Men of Our Times; Or, Leading Patriots of the Day
by Harriet Beecher Stowe · English · Gutenberg #46347 · 913,147 chars · public domain (US)
The Project Gutenberg eBook of Men of Our Times; Or, Leading Patriots of the Day
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.
Title: Men of Our Times; Or, Leading Patriots of the Day
Author: Harriet Beecher Stowe
Release date: July 21, 2014 [eBook #46347]
Most recently updated: October 24, 2024
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/46347
Credits: Produced by David Edwards, Charlie Howard, and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
file was produced from images generously made available
by The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MEN OF OUR TIMES; OR, LEADING PATRIOTS OF THE DAY ***
[Illustration: Harriet Beecher Stowe]
MEN OF OUR TIMES;
OR
LEADING PATRIOTS OF THE DAY.
BEING NARRATIVES OF THE LIVES AND DEEDS OF
Statesmen, Generals, and Orators.
INCLUDING
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES AND ANECDOTES
OF
LINCOLN, GRANT, GARRISON, SUMNER, CHASE, WILSON, GREELEY,
FARRAGUT, ANDREW, COLFAX, STANTON, DOUGLASS,
BUCKINGHAM, SHERMAN, SHERIDAN, HOWARD,
PHILLIPS AND BEECHER.
BY
HARRIET BEECHER STOWE,
AUTHOR OF UNCLE TOM'S CABIN.
BEAUTIFULLY ILLUSTRATED
WITH EIGHTEEN STEEL PORTRAITS.
PUBLISHED BY SUBSCRIPTION ONLY.
HARTFORD PUBLISHING CO., HARTFORD, CONN.
J. D. DENISON, NEW YORK; J. A. STODDARD, CHICAGO, ILL.
1868
Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1868, by
HARRIET BEECHER STOWE,
in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States
for the District of Connecticut.
Electrotyped by
LOCKWOOD & MANDEVILLE,
HARTFORD, CONN.
DEDICATION.
To the Young Men Of America,
THESE RECORDS
OF THEIR ELDER BRETHREN IN THE REPUBLIC,
ARE INSCRIBED
BY THE AUTHOR.
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
PAGE.
1. PRESIDENT LINCOLN, FRONTISPIECE.
2. GEN. U. S. GRANT, 111
3. WILLIAM L. GARRISON, 154
4. CHARLES SUMNER, 214
5. SALMON P. CHASE, 241
6. HENRY WILSON, 269
7. HORACE GREELEY, 293
8. COM. D. G. FARRAGUT, 311
9. GOV. JOHN A. ANDREW, 325
10. SCHUYLER COLFAX, 347
11. E. M. STANTON, 363
12. FREDERICK DOUGLASS, 380
13. GEN. P. H. SHERIDAN, 405
14. GEN. W. T. SHERMAN, 423
15. GEN. OLIVER O. HOWARD, 447
16. GOV. WM. A. BUCKINGHAM, 463
17. WENDELL PHILLIPS, 483
18. REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER, 505
PREFACE.
In these sketches of some of the leading public men of our times, the
editor professes to give such particulars of their lives, and such
only, as the public have a right to know.
Every such man has two lives, his public and his private one. The one
becomes fairly the property of the public, in virtue of his having been
connected with events in which every one has a share of interest; but
the other belongs exclusively to himself, his family, and his intimate
friends, and the public have no more right to discuss or pry into its
details than they have into those of any other private individual.
The editor has aimed to avoid all privacies and personalities which
might be indelicate in relation to family circles. She has indeed, in
regard to all the characters, so far as possible, dwelt upon the early
family and community influences by which they were formed, particularly
upon the character and influence of mothers; but such inquiries relate
for the most part to those long dead, and whose mortal history has
become a thing of the past.
Whenever the means have been at hand, the family stock from which
each man has been derived, has been minutely traced. The question
of inherited traits is becoming yearly one of increasing interest,
and most striking results come from a comparison of facts upon this
subject. The fusion of different races is said to produce marked
results on the characteristics of the human being. America has been a
great smelting furnace in which tribes and nations have been melted
together, and the result ought to be some new developments of human
nature. It will always be both interesting and useful to know both
the quality of the family stock, and the circumstances of the early
training of men who have acted any remarkable part in life.
Our country has recently passed through a great crisis which has
concentrated upon it for a time the attention of the civilized world.
It has sustained a shock which the whole world, judging by past
experience, said must inevitably shatter the republic to fragments, and
yet, like a gallant ship in full sail, it has run down the terrible
obstacle, and gone on triumphant, and is this day stronger for the
collision.
This wonderful success is owing to the character of the people which
a Christian Democracy breeds. Of this people we propose to give
a specimen; to show how they were formed in early life, from the
influences which are inherent in such a state.
We are proud and happy to know that these names on our list are after
all but _specimens_. Probably every reader of this book will recall as
many more whom he will deem equally worthy of public notice. There is
scarcely one of them who would not say in reference to his position
before the public, what Lincoln said: "I stand where I do because some
man must stand there, but there are twenty others that might as well
have been leaders as myself." On the whole, we are not ashamed to
present to the world this list of men as a specimen of the graduates
from the American school of Christian Democracy.
So far as we know, the American government is the only permanent
republic which ever based itself upon the principles laid down by
Jesus Christ, of the absolute equal brotherhood of man, and the rights
of man on the simple ground of manhood. Notwithstanding the contrary
practices of a section of the States united in the Union, and the
concessions which they introduced into the constitution, nobody doubts
that this was the leading idea of the men who founded our government.
The declaration of American Independence crystalized a religious
teaching within a political act. The constitution of the United States
still further elaborates these principles, and so strong was the logic
of ideas that the conflict of opinions implied in the incidental
concessions to opposite ideas, produced in the government of the
country a continual and irrepressible discord. For a while it seemed
doubtful which idea would triumph, and whether the accidental parasite
would not strangle and wither the great original tree. The late war
was the outcome of the whole. The fierce fire into which our national
character has been cast in the hour of trial, has burned out of it the
last lingering stain of compromise with anything inconsistent with its
primary object, "to ordain justice and perpetuate liberty."
These men have all been formed by the principles of that great
Christian document, and that state of society and those social
influences which grew out of it, and it is instructive to watch, in
their early life, how a Christian republic trains her sons.
In looking through the list it will be seen that almost every one
of these men sprang from a condition of hard-working poverty. The
majority of them were self-educated men, who in early life were inured
to industrious toil. The farm life of America has been the nursery of
great men, and there is scarce a man mentioned in the book who has not
hardened his muscles and strengthened his brain power by a hand to hand
wrestle with the forces of nature in agricultural life. Frugality,
strict temperance, self-reliance and indomitable industry have been the
lessons of their early days.
Some facts about these specimen citizens are worthy of attention. More
than one-half of them were born and received their early training in
New England, and full one-third are direct lineal descendants of the
Pilgrim fathers. All, so far as we know, are undoubted believers in
the Christian religion--the greater proportion of them are men of
peculiarly and strongly religious natures, who have been active and
efficient in every peculiarly religious work. All have been agreed in
one belief, that the teachings of Jesus Christ are to be carried out
in political institutions, and that the form of society based on his
teachings, is to be defended at any sacrifice and at all risks.
There is scarcely a political man upon this list whose early efforts
were not menaced with loss and reproach and utter failure, if he
advocated these principles in the conduct of political affairs.
For these principles they have temporarily suffered buffetings,
oppressions, losses, persecutions, and in one great instance, DEATH.
All of them honored liberty when she was hard beset, insulted and
traduced, and it is fit that a free people should honor them in the
hour of her victory.
It will be found when the sum of all these biographies is added up that
the qualities which have won this great physical and moral victory have
not been so much exceptional gifts of genius or culture, as those more
attainable ones which belong to man's moral nature.
Taken as a class, while there is a fair proportion both of genius and
scholarship among them, yet the general result speaks more of average
talent and education turned to excellent account, than of any striking
eminence in any particular direction.
But we regard it as highest of all that they were men of good and
honest hearts--men who have set their faces as a flint to know and do
the RIGHT. All of them are men whose principles have been tried in
the fire, men who have braved opposition and persecution and loss for
the sake of what they believed to be true, and knew to be right, and
for this even more than for their bravery in facing danger, and their
patience and perseverance in overcoming difficulties, we have good hope
in offering them as examples to the young men of America.
In respect to one of the names on the list, the editor's near
relationship, while it gives her most authentic access to all
sources of just information, may be held to require an apology. But
the fashion of writing biographies of our leading men is becoming
so popular that the only way in which a prominent man can protect
himself from being put before the public by any hands who may think
fit to assume the task, is to put into the hands of some friend such
authentic particulars as may with propriety be recorded. Mr. Beecher
has recently been much embarrassed by the solicitation of parties, who
notwithstanding his remonstrances, announce an intention of writing his
life. He has been informed by them that it was to be done whether he
consented or not, and that his only choice was between furnishing these
parties with material, or taking the risk of what they might discover
in their unassisted researches.
In this dilemma, it is hoped that the sketch presented in this volume,
as being undeniably authentic, may so satisfy the demand, that there
may be no call for any other record.
H. B. STOWE.
HARTFORD, January, 1868.
CONTENTS.
PAGE
CHAPTER I.--ABRAHAM LINCOLN.
The Men of our Time--Lincoln Foremost--The War was the
Working-Man's Revolution--Abraham Lincoln's Birth and Youth--
The Books he Read--The Thirty Thousand Dollars for Tender--
The Old Stocking of Government Money--A Just Lawyer; Anecdotes
--His First Candidacy and Speech--Goes to Legislature and
Congress--The Seven Debates and Campaign against Douglass
in 1858--Webster's and Lincoln's Language Compared--The
Cooper Institute Speech--The Nomination at Chicago--Moral
and Physical Courage--The Backwoodsman President and the
Diplomatists--Significance of his Presidential Career--
Religious Feelings--His Kindness--"The Baby Did It"--The
First Inaugural--The Second Inaugural, and other State Papers
--The Conspiracy and Assassination--The Opinions of Foreign
Nations on Mr. Lincoln. 11
CHAPTER II.--ULYSSES S. GRANT.
A General Wanted--A Short War Expected--The Young Napoleon
--God's Revenge Against Slavery--The Silent Man in Galena
--"Tanning Leather"--Gen. Grant's Puritan Descent--How he
Loaded the Logs--His West Point Career--Service in Mexico
--Marries, and Leaves the Army--Wood-Cutting, Dunning and
Leather-Selling--Enlists against the Rebellion--Missouri
Campaign--Paducah Campaign--Fort Donelson Campaign--Battle
of Shiloh--How Grant Lost his Temper--Vicksburg Campaign
--Lincoln on Grant's "Drinking"--Chattanooga--Grant's
Method of Making a Speech--Appointed Lieutenant-General--
The Richmond Campaign--"Mr. Grant is a Very Obstinate Man"--
Grant's Qualifications as a Ruler--Honesty--Generosity to
Subordinates--Sound Judgment of Men--Power of Holding his
Tongue--Grant's Sidewalk Platform--Talks Horse to Senator
Wade--"Wants Nothing Said"--The Best Man for Next President. 111
CHAPTER III.--WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON.
Mr. Garrison's Birth and Parents--His Mother--Her Conversion
--His Boyhood--Apprenticed to a Printer--First Anti-Slavery
Address--Advice to Dr. Beecher--Benjamin Lundy--Garrison
Goes to Baltimore--First Battle with Slavery--In Jail--
First Number of the Liberator--Threats and Rage from the South
--The American Anti-Slavery Society--First Visit to England
--The Era of Mob Violence--The Respectable Boston Mob--
Mr. Garrison's Account--Again in Jail--The Massachusetts
Legislature Uncivil to the Abolitionists--Logical Vigor of the
Slaveholders--Garrison's Disunionism--Denounces the Church
--Liberality of the Liberator--The Southerners' own Testimony
--Mr. Garrison's Bland Manners--His Steady Nerves--His
use of Language--Things by their Right Names--Abolitionist
"Hard Language;" Garrison's Argument on it--Protest for
Woman's Rights--The Triumph of his Cause--"The Liberator"
Discontinued--Second Visit to England--Letter to Mrs. Stowe. 154
CHAPTER IV.--CHARLES SUMNER.
Mr. Sumner an instance of Free State High Culture--The "Brahmin
Caste" of New England--The Sumner Ancestry; a Kentish Family
--Governor Increase Sumner; His Revolutionary Patriotism--His
Stately Presence; "A Governor that can Walk"--Charles Sumner's
Father--Mr. Sumner's Education, Legal and Literary Studies
--Tendency to Ideal Perfection--Sumner and the Whigs--
Abolitionism Social Death--Sumner's Opposition to the Mexican
War--His Peace Principles--Sumner Opposes Slavery Within the
Constitution, as Garrison Outside of it--Anti-Slavery and the
Whigs--The Political Abolitionist Platform--Webster asked
in vain to Oppose Slavery--Sumner's Rebuke of Winthrop--
Joins the Free Soil Party--Succeeds Webster in the Senate--
Great Speech against the Fugitive Slave Law--The Constitution
a Charter of Liberty--Slavery not in the Constitution--
First Speech after the Brooks Assault--Consistency as to
Reconstruction. 214
CHAPTER V.--SALMON P. CHASE.
England and our Finances in the War--President Wheelock and
Mr. Chase's Seven Uncles--His Uncle the Bishop--His Sense
of Justice at College--His Uncle the Senator--Admitted to
the Bar for Cincinnati--His First Argument before a U. S.
Court--Society in Cincinnati--The Ohio Abolitionists--
Cincinnati on Slavery--The Church admits Slavery to be "an
Evil"--Mr. Chase and the Birney Mob--The Case of the Slave
Girl Matilda--How Mr. Chase "Ruined Himself"--He Affirms the
Sectionality of Slavery--The Van Zandt Case--Extracts from
Mr. Chase's Argument--Mr. Chase in Anti-Slavery Politics--His
Qualifications as a Financier. 241
CHAPTER VI.--HENRY WILSON.
Lincoln, Chase and Wilson as Illustrations of Democracy--Wilson's
Birth and Boyhood--Reads over One Thousand Books in Ten Years
--Learns Shoemaking--Earns an Education Twice Over--Forms a
Debating Society--Makes Sixty Speeches for Harrison--Enters
into Political Life on the Working-Men's Side--Helps to form
the Free Soil Party--Chosen United States Senator over Edward
Everett--Aristocratic Politics in those Days--Wilson and the
Slaveholding Senators--The Character of his Speaking--Full of
Facts and Practical Sense--His Usefulness as Chairman of the
Military Committee--His "History of the Anti-Slavery Measures
in Congress"--The 37th and 38th Congresses--The Summary of
Anti-Slavery Legislation from that Book--Other Abolitionist
Forces--Contrast of Sentiments of Slavery and of Freedom--
Recognition of Hayti and Liberia; Specimen of the Debate--Slave
and Free Doctrine on Education--Equality in Washington Street
Cars--Pro-Slavery Good Taste--Solon's Ideal of Democracy
Reached in America. 269
CHAPTER VII.--HORACE GREELEY.
The Scotch-Irish Race in the United States--Mr. Greeley a Partly
Reversed Specimen of it--His Birth and Boyhood--Learns to
Read Books Upside Down--His Apprenticeship on a Newspaper--
The Town Encyclopedia--His Industry at his Trade--His First
Experience of a Fugitive Slave Chase--His First Appearance in
New York--The Work on the Polyglot Testament--Mr. Greeley
as "The Ghost"--The First Cheap Daily Paper--The Firm of
Greeley & Story--The New Yorker, the Jeffersonian and the Log
Cabin--Mr. Greeley as Editor of the New Yorker--Beginning of
The Tribune--Mr. Greeley's Theory of a Political Newspaper--
His Love for The Tribune--The First Week of that Paper--The
Attack of the Sun and its Result--Mr. McElrath's Partnership
--Mr. Greeley's Fourierism--"The Bloody Sixth"--The Cooper
Libel Suits--Mr. Greeley in Congress--He Goes to Europe--
His Course in the Rebellion--His Ambition and Qualifications
for Office--The Key-Note of his Character. 293
CHAPTER VIII.--DAVID G. FARRAGUT.
The Lesson of the Rebellion to Monarchs--The Strength of the
United States--The U. S. Naval Service--The Last War--
State of the Navy in 1861--Admiral Farragut Represents the Old
Navy and the New--Charlemagne's Physician, Farraguth--The
Admiral's Letter about his Family--His Birth--His Cruise
with Porter when a Boy of Nine--The Destruction of the Essex
--Farragut in Peace Times--Expected to go with the South--
Refuses, is Threatened, and goes North--The Opening of the
Mississippi--The Bay Fight at Mobile--The Admiral's Health--
Farragut and the Tobacco Bishop. 311
CHAPTER IX.--JOHN A. ANDREW.
Governor Andrew's Death Caused by the War--The Governors Dr.
Beecher Prayed for--Governor Andrew a Christian Governor--
Gov. Andrew's Birth--He goes to Boston to Study Law--Not
Averse to unfashionable and Unpopular Causes--His Cheerfulness
and Social Accomplishments--His Sunday School Work--Lives
Plainly--His Clear Foresight of the War--Sends a Thousand
Men to Washington in One Day--The Story of the Blue Overcoats
--The Telegram for the Bodies of the Dead of Baltimore--Gov.
Andrew's Tender Care for the Poor--The British Minister and the
Colored Women--The Governor's Kindness to the Soldier's Wife
--His Biblical Proclamations--The Thanksgiving Proclamation
of 1861--The Proclamation of 1862--His Interest in the
Schools for the Richmond Poor--Cotton Mather's Eulogy on Gov.
Winthrop--Gov. Andrew's Farewell Address to the Massachusetts
Legislature--State Gratitude to Gov. Andrew's Family. 325
CHAPTER X.--SCHUYLER COLFAX.
General William Colfax, Washington's Friend--Mr. Colfax his
Grandson--Mr. Colfax's Birth and Boyhood--Removes to
Indiana--Becomes Deputy County Auditor--Begins to Deal with
Politics--Becomes an Editor--The Period of Maximum Debt--
Mr. Colfax's First Year--He is Burnt Out--His Subsequent
Success as an Editor--His Political Career as a Whig--Joins
the Republican Party--Popularity in his own District--The
Nebraska Bill--Mr. Colfax goes into Congress--The Famous
Contest for Speakership--Mr. Colfax Saves his Party from Defeat
--Banks Chosen Speaker--Mr. Colfax's Great Speech on the Bogus
Laws of Kansas--The Ball and Chain for Free Speech--Mr.
Colfax Shows the Ball, and A. H. Stephens Holds it for him--Mr.
Colfax Renominated Unanimously--His Remarkable Success in his
own District--Useful Labors in Post Office Committee--Early
for Lincoln for President--Mr. Colfax urged for Post Master
General--His Usefulness as Speaker--The Qualifications for
that Post--Mr. Colfax's Public Virtues. 347
CHAPTER XI.--EDWIN M. STANTON.
Rebel Advantages at Opening of the War--They Knew all about
the Army Officers--Early Contrast of Rebel Enthusiasm and
Union Indifference--Importance of Mr. Stanton's Post--His
Birth and Ancestry--His Education and Law Studies--County
Attorney--State Reporter--Defends Mr. McNulty--Removes to
Pittsburg--His Line of Business--The Wheeling Case--He
Removes to Washington--His Qualifications as a Lawyer--He
Enters Buchanan's Cabinet--His Unexpected Patriotism--His
Own Account of the Cabinet at News of Anderson's Move to Sumter
--The Lion before the Old Red Dragon--Appointed Secretary of
War--"Bricks in his Pockets"--Stanton's Habitual Reserve--
His Wrath--"The Angel Gabriel as Paymaster"--Anecdotes of
Lincoln's Confidence in Stanton--Lincoln's Affection for him--
The Burdens of his Office--His Kindness of Heart within a Rough
Outside--The Country his Debtor. 363
CHAPTER XII.--FREDERICK DOUGLASS.
