; and most important of all the
steadfast and courageous soul of the man called to direct the struggle.
Abraham Lincoln, the poor frontier boy, the struggling young lawyer, the
Illinois politician, whom many, even among the Republicans who voted to
elect him President, thought scarcely fit to hold a much smaller
office, proved beyond question the man for the task gifted above all
his associates with wisdom and strength to meet the great emergencies as
they arose during the four years' war that had already begun.

Since this is the story of Mr. Lincoln's life, and not of the Civil
War, we cannot attempt to follow the history of the long contest as
it unfolded itself day by day and month by month, or even to stop to
recount a list of the great battles that drenched the land in blood. It
was a mighty struggle, fought by men of the same race and kindred, often
by brother against brother. Each fought for what he felt to be right;
and their common inheritance of courage and iron will, of endurance and
splendid bravery and stubborn pluck, made this battle of brothers the
more bitter as it was the more prolonged. It ranged over an immense
extent of country; but because Washington was the capital of the Union,
and Richmond, Virginia, the capital of the Confederacy, and the desire
of each side was to capture the chief city of the other, the principal
fighting ground, during the whole war, lay between these two towns, with
the Alleghany Mountains on the west, and Chesapeake Bay on the east.
Between the Alleghanies and the Mississippi River another field of
warfare developed itself, on which some of the hardest battles were
fought, and the greatest victories won. Beyond the Mississippi again
stretched another great field, bounded only by the Rocky Mountains and
the Rio Grande. But the principal fighting in this field was near or
even on the Mississippi, in the efforts made by both Unionists and
Confederates to keep and hold the great highway of the river, so
necessary for trade in time of peace, and for moving armies in time of
war.

On this immense battle-ground was fought one of the most costly wars
of modern times, with soldiers numbering a million men on each side; in
which, counting battles and skirmishes small and great, an average of
two engagements a day were fought for four long years, two millions of
money were used up every twenty-four hours, and during which the unholy
prize of slavery, for which the Confederate States did battle, was
completely swept away.

Though the tide of battle ebbed and flowed, defeat and victory may be
said to have been nearly evenly divided. Generally speaking, success was
more often on the side of the South during the first half of the war;
with the North, during the latter half. The armies were equally brave;
the North had the greater territory from which to draw supplies; and the
end came, not when one side had beaten the other, man for man, but
when the South had been drained of fighting men and food and guns, and
slavery had perished in the stress of war.

Fortunately for all, nobody at the beginning dreamed of the length of
the struggle. Even Lincoln's stout heart would have been dismayed if he
could have foreseen all that lay before him. The task that he could
see was hard and perplexing enough. Everything in Washington was in
confusion. No President ever had such an increase of official work as
Lincoln during the early months of his administration. The halls and
ante-rooms of the Executive Mansion were literally crowded with people
seeking appointment to office; and the new appointments that were
absolutely necessary were not half finished when the firing on Fort
Sumter began active war. This added to the difficulty of sifting the
loyal from the disloyal, and the yet more pressing labor of organizing
an immense new army.

Hundreds of clerks employed in the Government Departments left their
desks and hurried South, crippling the service just at the time when
the sudden increase of work made their presence doubly needed. A large
proportion of the officers of the Army and Navy, perhaps as many as
one-third, gave their skill and services to the Confederacy, feeling
that their allegiance was due to their State or section rather than to
the general government. Prominent among these was Robert E. Lee, who had
been made a colonel by Lincoln, and whom General Scott had recommended
as the most promising officer to command the new force of 75,000 men
called out by the President's proclamation. He chose instead to resign
and cast his fortunes with the South, where he became the head of
all the Confederate armies. The loss to the Union and gain to the
Confederate cause by his action is hard to measure, since in him the
Southern armies found a commander whose surpassing courage and skill
inspired its soldiers long after all hope of success was gone. Cases
such as this gave the President more anxiety than all else. It seemed
impossible to know whom to trust. An officer might come to him in the
morning protesting devotion to the Union, and by night be gone to the
South. Mr. Lincoln used to say at this time that he felt like a man
letting rooms at one end of his house while the other end was on fire.