The Opportunity for Every Man in a Republic--The Depth Below a
White Man's Poverty--The Starting Point whence Fred Douglass
Raised Himself--His Mother--Her Noble Traits--Her Self
Denial for the sake of Seeing him--She Defends him against Aunt
Katy--Her Death--Col. Loyd's Plantation--The Luxury of his
own Mansion--The Organization of his Estate--"Old Master"--
How they Punished the Women--How Young Douglass Philosophized
on Being a Slave--Plantation Life--The Allowance of Food
--The Clothes--An Average Plantation Day--Mr. Douglass'
Experience as a Slave Child--The Slave Children's Trough--The
Slave Child's Thoughts--The Melancholy of Slave Songs--He
Becomes a House Servant--A Kind Mistress Teaches him to Read--
How he Completed his Education--Effects of Learning to Read--
Experiences Religion and Prays for Liberty--Learns to Write--
Hires his Time, and Absconds--Becomes a Free Working-Man in New
Bedford--Marries--Mr. Douglass on Garrison--Mr. Douglass'
Literary Career. 380
CHAPTER XIII.--PHILIP H. SHERIDAN.
Sheridan a Full-Blooded Irishman--The Runaway Horse--
Constitutional Fearlessness--Sheridan Goes to West Point--
Sheridan's Apprenticeship to War--The Fight with the Apaches
at Fort Duncan--He is Transferred to Oregon--Commands at
Fort Yamhill in the Yokima Reservation--The Quarrel among
the Yokimas--Sheridan Popular with Indians--He Thinks he
has a Chance to be Major Some Day--Sheridan's Shyness with
Ladies--He Employs a Substitute in Waiting on a Lady--
Sheridan's Kindness and Efficiency in Office Work--He Becomes
a Colonel of Cavalry--His Shrewd Defeat of Gen. Chalmers--
Becomes Brigadier--The Kentucky Campaign against Bragg--
Sheridan Saves the Battle of Perrysville--Saves the Battle of
Murfreesboro--Gen. Rousseau on Sheridan's Fighting--Sheridan
at Missionary Ridge--Joins Grant as Chief of Cavalry--His
Raids around Lee--His Campaign in the Valley of Virginia
--He Moves Across and Joins in the Final Operations--His
Administration at New Orleans--Grant's Opinion of Sheridan. 405
CHAPTER XIV.--WILLIAM T. SHERMAN.
The Result of Eastern Blood and Western Developments--Lincoln,
Grant, Chase and Sherman Specimens of it--The Sherman Family
Character--Hon. Thomas Ewing adopts Sherman--Character of the
Boy--He Enters West Point--His Peculiar Traits Showing thus
Early--How he Treated his "Pleb"--His Early Military Service
--His Appearance as First Lieutenant--Marries and Resigns--
Banker at San Francisco--Superintendent of Louisiana Military
Academy--His Noble Letter Resigning the Superintendency--He
Foresees a Great War--Cameron and Lincoln Think not--Sherman
at Bull Run--He Goes to Kentucky--Wants Two Hundred Thousand
Troops--The False Report of his Insanity--Joins Grant; His
Services at Shiloh--Services in the Vicksburg Campaigns--
Endurance of Sherman and his Army--Sherman's estimate of Grant
--How to live on the Enemy--Prepares to move from Atlanta--
The Great March--His Courtesy to the Colored People--His
Foresight in War--Sherman on Office-Holding. 423
CHAPTER XV.--OLIVER O. HOWARD.
Can there be a Christian Soldier?--General Howard's Birth--His
Military Education--His Life Before the Rebellion--Resigns in
Order to get into the Field--Made Brigadier for Good Conduct
at Bull Run--Commands the Eleventh Corps and Joins the Army
at Chattanooga--His Services in the Army of the Potomac--
Extreme Calmness on the Field of Battle--Services with Sherman
--Sherman's high Opinion of him--Col. Bowman's Admiration
of Howard's Christian Observances--Patriotic Services while
Invalided at Home--Reproves the Swearing Teamster--Placed
over the Freedmen's Bureau--The Central Historic Fact of the
War--The Rise of Societies to Help the Freedmen--The Work of
the Freedmen's Bureau--Disadvantages Encountered by it, and by
General Howard--Results of the Bureau thus far--Col. Bowman's
Description of Gen. Howard's Duties--Gen. Sherman's Letter to
Gen. Howard on Assuming the Post--Estimate of Gen. Howard's
Abilities. 447
CHAPTER XVI.--WILLIAM A. BUCKINGHAM.
The Buckinghams an Original Puritan Family--Rev. Thomas
Buckingham--Gov. Buckingham's Father and Mother--Lebanon, the
Birthplace of Five Governors--Gov. Buckingham's Education--He
Teaches School--His Natural Executive Tendency--His Business
Career--His Extreme Punctuality in Payments--His Business
and Religious Character--His Interest in the Churches and
Schools--His Benefactions in those Directions--His Political
Course--He Accepts Municipal but not Legislative Offices--A
Member of the Peace Conference--He Himself Equips the First
State Militia in the War--His Zealous Co-operation with the
Government--Sends Gen. Aiken to Washington--The Isolation of
that City from the North--Gov. Buckingham's Policy for the War;
Letter to Mr. Lincoln--His Views on Emancipation; Letter to Mr.
Lincoln--Anecdote of the Temperance Governor's Staff. 463
CHAPTER XVII.--WENDELL PHILLIPS.
Birth and Ancestry of Wendell Phillips--His Education and Social
Advantage--The Lovejoy Murder--Speech in Faneuil Hall--The
Murder Justified--Mr. Phillips' First Speech--He Defends the
Liberty of the Press--His Ideality--He Joins the Garrisonian
Abolitionists--Gives up the Law and Becomes a Reformer--His
Method and Style of Oratory--Abolitionists Blamed for the
Boston Mob--Heroism of the Early Abolitionists--His Position
in Favor of "Woman's Rights"--Anecdote of His Lecturing--His
Services in the Cause of Temperance--Extract from His Argument
on Prohibition--His Severity towards Human Nature--His Course
During and Since the War--A Change of Tone Recommended. 483
CHAPTER XVIII.--HENRY WARD BEECHER.
Mr. Beecher a Younger Child--Death of his Mother--His
Step-Mother's Religious Influence--Ma'am Kilbourn's School
--The Passing Bell--Unprofitable Schooling--An Inveterate
School Joker--Masters the Latin Grammar--Goes to Amherst
College--His Love of Flowers--Modes of Study; a Reformer--
Mr. Beecher and the Solemn Tutor--His Favorite Poetry--His
Introduction to Phrenology--His Mental Philosophy--Doctrine
of Spiritual Intuition--Punctuality for Joke's Sake--Old
School and New School--Doubts on Entering the Ministry--
Settlement at Lawrenceburg--His Studies; First Revival--Large
Accessions to the Church--"Tropical Style"--Ministerial Jokes
--Slavery in the Pulpit--The Transfer to Brooklyn--Plymouth
Church Preaching--Visit to England--Speeches in England--
Letters from England--Christian View of England--The Exeter
Hall Speech--Preaches an Unpopular Forgiveness. 505
[Illustration: A. Lincoln]
CHAPTER I.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN.
The Men of our Time--Lincoln Foremost--The War was the
Working-Man's Revolution--Abraham Lincoln's Birth and Youth--
The Books he read--The Thirty Thousand Dollars for Tender--The
Old Stocking of Government Money--A Just Lawyer; Anecdotes--His
First Candidacy and Speech--Goes to Legislature and Congress--
The Seven Debates and Campaign against Douglas in 1858--Webster's
and Lincoln's Language Compared--The Cooper Institute Speech--
The Nomination at Chicago--Moral and Physical Courage--The
Backwoodsman President and the Diplomatists--Significance of
his Presidential Career--Religious Feelings--His Kindness--
"The Baby Did It"--The First Inaugural--The Second Inaugural,
and other State Papers--The Conspiracy and Assassination--The
Opinions of Foreign Nations on Mr. Lincoln.
Our times have been marked from all other times as the scene of an
immense conflict which has not only shaken to its foundation our own
country, but has been felt like the throes of an earthquake through all
the nations of the earth.
Our own days have witnessed the closing of the great battle, but the
preparations for that battle have been the slow work of years.
The "Men of Our Times," are the men who indirectly by their moral
influence helped to bring on this great final crisis, and also those
who, when it was brought on, and the battle was set in array, guided it
wisely, and helped to bring it to its triumphant close.
In making our selection we find men of widely different spheres and
characters. Pure philanthropists, who, ignoring all selfish and worldly
politics, have labored against oppression and wrong; far-seeing
statesmen, who could foresee the working of political causes from
distant years; brave naval and military men, educated in the schools
of our country; scientific men, who helped to perfect the material
forces of war by their discoveries and ingenuity--all are united in one
great crisis, and have had their share in one wonderful passage of the
world's history.
Foremost on the roll of "men of our time," it is but right and fitting
that we place the honored and venerated name of the man who was called
by God's providence to be the leader of the nation in our late great
struggle, and to seal with his blood the proclamation of universal
liberty in this country--the name of
ABRAHAM LINCOLN.
The revolution through which the American nation has been passing
was not a mere local convulsion. It was a war for a principle which
concerns all mankind. It was the war for the rights of the working
class of society as against the usurpation of privileged aristocracies.
You can make nothing else of it. That is the reason why, like a
shaft of light in the judgment day, it has gone through all nations,
dividing the multitudes to the right and the left. _For_ us and our
cause, all the common working classes of Europe--all that toil and
sweat, and are oppressed. _Against_ us, all privileged classes,
nobles, princes, bankers and great manufacturers, all who live at
ease. A silent instinct, piercing to the dividing of soul and spirit,
joints and marrow, has gone through the earth, and sent every soul
with instinctive certainty where it belongs. The poor laborers of
Birmingham and Manchester, the poor silk weavers of Lyons, to whom our
conflict has been present starvation and lingering death, have stood
bravely _for_ us. No sophistries could blind or deceive _them_; they
knew that _our_ cause was _their_ cause, and they suffered their part
heroically, as if fighting by our side, because they knew that our
victory was to be their victory. On the other side, all aristocrats and
holders of exclusive privileges have felt the instinct of opposition,
and the sympathy with a struggling aristocracy, for they, too, felt
that our victory would be their doom.
This great contest has visibly been held in the hands of Almighty God,
and is a fulfillment of the solemn prophecies with which the Bible is
sown thick as stars, that He would spare the soul of the needy, and
judge the cause of the poor. It was He who chose the instrument for
this work, and He chose him with a visible reference to the rights and
interests of the great majority of mankind, for which he stood.
Abraham Lincoln was in the strictest sense _a man of the working
classes_. All his advantages and abilities were those of a man of
the working classes, all his disadvantages and disabilities those of
the working classes, and his position at the head of one of the most
powerful nations of the earth was a sign to all who live by labor,
that their day is coming. Lincoln was born to the inheritance of hard
work, as truly as the poorest laborer's son that digs in our fields.
He was born in Kentucky, in 1809. At seven years of age he was set
to work, axe in hand, to clear up a farm in a Western forest. Until
he was seventeen his life was that of a simple farm laborer, with
only such intervals of schooling as farm laborers get. Probably the
school instruction of his whole life would not amount to more than six
months. At nineteen he made a trip to New Orleans as a hired hand on a
flat-boat, and on his return he split the timber for a log cabin and
built it, and enclosed ten acres of land with a rail fence of his own
handiwork. The next year he hired himself for twelve dollars a month to
build a flat-boat and take her to New Orleans, and any one who knows
what the life of a Mississippi boatman was in those days, must know
that it involved every kind of labor. In 1832, in the Black Hawk Indian
war, the hardy boatman volunteered to fight for his country, and was
unanimously elected a captain, and served with honor for a season in
frontier military life. He was very popular with his soldiers for two
reasons; the first was his great physical strength; the second, that
he could tell more and better stories than any other man in the army.
Odd constituents for a commander's character; but like everything else
in Lincoln's life, the fact shows how wonderfully he represented, and
therefore suited, the people. Some time after the war, the surveyor of
Sangamon county, being driven with work, came to him to take the survey
of a tract off from his hands. True, he had never studied surveying,
but what of that? He accepted the job, procured a chain and a treatise
on surveying, and _did the work_. Do we not see in this a parallel of
the wider wilderness which in later years he was to undertake to survey
and fit for human habitation, _without_ chart or surveyor's chain?
After this, while serving as a postmaster, he began his law studies.
He took the postmastership for the sake of reading all the papers
that came into the town, at the same time borrowing the law books he
was too poor to buy, and studying by the light of his evening fire. He
soon acquired a name in the country about as a man of resources and
shrewdness. He was one that people looked to for counsel in exigencies,
and to whom they were ready to depute almost any enterprise which
needed skill and energy, or patience and justice. "He was in great
request," says one of his biographers, "by thick-headed people, because
of his clearness and skill in narration." It might well have been
added, because also of his kindness, patience and perfect justness of
nature in listening, apprehending and stating.
Mr. Lincoln was now about twenty-three. His life thus far may perhaps
be considered as his education; at any rate, it is the part of his life
which answers to the school years, college course, and professional
studies of a regularly educated lawyer at the East. It included, of
actual "schooling," only the six months total already mentioned. Even
then it was his mother who had taught him to read and write. Of the
use of books of any kind, this backwoods graduate had little enough.
His course of reading was a very thorough illustration of the ancient
rule to "read not many but much." He read seven books over and over. Of
three of them, the Bible, Shakspeare and Æsop's Fables, he could repeat
large portions by heart. The other four were the Pilgrim's Progress,
the Life of Washington, the Life of Franklin, and the Life of Henry
Clay. It is a curious fact that neither then nor afterwards did he ever
read a novel. He began Ivanhoe once, but was not interested enough to
finish it. He was one of those men who have the peculiar faculty of
viewing this whole world of men and things as a side spectator, and the
interest of the drama of life thus silently seen at first hand, was to
him infinitely more interesting than any second hand imitation. "My
life is story enough," once said a person of this peculiar temperament,
"what should I want to read stories for?" The interest he felt in human
beings was infinitely stronger with him than the interest in artistic
representation.
One of his biographers says that he "seldom bought a new book, and
seldom read one," and he adds, with a good deal of truth, that "his
education was almost entirely a newspaper one," and that he "was one of
the most thorough newspaper readers in America."
But that which was much more the real essence of his self-education,
was the never-ceasing and strenuous course of laborious thought and
reasoning that he kept up, upon the meaning, the connection, the
tendency, the right and wrong, the helps or remedies, of all the past
facts he read of, or of the present facts that he experienced in life.
And this education he not only began early and pursued effectively,
but he never ceased it. All his life he maintained that course of
steady labor after practical knowledge and practical wisdom. Whenever
he could read a good book he did, and his practice for a long time
was, after having finished it, to write out an analysis of it; a very
fatiguing but very improving process. One of his companions while a
young "hired man," described him in after years, as "the likeliest boy
in God's world. He would work all day as hard as any of us, and study
by fire-light in the log house half the night, and in this way he made
himself a thorough practical surveyor." Another man described him as he
saw him while working for a living, in 1830, or thereabouts, "lying on
a trundle-bed, with one leg stretched out rocking the cradle containing
the child of his hostess, while he himself was absorbed in the study of
English grammar."
The world has many losses that mankind are not conscious of. The
burning of the Alexandrian library was an irreparable loss, but a
greater loss is in the silence of great and peculiar minds. Had there
been any record of what Lincoln thought and said while he thus hewed
his way through the pedantic mazes of book learning, we might have
some of the newest, the strangest, the most original contributions to
the philosophy of grammar and human language in general that ever have
been given. They would have savored very much of Beethoven's answer
when the critics asked him why he would use consecutive octaves in
music. "Because they sounded well," said the scornful old autocrat; and
Lincoln's quiet perseverance in a style of using the English language
peculiarly his own had something of the same pertinacity. He seemed
equally amused by the critical rules of rhetoric, and as benevolently
and paternally indulgent to the mass of eager scholars who thought
them important, as he was to the turbulent baby whom he rocked with
one leg while he pursued his grammatical studies. But after his own
quaint, silent fashion, he kept up his inquiries into the world of book
learning with remarkable perseverance, and his friend and biographer,
Mr. Arnold, says, became "thoroughly at home in all the liberal
studies and scientific questions of the day." This is rather strongly
put, and we fancy that Lincoln would have smiled shrewdly over it, but
the specifications which Mr. Arnold adds are undoubtedly true. Mr.
Lincoln "had mastered English, and made some progress in Latin, and
knew the Bible more thoroughly than many who have spent their lives in
its perusal."
But what book learning he obtained would never have made him a lawyer,
not to say President. The education which gave him his success in life
was his self-training in the ability to understand and to state facts
and principles about men and things.
In 1836 our backwoodsman, flat-boat hand, captain, surveyor, obtained
a license to practice law, and as might be expected, rose rapidly. One
anecdote will show the esteem in which he was held in his neighborhood.
A client came to him in a case relating to a certain land claim, and
Lincoln said to him, "Your first step must be to take thirty thousand
dollars and go and make a legal tender; it of course will be refused,
but it is a necessary step." "But," said the man, "I haven't the thirty
thousand dollars to make it with." "O, that's it; just step over to the
bank with me, and I'll get it." So into the bank they went, and Lincoln
says to the cashier, "We just want to take thirty thousand dollars to
make a legal tender with; I'll bring it back in an hour or two." The
cashier handed across the money to "Honest Abe," and without a scratch
of the pen in acknowledgment, he strode his way with the money, all in
the most sacred simplicity, made the tender, and brought it back with
as much nonchalance as if he had been borrowing a silver spoon of his
grandmother.
It was after he had been practicing law some time, that another
incident took place, showing him as curiously scrupulous about small
sums as he was trusty and trusted about large ones. When he left New
Salem and went to Springfield, he was still so poor that he even found
it difficult to procure the necessaries of life. For some years he
struggled forward, when one day there came a post-office agent, who in
pursuance of the routine business of the department, presented to the
almost penniless and still struggling ex-postmaster a regulation draft
for the balance due to the Washington office, in all $17.60. Dr. Henry,
a friend of Mr. Lincoln's, happening to fall in with the agent, went
along with him, intending to offer to lend the money, as it was about
certain that he could have no such sum as that at his command. When the
draft was presented, Lincoln asked the officer to be seated, sat down
himself a few moments, looking puzzled; then asked to be excused for
a little, stepped out to his boarding house and returned. He brought
with him an old stocking, untied it, and poured out on the table a
quantity of small silver coin and "red cents." These they counted;
they amounted to $17.60, the precise amount called for by the draft.
More than that--it was _the very money_ called for by the draft, for
at leaving his postmastership, the punctilious officer had tied up the
balance on hand, and kept it by him, awaiting the legal call for it. At
paying it over, he remarked that he _never used, even temporarily, any
money that was not his_. This money, he added, he felt belonged to the
government, and he had no right to exchange or use it for any purposes
of his own.
His honesty, shrewdness, energy and keen practical insight into men
and things soon made him the most influential man in his state, both
as lawyer and politician. Of this influence, and most especially of
its depending upon his wonderfully direct plain common sense, and
the absolute honesty and utter justness of his mind, there are many
anecdotes. In politics and in law alike, both the strength of his
conscientiousness and the kind of yearning after a rounded wholeness of
view which was an intellectual instinct with him, forced him habitually
to consider all sides of any question. "For fifteen years before his
election to the Presidency," says one writer, in striking illustration
of this habit in politics, "he subscribed regularly to _The Richmond
Enquirer_ and _The Charleston Mercury_. He grew slowly, as public
opinion grew; and as an anti-slavery man, was a gradual convert." Thus
it resulted that "while Rhett and Wise, with slavery in full feather,
wrote every day the inviolateness of secession and the divinity
of bondage, these two Illinois lawyers, (Lincoln and his partner,
Herndon,) in their little square office, read every vaunting cruel
word, paid to read it, and educated themselves out of their mutual
indignations."
In like manner he was fair and impartial in legal investigations. "The
jury" says one account, "always got from him a fair statement of any
case in hand, and years later it was remarked by the Chief Justice of
Illinois that when Lincoln spoke, he argued both sides of the case so
well that a speech in response was always superfluous."
Mr. Lincoln's fellow lawyers used to say that he was in professional
matters, "perversely honest." He could not take hold heartily on the
wrong side. He never engaged in it, knowingly; if a man desired to
retain him whose cause was bad, he declined, and told the applicant not
to go to law. A lady once came to him to have him prosecute a claim
to some land, and gave him the papers in the case for examination,
together with a retainer in the shape of a check for two hundred
dollars. Next day she came to see what her prospects were, when Mr.
Lincoln told her that he had examined the documents very carefully,
that she "had not a peg to hang her claim on," and that he could not
conscientiously advise her to bring an action. Having heard this
judgment, the lady thanked him, took her papers, and was about to
depart. "Wait a moment," said Mr. Lincoln, "here is the check you gave
me." "But," said she, "Mr. Lincoln, I think you have earned _that_."
"No, no," he answered, insisting on her receiving it, "that would not
be right. I can't take pay for doing my duty."
He was quite as prompt and just in accepting unprofitable duty as in
declining its profitable opposite. During all the early part of his
legal practice in Springfield, it was considered an unpopular and
politically dangerous business for a lawyer to defend any fugitive
slave on trial for surrender to the South, and even the brave Col.
Baker, in those days also practicing there, on one occasion directly
refused to defend such a case, saying that as a political man he could
not afford it. But the luckless applicant, having consulted with an
abolitionist friend, went next to Lincoln, and got him. "_He's_ not
afraid of an unpopular case," said the friend; "when I go for a lawyer
to defend an arrested fugitive slave, other lawyers will refuse me; but
if Mr. Lincoln is at home, he will always take up my case."
On a few occasions after having even entered into the trial of a case,
Mr. Lincoln would find that, as sometimes happens, he had been deceived
by his own client, and that he really had not the right on his side.
When this was the case, he could as it were be seen to wilt at once,
and whatever further he might do in the case was only mechanical. In
such a case, having an associate, and having refused to argue it, the
associate argued the case _and won it_, and then offered to divide with
Mr. Lincoln the fee of $900; but Lincoln would not take a cent. Once
in defending a man sued for delivering lambs instead of sheep, the
testimony clearly showed that such delivery had been made. Instead of
trying to confuse the witnesses or becloud the evidence, Mr. Lincoln
ascertained how many such lambs had been delivered, and quietly told
the jury that they must give a verdict against his client. He simply
cautioned them to be just in fixing the damages. When he had recovered
a verdict against a railroad company, and a certain offset against
his client was to be deducted, he interrupted the final decision just
in time to have the offset _made larger_ by a certain amount which he
had just found out ought to be added to it. His careful and primitive
scrupulousness was just as marked in dealing with any associates in a
case. When he received a joint fee his invariable custom was to divide
it properly, and tie up in a separate parcel each associate's part of
_the very money received_, duly labelled and directed.
In 1841 Mr. Lincoln argued before the Supreme Court of Illinois, the
case of Nance, a negro girl, who had been sold within the state. A note
had been given in payment for her, and the suit was brought to recover
upon this note. Mr. Lincoln, defending, proved that Nance was free, and
that thus nothing had been sold; so that the note was void. The Court
below had sustained the note, but the Supreme Court, in accordance with
Mr. Lincoln's argument, reversed this judgment. The decision made Nance
free, and put a stop to sales of human beings in Illinois.
Another remarkable case in which he was engaged, was, the defence of
young Armstrong from a charge of murder. This Armstrong was the son
of a man who had befriended and employed Mr. Lincoln in youth, and
the present charge was, that he had killed a certain person who had
unquestionably died from injuries received in a camp-meeting riot where
young Armstrong was present. The father was dead, and the mother aged
and poor; a chain of apparently perfectly conclusive circumstantial
evidence had been forged, which had convinced the community of
Armstrong's guilt; indeed, had he not been safely secured in a strong
jail he would have been lynched. Neither the youth nor his old mother
had any money. The people and the newspapers were furious against the
prisoner; and his fate appeared absolutely certain even to himself,
when Mr. Lincoln, hearing of the matter in some way, volunteered
for the defence, and was gladly accepted. When the trial came on,
the evidence for the prosecution was given, and constituted what
appeared to the audience a perfectly conclusive proof of guilt. Lincoln
cross-examined very lightly, only correcting up and ascertaining a few
places and dates; and his own witnesses were only to show comparatively
good previous character for the prisoner.
The prosecutor, sure of his prey, made only a short and formal
argument. Mr. Lincoln followed for the defence. He began slowly,
calmly, carefully. He took hold of the heart of the evidence for the
state--that of the chief witness. He pointed out first one discrepancy,
and then another, and then another. He came at last to that part of
the evidence where this principal witness had sworn positively that he
had been enabled by the light of the moon to see the prisoner give the
fatal blow with a slung shot; and taking up the almanac he showed that
at the hour sworn to on the night sworn to _the moon had not risen_;
that the whole of this evidence was a perjury.
The audience, gradually stirred and changed in the temper of their
minds by the previous series of skilfully displayed inconsistencies,
rising from hate into sympathy, flamed suddenly up at this startling
revelation, and the verdict of "not guilty" was almost visible in the
faces of the jury. But this was not all. Turning upon the infamous
man who had sought to swear away another's life, Mr. Lincoln, now
fully kindled into his peculiarly slow but intensely fiery wrath, held
him up to the view of court and jury and audience, in such a horrid
picture of guilt and shame that the miserable fellow, stunned and
confounded, actually fled from the face of the incensed lawyer out of
the court room. And in conclusion, Mr. Lincoln appealed to the jury to
lay aside any temporary prejudices, and to do simple justice. And he
referred to the motive of his own presence there,--to his gratitude for
the kindness of the prisoner's father in past years, in a manner so
affecting as to bring tears from many eyes. In less than half an hour
the jury returned a verdict of not guilty, and the young man was set
free, his life saved and his character restored.
When he went for the second time into public life, on the passage of
the Nebraska Bill in 1854, he was becoming eminent in the difficult and
lucrative department of patent law. But his fellow lawyers used to call
his fees "ridiculously small." Indeed, he never took but one large fee,
and that his friends insisted on his taking. This was $5,000 from the
Illinois Central Railroad Company, one of the richest corporations in
the country, and for very valuable services in a very important case.
Once before this he had received what he thought a large fee, and he
made a good use of it. The sum was five hundred dollars, and a friend
who called to see him the next morning, found him counting it over and
over, and piling it up on the table to look at. "Look here," he said,
"see what a heap of money I've got from the ---- case! Did you ever see
anything like it! Why, I never had so much money in my life before,
put it all together!" Then he added, that if he could only get another
$250 to put with it, he would at once buy a quarter-section of land,
and settle it on his old step-mother. This was an odd use to make of
a man's first important gains in money, and his friend, who at once
loaned him the required additional amount, tried to make him give the
land for the old lady's life only. But Lincoln insisted on his own
plan, saying, "I shall do no such thing. It is a poor return at the
best, for all the good woman's devotion and fidelity to me, and there
isn't going to be any half-way work about it."
Mr. Lincoln was a great favorite at the bar, his good nature, his
kindness, and his unfailing flow of stories, making him a most welcome
guest on every circuit.
He never took technical advantages, but on the other hand often
showed an adversary some error in matter of form, and suggested to
him how to cure it. His forensic habits were excessively simple, but
very effective. The most telling of all of them was _to be in the
right_; for when juries know that a lawyer habitually refuses to be
on the wrong side, habitually breaks down if on that side, simply
from consciousness of the fact, and habitually makes strong and clear
arguments if on the right side, they are prepossessed in favor of
that lawyer before he says a word. He did not make speeches to the
jury, he talked with them; often in warm weather taking off his coat
for coolness, selecting some intelligent looking juryman, reasoning
with him until convinced, then taking another, and so on. He did not
browbeat witnesses, but kept them comfortable and good humored. In
short, Mr. Lincoln was decidedly and deservedly a powerful as well as
a successful lawyer. He must have been of great professional powers
to maintain himself, and rise to the leadership of the bar, with the
competitors he had. Among these were Mr. Douglas, Secretary Browning,
Senator Trumbull, Governor Yates, Judge Davis of the U. S. Supreme
Court, Col. Baker, Gen. Hardin, Gov. Bissell, Gen. Shields, Senator
Washburn, N. B. Judd, Gen. Logan, and others. He became recognized by
his fellow-citizens as "the first lawyer in Illinois," and one of the
judges on the bench described him as "the finest lawyer he ever knew,"
and another as "one of the ablest he had ever known."
Like so many of his profession, Mr. Lincoln was very early a
politician. Indeed, his devotion to politics interfered very
considerably with his gains, and delayed his eminence in his
profession. The value to his fellow-countrymen of the political results
which he was the means of bringing to pass, is, however, so infinitely
beyond any money value, that no regret can be felt at his ambition.
Mr. Lincoln's popularity among his neighbors, his assiduous study of
the newspapers, his intense and untiring meditations and reasonings
on the political questions of the day, brought him into the political
field pretty early and pretty well prepared. It was in 1832, when he
was twenty-three years old, that his first candidacy and his first
speech took place. The story and speech all together are so short
that they can be inserted here in full. On the day of election, then,
Mr. Lincoln's opponent spoke first, and delivered a long harangue of
the regular political sort. Lincoln, who followed him, completed his
oration in just seventy-nine words--less than one minute's talking.
This is what he said: "Gentlemen, fellow citizens:--I presume you know
who I am; I am humble Abraham Lincoln. I have been solicited by many
friends to become a candidate for the Legislature. My politics can be
briefly stated. I am in favor of a national bank, I am in favor of the
internal improvement system, and a high protective tariff. These are my
sentiments and political principles. If elected I shall be thankful, if
not, it will be all the same."
He was beaten, however, in spite of his terseness. But in his own
district he received all but seven out of 284 votes; and he was never
beaten again in any election by the people.
His actual political career, not counting this defeat, began in 1834,
when he was chosen member of the State Legislature, and being too poor
to afford a horse, _walked_ over a hundred miles to Vandalia to take
his seat. He remained a member for four successive terms of two years
each. Mr. Douglas became a member two years after him, in 1836; the
two men quickly became party leaders on their respective sides of the
house, and thus their political courses and their political rivalries
began almost together. At the two latter of his four legislative terms,
Mr. Lincoln was the Whig candidate for Speaker, and once lacked only
one vote of being elected. Mr. Lincoln's eight years' service in the
State Legislature was busy and useful, and gave him an assured and high
position in his party. The work done was usually of a local character,
of course, its most important departments being that of the improvement
of internal communication by railroad and canal, and that of education.
But even on the question of slavery, the one significant occasion for
utterance which arose was promptly improved, and in such a manner as
to show both the settled feelings and convictions of Lincoln's mind
on the subject, and his characteristic practice of restricting his
official utterances strictly to the exigencies of the case. His dislike
of slavery was not only the consequence of his inborn sense of justice
and kindly feelings, but was his direct inheritance from his parents,
who left Kentucky and settled in Indiana expressly to bring up their
family on free instead of slave soil. In March, 1839, some strong
pro-slavery resolutions were passed by the Legislature of Illinois,
and by large majorities in both houses. This, the few anti-slavery
members could not prevent. But Mr. Lincoln and Mr. Dan Stone took the
most decided stand in their power on the other side, by putting on
record on the House journals a formal protest against the resolutions.
In this protest, they declared views that would to-day be considered
very conservative, about legal or political interference with slavery;
but they also declared in the most unqualified manner, and in so many
words, their belief "that the institution of slavery is founded on both
injustice and bad policy."
At the end of his fourth term, Mr. Lincoln declined a further
nomination, finding it absolutely necessary to devote more time than
hitherto to his own private affairs. When he thus left the Legislature
of his own accord, he was virtually the leader of his party in the
State, having reached that creditable and influential though unofficial
position by his own good qualities, in the eight years of his life
ending with his thirty-fifth. It was a great achievement for a man no
older, and so destitute of outside help.
For four years Mr. Lincoln now remained a hard-working lawyer,
although he did a good deal of political work besides, particularly in
"stumping" Illinois and Indiana in the Presidential canvass of 1844.
In this campaign Mr. Lincoln made many strong and effective speeches
for Henry Clay, and though his candidate was beaten, his own reputation
as a politician and speaker was much increased. In 1846 he was elected
to Congress as a Whig, and his extreme popularity at home is shown
by the fact that his own majority on this occasion was 1,511 in the
Springfield district, while Mr. Clay's had been only 914.
During this congressional term, Mr. Lincoln met the grinding of the
great question of the day--the upper and nether millstone of slavery
and freedom revolving against each other. Lincoln's whole nature
inclined him to be a harmonizer of conflicting parties, rather than a
committed combatant on either side. He was firmly and from principle an
enemy to slavery, but the ground he occupied in Congress was in some
respects a middle one between the advance guard of the anti-slavery
army and the spears of the fire-eaters. He voted with John Quincy Adams
for the receipt of anti-slavery petitions; he voted with Giddings for
a committee of inquiry into the constitutionality of slavery in the
District of Columbia, and the expediency of abolishing slavery in that
district; he voted for the various resolutions prohibiting slavery in
the territories to be acquired from Mexico, and he voted forty-two
times for the Wilmot Proviso. On one occasion, he offered a plan
for abolishing slavery in the District of Columbia, by compensation
from the national treasury, with the consent of a majority of the
citizens. He opposed the annexation of Texas, but voted for the bill
to pay the expenses of the war. He voted against paying for slaves as
property, when that question came up in the celebrated Pacheco case,
and thus recorded his denial of the right of owning men, or of its
acknowledgment by the nation.
During this term of service in Congress, Mr. Lincoln was a laborious
and faithful public servant; always present to vote, and always ready
for business; and his speeches, homely and rough as they were, showed
so much broad strong sense, natural rectitude, sincerity, and power of
reasoning, as to give him a good position as a debater. He declined a
re-election; tried for but did not obtain the commissionership of the
Land Office at Washington; declined appointments as Secretary and as
Governor of Oregon Territory; returned to his home and his work; was
unsuccessful as candidate for the United States Senate in the Illinois
Legislature of 1849-50; and labored industriously at his profession,
until the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, the Kansas Nebraska Bill,
and the violences and iniquities connected with them, called him once
more into public life.
He now took the field, heart and soul against the plot to betray
our territories into slavery, and to perpetuate the power of that
institution over the whole country. Henceforth he was all his life a
public man; first a prominent champion in the decisively important
state of Illinois, and afterwards the standard bearer and the martyr of
Freedom in America.
That contest in Illinois, in which the political doctrines of Mr.
Douglas were the central theme of discussion, and in which he himself
on one side and Mr. Lincoln on the other, were the leading speakers
and the controlling minds, was an important act in that great drama
of emancipation which culminated in the Rebellion. In Mr. Lincoln's
life it was if possible still greater in comparative importance; for
his debates with Douglas determined his reputation as a speaker and a
public man, and lifted him to the position from which he stepped into
the presidential chair.
During other previous and subsequent portions of his life, other traits
of Mr. Lincoln's character were often and clearly exemplified. But at
no time was he nearly as plainly and strikingly prominent as a power,
as during his contest with that bold and energetic politician and
remarkably ready and forcible debater, Stephen A. Douglas.
Their first great public duel, as it may be called, was at Springfield,
in October, 1854, just after the passage of the Nebraska bill. The
country was all aflame with excitement. Every fibre of justice, honor,
honesty, conscience that there was in the community was in that
smarting and vibrating state which follows the infliction of a violent
blow, and Douglas had come back to his own state to soothe down the
irritation and to defend his wicked and unpopular course before the
aroused tribunal of his fellow citizens.
He was to defend his course and conduct to a great audience assembled
at the State fair, and Mr. Lincoln was to answer him.
Never was there a greater contrast between two men. Douglas might be
called a brilliant impersonation of all the mere worldly forces of
human nature. He had a splendid physique, with all the powers of
the most captivating oratory, the melody of a most astonishing voice
which ran with ease through every gamut of human feeling, grave, gay,
pathetic, passionate, enthusiastic; now rising with irresistible
impetuosity, now mocking with gay and careless defiance, and with
this voice and this person, he was master of all those shadings and
delicacies of sophistry by which the worse can be made to appear the
better reason. He knew well how to avoid answering a telling argument
by a dazzling glitter of side issues--to make a plain man believe
he had got his difficulty solved, when he had been only skilfully
bewitched, and made to forget where it was. In a popular audience he
had something for every one. Gaiety, gallantry and compliments for
ladies, assured confidence for doubters, vehement assertions for timid
people, stormy brow-beatings, and lion roars of denunciation, to finish
with a grand sweep the popular impression which his sophistries and
assertions had begun. Of truth, he made that very sparing use which
demagogues always do. A little blue line of steel makes a whole heavy
headed iron axe go through the wood,--and so Douglas just skilfully and
artistically tipped the edges of heavy masses of falsehood with the
cutting force of some undeniable truth.
Of moral sensibility Douglas had not enough in his nature, even to
understand that kind of material in others, and to make allowance for
it. Nothing could be more exactly the contrary of Lincoln's scrupulous
careful self-education, in pure questions of the right and the wrong of
things, than Douglas' glittering, careless, reckless, defiant mode of
treating all these subjects. Lincoln had trained himself always to ask,
What is it right to do? Douglas, What _can_ I do? Lincoln, to enquire
What course _ought_ they to take? Douglas, What course can I make them
take? Lincoln, to ask, What is the truth--Douglas, What can be made to
_seem_ truth. His life question was an inquiry, pure and simple, how
much can I get, how much can I do, without losing my hold over men and
being turned out of society?
The pure moral aspects of political questions, he flouted and scoffed
at as unworthy the attention of a practical politician. The rights of
human beings, the eternal laws of rectitude, he treated as a skilful
conjurer treats so many gaily painted balls, which he throws up and
tosses and catches, simply to show his own agility; he played with them
when they came in his way, just as he thought he could make them most
effective for his own purposes.
But if he did not understand or care for eternal principles, he was
perfect master of all the weak and low and petty side of human nature.
He knew how to stir up all the common-place, base and ignoble passions
of man; to bring his lower nature into lively exercise.
The first day in the fair, the multitude was given up to him, and he
swept and played on them as a master musician sweeps a piano, and for
the hour he seemed to be irresistible, bearing all things in his own
way.
Lincoln had this advantage, when his turn came, that he represented
that higher portion of human nature, of which Douglas had little
knowledge, and which his mode of treatment had left almost wholly
untouched. We have spoken of the vast legal influence which Lincoln had
gradually acquired in his own state, by the intense pertinacity with
which he identified himself in every case with right and justice, so
that the mere fact that he had accepted a cause was a strong reason in
advance for believing it the true one.