The situation grew steadily worse. Maryland refused to allow United
States soldiers to cross her territory, and the first attempt to bring
troops through Baltimore from the North ended in a bloody riot, and the
burning of railroad bridges to prevent help from reaching Washington.
For three days Washington was entirely cut off from the North, either by
telegraph or mail. General Scott hastily prepared the city for a siege,
taking possession of all the large supplies of flour and provisions
in town, and causing the Capitol and other public buildings to be
barricaded. Though President Lincoln did not doubt the final arrival
of help, he, like everyone else, was very anxious, and found it hard
to understand the long delay. He knew that troops had started from the
North. Why did they not arrive? They might not be able to go through
Baltimore, but they could certainly go around it. The distance was not
great. What if twenty miles of railroad had been destroyed, were the
soldiers unable to march? Always calm and self-controlled, he gave no
sign in the presence of others of the anxiety that weighed so heavily
upon him. Very likely the visitors who saw him during those days thought
that he hardly realized the plight of the city; yet an inmate of the
White House, passing through the President's office when the day's work
was done and he imagined himself alone, saw him pause in his absorbed
walk up and down the floor, and gaze long out of the window in
the direction from which the troops were expected to appear. Then,
unconscious of any hearer, and as if the words were wrung from him by
anguish, he exclaimed, "Why don't they come, why don't they come?"

The New York Seventh Regiment was the first to "come." By a roundabout
route it reached Washington on the morning of April 25, and, weary
and travel-worn, but with banners flying and music playing, marched up
Pennsylvania Avenue to the big white Executive Mansion, bringing cheer
to the President and renewed courage to those timid citizens whose
fright during this time had almost paralyzed the life of the town.
Taking renewed courage they once more opened their houses and the shops
that had been closed since the beginning of the blockade, and business
began anew.

The greater part of the three months' regiments had been ordered to
Washington, and the outskirts of the capital soon became a busy military
camp. The great Departments of the Government, especially of War and
Navy, could not immediately handle the details of all this sudden
increase of work. Men were volunteering rapidly enough, but there was
sore need of rations to feed them, money to pay them, tents to shelter
them, uniforms to clothe them, rifles to arm them, officers to drill
them, and of transportation to carry them to the camps of instruction
where they must receive their training and await further orders. In this
carnival of patriotism and hurly-burly of organization the weaknesses as
well as the virtues of human nature quickly showed themselves; and, as
if the new President had not already enough to distress and harass his
mind, almost every case of confusion and delay was brought to him for
complaint and correction. On him also fell the delicate and serious task
of deciding hundreds of novel questions as to what he and his cabinet
ministers had and had not the right to do under the Constitution.

The month of May slipped away in all these preparatory vexations; but
the great machine of war, once started, moved on as it always does, from
arming to massing of troops, and from that to skirmish and battle.
In June small fights began to occur between the Union and Confederate
armies. The first large battle of the war took place at Bull Run, about
thirty-two miles southwest of Washington, on July 21, 1861. It ended in
a victory for the Confederates, though their army was so badly crippled
by. its losses that it made no further forward movement during the whole
of the next autumn and winter.

The shock of this defeat was deep and painful to the people of the
North, not yet schooled to patience, or to the uncertainties of war.
For weeks the newspapers, confident of success, had been clamoring for
action, and the cry, "Forward to Richmond," had been heard on every
hand. At first the people would not believe the story of a defeat; but
it was only too true. By night the beaten Union troops were pouring
into the fortifications around Washington, and the next day a horde of
stragglers found their way across the bridges of the Potomac into the
city.

President Lincoln received the news quietly, as was his habit, without
any visible sign of distress or alarm, but he remained awake and in
his office all that Sunday night, listening to the excited tales of
congressmen and senators who, with undue curiosity, had followed the
army and witnessed some of the sights and sounds of battle; and by dawn
on Monday he had practically made up his mind as to the probable result
and what he must do in consequence.

The loss of the battle of Bull Run was a bitter disappointment to him.
He saw that the North was not to have the easy victory it anticipated;
and to him personally it brought a great and added care that never left
him during the war. Up to that time the North had stood by him as one
man in its eager resolve to put down the rebellion. From this time on,
though quite as determined, there was division and disagreement among
the people as to how this could best be done. Parties formed themselves
for or against this or that general, or in favor of this or that method
and no other of carrying on the war. In other words, the President and
his "administration"--the cabinet and other officers under him--became,
from this time on, the target of criticism for all the failures of the
Union armies, and for all the accidents and mistakes and unforeseen
delays of war. The self-control that Mr. Lincoln had learned in the hard
school of his boyhood, and practised during all the long struggle of
his young manhood, had been severe and bitter training, but nothing else
could have prepared him for the great disappointments and trials of
the crowning years of his life. He had learned to endure patiently, to
reason calmly, never to be unduly sure of his own opinion; but, having
taken counsel of the best advice at his command, to continue in the path
that he felt to be right, regardless of criticism or unjust abuse. He
had daily and hourly to do all this. He was strong and courageous, with
a steadfast belief that the right would triumph in the end; but his
nature was at the same time sensitive and tender, and the sorrows and
pain of others hurt him more than did his own.