The people had been excited, amused, dazzled and bewildered, and were
tossing restlessly as the sea swells and dashes after a gale--when
that plain man without outward "form or comeliness," without dazzle of
oratory, or glitter of rhetoric, rose to give them in a fatherly talk,
the simple eternal RIGHT of the whole thing.
It was, he felt, an hour of destiny, a crisis in the great battle
to be fought for mankind for ages to come, and an eye witness thus
describes the scene: "His whole heart was in the subject. He quivered
with feeling and emotion; the house was as still as death." And another
account describes how "the effect of this speech was most magnetic
and powerful. Cheer upon cheer interrupted him, women waved their
handkerchiefs, men sprung from their seats and waved their hats in
uncontrollable enthusiasm." Mr. Douglas was present at this speech,
and was the most uneasy auditor there. As soon as Mr. Lincoln had
concluded, Mr. Douglas jumped up and said that he had been abused,
"though," he added, "in a perfectly courteous manner." He went on
with a rejoinder, and spoke for some time, but without much success.
In fact, he was astounded and disconcerted at finding that there
was so much to be said against him, and that there was a man to say
it so powerfully. The self-confident and even arrogant tone in which
he had opened the debate was gone. At closing, he announced himself
to continue his remarks in the evening, but he did not do it. He had
received a blow too tremendous even for his immense vigor, and from
which he could not so quickly recover.
A little while afterwards, Douglas spoke again and Lincoln answered
him again, at Peoria, and with a similar result. The vast positive
will of the "Little Giant" could not stand up against the still
loftier power with which Mr. Lincoln assailed him from the height
of a moral superiority that irresistibly carried with it the best
convictions of the whole community, and cowed the defiant wrong-doer.
Mr. Lincoln was _right_. Mr. Douglas felt himself vanquished by a
power incomprehensible to himself, and of which none of his political
calculations ever took account.
But as regards the struggle at this time in Illinois, the fact that he
felt himself over-weighted, was sufficiently proved by his declining,
after the two duels at Springfield and Peoria, to proceed, as Mr.
Lincoln invited him, with a series of such debates in other parts of
the State.
Mr. Lincoln, having thus publicly shown himself far stronger than the
strongest of his opponents, proceeded to show himself a man of kindly
self-command, by foregoing the Republican nomination to the U. S.
Senate, and giving it to Hon. Lyman Trumbull, in order to save the risk
of admitting Matteson, the pro-slavery candidate. Unquestionably this
conduct coincided with the shrewdest selfishness; but very few are the
politicians from whom a selfishness small and near would not conceal
the larger and further one. It was by earnest and assiduous personal
influence that Mr. Lincoln secured Mr. Trumbull's election.
It is said of a certain great diplomatist, that he was so accustomed
to dealing with men as knaves that when he had to do with an honest
man he always blundered. Douglas' mistake and defeat were precisely
of this kind. He had so little sense of conscience or moral feeling
himself that he was perfectly unprepared for the uprising of these
sentiments on the part of the people, and astonished at the power which
a man might wield simply from addressing a class of sentiments which he
habitually ignored.
So in Congress, when the petition of the three thousand clergymen was
presented against the Kansas and Nebraska bill, he was in a perfect
rage, and roared like a lion at bay. That this contemptible question of
right and wrong should get up such an excitement and seriously threaten
such a brilliant stroke of diplomacy as he meditated, seemed to him, in
all sincerity, perfectly ridiculous--he could not sufficiently express
his hatred and contempt.
Mere power as a debater, either in parliamentary assemblies or before
popular meetings, has often existed, without any share of the calmer,
and larger, and profounder, and more reflective abilities of the
statesman. Mr. Lincoln possessed both, and in both, his methods were
alike of an intuitively practical, and remarkably direct, simple and
effective nature. Doubtless he had often given proofs of skill in
practical politics, during his consultations of the preceding twenty
years, with the leaders and managers of his party in Illinois. Obscure
operations of local party organizations seldom make any record, or
become visible at all on the surface of history. But the man who in
an adverse hour, when all other counsellors have failed, can unite
discordant elements into a new party, must be confessed to have
statesmanlike skill. This is more peculiarly so when this party must
be founded on a moral principle, and must be bounded and circumscribed
in its working by moral rules and restraints. While unprincipled men
can help themselves by any and all sorts of means, men of principle
are confined to those within certain limits, and the difficulties of
organization in such cases are vastly greater.
When in 1856 the Illinois convention met to choose delegates to the
National Convention that nominated Fremont, there was in the political
ocean a wild chaos of elements. Free Soil men, Anti-Nebraska men,
Liberty Party men, Native Americans, Old Whigs and Old Democrats, and
newly arrived emigrants of no party at all, mixed up in heterogeneous
confusion, tossing and tumbling blindly about for a new platform
to stand on. After long and vain discussion, the committee on a
platform sent for Mr. Lincoln and asked for a suggestion. All the
sections of the Convention were opposed to slavery extension, but
in no other current political question were they at one. There was
imminent danger of discord and division. Their calm adviser quietly
said, "Take the Declaration of Independence, and Hostility to Slavery
Extension. Let us build our new party on the rock of the Declaration
of Independence, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against us."
Mr. Lincoln's profound and unfailing moral sense had seized upon the
relation between the heart of the United States and eternal right. His
suggestion embodied the only doctrine that could have won in the coming
battle. What he advised was done, and the party, on this platform,
revolutionized Illinois, made Mr. Lincoln President, extinguished
slavery, and reorganized the nation.
At Philadelphia, the same question came up again, and was solved by
adopting the same principle. It was on this occasion that Mr. Lincoln's
high position and important influence in the northwest received the
first acknowledgement that he was obtaining a national reputation. He
obtained a vote of one hundred and ten for the Vice Presidency on the
preliminary or informal ballot.
The great effort, however, which finally and firmly established Mr.
Lincoln's reputation as a speaker and statesman, was in 1858, when
he and Douglas once more were brought to a face encounter before the
people of Illinois, as opposing candidates for the U. S. Senate.
During the months of August, September and October, according to the
honest western custom, these two opposing candidates stumped the State
together, and presented their opposing claims and views in a series of
public gatherings. These meetings were in consequence of Mr. Lincoln's
invitation, but Mr. Douglas in accepting adroitly contrived to name
terms that gave him the opening and the closing turns, not only of the
whole series, but of four out of seven of the meetings.
In the June and July preceding, Mr. Lincoln made three other speeches,
two at Springfield and one at Chicago, which may be considered a sort
of preface to the great debates. The first of these, at Springfield,
June 17, 1858, was in some respects the most remarkable of Mr.
Lincoln's oratorical productions. It was made at the close of the
Republican State Convention which nominated Mr. Lincoln a candidate for
the U. S. Senate; and its opening paragraph is so remarkable for style,
so heavy with meaning, and so instinct with political foresight, that
it is worth quoting entire. It is as follows:
"Mr. President, and Gentlemen of the Convention:--If we could first
know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could better judge
what to do, and how to do it. We are now far into the fifth year since
a policy was initiated with the avowed object and confident promise
of putting an end to slavery agitation. Under the operation of that
policy, that agitation has not only not ceased, but has constantly
augmented. In my opinion it will not cease until a crisis shall have
been reached and passed. 'A house divided against itself cannot stand.'
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. Either the opponents of slavery
will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public
mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate
extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall
become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new, North as
well as South."
In this brief statement, Mr. Lincoln set forth the whole object of
the southern and northern parties on the slavery question, and though
he did not prophesy which way the contest would be decided, he did
prophesy exactly the two alternatives to one of which the country
was necessarily to advance. It is further noticeable here that Mr.
Lincoln's statement includes exactly the same prophecy, only not so
classically worded, as Mr. Seward's famous phrase, in his speech at
Rochester, the following October, of "an Irrepressible Conflict." And
once more; the opening sentence, as a writer upon Mr. Lincoln has
shown, is in like manner curiously coincident in thought with the first
sentence of another still more famous speech--Daniel Webster's reply to
Hayne. Mr. Webster said:
"When the mariner has been tossed for many days in thick weather, and
on an unknown sea, he naturally avails himself of the first pause in
the storm, the earliest glance of the sun, to take his latitude, and
ascertain how far the elements have driven him from his true course.
Let us imitate that prudence, and before we float further, refer to
the point from which we departed, that we may at least be able to
conjecture where we now are."
That is a stately and sonorous opening, majestic and poetical. Now
compare it with Mr. Lincoln's synonym: "If we could first know where
we are, and whither we are tending, we could better judge what to do,
and how to do it." The thing could not have been said more shortly,
more directly, more clearly, more strongly in English. As the writer
observes from whom this parallel is taken, "Mr. Webster used eighty-two
words, nearly a quarter of them having over one syllable; Mr. Lincoln
only twenty-five, of which only three, or less than one-eighth, have
more than one syllable. Counting still more closely, we find that Mr.
Webster used 347 letters, to Mr. Lincoln's 88." In less than one-third
the words, in just over one-fourth the letters, and without the least
approach to a figure of speech, Mr. Lincoln said what Mr. Webster did.
"This," to quote once more, "may seem a petty method of comparing
orators; but it reveals a great secret of directness, clearness,
simplicity and force of style; it goes far to explain how Mr. Lincoln
convinced an audience."
"This speech," says Mr. Arnold, "was the text of the great debate
between Lincoln and Douglas." It states the question in the United
States as between slavery and freedom, with very great strength and
plainness, and lays down the principles that apply to it with equal
power. It had been carefully prepared beforehand, as a manifesto for
which the times were ripe. For the first time it placed the speaker
publicly upon advanced anti-slavery ground; and it is by no means
improbable that in taking that ground, Mr. Lincoln had some secret
conscious or half conscious feeling not only that he was marking out
the place that his party must occupy in the coming struggle, but that
in doing so he assumed the place of standard-bearer. He explained the
doctrines of the Nebraska Act, and the Dred Scott decision; showed
how the Democratic party had become ranged on the side of slavery;
explained how the result of the Dred Scott decision, together with
the indifferent policy so jauntily vaunted by Douglas, of "not caring
whether slavery were voted up or down," must result in a final victory
of slavery; and showed how Mr. Douglas' doctrines permitted and invited
that final victory. And having thus showed "where we are, and whither
we are tending," he ended with a solemn but cheering exhortation, "what
to do and how to do it." "The result," he said, "is not doubtful. We
shall not fail, if we stand firm we shall not fail. Wise counsels may
accelerate, or mistakes delay it, but sooner or later, THE VICTORY IS
SURE TO COME."
That is the language, not of a party politician, recommending expedient
nostrums, but of a statesman who feels profoundly that his people
are sound at heart, and will assuredly one day do full justice; who
proclaims in advance the eternal victory of the right side, and boldly
calls on all who hear him to advance up to the line of their own
consciences.
Before delivering this speech, Mr. Lincoln locked himself into a room
with his partner, Mr. Herndon, and read him the first paragraph of
the speech. "What do you think of it?" said he. Herndon answered, "I
think it is all true, but I doubt whether it is good policy to say it
now." Mr. Lincoln replied, "That makes no difference; it is the truth,
and the nation is entitled to it." This was both honest and politic;
for if the ground of principle as against expediency had not been
taken, there was none left to oppose the reasonings of Mr. Douglas,
which were extremely adroit, and so far as expediency admitted, indeed
unanswerable.
In the conduct of that remarkable campaign of 1858, Mr. Douglas was
the advocate of expediency, Mr. Lincoln of principle. Mr. Douglas
appealed to the prejudices of the white race against the black, and
argued in favor of present ease and selfish indifference to justice
in our conduct as a nation. Mr. Lincoln incessantly appealed to the
consciences of his audience, to all that part of human nature which
is kindly, which is just, which is noble; to the broad doctrines upon
which our national freedom was originally based. It is true that along
with these main currents of debate numerous minor questions and side
issues came up; but such was the pervading color, the chief drift of
the discussion. Over and over and over again, there sounds out among
the words of Douglas, "This is a white man's government; the negro
ought not to vote." And even more constant is the lofty reply, "I stand
by the Declaration of Independence, and the everlasting rights of
humanity. The negro is a man, and he ought to have all the rights of a
man!"
Mr. Lincoln's speech at Springfield, on June 17th, has been briefly
described. Mr. Douglas, coming home to his own State, to justify his
course, and receive his re-election, answered him in his Chicago speech
of July 9th, and Mr. Lincoln rejoined next day. Douglas spoke again,
at Bloomington on the 16th, and at Springfield on the 17th, and on the
latter day Mr. Lincoln spoke also at Springfield. In this speech he
set forth a curious and characteristic contrast between himself and
his opponent, in a grotesque and sarcastic manner that must have told
sharply upon his western audience, while its comic surface is underlaid
with the usual solid basis of conscious adherence to justice and
principle. Mr. Lincoln said:
"Senator Douglas is of world-wide renown. All the anxious politicians
of his party, or who have been of his party for years past, have
been looking upon him as certainly, at no distant day, to be the
President of the United States. They have seen in his round, jolly,
fruitful face, post-offices, land-offices, marshalships and cabinet
appointments, chargeships and foreign missions, bursting and sprouting
out in wonderful exuberance, ready to be laid hold of by their greedy
hands. And as they have been gazing upon this attractive picture so
long, they cannot, in the little distraction that has taken place
in the party, bring themselves to give up the charming hope; but
with greedier anxiety they rush about him, sustain him, and give him
marches, triumphal entries, and receptions beyond what even in the
days of his highest prosperity they could have brought about in his
favor. On the contrary, nobody has ever expected me to be President.
In my poor, lean, lank face, nobody has ever seen that any cabbages
were sprouting out. These are disadvantages, all taken together,
that the Republicans labor under. We have to fight this battle upon
principle, and upon principle alone. I am, in a certain sense, made
the standard-bearer in behalf of the Republicans. I was made so
merely because there had to be some one so placed--I being in no wise
preferable to any other one of the twenty-five--perhaps a hundred, we
have in the Republican ranks. Then I say I wish it to be distinctly
understood and borne in mind, that we have to fight this battle without
many--perhaps without any--of the external aids which are brought
to bear against us. So I hope those with whom I am surrounded have
principle enough to nerve themselves for the task and leave nothing
undone that can be fairly done, to bring about the right result."
Two years before, Mr. Lincoln had used even stronger terms in
contrasting himself and his antagonist. In 1856 he said: "Twenty-two
years ago, Judge Douglas and I first became acquainted; we were
both young men--he a trifle younger than I. Even then we were both
ambitious, I perhaps quite as much as he. With me, the race of ambition
has been a failure--a flat failure. With him, it has been one of
splendid success. His name fills the nation, and it is not unknown
in foreign lands. I affect no contempt for the high eminence he has
reached. _So reached that the oppressed of my species might have shared
with me in the elevation_, I would rather stand on that eminence than
wear the richest crown that ever pressed a monarch's brow."
Mr. Lincoln's exact position on the emancipation question at this time,
is an interesting illustration of his firm adherence to principle, and
at the same time of his extreme caution in touching established laws,
and his natural tendency to give voice to the average public sentiment
of his day, rather than to go beyond it, or to reprove that sentiment
for not going further. He averred over and over again, that he was "not
in favor of negro citizenship;" but he said "there is no reason in the
world why the negro is not entitled to all the rights enumerated in the
Declaration of Independence--the right of life, liberty and the pursuit
of happiness. In the right to eat the bread without the leave of
anybody else, which his own hand earns, he is my equal, and the equal
of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every other man."
The same primary granite substratum of moral right, of everlasting
justice, underlies all these speeches. It crops out here and there,
in passages, a specimen of which is worth quoting, not merely for the
sake of their aptness then or now; but also as excellent patterns
for the application of moral principles to political practices--a
lesson peculiarly important in a republic, simply because its diligent
employment is the sole possible basis of national strength and
happiness. In the debate at Quincy, October 13th, Mr. Lincoln stated a
whole code of political ethics, along with its application to the case
in hand, in one paragraph, as follows:
"We have in this nation this element of domestic slavery. It is a
matter of absolute certainty that it is a disturbing element. It is the
opinion of all the great men who have expressed an opinion upon it,
that it is a dangerous element. We keep up a controversy in regard to
it. That controversy necessarily springs from difference of opinion,
and if we can learn exactly--can reduce to the lowest elements--what
that difference of opinion is, we perhaps shall be better prepared for
discussing the different systems of policy that we would propose in
regard to that disturbing element. I suggest that the difference of
opinion, reduced to its lowest terms, is no other than the difference
between the men who think slavery a wrong and those who do not think it
a wrong. The Republican party think it wrong--we think it is a moral,
a social and a political wrong. We think it is a wrong not confining
itself merely to the persons or the States where it exists, but that it
is a wrong in its tendency, to say the least, that it extends itself
to the existence of the whole nation. Because we think it wrong, we
propose a course of policy that shall deal with it as a wrong. We
deal with it as with any other wrong, in so far as we can prevent its
growing any larger, and so deal with it that in the run of time there
may be some promise of an end to it. We have a due regard to the actual
presence of it amongst us and the difficulties of getting rid of it in
any satisfactory way, and all the Constitutional obligations thrown
about it. I suppose that in reference both to its actual existence in
the nation, and to our Constitutional obligations, we have no right at
all to disturb it in the States where it exists, and we profess that
we have no more inclination to disturb it than we have the right to do
it. We go further than that; we don't propose to disturb it where, in
one instance, we think the Constitution would permit us. We think the
Constitution would permit us to disturb it in the District of Columbia.
Still we do not propose to do that, unless it should be in terms which
I don't suppose the nation is very likely soon to agree to--the terms
of making the emancipation gradual and compensating the unwilling
owners. Where we suppose we have the Constitutional right, we restrain
ourselves in reference to the actual existence of the institution and
the difficulties thrown about it. We also oppose it as an evil so
far as it seeks to spread itself. We insist on the policy that shall
restrict it to its present limits."
Still more sharply and strongly he stated the question in the last
debate, at Alton, as simply this: Is Slavery wrong?
"That is the real issue. That is the issue that will continue in this
country when these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be
silent. It is the eternal struggle between these two principles--right
and wrong--throughout the world. They are the two principles that have
stood face to face from the beginning of time; and will ever continue
to struggle. The one is the common right of humanity and the other the
divine right of kings. It is the same principle, in whatever shape it
develops itself. It is the same spirit that says, "You work and toil
and earn bread, and I'll eat it." No matter in what shape it comes,
whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people
of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one
race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same
tyrannical principle."
With equal force he often exposed and rebuked the moral levity shown
by his opponent--his affectation of indifference to all principle,
his supercilious dazzling contempt of moral distinctions. In his last
speech at Alton, he very fully reviewed the whole question, and Mr.
Douglas' individual position before the country, with great breadth and
power.
There was as striking a contrast between the externals of the two
champions, as between their political doctrines. Douglas went pompously
up and down the land, with special trains of railroad cars, bands of
music, long processions, banners, cannon firing, and all the flourish
and gaudy show of a triumphing conqueror; and he is said to have paid
away half his fortune in securing this fatal victory. But Mr. Lincoln
went about almost as frugally, as plainly, as quietly, as if he had
been on one of his accustomed legal circuits, and reflected with a
queer astonishment upon the trifling sum that he did actually expend.
He said to a friend after the campaign was over, "I don't believe I
have expended in this canvass one cent less than Five Hundred Dollars
in cash!" He sometimes good humoredly alluded to these demonstrations.
"Auxiliary to these main points," he says, "to be sure, are their
thunderings of cannon, their marching and music, their fizzle-gigs
and fire works; but I will not waste time with them, they are but
the little trappings of the campaign." Mr. Townsend, a picturesque
writer, thus contrasts the bearing of the two men: "Douglas was
uneasily arrogant in Lincoln's presence; the latter, never sensitive
nor flurried, so grew by his imperturbability that when he reached
the White House, Mr. Douglas was less surprised than anybody else.
The great senatorial campaign, in which they figured together, is
remembered by every Springfielder. Douglas, with his powerful voice and
facile energy, went into it under full steam. Lincoln began lucidly
and cautiously. When they came out of it, Douglas was worn down with
rage and hoarseness, and Lincoln was fresher than ever. He prepared
all the speeches of this campaign by silent meditation, sitting or
lying alone, studying the flies on the ceiling. "The best evidence
of his superiority in this debate is the fact that the Republicans
circulated both sets of speeches as a campaign document in 1860, but
Mr. Douglas's friends refused to do so.
And Mr. Arnold, a personal friend of Mr. Lincoln's, attributes to Mr.
Lincoln just that sort of superiority that comes from a consciousness
of being on the right side and of having an antagonist in whose
attitude there is reason for contempt. "He had one advantage," says Mr.
Arnold, "over Douglas, he was always good humored; he had always an
apt and happy story for illustration, and while Douglas was sometimes
irritable, Lincoln never lost his temper." And Mr. Arnold says that
when Lincoln and Douglas came to Chicago together just after the close
of the seven debates, "Lincoln was in perfect health, his face bronzed
by the prairie suns, but looking and moving like a trained athlete. His
voice was clearer, stronger and better than when he began the canvass.
Douglas was physically much broken. He was so hoarse that he could
hardly articulate, and was entirely unintelligible in an ordinary tone."
But the circumstance that shows most clearly of all, how entirely
Mr. Lincoln saw over, and through, and beyond his adversary, both as
statesman and politician, how entirely he managed him, wielded him,
used him, is the fearful grip into which he put the "Little Giant" on
the question of the conflict between "Popular Sovereignty" and the Dred
Scott decision. In return for a series of questions by Mr. Douglas,
Mr. Lincoln, having answered them all categorically, prepared certain
others to put to Mr. Douglas; and of these one was:
"Can the people of a United States Territory, in any lawful way,
against the wish of any citizen of the United States, exclude slavery
from its limits prior to the formation of a State Constitution?"
When Mr. Lincoln consulted a friend upon this set of questions, the
friend remonstrated against this one; saying in substance, "In answer,
Mr. Douglas must either accept the Dred Scott decision as binding,
which would lose him the election to the Senate in consequence of the
popular feeling in Illinois against it, or else that he must assert
that his doctrine of "squatter sovereignty" would enable the territory
to keep slavery out, by "unfriendly legislation," contrary to the
Dred Scott decision. And this," urged the friend, "he will do; it
will satisfy Illinois, and give Douglas the senatorship. You are only
placing the step for him to rise upon."
"That may be," said Mr. Lincoln, with a shrewd look, "_but if he
takes that shoot he never can be President_." This meant, that while
the doctrine of legislating slavery out of a territory might satisfy
Illinois, it would be odious and inadmissible to the whole South, and
that it would therefore render Douglas' election to the Presidency
impossible. And it came to pass exactly as Mr. Lincoln foretold at
this time, and as he told "Billy" when he returned home at the end of
the canvass. One of Mr. Lincoln's characteristic sentences afterwards
summed all the contradiction of Douglas' position, in the statement
that it was "declaring that a thing may be lawfully driven away from a
place where it has a lawful right to go."
These seven debates were the most widely known of Mr. Lincoln's labors
in this campaign, but he made about fifty other speeches in different
parts of the State.
The result of this celebrated canvass was to return Douglas to the
Senate, although the vote of the people was in favor of Lincoln.
The Legislative districts in the State had been so arranged by the
Democratic party as to secure their majority in the Legislature. But
even if the popular majority had been with Douglas, Mr. Lincoln had
won. He set out to lose the State; he set out to carry the nation;
and he did it. It was the foresight of the statesman, contending with
the cunning of the politician. It was part of the victory that he who
really lost thought he had won. Mr. Herndon, Mr. Lincoln's law partner,
told afterwards how Mr. Lincoln came home and said, "Billy, I knew I
should miss the place, when I competed for it. _This defeat will make
me President._"
In the period between this canvass and the Presidential nomination at
Chicago, Mr. Lincoln, while at work in his profession, did good service
in the cause of freedom in several of the States, making a number of
effective speeches in Ohio, Kansas, and particularly in New England
and New York. His contest with Douglas had probably already made Mr.
Lincoln the second choice of large numbers of Republicans for the
nomination of 1860. His great speech at Cooper Institute in February,
1860, confirmed this choice, and enlarged those numbers.
The invitation which resulted in his great Cooper Institute speech
was originally to give a lecture in Plymouth Church, in Brooklyn, and
he was to receive $200 for it. After some delay, at last he agreed
to speak on February 27th; but the three young men who had organized
the course, thought the time late in the season, and began to fear
that they would lose money. It sounds curious enough now, to think of
a fear lest a speech by Mr. Lincoln should not refund $350 expenses,
but so they thought. A political friend of his who had negotiated
the engagement, at last assumed one fourth of the risk, and with a
good deal of trouble, managed to have the speech at Cooper Institute,
instead of Brooklyn. Attempts were vainly made to induce one and then
another Republican club to assume the risk of the engagement. The New
York Times, in announcing the lecture, kindly spoke of the speaker as
"a lawyer who had some local reputation in Illinois."
The Cooper Institute speech was prepared with much care, and was
a production of very great power of logic, history and political
statement. It consisted of an exposition of the true doctrines of the
founders of our nation on the question of slavery, and of the position
of the two parties of the day on the same question. It was alive and
luminous throughout with the resolute and lofty and uncompromising
morality on principle, which had colored all his debates with Douglas,
and made a very deep impression upon the audience present, and upon the
far greater audience that read it afterwards.
Its close was very powerful. After showing that the demands of the
South were summed up in the requirement that the North should call
slavery right instead of wrong, and should then join the south in
acting accordingly, he added:
"If our sense of duty forbids this, then let us stand by our duty,
fearlessly and effectively. Let us be diverted by none of those
sophistical contrivances wherewith we are so industriously plied and
belabored--contrivances such as groping for some middle ground between
the right and the wrong, vain as the search for a man who should
be neither a living man nor a dead man--such as a policy of "don't
care" on a question about which all true men do care--such as Union
appeals, beseeching true Union men to yield to disunionists, reversing
the Divine rule, and calling, not the sinners, but the righteous to
repentance--such as invocations of Washington, imploring men to unsay
what Washington said, and undo what Washington did. Neither let us be
slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor frightened
from it by menaces of destruction to the Government, nor of dungeons to
ourselves. 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 words are singularly plain, they are nakedly homely. But the
thoughts are very noble and very mighty.
At the close of the speech, the same friend who had engineered it, made
a few remarks, in which he prophesied. He said, "One of three gentlemen
will be our standard bearer in the Presidential contest of this year;
the distinguished Senator from New York--Mr. Seward; the late able and
accomplished Governor of Ohio, Mr. Chase, or the unknown knight who
entered the political list, against the Bois Guilbert of democracy,
Stephen A. Douglas, on the prairies of Illinois, in 1858, and unhorsed
him--Abraham Lincoln."
The narrator adds, "Some friends joked me after the meeting, as not
being a good prophet. The lecture was over; all the expenses were paid;
I was handed by the gentlemen interested, the sum of $4.25 as my share
of the profits." It is worth adding that Mr. Lincoln observed to the
same gentleman, after his subsequent tour further eastward, "when I was
East, several gentlemen made about the same remark to me that you did
to-day about the Presidency; they thought my chances were about equal
to the best."
The story of the nomination at Chicago, of the election, of the
perilous journey to Washington, need not be repeated. While the
nominating convention was sitting, Mr. Lincoln's friends telegraphed
to him that in order to be nominated he needed the votes of two of the
delegations, and that to secure these, he must promise that if elected
the leaders of those delegations should be made members of his Cabinet.
He telegraphed at once back again; "I authorize no bargains and will be
bound by none." The adoption of those ten words as a rule would go very
far to purify the whole field of political party action.
Little did the convention that nominated Abraham Lincoln for President,
know what they were doing. Little did the honest, fatherly, patriotic
man, who stood in his simplicity on the platform at Springfield, asking
the prayers of his townsmen and receiving their pledges to remember
him, foresee how awfully he was to need those prayers, the prayers
of all this nation and the prayers of all the working, suffering
common people throughout the world. God's hand was upon him with a
visible protection, saving first from the danger of assassination at
Baltimore, and bringing him safely to our national capital.
Perhaps the imperturbable cool courage of Mr. Lincoln was the trait in
him least appreciated in proportion to his share of it. He promptly and
unhesitatingly risked his life to keep his Philadelphia appointment on
the way to Washington, filling his programme, because it was his duty,
without any variance for assassins. It should be here recorded, by the
way, that the story that he fled from Harrisburg, disguised in a Scotch
cap and cloak, which made so much noise in the country at the time, was
a forgery, devised by a disreputable reporter. Mr. Lincoln never used
any disguises, and it would have required more than one "Scotch cap" to
bring his six feet four down to an average height.
He was so kind-hearted, so peaceable, so averse, either to cause or to
witness controversy or wrath, that only the extremest need would force
him to the point of wrath and of fighting. But when the need was real,
the wrath and the fight came out. Whether moral or physical courage,
upon a real demand for it, it never failed. On his flat boat trip to
New Orleans in his youth, he and his mate, armed only with sticks of
wood, beat off seven negro marauders who attacked and would have robbed
their boat. When clerk in a country store he seized, flung down and
subdued a bully who was insolent to some women, and what is more, the
beaten bully became his friend. He once, alone, by suddenly dropping
from a scuttle down upon the platform, kept off a gang of rowdies who
were about to hustle his friend Col. Baker off the stand. He and
Baker once, with no others, escorted to the hotel, a speaker who was
threatened with violence by a Democratic crowd whom he had offended.
When some Irishmen at Springfield once undertook to take possession of
the poll and restrict the voting to their friends, Lincoln, hearing
of it, stepped into the first store, seized an axe helve, and marched
alone through the turbulent crowd up to the poll, opening the road
as he went; and alone he kept the ballot-box free and safe until the
foolish crowd gave up their plan. His anger sometimes--though very
seldom--flamed up at ill usage of himself; but never so hotly as
at ill usage to others. When a poor negro citizen of Illinois was
imprisoned at New Orleans, simply for being a free negro from outside
of Louisiana, and was about to be sold into slavery, to pay jail fees,
Mr. Lincoln found that the Governor of Illinois could not help the poor
fellow. When the fact became plain, he jumped up and swore, "By the
Almighty," he said, "I'll have that negro back, or I'll have a twenty
years' agitation in Illinois, until the Governor can do something in
the premises!" Somebody sent money and set the man free; or else the
twenty years' agitation would have begun, and finished too. An officer,
a worthless fellow, after being dismissed and repeatedly trying to get
back into the army, at last insolently told President Lincoln, "I see
you are fully determined not to do me justice." Now this was just what
he _was_ determined to do him; and in righteous anger he arose, laid
down his papers, collared the fellow, walked him to the door and flung
him out, saying, "Sir, I give you fair warning, never to show yourself
in this room again. I can bear censure, but not insult!"
In Mr. Lincoln's administration, the world has seen and wondered at the
greatest sign and marvel of our day, to wit, a plain working man of the
people, with no more culture, instruction or education than any such
working man may obtain for himself, called on to conduct the passage of
a great nation through a crisis involving the destinies of the whole
world. The eyes of princes, nobles, aristocrats, of dukes, earls,
scholars, statesmen, warriors, all turned on the plain backwoodsman,
with his simple sense, his imperturbable simplicity, his determined
self-reliance, his impracticable and incorruptible honesty, as he sat
amid the war of conflicting elements, with unpretending steadiness,
striving to guide the national ship through a channel at whose perils
the world's oldest statesmen stood aghast. The brilliant courts of
Europe levelled their opera glasses at the phenomenon. Fair ladies saw
that he had horny hands and disdained white gloves; dapper diplomatists
were shocked at his system of etiquette; but old statesmen, who knew
the terrors of that passage, were wiser than court ladies and dandy
diplomatists, and watched him with a fearful curiosity, simply asking,
"Will that awkward old backwoodsman really get that ship through? If
he does, it will be time for us to look about us." Sooth to say, our
own politicians were somewhat shocked with his State papers at first.
"Why not let _us_ make them a little more conventional, and file them
to a classical pattern?" "No," was his reply, "I shall write them
myself. _The people will understand them._" "But this or that form of
expression is not elegant, nor classical." "_The people will understand
it_," was his invariable reply. And whatever may be said of his State
papers, as compared with the diplomatic standards, it has been a fact
that they have always been wonderfully well understood by the people,
and that since the time of Washington, the State papers of no President
have more controlled the popular mind. And one reason for this is, that
they have been informal and undiplomatic. They have more resembled a
father's talks to his children than a State paper. And they have had
that relish and smack of the soil, that appeal to the simple human
heart and head, which is a greater power in writing than the most
artful clerices of rhetoric. Lincoln might well say with the apostle,
"But though I be rude in speech yet not in knowledge, but we have been
thoroughly _made manifest among you_ in all things." His rejection of
what is called fine writing, was as deliberate as St. Paul's, and for
the same reason--because he felt that he was speaking on a subject
which must be made clear to the lowest intellect, though it should fail
to captivate the highest. But we say of Lincoln's writings, that for
all true, manly purposes of writing, there are passages in his State
papers that could not be better put--they are absolutely perfect.
They are brief, condensed, intense, and with a power of insight and
expression which make them worthy to be inscribed in letters of gold.
Such are some passages of the celebrated letter to the Springfield
convention, especially that masterly one where he compares the conduct
of the patriotic and loyal blacks with that of the treacherous and
disloyal whites. No one can read this letter and especially the passage
mentioned, without feeling the influence of a mind both strong and
generous. "Peace does not appear so distant as it did. I hope it will
come soon and come to stay; and so come as to be worth the keeping in
all future time. It will then have been proved that among freemen there
can be no successful appeal from the ballot to the bullet, and that
they who take such appeal are sure to lose their case and pay the cost.
And then there will be some black men who can remember that with silent
tongue, and clenched teeth, and steady eye, and well-poised bayonet,
they have helped mankind on to this great consummation, while I fear
there will be some white ones unable to forget that with malignant
heart and deceitful speech they have striven to hinder it."
The lesson of Mr. Lincoln's career as President, is a manifold
one. He was in a strangely full and close manner the exponent, the
representative, the federal head, the voice, the plenary agent, of
the people of the United States. As such, his life teaches what the
war teaches, to wit; the strength and the magnificent morality of
an intelligent people, trained in self-control, in thought, in the
doctrines of justice and freedom, and in the fear of God.
As one man's life, the life of Mr. Lincoln after his election is simply
the picture over again, on a gigantic scale, in stronger colors, in
bolder relief, of the same courage, devotion, strength, industry,
energy, sense, decision, kindness, caution, instinctive feeling of
what was right and what was practicable, and deliberate execution of
it, that had marked his career before, as the political leader in a
great state controversy, and as a laborious lawyer at the bar. As he
mounted upon a higher plane of action, his views became enlarged and
elevated. Especially is it noticeable how as President, he was very
much more open and specific in avowing an immediate dependence upon
help higher than man's, in doing the work before him. Mr. Lincoln was
naturally inclined to religious feelings. His habit of considering all
the affairs of life from the religious point of view, at the tribunal
of the laws of God, is clearly traceable in his private history and
even in his political campaigns. He was not obtrusive nor unreasonable
however in avowals of this feeling. It would have been out of place
to request the prayers of his fellow citizens during the debates
with Douglas, almost as much as to ask the prayers of the jury while
arguing a case. But while placed at the head of his nation, during the
vastest peril of its existence--while occupying the most prominent,
the most powerful, the most responsible, the most difficult, and the
most dangerous position upon the whole round world--while at the very
front of the very vanguard of humanity in the great battle which was
deciding whether good or evil should overcome--in such a position, no
avowals of the need of Divine aid, no repetition of the consciousness
of that need, no requests for the sympathy and the help of all good
men's prayers, could be too frequent or too free. This profound sense
of human weakness and of God's strength, and a distinct sentiment of
mournful foreboding, give the whole coloring to the brief address in
which he bade good bye to his neighbors at Springfield, at setting out
for Washington in 1861.
This habit of religious feeling, and the avowal of it, remained a very
marked one during all Mr. Lincoln's Presidency. Subordinate to this,
the acts of his official life, his written and spoken utterances, and
his personal conduct, were mainly marked by solicitous and extreme
sense of duty, unfailing resolution, unerring tact and wisdom, and
a kindness and patience entirely unparalleled in the history of
governments. These traits were often hidden by his quaint modes of
expression, by the wonderful flow of humorous anecdotes which he
so constantly used in arguing, in answering, in evading, or for
entertainment; and by his confirmed habit of arguing all questions
against himself, against his own views, before coming to a conclusion.
These externals often concealed him, often occasioned him to be
misunderstood, distrusted, and opposed. It was only as time passed on,
and his public acts gradually formed themselves into his history, that
it was possible for those broad and massive characteristics to be seen
in a just perspective. Now however, they are visible throughout all
his life, whether traced in anecdote, in speech, in state papers, in
cabinet debates, in intercourse with the representatives of bodies of
the people, or in executive orders and acts.
Of all these traits, Mr. Lincoln's kindness was unquestionably the
rarest, the most wonderful. It may be doubted whether any human being
ever lived whose whole nature was so perfectly sweet with the readiness
to do kind actions; so perfectly free from even the capacity of
revenge. He could not even leave a pig in distress. He once on circuit,
drove past a pig, stuck fast in a mud hole. Having on a suit of new
clothes, he felt unable to afford them for the pig, but after going two
miles, he could not stand it, turned and drove back, made a platform
of rails, helped out the pig, spoiled his new clothes, and then went
contentedly about his business. He used to help his poor clients
with money--a ridiculous thing in a lawyer. He was quite as helpless
about traitors and deserters and criminals, as about pigs; even when
pardoning or non-retaliation was actually doing harm. The beseechings
and tears of women, the sight of a little child, even a skilful picture
of the sorrow of a scoundrel's friends, was almost certain to gain
whatever favor they sought. It really sometimes seemed as if he was
tenderer of individual lives than of multitudes of them, so nearly
impossible was it for him to pronounce sentence of death or to forbear
the gift of life. His doorkeeper had standing orders never to delay
from one day to another any message asking for the saving of life. He
undoubtedly did harm by giving life to deserters, and thus weakening
army discipline. He heard a child cry in his anteroom one day, and
calling his usher, had the woman that carried the child shown in. She
had been waiting three days, by some mischance. Her husband was to be
shot. She stated her case; the pardon was at once granted; she came
out of the office praying and weeping; and the old usher, touching her
shawl, told her who had really saved her husband's life. "Madam," said
he, "the baby did it."
One of his generals once urgently remonstrated with him for rendering
desertion safe, though it was seriously weakening the army. "Mr.
General," said Mr. Lincoln, "there are already too many weeping widows
in the United States. For God's sake don't ask me to add to the number,
for I won't do it." Even to put a stop to the unutterable horrors which
were slowly murdering our brave men in the rebel prisons, he could not
retaliate. He said, "I can never, never starve men like that. Whatever
others may say or do, I never can, and I never will, be accessory to
such treatment of human beings." Once, after the massacre at Fort
Pillow, he pledged himself in a public speech that there should be a
retaliation. But that pledge he could not keep, and he did not.