VIII. UNSUCCESSFUL GENERALS

So far Mr. Lincoln's new duties as President had not placed him at any
disadvantage with the members of his cabinet. On the old question of
slavery he was as well informed and had clearer ideas than they. On the
new military questions that had come up since the inauguration, they,
like himself, had to rely on the advice of experienced officers of the
army and navy; and since these differed greatly, Mr. Lincoln's powerful
mind was as able to reach true conclusions as were men who had been
governors and senators. Yet the idea lingered that because he had never
before held high office, and because a large part of his life had been
passed in the rude surroundings of the frontier, he must of necessity
be lacking in power to govern--be weaker in will, without tact or
culture--must in every way be less fitted to cope with the difficult
problems so rapidly coming upon the administration.

At the beginning even Secretary Seward shared this view. Mr. Lincoln
must have been surprised indeed, when, on the first day of April,
exactly four weeks after his inauguration, his Secretary of State, the
man he justly looked upon as the chief member of his cabinet, handed
him a paper on which were written "Some Thoughts for the President's
Consideration." It was most grave and dignified in language, but in
substance bluntly told Mr. Lincoln that after a month's trial the
Administration was without a policy, domestic or foreign, and that this
must be remedied at once. It advised shifting the issue at home from
slavery to the question of Union or disunion; and counseled the adoption
of an attitude toward Europe which could not have failed to rouse the
anger of the principal foreign nations. It added that the President or
some member of his cabinet must make it his constant duty to pursue and
direct whatever policy should be adopted, and hinted very plainly
that although he, Mr. Seward, did not seek such responsibility, he was
willing to assume it. The interest of this remarkable paper for us lies
in the way Mr. Lincoln treated it, and the measure that treatment gives
us of his generosity and self-control. An envious or a resentful man
could not have wished a better opportunity to put a rival under his
feet; but though Mr. Lincoln doubtless thought the incident very
strange, it did not for a moment disturb his serenity or his kindly
judgment. He answered in a few quiet sentences that showed no trace of
passion or even of excitement; and on the central suggestion that some
one person must direct the affairs of the government, replied with
dignity "if this must be done, I must do it," adding that on affairs of
importance he desired and supposed he had a right to have the advice of
all the members of his cabinet. This reply ended the matter, and as
far as is known, neither of them ever mentioned the subject again. Mr.
Lincoln put the papers away in an envelope, and no word of the affair
came to the public until years after both men were dead. In one mind
at least there was no longer a doubt that the cabinet had a master. Mr.
Seward recognized the President's kindly forbearance, and repaid it by
devotion and personal friendship until the day of his tragic death.

If, after this experience, the Secretary of State needed any further
proof of Mr. Lincoln's ability to rule, it soon came to him, for during
the first months of the war matters abroad claimed the attention of
the cabinet, and with these also the untried western man showed himself
better fitted to deal than his more experienced advisers. Many of the
countries of Europe, especially France and England, wished the South
to succeed. France because of plans that Emperor Napoleon III had for
founding French colonies on American soil, and England because such
success would give her free cotton for her mills and factories. England
became so friendly toward the rebels that Mr. Seward, much irritated,
wrote a despatch on May 21, 1861, to Charles Francis Adams, the American
Minister at London, which, if it had been sent as he wrote it, would
almost certainly have brought on war between the two countries. It set
forth justly and with courage what the United States government would
and would not endure from foreign powers during the war with the South,
but it had been penned in a heat of indignation, and was so blunt and
exasperating as to suggest intentional disrespect. When Mr. Seward read
it to the President the latter at once saw this, and taking it from his
Secretary of State kept it by him for further consideration. A second
reading showed him that his first impression was correct. Thereupon the
frontier lawyer, taking his pen, went carefully over the whole
dispatch, and by his corrections so changed the work of the trained and
experienced statesman as entirely to remove its offensive tone, without
in the least altering its force or courage.