His perfectly sweet kindness of feeling was as inexhaustible towards
the rebels as such, as towards dumb beasts, or the poor and unfortunate
of his own loyal people, and it was shown as clearly in his state
papers and speeches as in any private act or word. That sentiment, and
one other--the unconditional determination to adhere to the doctrines
of the Declaration of Independence and to do his sworn official
duty--colored the series of speeches which he made on his way to
Washington. At Philadelphia, where he was especially impressed with
associations about the old Independence Hall, he said, speaking of that
edifice, and standing within the old Hall itself:
"All the political sentiments I entertain have been drawn, so far as I
have been able to draw them, from the sentiments which originated in
and were given to the world from this hall. I have never had a feeling,
politically, that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the
Declaration of Independence."
Then he referred to the doctrine of freedom in that instrument; and he
said:
"But if this country can not be saved without giving up that principle,
I was about to say I would rather be assassinated in this spot than
surrender it. * * * I have said nothing but what I am willing to live
by, and if it be the pleasure of Almighty God, to die by."
These references to assassination and death, were no casual flourishes
of oratory. They were deliberate defiances of the fate which had
already been denounced against the speaker, in public and in private,
which continued to be threatened during all the rest of his life,
and which finally actually befel him, but the fear of which never
made him turn pale nor waver in his duty. He began as soon as he was
nominated, to receive anonymous letters from the South threatening him
with death. They became so frequent that he kept a separate file of
them. They continued to come, up to the year of his death. The first
one or two, he said, made him "a little uncomfortable;" but afterwards
he only filed them. The train on which he left home for the East, was
to have been thrown off the track. A hand grenade was hidden in one
of the cars. An association was known to exist at Baltimore for the
express purpose of killing him. When therefore he spoke as he did at
Philadelphia, it was doubtless with a feeling that some one concerned
in these plans was probably hearing him, and understanding him. It was,
no doubt, at the same time a sort of vow, taken upon himself under the
feelings aroused by the birth-place of the Declaration which he had
so often and so well defended. Whether a challenge, a vow, or a mere
statement of principle, he kept his word. He lived by it, and he died
by it.
The same mixture of firmness and kindness appears in the First
Inaugural, and in this document there is also another most
characteristic element;--circumspect adherence to the Constitution as
he understood it, and most remarkable care and skill in the language
used to interpret law, or to announce his own conclusions or purposes.
Lover of freedom as he was, and believer in the rights of man, he
had already been invariably careful not to demand from the masses of
men whom he sought to influence, more than they could be expected
to give. Now, he went even further. He expressly and clearly avowed
his intention to execute all that he had sworn, even the laws most
distasteful to any freeman. In speaking of the crisis of the moment,
and after setting forth his doctrine of national sovereignty and an
unbroken Union, he promised to maintain it as far as he could, and
added:
"Doing this I deem to be only a simple duty on my part; and I shall
perform it so far as practicable, unless my rightful masters, the
American people, shall withhold the requisite means, or in some
authoritative manner direct the contrary."
Then, as if to avert ill feeling if possible:
"I trust this will not be regarded as a menace, but only as the
declared purpose of the Union, that it will constitutionally defend and
maintain itself."
Then, with careful adherence to the mildest terms possible--could
anything be a more peaceful assertion of national right than the simple
"hold, occupy and possess"?--he says what the nation will do:
"In doing this there need be no bloodshed or violence, and there shall
be none, unless it be forced upon the national authority. The power
confided to me will be used to hold, occupy and possess the property
and places belonging to the government, and to collect the duties and
imposts; but beyond what may be necessary for these objects, there will
be no invasion, no using of force against or among the people anywhere."
The remainder of the Inaugural is just such a kindly, homely, earnest,
sincere, straight-forward appeal to the South, as he might have made
in a country court-house in Illinois, "taking off his coat, leaning
upon the rail of the jury box, and singling out a leading juryman and
addressing him in a conversational tone." Having stated the case,
and once more barely repeated that it was "his duty to administer
the present government as it came to his hands, and to transmit it
unimpaired by him to his successor," he then quietly but powerfully
appeals to his own two life-long trusts, God Almighty, and the free
people of America. He asks:
"Why should there not be a patient confidence in the ultimate justice
of the people? Is there any better or equal hope in the world? In our
present differences, is either party without faith of being in the
right? If the Almighty Ruler of nations, with his eternal truth and
justice, be on your side of the North, or on yours of the South, that
truth and that justice will surely prevail, by the judgment of the
great tribunal of the American people."
And the final paragraphs are sad and heavy with his unutterable
longings and yearnings for peace; so that the words, plain and simple
as they are, are full of deep and melancholy music:
"You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors. You
have no oath registered in heaven to destroy the government, while I
shall have the most solemn one, to 'preserve, protect and defend' it.
I am loth to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be
enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our
bonds of affection. The mystic cord of memory, stretching from every
battle-field and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone
all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when
again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our
nature."
As the war went on, the same unwavering decision, the same caution and
kindness marked the whole action of the Executive. Especially were
these traits exhibited in his dealings with the main question at issue,
that of slavery.
On this point he bore a pressure such as it is safe to say no mortal
son of earth ever bore before or since. The interests of the great
laboring, suffering classes that go to make up human nature, were all
at this period of history condensed into one narrow channel, like that
below Niagara where the waters of all the great lakes are heaped up in
ridges, and seem, in Scripture language, to "utter their voices and
lift up their hands on high." Like the course of those heavy waters
the great cause weltered into a place where its course resembled that
sullen whirlpool below the falls where the awful waters go round
and round in blindly, dizzy masses, and seem with dumb tossings and
dark agonies to seek in vain for a clear, open channel. In this dread
vortex, from time to time are seen whirling helplessly the bodies of
drowned men, fragments of wrecked boats splintered and shattered, and
trees torn to ghastly skeletons, which from time to time dart up from
the whirling abyss with a sort of mad, impatient despair.
So we can all remember when the war had struggled on a year or
two--when a hundred thousand men, the life and light and joy of as many
families, who entered it warm with hope and high in aspiration, were
all lying cold and low, and yet without the least apparent progress
towards a result--when the resistance only seemed to have become wider,
deeper, more concentrated, better organized, by all that awful waste
of the best treasures of the nation; then was the starless night--the
horror of the valley of the shadow of death. Above, darkness filled
with whisperings, and jibes, and sneers of traitor fiends; on one side
a pit, on the other a quagmire, and in the gloom all faces gathered
blackness, and even friends and partisans looked strangely on each
other. Confidence began to be shaken. Each separate party blamed the
other as they wandered in the darkness. It was one of the strange
coincidences which show the eternal freshness of Scripture language in
relation to human events, that the church lesson from the Old Testament
which was read in the churches the Sunday after the attack on Sumter,
was the prediction of exactly such a conflict:
"Prepare war, wake up the mighty men, let all the men of war draw near;
let them come up:
Beat your plough-shares into swords, and your pruning-hooks into
spears: let the weak say, I _am_ strong.
Assemble yourselves, and come, all ye heathen, and gather yourselves
together round about: thither cause thy mighty ones to come down, O
Lord.
Put ye in the sickle, for the harvest is ripe: the press is full, the
fats overflow; for their wickedness is great.
Multitudes, multitudes in the valley of decision: for the day of the
Lord is near in the valley of decision.
_The sun and the moon shall be darkened, and the stars shall withdraw
their shining._ The Lord also shall roar out of Zion, and utter his
voice from Jerusalem; and the heavens and the earth shall shake: but
the Lord _will be_ the hope of his people, and the strength of the
children of Israel. So shall ye know that I am the Lord your God."
The repeated defeats, disasters, and distresses that had come upon the
Union cause stirred the conscience of all the religious portion of the
community. They remembered the parallels in the Old Testament where
the armies of Israel were turned back before the heathen, because they
cherished within themselves some accursed thing--they began to ask
whether the Achan who had stolen the wedge of gold and Babylonish vest
in our midst was not in truth the cause why God would not go forth
with our armies! and the pressure upon Lincoln to end the strife by
declaring emancipation, became every day more stringent; at the same
time the pressure of every opposing party became equally intense, and
Lincoln by his peculiar nature and habits, must listen to all, and
take time to ponder and weigh all. In consequence there was a time when
he pleased nobody. Each party was incensed at the degree of attention
he gave to the other. He might say, in the language of the old prophet,
at this time, "Woe is me, my mother, that thou hast borne me a man of
strife, and a man of contention to the whole earth! I have neither
lent on usury, nor men have lent to me on usury; _yet_ every one of
them doth curse me." He was, like the great Master whom he humbly
followed, despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted
with grief; we hid, as it were, our faces from him, he was despised,
and we esteemed him not. Like the poor, dumb, suffering, down-trodden
classes for whom he stood, he had no prestige of personal advantages,
or of that culture which comes from generations of wealth and ease.
His method of thought and expression had not the stamp of any old
aristocratic tradition. He was a sign upon the earth--the sign and the
leader of a new order of events in which the power and the prestige
should be in the hands of the plain, simple common people, and not in
those of privileged orders. But the time had not yet come, and now was
their hour of humiliation, and while in England the poor operatives
of Manchester bravely and manfully bore starvation caused by want of
cotton, rather than ask their government to break the blockade and
get it for them; while the poor silk weavers of Lyons, and the poorer
classes all over Europe trembled, and hoped, and sympathised with the
struggling cause and its unfashionable leader--all the great, gay,
successful, fashionable world went the other way. Punch had his jolly
caricatures of Lincoln's long, thin face, and anxious perplexities,
and the caricatures of Paris were none the less merry. Even in America
there was a time when some of his most powerful friends doubted his
fitness for his position, and criticisms filled the columns of every
newspaper. In Washington, every fop and every fool felt at liberty to
make a jest at the expense of his want of dignity, and his personal
awkwardness. He was freely called an ape, a satyr, a stupid blockhead,
for even the ass can kick safely and joyfully at a lion in a net. Even
his cabinet and best friends said nothing for him, and kept an ominous
and gloomy silence.
Lincoln knew all this, and turned it over in the calm recesses of his
mind, with a quiet endurance, gilded at times by a gleam of the grim,
solemn humor peculiar to himself. "I cannot _make_ generals," he said
once, "I would if I could." At another, to an important man who had
been pressing some of his own particular wisdom upon him, "Perhaps
you'd like to try to run the machine yourself." Somebody gave him a
series of powerful criticisms which a distinguished writer had just
poured forth on him. "I read them all through," he said quaintly, "and
then I said to myself, Well, Abraham Lincoln, are you a man, or are you
a dog?"
No man in the great agony suffered more or deeper, but it was with
a dry, weary, patient pain, that many mistook for insensibility.
"Whichever way it ends," he said to the writer, on one occasion, "I
have the impression that I shan't last long after it's over."
After the dreadful repulse at Fredericksburg, he is reported to have
said, "If there is a man out of hell that suffers more than I do,
I pity him." In those dark days, his heavy eyes and worn and weary
air told how our reverses wore upon him, and yet there was a never
failing fund of patience at bottom that sometimes rose to the surface
in bubbles of quaint sayings or a story that forced a laugh even from
himself. The humor of Lincoln was the oil that lubricated the otherwise
dry and wiry machinery of his mind. The power of looking at men and
things with reference to their humorous side, enabled him to bear
without irritation many things in the political joltings and jarrings
of his lot, which would have driven a more nervous man frantic. It
is certainly a great advantage to be so made that one can laugh at
times when crying will do no good, and Lincoln not only had his own
laugh in the darkest days, but the wherewithal to bring a laugh from
a weary neighbor. His jests and stories helped off many a sorry hour,
and freshened the heart of his hearer for another pull in the galling
harness.
He saw through other men who thought all the while they were
instructing or enlightening him, with a sort of dry, amused patience.
He allowed the most tedious talker to prose to him, the most shallow
and inflated to advise him, reserving only to himself the right to a
quiet chuckle far down in the depths of his private consciousness. Thus
all sorts of men and all sorts of deputations saw him, had their talks,
bestowed on him all their tediousness, and gave him the benefit of
their opinions; not a creature was denied access, not a soul so lowly
but might have their chance to bore the soul of this more lowly servant
of the people. His own little, private, quiet, harmless laugh was his
small comfort under all these inflictions. Sometimes the absolute
confidence with which all contending sides urged their opinions and
measures upon him, seemed to strike him with a solemn sense of the
ludicrous. Thus when Dr. Cheever, at the head of a committee of
clergymen, had been making a vigorous, authoritative appeal to him
in Old Testament language, to end all difficulties by emancipation,
Lincoln seemed to meditate gravely, and at last answered slowly, "Well,
gentlemen, it is not very often that one is favored with a _delegation
direct from the Almighty_!"
Washington, at this time, was one great hospital of wounded soldiers;
the churches, the public buildings all filled with the maimed, the sick
and suffering, and Lincoln's only diversion from the perplexity of
state was the oversight of these miseries. "Where do you dine?" said
one to him in our hearing. "Well, I don't dine, I just browse round
a little, now and then." There was something irresistibly quaint and
pathetic in the odd, rustic tone in which this was spoken.
Even the Emancipation Proclamation--that one flag stone in the wide
morass of despondency on which the wearied man at last set firm
foothold, did not at first seem to be a first step into the land of
promise.
It was uttered too soon to please some parties, too late to please
others. In England it was received in the face of much military ill
success, with the scoffing epigram that the President had proclaimed
liberty in the states where he had no power, and retained slavery in
those where he had. It is true there was to this the sensible and just
reply that he only gained the right to emancipate by this war power,
and that of course this did not exist in states that were not at war;
but when was ever a smart saying stopped in its course by the slow
considerations and explanations of truth?
The battle of Gettysburg was the first argument that began to convince
mankind that Mr. Lincoln was right. It has been well said, that in this
world nothing succeeds but _success_. Bonaparte professed his belief
that Providence always went with the strongest battalions, and therein
he expressed about the average opinion of this world. Vicksburg and
Gettysburg changed the whole face of the nation--they were the first
stations outside of the valley of the shadow of death.
The nation took new courage--even the weary clamorers for peace at any
price, began to shout on the right side, and to hope that peace might
come through northern victory, and so it _did_ come, they did not care
how.
Whereas a few months before, Lincoln was universally depreciated,
doubted, scoffed and scorned, now he found himself re-elected to the
Presidential chair, by an overwhelming majority. It was in fact almost
an election by acclamation. When the votes were being counted in New
York late at night, and this victory became apparent, the vast surging
assembly at the motion of one individual, uncovered their heads and
sang a solemn Doxology--an affecting incident which goes far to show
what sort of feelings lay at the bottom of this vast movement, and how
profoundly the people felt that this re-election of Lincoln was a vital
step in their onward progress.
At this hour the nation put the broad seal of its approbation on all
his past course. At this moment she pledged herself to follow him and
him alone to the end.
Perhaps never was man re-elected who used fewer of popular arts--made
fewer direct efforts. He was indeed desirous to retain the place, for
though he estimated himself quite humbly, still he was of opinion that
on the whole his was as safe a hand as any, and he had watched the
navigation so far as to come to love the hard helm, at which he had
stood so painfully. In his usual quaint way he expressed his idea by a
backwoods image. Alluding to the frequent fordings of turbulent streams
that are the lot of the western traveller, he said, "It is'nt best to
swap horses in the middle of a creek."
There was something almost preternatural in the calmness with which
Lincoln accepted the news of his re-election. The first impulse seemed
to be to disclaim all triumph over the opposing party, and to soberly
gird up his loins to go on with his work to the end.
His last inaugural has been called by one of the London newspapers "the
noblest political document known to history."
It was characterized by a solemn religious tone, so peculiarly free
from earthly passion, that it seems to us now, who look back on it in
the light of what has followed, as if his soul had already parted from
earthly things, and felt the powers of the world to come. It was not
the formal state-paper of the chief of a party in an hour of victory,
so much as the solemn soliloquy of a great soul reviewing its course
under a vast responsibility, and appealing from all earthly judgments
to the tribunal of Infinite Justice. It was a solemn clearing of his
soul for the great sacrament of death:
"_Fellow Countrymen_--At this second appearing to take the oath of the
Presidential office, there is less occasion for an extended address
than there was at the first. Then a statement somewhat in detail of
a course to be pursued seemed very fitting and proper. Now, at the
expiration of four years, during which public declarations have been
constantly called forth on every point and phase of the great contest
which still absorbs the attention and engrosses the energies of the
nation, little that is new could be presented.
The progress of our arms, upon which all else chiefly depends is as
well known to the public as to myself, and it is, I trust, reasonably
satisfactory and encouraging to all. With high hope for the future, no
prediction in regard to it is ventured.
On the occasion corresponding to this four years ago, all thoughts
were anxiously directed to an impending civil war. All dreaded
it; all sought to avoid it. While the inaugural address was being
delivered from this place, devoted altogether to saving the Union
without war, insurgent agents were in the city seeking to destroy it
without war--seeking to dissolve the Union and divide the effects by
negotiation. Both parties deprecated war, but one of them would make
war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war
rather than let it perish, and the war came.
One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed
generally over the Union, but localized in the Southern part of it.
These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew
that this interest was somehow the cause of the war. To strengthen,
perpetuate and extend this interest, was the object for which the
insurgents would rend the Union even by war, while the Government
claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial
enlargement of it.
Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which
it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the
conflict might cease with, or even before the conflict itself should
cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental
and astounding.
Both read the same Bible and prayed to the same God, and each invoke
his aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare
to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat
of other men's faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged.
The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been
answered fully. The Almighty has his own purposes. 'Woe unto the world
because of offences, for it must needs be that offences come: but woe
to that man by whom the offence cometh.' If we shall suppose that
American slavery is one of these offences, which in the providence of
God must needs come, but which having continued through his appointed
time, He now wills to remove, and that he gives to both North and South
this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offence came,
shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes
which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we
hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may soon
pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth
piled by the bondman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil
shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall
be paid with another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand
years ago; so, still it must be said, 'The judgments of the Lord are
true and righteous altogether.'
With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the
right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish
the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him
who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and orphans, to do
all which may achieve and cherish a just and a lasting peace among
ourselves and with all nations."
The words of Lincoln seemed to grow more clear and more remarkable as
they approached the end. Perhaps in no language, ancient or modern, are
any number of words found more touching and eloquent than his speech
of November 19, 1863, at the Gettysburg celebration. He wrote it in a
few moments, while on the way to the celebration, on being told that he
would be expected to make some remarks, and after Mr. Everett's oration
he rose and read it. It was as follows:
"Fourscore and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this
continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the
proposition that all men are created equal. Now, we are engaged in
a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so
conceived and dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great
battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that
field as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives that
the nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we
should do this.
But in a larger sense, _we_ cannot dedicate, _we_ cannot consecrate,
_we_ cannot hallow, this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who
struggled here, _have_ consecrated it far above our poor power to add
or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we _say_
here, but it can never forget what they _did_ here. It is for us, the
living, rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they
who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for
us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us, that
from these honored dead, we take increased devotion to that cause for
which they gave the last full measure of devotion; that we here highly
resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation,
under God, shall have a new birth of freedom; and that government _of_
the people, _by_ the people, and _for_ the people, shall not perish
from the earth."
The audience had admired Mr. Everett's long address. At Mr. Lincoln's
few words, they cheered and sobbed and wept. When Mr. Lincoln had
ended, he turned and congratulated Mr. Everett on having succeeded so
well. Mr. Everett replied, with a truthful and real compliment, "Ah,
Mr. Lincoln, how gladly I would exchange all my hundred pages, to have
been the author of your twenty lines!"