Once again during 1861 the country was in serious danger of war with
England, and the action of President Lincoln at this time proved not
only that he had the will to be just, even when his own people were
against him, but had the skill to gain real advantage from what seemed
very like defeat. One of the earliest and most serious tasks of the
Government had been to blockade the southern ports, in order to prevent
supplies from foreign countries reaching the southern people, especially
the southern armies. Considering the great length of coast to be
patrolled, and the small size of the navy at the commencement of the
struggle, this was done with wonderful quickness, and proved in the main
effective, though occasionally a rebel boat managed to slip in or out
without being discovered and fired upon by the ships on guard.

In November Captain Charles Wilkes learned that Ex-Senators J. M. Mason
and John Slidell, two prominent Confederates bound on an important
mission to Europe, had succeeded in reaching Cuba, and from there had
taken passage for England on the British mail steamer Trent. He stopped
the Trent and took Mason and Slidell prisoners, afterward allowing the
steamer to proceed on her way. The affair caused intense excitement
both in England and in the United States, and England began instant
preparations for war. Lord Lyons, the British Minister at Washington,
was instructed to demand the release of the prisoners and a suitable
apology within one week, and if this were refused, to close his legation
and come home. It was fortunate that Lord Lyons and Mr. Seward were
close personal friends, and could, in spite of the excitement of
both countries, discuss the matter calmly and without anger. Their
conferences were brought to an end by Mr. Lincoln's decision to give
up the prisoners. In the North their capture had been greeted with
extravagant joy. Newspapers rang with praises of Captain Wilkes; his act
was officially approved by the Secretary of the Navy, and the House of
Representatives passed a resolution thanking him for his "brave, adroit,
and patriotic conduct." In the face of all this it must have been hard
indeed for Mr. Lincoln to order that Mason and Slidell be given up;
but though he shared the first impulse of rejoicing, he soon became
convinced that this must be done. War with England must certainly be
avoided; and Captain Wilkes, by allowing the Trent to proceed on her
voyage, instead of bringing her into port with the prisoners, had put
it out of the power of his Government to prove, under international law,
that the capture was justified. Besides all else, the President's quick
mind saw, what others failed to note, that by giving up the prisoners
as England demanded, the United States would really gain an important
diplomatic victory. For many years England had claimed the right to stop
and search vessels at sea when she had reason to believe they carried
men or goods hostile to her interests. The United States denied the
right, and yet this was exactly what Captain Wilkes had done in stopping
the Trent. By giving up the prisoners the United States would thus force
England to admit that her own claim had been unjust, and bind her in
future to respect the rights of other ships at sea. Excited American
feeling was grievously disappointed, and harsh criticism of the
Administration for thus yielding to a foreign country was not wanting;
but American good sense soon saw the justice of the point taken and the
wisdom of Mr. Lincoln's course.

"He that is slow to anger," says the proverb, "is better than the
mighty, and he that ruleth his spirit than he that taketh a city." Great
as was his self-control in other matters, nowhere did Mr. Lincoln's
slowness to anger and nobility of spirit show itself more than in
his dealings with the generals of the Civil War. He had been elected
President. Congress had given him power far exceeding that which
any President had ever exercised before. As President he was also
Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States. By
proclamation he could call forth great armies and he could order those
armies to go wherever he chose to send them; but even he had no power
to make generals with the genius and the training necessary to lead them
instantly to success. He had to work with the materials at hand, and one
by one he tried the men who seemed best fitted for the task, giving each
his fullest trust and every aid in his power. They were as eager for
victory and as earnest of purpose as himself, but in every case some
misfortune or some fault marred the result, until the country grew weary
with waiting; discouragement overshadowed hope, and misgiving almost
engulfed his own strong soul. Then, at last, the right men were found,
the battles were all fought, and the war was at an end.

His kindness and patience in dealing with the generals who did not
succeed is the wonder of all who study the history of the Civil War. The
letters he wrote to them show better than whole volumes of description
could do the helpful and forbearing spirit in which he sought to aid
them. First among these unsuccessful generals was George B. McClellan,
who had been called to Washington after the battle of Bull Run and
placed in charge of the great new army of three years' volunteers that
was pouring so rapidly into the city. McClellan proved a wonderful
organizer. Under his skilful direction the raw recruits went to their
camps of instruction, fell without confusion or delay into brigades and
divisions, were supplied with equipments, horses and batteries, and put
through a routine of drill, tactics and reviews that soon made this Army
of the Potomac, as it was called, one of the best prepared armies the
world has ever seen--a perfect fighting machine of over 150,000 men and
more than 200 guns. General McClellan excelled in getting soldiers ready
to fight, but he did not succeed in leading them to fruitful victory. At
first the administration had great hopes of him as a commander. He
was young, enthusiastic, winning, and on arriving in Washington seemed
amazed and deeply touched by the confidence reposed in him. "I find
myself," he wrote to his wife, "in a new and strange position here,
President, cabinet, General Scott, and all, deferring to me. By some
strange operation of magic I seem to have become the power of the land."
His rise in military rank had equaled the inventions of fairy tales. He
had been only a captain during the Mexican war. Then he resigned. Two
months after volunteering for the Civil War he found himself a Major
General in the Regular Army. For a short time his zeal and activity
seemed to justify this amazing good fortune. In a fortnight however he
began to look upon himself as the principal savior of his country. He
entered upon a quarrel with General Scott which soon drove that old hero
into retirement and out of his pathway. He looked upon the cabinet as a
set of "geese," and seeing that the President was kind and unassuming in
discussing military affairs, he formed the habit of expressing contempt
for him in letters to confidential friends. This feeling grew until
it soon reached a mark of open disrespect, but the President's conduct
toward him did not change. Mr. Lincoln's nature was too forgiving,
and the responsibility that lay upon him was too heavy for personal
resentment. For fifteen months he strove to make McClellan succeed even
in spite of himself. He gave him help, encouragement, the most timely
suggestions. He answered his ever-increasing complaints with unfailing
self-control. It was not that he did not see McClellan's faults. He saw
them, and felt them keenly. "If Gen. McClellan does not want to use
the army, I would like to borrow it," he said one day, stung by the
General's inactivity into a sarcasm he seldom allowed himself to use.
But his patience was not exhausted. McClellan had always more soldiers
than the enemy, at Antietam nearly double his numbers, yet his constant
cry was for re-enforcements. Regiments were sent him that could ill be
spared from other points. Even when his fault-finding reached the height
of telegraphing to the Secretary of War, "If I save this army now I
tell you plainly that I owe no thanks to you or to any other persons
in Washington. You have done your best to sacrifice this army," the
President answered him kindly and gently, without a sign of resentment,
anxious only to do everything in his power to help on the cause of
the war. It was of no avail. Even the great luck of finding a copy of
General Lee's orders and knowing exactly what his enemy meant to do, at
a time when the Confederate general had only about half as many troops
as he had, and these were divided besides, did not help him to success.
All he could do even then was to fight the drawn battle of Antietam,
and allow Lee to get away safely across the Potomac River into Virginia.
After this the President's long-suffering patience was at an end, but he
did not remove McClellan until he had visited the Army of the Potomac
in person. What he saw on that visit assured him that it could never
succeed under such a general. "Do you know what that is?" he asked a
friend, waving his arm towards the white tents of the great army. "It is
the Army of the Potomac, I suppose," was the wondering answer. "So it
is called," replied the President, in a tone of suppressed indignation.
"But that is a mistake. It is only McClellan's bodyguard." On November
5, 1862, McClellan was relieved from command, and this ended his
military career.

There were others almost equally trying. There was General Fremont,
who had been the Republican candidate for President in 1856. At the
beginning of the war he was given a command at St. Louis and charged
with the important duty of organizing the military strength of the
northwest, holding the State of Missouri true to the Union, and leading
an expedition down the Mississippi River. Instead of accomplishing
all that had been hoped for, his pride of opinion and unwillingness
to accept help or take advice from those about him, caused serious
embarrassment and made unending trouble. The President's kindness
and gentleness in dealing with his faults were as marked as they were
useless.