Probably no ruler ever made a more profoundly and peculiarly
_Christian_ impression on the mind of the world than Lincoln. In
his religious faith two leading ideas were prominent from first to
last--man's helplessness, both as to strength and wisdom, and God's
helpfulness in both. When he left Springfield to assume the Presidency,
he said to his townsmen:
"A duty devolves on me which is perhaps greater than that which has
devolved on any other man since the days of Washington. He never would
have succeeded but for the aid of divine Providence, on which he at
all times relied, and I feel that I cannot succeed without the same
Divine aid which sustained him. On the same Almighty Being I place my
reliance for support, and I hope that you, my friends, will pray that I
may receive that Divine assistance, without which I cannot succeed, but
with which success is certain."
Abraham Lincoln's whole course showed that he possessed that faith
without which, St. Paul says, it is impossible to please God, for
"he that cometh to God _must believe that He_ IS, and that He is a
_rewarder of those who diligently seek him_."
And now our Christian pilgrim having passed through the valley of the
shadow of death, and slain and vanquished giants and dragons, at last
had a little taste, a few days sojourn, in the land of Beulah.
Cheer after cheer rose up and shook the land as by one great stroke
after another the awful convulsions of the conflict terminated in full,
perfect, final victory.
Never did mortal man on this earth have a triumph more dramatic and
astounding than Lincoln's victorious entry into Richmond. Years before,
when a humble lawyer in Illinois, a man without prestige of person or
manners or education, he had espoused what the world called the losing
side, and been content to take the up-hill, laborious road. He had seen
his rival, adorned with every external advantage of person, manners,
eloquence and oratory, sweeping all prizes away from him, and far
distancing him in the race of political ambition.
In those days, while confessing that he had felt the promptings of
ambition, and the disappointment of ill success, there was one manly
and noble sentiment that ought to be printed in letters of gold, as the
motto of every rising young man. Speaking of the distinction at which
Douglas was aiming, he said:
"SO REACHED AS THAT THE OPPRESSED OF MY SPECIES MIGHT HAVE EQUAL REASON
TO REJOICE WITH ME, I SHOULD VALUE IT MORE THAN THE PROUDEST CROWN THAT
COULD DECK THE BROW OF A MONARCH."
At this moment of his life he could look back and see far behind
him the grave of the once brilliant Douglas, who died worn out and
worn down with disappointed ambition, while he, twice elected to
the Presidency, was now standing the observed of all the world, in
a triumph that has no like in history. And it was a triumph made
memorable and peculiar by the ecstacies and hallelujahs of those very
oppressed with whose care years before he had weighted and burdened
his progress. It was one of those earthly scenes which grandly
foreshadow that great final triumph predicted in prophecy, when the
Lord God shall wipe away all tears from all faces, and the rebuke
of his people shall he utterly take away. A cotemporary witness has
described Lincoln, calm and simple, leading his little boy by the hand,
while the liberated blacks hailed him with hymns and prayers, mingling
his name at each moment with ascriptions of praise and glory to Jesus
the Great Liberator, whose day at last had come. Who can say of what
ages of mournful praying and beseeching, what uplifting of poor, dumb
hands that hour was the outcome? Years before, a clergyman of Virginia
visiting the black insurrectionist, Nat Turner, in his cell before
execution, gives the following wonderful picture of him: "In rags, in
chains, covered with blood and bruises, he yet is inspired by such a
force of enthusiasm, as he lifts his chained hands to heaven, as really
filled my soul with awe. It is impossible to make him feel that he
is guilty. He evidently believes that he was called of God to do the
work he did. When I pointed out to him that it could not be, because
he was taken, condemned, and about to be executed, he answered with
enthusiasm, 'Was not Jesus Christ crucified? My cause _will_ succeed
yet!'"
Years passed, and the prophetic visions of Nat Turner were fulfilled
on the soil of Virginia. It did indeed rain blood; the very leaves of
the trees dripped blood; but the work was _done_, the yoke was broken,
and the oppressed went free. An old negress who stood and saw the
confederate prisoners being carried for safe keeping into the former
slave pens, said grimly, "Well, de Lord am slow, but He am _sure_!"
As the final scenes of his life drew on, it seemed as if a heavenly
influence overshadowed the great martyr, and wrought in him exactly
the spirit that a man would wish to be found in when he is called to
the eternal world. His last expressions and recorded political actions
looked towards peace and forgiveness. On the day before his death
he joyfully ordered the discontinuance of the draft. His very last
official act was to give orders that two of the chief leaders of the
rebellion, then expected in disguise at a sea port, on their flight to
Europe, should not be arrested, but permitted to embark; so that he was
thinking only of saving the lives of rebels, when they were thinking of
taking his. If he had tried of set purpose to clear his soul for God's
presence, and to put the rebels and their assassin champion in the
wrong before that final tribunal, he could not have done better.
Mr. Lincoln seems to have had during his course a marked presentiment
of the fate which had from the first been threatening him, and which
the increasing pile of letters marked "Assassination," gave him
constant reason to remember. In more than one instance he had in
his public speeches professed a solemn willingness to die for his
principles. The great tax which his labors and responsibilities made
on his vitality, was perhaps one reason for his frequently saying that
he felt that he should not live to go through with it. He observed
to Mr. Lovejoy, during that gentleman's last illness, in February,
1864, "This war is eating my life out; I have a strong impression
that I shall not live to see the end." In July following, he said to
a correspondent of the Boston Journal, "I feel a presentiment that I
shall not outlast the rebellion. When it is over, my work will be done."
Concerning the last painful history, there have been a thousand
conflicting stories. From the mass of evidence the following
brief account has been prepared, which sufficiently outlines the
circumstances:
Who were the persons concerned in the assassination of President
Lincoln, has never been judicially proved. Perhaps it never will be.
The indictment against the conspirators named the following parties.
David E. Herold, George A. Atzerodt, Lewis Payne, Michael O'Laughlin,
Edward Spangler, Samuel Arnold, Mary E. Surratt, Samuel A. Mudd, John
H. Surratt, John Wilkes Booth, Jefferson Davis, George N. Sanders,
Beverly Tucker, Jacob Thompson, William C. Cleary, Clement C. Clay,
George Harper, and George Young; and it added, "and others unknown."
The assassin was John Wilkes Booth. And whether or no Jefferson Davis
and his fellows in the rebel government were actually aiding and
abetting in this particular crime, it has not been unjust nor unnatural
to suspect them of it. For Mr. Davis certainly accredited Thompson,
Sanders, Clay, and Tucker, as his official agents in Canada. These men
in their turn, and acting in harmony with their instructions and the
purposes of their government, gave a commission to that John A. Kennedy
who was detected in attempting to kindle an extensive fire in the city
of New York, and consulted with him about his proposed plans. This was
the substance of Kennedy's own confession, and he and his accomplices
did kindle fires in four of the New York hotels. It is completely
proved, again, that Davis paid sundry sums, in all $35,000 in gold, to
incendiaries hired by his government to burn hospitals and steamboats
at the West, and that Thompson paid money to a person engaged in Dr.
Blackburn's attempt to spread yellow fever in our cities.
But more: when one Alston wrote to Davis, offering his services to try
to "rid my country of some of her deadliest enemies, by striking at the
very heart's blood of those who seek to enchain her in slavery"--adding
the very significant remark, "I consider nothing dishonorable having
such a tendency," Mr. Davis caused this proposition not to be refused,
nor passed over in silence, nor indignantly exposed; but to be
"respectfully referred, by direction of the President, to the honorable
Secretary of War." Still more: it has been proved that in 1863, John
Wilkes Booth declared that "Abraham Lincoln must be killed." The rebel
agents in Canada, six months before the assassination, specifically
made the same declaration. In the summer of 1864, Thompson said that
he could at any time have the "tyrant Lincoln," or any of his advisers
that he chose, "put out of the way," and that Thompson's agents would
not consider doing this a crime, if done for the rebel cause; and Clay,
when he heard of this, corroborated the sentiment, saying, "That is
so; we are all devoted to our cause, and ready to go any length--to do
anything under the sun." Many other such utterances by rebel leaders
are proved and have become uncontradicted matter of history. Besides;
when Mr. Davis, at Charlotte, North Carolina, while fleeing from
Richmond, received the telegram announcing the fate of Mr. Lincoln,
he calmly read it aloud to the people present, and without a word of
disapproval, uttered a cold comment: "If it were to be done, it were
better it were well done." And when Breckinridge said he regretted
it, (not because it was wicked or dishonorable, but because it was
unfortunate for the South just then,) Mr Davis replied in the same
tone of cold indifference or of concealed satisfaction, and using the
same words: "Well, General, I don't know; if it were to be done at
all, it were better that it were well done; and if the same had been
done to Andy Johnson, the Beast (i. e. Gen. Butler), and to Secretary
Stanton, the job would then be complete." Those are not the words of
an honorable man, nor of a disapprover. But they are exactly natural
to an accessory before the fact, who does not confess his part in it,
and prefers to dissemble his joy. It is not at all unreasonable to
suspect that the men who are proved to have done thus and spoken thus,
before and after the deed, and who have openly hired and approved the
perpetration of such other deeds, were concerned in the planning and
execution of this deed too.
Booth was an actor, and the son of a well known actor; and the son had
inherited, apparently, much of the reckless and occasionally furious
temper of his father. He was also a very violent and bitter rebel.
During the fall of 1864, he had been in Canada, consulting with the
rebel agents there, and mixed up with a number of other subordinate
agents in the business of assassinating President Lincoln; and he was
the most prominent candidate, so to speak, for the place of actual
murderer. On November 11th, 1864, he was in New York, where, while
riding with a companion in a street car, he dropped a letter which came
into the possession of the government; it was a vigorous appeal to
him to assassinate Mr. Lincoln. It said: "Abe must die, and now. You
can choose your weapons, the cup, the knife, the bullet;" and again:
"Strike for your home, strike for your country; bide your time, but
strike sure." During the winter, Booth was engaging the assistance
required for his scheme; and he had already fixed upon the scene of the
murder; for, not later than January, he was urging one Chester to enter
into the plan, and assuring him that all his part of it would be to
stand at the back door of Ford's Theatre and open it. This was a safe
calculation, for the President's enjoyment of dramatic performances was
great, and enhanced by the difficulty of finding agreeable relaxations,
and also by the awful pressure of his official duties and of the war,
which intensified the need of relaxation.
The scheme as finally arranged, provided for the assassination of
Mr. Lincoln, by Booth; of Mr. Johnson, by Atzerodt; of Mr. Seward,
by Payne, (alias Powell); and of Gen. Grant, by O'Laughlin. For the
President, an elaborate death trap was constructed in Ford's Theatre.
The catches of the locks to all three doors of the President's box (one
outer and two inner ones), were loosened by loosening their screws, and
left so that a slight push would enable the assassin to enter even
though the doors should be locked. A small hole was made through one
of the two inner ones, to enable him to see before entering exactly
how his victim sat, so that the final moves within the box could be
laid out before entering it; and a wooden brace was prepared to set
against the outer door (which opened inward) with one end, and with the
other to fit a mortice cut in the wall behind, so that after entering,
the assassin could fasten the door behind him sufficiently to prevent
any interruption until his work was done. Arrangements were made for
securing horses for the murderers to flee with. The stage carpenter or
assistant, Spangler, was employed to be on hand and open and shut the
back door of the theatre when wanted. Some scenes and miscellaneous
matter that frequently impeded more or less the passage from the front
of the stage to this back door, were piled up or otherwise put out of
the way. A supply of weapons for the conspirators was provided. And a
route for flight from Washington within the rebel lines was determined
on. This route led southward from the city, over Anacostia Bridge, ten
miles to Mrs. Surratt's house at Surrattsville, then some fifteen miles
more to Dr. Mudd's house, then about twenty miles to a point where
arrangements were made for crossing the Potomac and proceeding towards
Richmond.
All being ready, Booth, about 9 P. M., on the 14th of April, 1865, went
to the theatre. He first went to the back door, entered it and saw that
all was prepared; left Spangler in charge, and left his horse to be
held by another subordinate of the theatre. Then he went round to the
front of the building, where three of the conspirators were waiting.
It was now about half past nine. One act of the play, "Our American
Cousin,"--was nearly through. "I think he will come out now," remarked
Booth. It is very usual for the spectators to leave the theatre between
the acts, often to return; and if Mr. Lincoln had happened to feel too
busy to remain longer and had left then, probably Booth would have
attacked him there, trusting to be able to escape into the theatre in
the bustle and so through his guarded door. But the President did not
come. Booth went into a saloon close by and drank some whisky. The
spectators had returned for the next act. Booth entered the vestibule
of the theatre, and from it the passage that leads from the street to
the stage and also to the outer door of the President's box. As he did
so, one of his companions followed him into the vestibule, looked up
to the clock and called out the hour. It was approaching ten. Three
successive times, at intervals of several minutes, the companion thus
called out the hour. The third time he called, in a louder tone, "Ten
minutes past ten o'clock!" At this Booth disappeared in the theatre,
and the three others walked rapidly away. Booth went straight to the
outer door of the President's box, paused and showed a visiting card
to the President's messenger, who was in waiting; placed his hand
and his knee against the door, and pushing it open, entered. He then
quietly fastened the door with the brace that stood ready; looked
through the hole in the inner door, and saw the President. Silently
opening the door, he entered. Mr. Lincoln sat at the left hand front
corner of the box, his wife at his right hand, a Miss Harris at the
right hand front corner, and a Major Rathbone behind her. Mr. Lincoln
was leaning forward and looking down into the orchestra. Booth stepped
quickly up, and fired a pistol bullet into the President's head, behind
and on the left side. The murdered man raised his head once; it fell
back upon his chair, and his eyes closed. Major Rathbone, a cool, bold
and prompt soldier, who had been absorbed in the play, now hearing
the pistol-shot, turned, saw Booth through the smoke, and instantly
sprang upon him. Booth, a nervous and strong man, expert in all
athletic exercises, and a skillful fencer, wrenched himself free with
a desperate effort, as he well needed to do. He had already dropped
his pistol and drawn a heavy bowie knife, with which he made a furious
thrust at his captor's heart. Rathbone parried it, but was wounded
deeply in the arm and his hold loosed. Booth sprang for the front of
the box; Rathbone followed, but only caught his clothes as he sprang
over. Rathbone shouted "Stop that man!" and then turned to assist the
President.
Booth leaped over the front of the box, down upon the stage, shouting
as he went, "Revenge for the South!" His spur caught in the national
flag as he descended; the entanglement caused him to fall almost flat
on the stage as he came down; and either the wrench of tearing loose
from the flag, or the fall, snapped one of the bones of his leg between
knee and ankle. This fracture, though not preventing him at once from
moving about, so far disabled him as probably to have been the occasion
of his being overtaken and captured; so that it is scarcely extravagant
to imagine the flag as having, in a sense, avenged the guilt of the
crime perpetrated upon its chief official defender, by waylaying and
entrapping the criminal in his turn, as he had done his victim. Booth
instantly sprang up, turned towards the audience, and raising his
bloody knife in a stage attitude, with a theatrical manner, vociferated
the motto of the State of Virginia, "_Sic semper tyrannis!_"--a motto
already turned into a discreditable satire by its contrast with the
characteristic traffic of the great slavebreeding state, and even
more effectually disgraced by the use now made of it, to justify
assassination. It will be strange if some less dishonored words are not
one day chosen for the device of Free Virginia.
Booth, thus vaporing for a moment, then rushed headlong across the
stage, and darted by the side passage to the rear door. One man sprang
from an orchestra seat upon the stage and shouted to stop him. One of
the employes of the theatre, standing in the passage, was too much
startled to stand aside, and the desperate fugitive struck him on the
leg, cut at him twice, knocked him one side and darted on. The door
was ready. He sprang out, and it shut behind him. Seizing the horse
which was held in waiting for him, Booth, as if in a frenzy like that
of the Malays when "running _amok_," struck the poor fellow who held
it, with the butt of his knife, knocking him down; and then kicking
him, sprang to the saddle, and after a few moments lost in consequence
of some nervousness or fright of the animal, rode swiftly off. This
was on the evening of Friday, the 14th; it was on Wednesday, the 26th,
that Booth, after having been delayed by having his leg set, and
crippled by it afterwards, was discovered in Garrett's barn, south of
the Rappahannock, not far from twenty miles from the Potomac, and was
surrounded, shot and taken.
The murdered President was quickly carried from the theatre to a house
across the street and placed upon a bed. Surgical aid was at once
obtained, but an examination at once showed that there was no hope of
life. Mr. Lincoln's eyes had not opened, nor had consciousness returned
at all, and they never did. The ball was a heavy one, from what is
called a Derringer pistol, a short single-barreled weapon with a large
bore. It had passed clear through the brain, and lodged against the
bone of the orbit of the left eye, breaking that bone. It is almost
certain that Mr. Lincoln suffered no pain after being shot, as the
injury was of a nature to destroy conscious life. His exceedingly
strong constitution and tenacity of life maintained respiration and
circulation for a remarkably long time, but he died the next morning at
about half past seven.
Of the particulars of that great national mourning which bowed the
whole land, it is not needful to speak. Like many parts of that great
history of which it formed a portion, there were often points in it of
a peculiar and symbolic power, which rose to the sublime. Such was the
motto--"Be still, and know that I am God"--which spoke from the walls
of the New York depot when amid the hush of weeping thousands, the
solemn death car entered. The contrast between the peaceful expression
on the face of the weary man, and the surging waves of mourning and
lamentation around him was touching and awful.
Not the least touching among these expressions of national mourning was
the dismay and anguish of that poor oppressed race for whose rights he
died.
A southern correspondent of the New York Tribune, the week following
the assassination, wrote: "I never saw such sad faces, or heard such
heavy heart-beatings, as here in Charleston the day the news came. The
colored people were like children bereaved of a parent. I saw one old
woman going up the streets, wringing her hands, and saying aloud as she
walked, looking straight before her, so absorbed in her grief that she
noticed no one;
'O Lord! Oh Lord! O Lord! Massa Sam's dead! Massa Sam's dead!'
'Who's dead, Aunty?' 'Massa Sam's dead!' she said, not looking at me,
and renewing her lamentations.
'Who's Massa Sam?' said I.
'Uncle Sam,' she said, 'O Lord! O Lord!'
Not quite sure that she meant the President, I spoke again:
'Who's Massa Sam, Aunty?'
'Mr. Lincum!' she said, and resumed wringing her hands, mourning in
utter hopelessness of sorrow."
The poor negroes on the distant plantations had formed a conception
of Lincoln, much akin to that of a Divine Being. Their masters
fled on the approach of our soldiers, and this gave the slaves the
conception of a great Invisible Power which they called Massa Lincum.
An old negro exhorter once, rising in an assembly of them, was heard
solemnly instructing his fellows in the nature of this great unknown:
"Bredren," he said solemnly, "Massa Lincum, he be eberywhere. He knows
ebery ting;" and looking up solemnly, "He walk de earf like de Lord."
To them the stroke was almost as if we could possibly conceive death as
happening to the God we worship; a mingled shock of grief, surprise and
terror.
No death of a public man ever entered so deep into the life of
individual families, so as to seem like a personal domestic sorrow. The
assumption of mourning badges and garments, the hanging out of mourning
tokens, was immediate in thousands of families, each obeying the same
spontaneous impulse without stopping to consult the other. It seemed
almost as if the funeral bells tolled of themselves and without hands.
Wherever the news travelled, so immediately and without waiting for
public consultation, were these tributes of mourning given.