There was the long line of commanders who one after the other tried and
failed in the tasks allotted to them, while the country waited and lost
courage, and even Mr. Lincoln's heart sank. His care and wisdom
and sorrow dominated the whole long persistent struggle. That first
sleepless night of his after the battle of Bull Run was but the
beginning of many nights and days through which he kept unceasing watch.
From the time in June, 1861, when he had been called upon to preside
over the council of war that decided upon the Bull Run campaign, he
devoted every spare moment to the study of such books upon the art
of war as would aid him in solving the questions that he must face as
Commander-in-Chief of the armies. With his quick mind and unusual power
of logic he made rapid progress in learning the fixed and accepted
rules on which all military writers agree. His mastery of the difficult
science became so thorough, and his understanding of military situations
so clear, that he has been called, by persons well fitted to judge, "the
ablest strategist of the war." Yet he never thrust his knowledge upon
his generals. He recognized that it was their duty, not his, to fight
the battles, and since this was so, they ought to be allowed to fight
them in their own way. He followed their movements with keenest interest
and with a most astonishing amount of knowledge, giving a hint here, and
a suggestion there, when he felt that he properly could, but he rarely
gave a positive order.

There is not space to quote the many letters in which he showed his
military wisdom, or his kindly interest in the welfare and success
of the different generals. One of the most remarkable must however be
quoted. It is the letter he wrote to General Joseph Hooker on placing
him in command of the Army of the Potomac in January, 1863, after
McClellan's many failures had been followed by the crushing defeat of
the army under General McClellan's successor, General Burnside, at the
battle of Fredericksburg, on December 13, 1862.

"I have placed you," he wrote on giving General Hooker the command, "at
the head of the Army of the Potomac. Of course I have done this upon
what appear to me to be sufficient reasons, and yet I think it best for
you to know that there are some things in regard to which I am not quite
satisfied with you. I believe you to be a brave and skilful soldier,
which, of course, I like. I also believe you do not mix politics
with your profession, in which you are right. You have confidence in
yourself, which is a valuable, if not an indispensable quality. You are
ambitious, which, within reasonable bounds, does good rather than harm;
but I think that during General Burnside's command of the army you have
taken council of your ambition and thwarted him as much as you could,
in which you did a great wrong to the country, and to a most meritorious
and honorable brother officer. I have heard, in such a way as to believe
it, of your recently saying that both the army and the Government needed
a dictator. Of course it was not for this, but in spite of it, that I
have given you the command. Only those generals who gain successes can
set up dictators. What I now ask of you is military success, and I will
risk the dictatorship. The government will support you to the utmost of
its ability, which is neither more nor less than it has done and will do
for all commanders. I much fear that the spirit which you have aided
to infuse into the army, of criticising their commander and withholding
confidence from him, will now turn upon you. I shall assist you as far
as I can, to put it down. Neither you nor Napoleon, if he were alive
again, could get any good out of an army while such a spirit prevails in
it. And now, beware of rashness. Beware of rashness, but with energy and
sleepless vigilance go forward and give us victories."

Perhaps no other piece of his writing shows as this does how completely
the genius of the President rose to the full height of his duties and
responsibilities. From beginning to end it speaks the language and
breathes the spirit of the great ruler, secure in popular confidence and
in official authority.

Though so many of the great battles during the first half of the war
were won by the Confederates, military successes came to the North
of course from time to time. With such fine armies and such earnest
generals the tide of battle could not be all one way; and even when
the generals made mistakes, the heroic fighting and endurance of the
soldiers and under-officers gathered honor out of defeat, and shed the
luster of renown over results of barren failure. But it was a weary
time, and the outlook was very dark. The President never despaired. On
the most dismal day of the whole dismal summer of 1862 he sent Secretary
Seward to New York with a confidential letter full of courage, to be
shown such of the governors of free States as could be hastily summoned
to meet him there. In it he said: "I expect to maintain this contest
until successful, or till I die, or am conquered, or my term expires,
or Congress or the country forsake me," and he asked for 100,000 fresh
volunteers with which to carry on the war. His confidence was not
misplaced. The governors of eighteen free States offered him three times
the number, and still other calls for troops followed. Soon a popular
song, "We are coming, Father Abraham, three hundred thousand strong,"
showed the faith and trust of the people in the man at the head of
the Government, and how cheerfully they met the great calls upon their
patriotism.

So, week after week and month after month, he faced the future, never
betraying a fear that the Union would not triumph in the end, but
grieving sorely at the long delay. Many who were not so sure came to him
with their troubles. He was beset by night and by day by people who had
advice to give or complaints to make. They besought him to dismiss this
or that General, to order such and such a military movement; to do a
hundred things that he, in his great wisdom, felt were not right, or for
which the time had not yet come. Above all, he was implored to take some
decided and far-reaching action upon slavery.




IX. FREEDOM FOR THE SLAVES

By no means the least of the evils of slavery was a dread which had
haunted every southern household from the beginning of the government
that the slaves might one day rise in revolt and take sudden vengeance
upon their masters. This vague terror was greatly increased by the
outbreak of the Civil War. It stands to the lasting credit of the negro
race that the wrongs of their long bondage provoked them to no such
crime, and that the war seems not to have suggested, much less started
any such attempt. Indeed, even when urged to violence by white leaders,
as the slaves of Maryland had been in 1859 during John Brown's raid at
Harper's Ferry, they had refused to respond. Nevertheless it was plain
from the first that slavery was to play an important part in the Civil
War. Not only were the people of the South battling for the principle
of slavery; their slaves were a great source of military strength. They
were used by the Confederates in building forts, hauling supplies, and
in a hundred ways that added to the effectiveness of their armies in the
field. On the other hand the very first result of the war was to give
adventurous or discontented slaves a chance to escape into Union camps,
where, even against orders to the contrary, they found protection for
the sake of the help they could give as cooks, servants, or teamsters,
the information they brought about the movements of the enemy, or the
great service they were able to render as guides. Practically therefore,
at the very start, the war created a bond of mutual sympathy between
the southern negro and the Union volunteer; and as fast as Union troops
advanced and secession masters fled, a certain number found freedom in
Union camps.

At some points this became a positive embarrassment to Union commanders.
A few days after General Butler took command of the Union troops at
Fortress Monroe in May, 1861, the agent of a rebel master came to insist
on the return of three slaves, demanding them under the fugitive-slave
law. Butler replied that since their master claimed Virginia to be a
foreign country and no longer a part of the United States, he could not
at the same time claim that the fugitive slave law was in force, and
that his slaves would not be given up unless he returned and took the
oath of allegiance to the United States. In reporting this, a newspaper
pointed out that as the breastworks and batteries which had risen so
rapidly for Confederate defense were built by slave labor, negroes
were undoubtedly "contraband of war," like powder and shot, and other
military supplies, and should no more be given back to the rebels than
so many cannon or guns. The idea was so pertinent, and the justice of it
so plain that the name "contraband" sprang at once into use. But while
this happy explanation had more convincing effect on popular thought
than a volume of discussion, it did not solve the whole question. By
the end of July General Butler had on his hands 900 "contrabands," men,
women and children of all ages, and he wrote to inquire what was their
real condition. Were they slaves or free? Could they be considered
fugitive slaves when their masters had run away and left them? How
should they be disposed of? It was a knotty problem, and upon its
solution might depend the loyalty or secession of the border slave
States of Maryland, West Virginia, Kentucky and Missouri, which, up to
that time, had not decided whether to remain in the Union or to cast
their fortunes with the South.

In dealing with this perplexing subject. Mr. Lincoln kept in mind one of
his favorite stories: the one on the Methodist Presiding Elder who was
riding about his circuit during the spring freshets. A young and anxious
companion asked how they should ever be able to cross the swollen waters
of Fox River, which they were approaching, and the elder quieted him
by saying that he made it the rule of his life never to cross Fox
River until he came to it. The President, following this rule, did
not immediately decide the question, but left it to be treated at the
discretion of each commander. Under this theory some commanders admitted
black people to their camps, while others refused to receive them. The
curt formula of General Orders: "We are neither negro stealers nor negro
catchers," was easily read to justify either course. Congress greatly
advanced the problem, shortly after the battle of Bull Run, by passing
a law which took away a master's right to his slave, when, with his
consent, such slave was employed in service or labor hostile to the
United States.

On the general question of slavery, the President's mind was fully made
up. He felt that he had no right to interfere with slavery where slavery
was lawful, just because he himself did not happen to like it; for he
had sworn to do all in his power to "preserve, protect and defend" the
government and its laws, and slavery was lawful in the southern States.
When freeing the slaves should become necessary in order to preserve
the Government, then it would be his duty to free them; until that time
came, it was equally his duty to let them alone.

Twice during the early part of the war military commanders issued orders
freeing slaves in the districts over which they had control, and twice
he refused to allow these orders to stand. "No commanding general should
do such a thing upon his responsibility, without consulting him," he
said; and he added that whether he, as Commander-in-Chief, had the power
to free slaves, and whether at any time the use of such power should
become necessary, were questions which he reserved to himself. He did
not feel justified in leaving such decisions to commanders in the field.
He even refused at that time to allow Secretary Cameron to make a public
announcement that the government might find it necessary to arm slaves
and employ them as soldiers. He would not cross Fox River until he came
to it. He would not take any measure until he felt it to be absolutely
necessary.

Only a few months later he issued his first proclamation of
emancipation; but he did not do so until convinced that he must do this
in order to put down the rebellion. Long ago he had considered and in
his own mind adopted a plan of dealing with the slavery question--the
simple, easy plan which, while a member of Congress, he had proposed
for the District of Columbia--that on condition of the slave-owners
voluntarily giving up their slaves, they should be paid a fair price for
them by the Federal government. Delaware was a slave State, and seemed
an excellent place in which to try this experiment of "compensated
emancipation," as it was called; for there were, all told, only 1798
slaves left in the State. Without any public announcement of his purpose
he offered to the citizens of Delaware, through their representative in
Congress, four hundred dollars for each of these slaves, the payment
to be made, not all at once, but yearly, during a period of thirty-one
years. He believed that if Delaware could be induced to accept this
offer, Maryland might follow her example, and that afterward other
States would allow themselves to be led along the same easy way. The
Delaware House of Representatives voted in favor of the proposition, but
five of the nine members of the Delaware senate scornfully repelled the
"abolition bribe," as they chose to call it, and the project withered in
the bud.

Mr. Lincoln did not stop at this failure, but, on March 6, 1862, sent a
special message to the Senate and House of Representatives recommending
that Congress adopt a joint resolution favoring and practically offering
gradual compensated emancipation to any State that saw fit to accept
it; pointing out at the same time that the Federal government claimed no
right to interfere with slavery within the States, and that if the offer
were accepted it must be done as a matter of free choice.

The Republican journals of the North devoted considerable space to
discussing the President's plan, which, in the main, was favorably
received; but it was thought that it must fail on the score of expense.
The President answered this objection in a private letter to a Senator,
proving that less than one-half day's cost of war would pay for all
the slaves in Delaware at four hundred dollars each, and less than
eighty-seven days' cost of war would pay for all in Delaware, Maryland,
the District of Columbia, Kentucky and Missouri. "Do you doubt," he
asked, that taking such a step "on the part of those States and this
District would shorten the war more than eighty-seven days, and thus be
an actual saving of expense?"

Both houses of Congress favored the resolution, and also passed a
bill immediately freeing the slaves in the District of Columbia on the
payment to their loyal owners of three hundred dollars for each slave.
This last bill was signed by the President and became a law on April 16,
1862. So, although he had been unable to bring it about when a member of
Congress thirteen years before, it was he, after all, who finally swept
away that scandal of the "negro livery-stable" in the shadow of the dome
of the Capitol.

Congress as well as the President was thus pledged to compensated
emancipation, and if any of the border slave States had shown a
willingness to accept the generosity of the government, their people
might have been spared the loss that overtook all slave-owners on the
first of January, 1863. The President twice called the representatives
and senators of these States to the White House, and urged his plan most
eloquently, but nothing came of it. Meantime, the military situation
continued most discouraging. The advance of the Army of the Potomac
upon Richmond became a retreat; the commanders in the West could not get
control of the Mississippi River; and worst of all, in spite of their
cheering assurance that "We are coming, Father Abraham, three hundred
thousand strong," the people of the country were saddened and filled
with the most gloomy forebodings because of the President's call for so
many new troops.

"It had got to be midsummer, 1862," Mr. Lincoln said, in telling an
artist friend the history of his most famous official act. "Things had
gone on from bad to worse, until I felt that we had reached the end of
our rope on the plan of operations we had been pursuing; that we had
about played our last card, and must change our tactics or lose the
game. I now determined upon the adoption of the emancipation policy, and
without consultation with, or the knowledge of the cabinet, I prepared
the original draft of the proclamation, and after much anxious thought,
called a cabinet meeting upon the subject.... I said to the cabinet that
I had resolved upon this step, and had not called them together to ask
their advice, but to lay the subject-matter of a proclamation before
them, suggestions as to which would be in order after they had heard it
read."

It was on July 22 that the President read to his cabinet the draft of
this first emancipation proclamation, which, after announcing that
at the next meeting of Congress he would again offer compensated
emancipation to such States as chose to accept it, went on to order as
Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, that the
slaves in all States w

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