One fact alone, proves the depth and strength of these feelings more
than volumes of description. It is, the vast extent of the publications
in which the history of Mr. Lincoln's life and times, his individual
biography and real or written utterances, or his personal appearance,
were in one way or another commemorated. A gentleman who has begun a
collection of such materials had some time ago gathered two hundred
different books on Mr. Lincoln, a hundred and twenty-five portraits,
besides badges, mourning cards, autographs and manuscripts, as he
reports, "almost without number." And in the list of publications about
the rebellion compiled by Mr. Bartlett, are enumerated three hundred
and eighty books, sermons, eulogies or addresses upon his life or
death.
There is an astonishing contrast between the perfect sweetness and
kindness of Mr. Lincoln's sentiments and utterances, whether private
or public, individual or official, in reference to the rebels and
the rebellion, and theirs about him. Doubtless no loyal citizen of
the United States was so uniformly kind in feeling and decorous and
even courteous in expression, about the rebels; and doubtless no such
citizen was so odiously bespattered with the most hateful and vulgar
and ferocious insult and abuse, both public and private. To give the
quotations to prove the point would be simply disgusting. They were
sprinkled through the newspapers and the public documents of the
rebellion from beginning to end of it. A compend and a proof at once of
the whole of them was that private bundle of letters threatening death,
marked in Mr. Lincoln's own handwriting "Assassination," and kept in
his private cabinet. And the assassination itself and the circumstances
connected with it, constituted another proof and specimen, still more
overwhelming. Never since the times of the Christian martyrs has
history recorded a contrast more humiliating to humanity, between
his kind words and kind intentions on the one hand, and infamous
abusiveness and deliberate bloodthirsty ferocity in those who thus slew
the best and kindest friend they had in the world.
Scarcely less striking was the contrast between the habitual tone
of the foreign utterances about President Lincoln before his death
and that of those after it; a change, moreover, whose promptness
and evident manly good faith may in some measure atone for the
unreasonable and even indecent character of many things said and
printed in Europe. It is unnecessary to reproduce the offences: it
is a more grateful task to quote a few specimens of the feelings and
expressions with which the news of his death and of the manner of it
was received abroad.
It may be premised, that some few persons of foreign birth and good
position, had already discerned the truth of the character of Mr.
Lincoln. A correspondent of the N. Y. Times wrote that paper from
Washington, on one occasion, the following narrative:
"One day, as President Lincoln drove past a Washington hotel, sitting
alone in his carriage, three gentlemen stood talking in front of
the hotel. One of them, a foreigner of high cultivation and great
distinction, with a gesture quite involuntary, raised his hat and
remained uncovered until Mr. Lincoln had passed by. One of his
companions, surprised at so much ceremony, observed, "You forget that
you are in republican America and not in Russia." "Not at all, sir--not
at all," was the reply, given with a certain indignation; "that is the
only living ruler whom I sincerely reverence. I could not avoid showing
the feeling, if I would. He is a patriot, a statesman, a great-hearted
honest man. You Americans reverence nothing in the present." And
after a few more sentences to the like effect, he ended by saying:
"Not only your posterity, but the posterity of all the peoples which
love honesty and revere patriotism, will declare that the part which
President Lincoln was called to perform, required the exercise of as
noble qualities as the 'Father of his Country' ever possessed. It is
any thing but a credit to you that you do not better appreciate the man
whom God has sent in these perilous times to rule the people of this
republic."
The rebuke was received in silence. But such cases were very few. The
general tone of foreign opinion about him was thoroughly unjust. Not so
the obituary testimonials from across the sea.
On the first of May, 1865, Sir George Grey, in the English House of
Commons, moved an address to the Crown, to express the feelings of the
House upon the assassination of Mr. Lincoln. In this address he said
that he was convinced that Mr. Lincoln "in the hour of victory, and in
the triumph of victory, would have shown that wise forbearance, and
that generous consideration, which would have added tenfold lustre to
the fame that he had already acquired, amidst the varying fortunes of
the war."
In seconding the same address, at the same time and place, Mr. Benjamin
Disraeli said: "But in the character of the victim, and in the very
accessories of his almost latest moments, there is something so homely
and so innocent that it takes the subject, as it were, out of the pomp
of history, and out of the ceremonial of diplomacy. It touches the
heart of nations, and appeals to the domestic sentiments of mankind."
In the House of Lords, Lord John Russell, in moving a similar address,
observed: "President Lincoln was a man who, although he had not been
distinguished before his election, had from that time displayed a
character of so much integrity, sincerity and straightforwardness,
and at the same time of so much kindness, that if any one could have
been able to alleviate the pain and animosity which have prevailed
during the civil war, I believe President Lincoln was the man to have
done so." And again, in speaking of the question of amending the
constitution so as to prohibit slavery, he said: "We must all feel that
there again the death of President Lincoln deprives the United States
of the man who was the leader on this subject."
Mr. John Stuart Mill, the distinguished philosopher, in a letter to
an American friend, used far stronger expressions than these guarded
phrases of high officials. He termed Mr. Lincoln "the great citizen
who had afforded so noble an example of the qualities befitting
the first magistrate of a free people, and who, in the most trying
circumstances, had gradually won not only the admiration, but almost
the personal affection of all who love freedom or appreciate simplicity
or uprightness."
Professor Goldwin Smith, writing to the London Daily News, began by
saying, "It is difficult to measure the calamity which the United
States and the world have sustained by the murder of President Lincoln.
The assassin has done his best to strike down mercy and moderation, of
both of which this good and noble life was the main stay."
Senhor Rebello da Silva, a member of the Portuguese Chamber of Peers,
in moving a resolution on the death of Mr. Lincoln, thus outlined his
character: "He is truly great who rises to the loftiest heights from
profound obscurity, relying solely on his own merits as did Napoleon,
Washington, Lincoln. For these arose to power and greatness, not
through any favor or grace, by a chance cradle, or genealogy, but
through the prestige of their own deeds, through the nobility which
begins and ends with themselves--the sole offspring of their own
works. * * * Lincoln was of this privileged class; he belonged to this
aristocracy. In infancy, his energetic soul was nourished by poverty.
In youth, he learned through toil the love of liberty, and respect
for the rights of man. Even to the age of twenty-two, educated in
adversity, his hands made callous by honorable labor, he rested from
the fatigues of the field, spelling out, in the pages of the Bible,
in the lessons of the gospel, in the fugitive leaves of the daily
journal--which the aurora opens, and the night disperses--the first
rudiments of instruction, which his solitary meditations ripened.
The chrysalis felt one day the ray of the sun, which called it to
life, broke its involucrum, and it launched forth fearlessly from
the darkness of its humble cloister into the luminous spaces of its
destiny. The farmer, day-laborer, shepherd, like Cincinnatus, left the
plough-share in the half-broken furrow, and, legislator of his own
State, and afterwards of the Great Republic, saw himself proclaimed
in the tribunal the popular chief of several millions of people, the
maintainer of the holy principle inaugurated by Wilberforce."
There are some vague and some only partially correct statements in this
diffuse passage; but it shows plainly enough how enthusiastically the
Portuguese nobleman had admired the antique simplicity and strength of
Mr. Lincoln's character.
Dr. Merle d'Aubigne, the historian of the Reformation, writing to Mr.
Fogg, U. S. Minister to Switzerland, said: "While not venturing to
compare him to the great sacrifice of Golgotha, which gave liberty to
the captives, is it not just, in this hour, to recall the word of an
apostle (1 John, iii: 16): 'Hereby perceive we the love of God, because
he laid down his life for us: and we ought to lay down our lives for
the brethren'? Who can say that the President did not lay down his life
by the firmness of his devotion to a great duty? The name of Lincoln
will remain one of the greatest that history has to inscribe on its
annals. * * * Among the legacies which Lincoln leaves to us, we shall
all regard as the most precious, his spirit of equity, of moderation,
and of peace, according to which he will still preside, if I may so
speak, over the restoration of your great nation."
The "Democratic Association" of Florence, addressed "to the Free People
of the United States," a letter, in which they term Mr. Lincoln "the
honest, the magnanimous citizen, the most worthy chief magistrate of
your glorious Federation."
The eminent French liberal, M. Edouard Laboulaye, in a speech showing
a remarkably just understanding and extremely broad views with respect
to the affairs and the men of the United States, said: "Mr. Lincoln was
one of those heroes who are ignorant of themselves; his thoughts will
reign after him. The name of Washington has already been pronounced,
and I think with reason. Doubtless Mr. Lincoln resembled Franklin more
than Washington. By his origin, his arch good nature, his ironical
good sense, and his love of anecdotes and jesting, he was of the same
blood as the printer of Philadelphia. But it is nevertheless true
that in less than a century, America has passed through two crises in
which its liberty might have been lost, if it had not had honest men
at its head; and that each time it has had the happiness to meet the
man best fitted to serve it. If Washington founded the Union, Lincoln
has saved it. History will draw together and unite those two names.
A single word explains Mr. Lincoln's whole life: it was Duty. Never
did he put himself forward; never did he think of himself; never did
he seek one of those ingenious combinations which puts the head of a
state in bold relief, and enhances his importance at the expense of the
country; his only ambition, his only thought was faithfully to fulfil
the mission which his fellow-citizens had entrusted to him. * * * His
inaugural address, March 4, 1865, shows us what progress had been made
in his soul. This piece of familiar eloquence is a master-piece; it
is the testament of a patriot. I do not believe that any eulogy of
the President would equal this page on which he has depicted himself
in all his greatness and all his simplicity. * * * History is too
often only a school of immorality. It shows us the victory of force
or stratagem much more than the success of justice, moderation, and
probity. It is too often only the apotheosis of triumphant selfishness.
There are noble and great exceptions; happy those who can increase the
number, and thus bequeath a noble and beneficent example to posterity!
Mr. Lincoln is among these. He would willingly have repeated, after
Franklin, that 'falsehood and artifice are the practice of fools who
have not wit enough to be honest.' All his private life, and all his
political life, were inspired and directed by this profound faith in
the omnipotence of virtue. It is through this, again, that he deserves
to be compared with Washington; it is through this that he will remain
in history with the most glorious name that can be merited by the head
of a free people--a name given him by his cotemporaries, and which will
be preserved to him by posterity--that of Honest Abraham Lincoln."
A letter from the well known French historian, Henri Martin, to
the Paris Siècle, contained the following passages: "Lincoln will
remain the austere and sacred personification of a great epoch, the
most faithful expression of democracy. This simple and upright man,
prudent and strong, elevated step by step from the artizan's bench to
the command of a great nation, and always without parade and without
effort, at the height of his position; executing without precipitation,
without flourish, and with invincible good sense, the most colossal
acts; giving to the world this decisive example of the civil power
in a republic; directing a gigantic war, without free institutions
being for an instant compromised or threatened by military usurpation;
dying, finally, at the moment when, after conquering, he was intent on
pacification, * * * this man will stand out, in the traditions of his
country and the world, as an incarnation of the people, and of modern
democracy itself. The great work of emancipation had to be sealed,
therefore, with the blood of the just, even as it was inaugurated with
the blood of the just. The tragic history of the abolition of slavery,
which opened with the gibbet of John Brown, will close with the
assassination of Lincoln.
And now let him rest by the side of Washington, as the second founder
of the great Republic. European democracy is present in spirit at his
funeral, as it voted in its heart for his re-election, and applauded
the victory in the midst of which he passed away. It will wish with one
accord to associate itself with the monument that America will raise to
him upon the capitol of prostrate slavery."
The London Globe, in commenting on Mr. Lincoln's assassination, said
that he "had come nobly through a great ordeal. He had extorted the
admiration even of his opponents, at least on this side of the water.
They had come to admire, reluctantly, his firmness, honesty, fairness
and sagacity. He tried to do, and had done, what he considered his
duty, with magnanimity."
The London Express said, "He had tried to show the world how great, how
moderate, and how true he could be, in the moment of his great triumph."
The Liverpool Post said, "If ever there was a man who in trying times
avoided offenses, it was Mr. Lincoln. If there ever was a leader in a
civil contest who shunned acrimony and eschewed passion, it was he. In
a time of much cant and affectation he was simple, unaffected, true,
transparent. In a season of many mistakes he was never known to be
wrong. * * * By a happy tact, not often so felicitously blended with
pure evidence of soul, Abraham Lincoln knew when to speak, and never
spoke too early or too late. * * * The memory of his statesmanship,
translucent in the highest degree, and above the average, and openly
faithful, more than almost any of this age has witnessed, to fact and
right, will live in the hearts and minds of the whole Anglo-Saxon
race, as one of the noblest examples of that race's highest qualities.
Add to all this that Abraham Lincoln was the humblest and pleasantest
of men, that he had raised himself from nothing, and that to the last
no grain of conceit or ostentation was found in him, and there stands
before the world a man whose like we shall not soon look upon again."
In the remarks of M. Rouher, the French Minister, in the Legislative
Assembly, on submitting to that Assembly the official despatch of
the French Foreign Minister to the Chargé at Washington, M. Rouher
remarked, of Mr. Lincoln's personal character, that he had exhibited
"that calm firmness and indomitable energy which belong to strong
minds, and are the necessary conditions of the accomplishment of great
duties. In the hour of victory he exhibited generosity, moderation and
conciliation."
And in the despatch, which was signed by M. Drouyn de L'Huys, were the
following expressions: "Abraham Lincoln exhibited, in the exercise of
the power placed in his hands, the most substantial qualities. In him,
firmness of character was allied to elevation of principle. * * * In
reviewing these last testimonies to his exalted wisdom, as well as the
examples of good sense, of courage, and of patriotism, which he has
given, history will not hesitate to place him in the rank of citizens
who have the most honored their country."
In the Prussian Lower House, Herr Loewes, in speaking of the news of
the assassination, said that Mr. Lincoln "performed his duties without
pomp or ceremony, and relied on that dignity of his inner self alone,
which is far above rank, orders and titles. He was a faithful servant,
not less of his own commonwealth than of civilization, freedom and
humanity."
By far the most beautiful of all these foreign tributes, was the very
generous memorial of the London Punch. That paper had joined all
the fashionable world in making merry at Lincoln's expense while he
struggled, weary and miry, through the "valley of humiliation,"--but
it is not every one who does a wrong who is capable of so full and
generous a reparation. We give it entire, because, apart from its noble
spirit, it is one of the most truthful summaries of Lincoln's character:
_You_ lay a wreath on murdered Lincoln's bier!
_You_, who with mocking pencil wont to trace,
Broad for the self-complacent British sneer,
His length of shambling limb, his furrowed face,
His gaunt, gnarled hands, his unkempt, bristling hair,
His garb uncouth, his bearing ill at ease,
His lack of all we prize as debonair,
Of power or will to shine, of art to please!
_You_, whose smart pen backed up the pencil's laugh,
Judging each step, as though the way were plain;
Reckless, so it could point its paragraph,
Of chief's perplexity, or people's pain!
Beside this corpse, that bears for winding-sheet
The stars and stripes he lived to rear anew,
Between the mourners at his head and feet,
Say, scurril-jester, is there room for _you_?
Yes, he had lived to shame me from my sneer--
To lame my pencil, and confute my pen--
To make me own this hind of princes peer,
This rail-splitter a true-born king of men.
My shallow judgment I had learned to rue,
Noting how to occasion's height he rose;
How his quaint wit made home-truth seem more true;
How, iron-like, his temper grew by blows;
How humble, yet how hopeful he could be;
How in good fortune and in ill the same;
Nor bitter in success, nor boastful he,
Thirsty for gold, nor feverish for fame.
He went about his work--such work as few
Ever had laid on head, and heart, and hand--
As one who knows where there's a task to do;
Man's honest will must Heaven's good grace command,
Who trusts the strength will with the burden grow,
That God makes instruments to work his will,
If but that will we can arrive to know,
Nor tamper with the weights of good and ill.
So he went forth to battle, on the side
That he felt clear was Liberty's and Right's,
As in his peasant boyhood he had plied
His warfare with rude nature's thwarting mights;--
The uncleared forest, the unbroken soil,
The iron bark that turn's the lumberer's axe,
The rapid, that o'erbears the boatman's toil,
The prairie, hiding the mazed wanderer's tracks,
The ambushed Indian, and the prowling bear--
Such were the needs that helped his youth to train:
Rough culture--but such trees large fruit may bear,
If but their stocks be of right girth and grain.
So he grew up, a destined work to do,
And lived to do it: four long suffering years'
Ill-fate, ill-feeling, ill-report, lived through,
And then he heard the hisses change to cheers,
The taunts to tribute, the abuse to praise,
And took both with the same unwavering mood;
Till, as he came on light, from darkling days,
And seemed to touch the goal from where he stood,
A felon hand, between the goal and him,
Reached from behind his back, a trigger prest--
And those perplexed and patient eyes were dim,
Those gaunt, long-laboring limbs were laid to rest!
The words of mercy were upon his lips,
Forgiveness in his heart and on his pen,
When this vile murderer brought swift eclipse
To thoughts of peace on earth, good-will to men.
The old world and the new, from sea to sea,
Utter one voice of sympathy and shame!
Sore heart, so stopped when it at last beat high!
Sad life, cut short just as its triumph came.
Lincoln must be looked upon in the final review of his character, as
one of those men elect of God, whom he calls and chooses to effect
great purposes of his own, and fashions and educates with especial
reference to that purpose. As is usual in such cases, the man whom God
chooses for a work is not at all the man whom the world beforehand
would choose, and often for a time the world has difficulty in
receiving him. There was great questioning about him in the diplomatic
circles of Europe, when the war began, and there was great searching
of heart concerning him at home. There have been times when there were
impatient murmurs that another sort of man was wanted in his chair--a
man with more dash, more brilliancy, more Napoleonic efficiency. Yet
in the contest such a man might have been our ruin. A brilliant
military genius might have wrecked the republic on the rock of military
despotism, where so many good ships have gone down; whereas, slow,
cautious, honest old Abe only took our rights of habeas corpus, and
other civil privileges, as he did the specie of old, to make the legal
tender, and brought it all back safe and sound.
Lincoln was a strong man, but his strength was of a peculiar kind; it
was not aggressive so much as passive, and among passive things it was
like the strength not so much of a stone buttress as of a wire cable.
It was strength swaying to every influence, yielding on this side and
on that to popular needs, yet tenaciously and inflexibly bound to carry
its great end. Probably by no other kind of strength could our national
ship have been drawn safely through so dreadful a channel. Surrounded
by all sorts of conflicting claims, by traitors, by half-hearted, timid
men, by border State men and free State men, by radical abolitionists
and conservatives, he listened to all, heard all, weighed all, and in
his own time acted by his own honest convictions in the fear of God,
and thus simply and purely he did the greatest work that has been done
in modern times.
[Illustration: U S Grant]
CHAPTER II.
ULYSSES SIMPSON GRANT.
A General Wanted--A Short War Expected--The Young Napoleon--
God's Revenge Against Slavery--The Silent Man in Galena--
"Tanning Leather"--Gen. Grant's Puritan Descent--How he Loaded
the Logs--His West Point Career--Service in Mexico--Marries
and Leaves the Army--Wood-Cutting, Dunning and Leather-Selling
--Enlists against the Rebellion--Missouri Campaign--Paducah
Campaign--Fort Donelson Campaign--Battle of Shiloh--How
Grant Lost his Temper--Vicksburg Campaign--Lincoln on Grant's
"Drinking"--Chattanooga--Grant's Method of Making a Speech--
Appointed Lieutenant-General--The Richmond Campaign--"Mr. Grant
is a Very Obstinate Man"--Grant's Qualifications as a Ruler--
Honesty--Generosity to Subordinates--Sound Judgment of Men--
Power of Holding his Tongue--Grant's Sidewalk Platform--Talks
Horse to Senator Wade--"Wants Nothing Said"--The Best Man for
Next President.
When the perception of our late great military crisis first came upon
us, and we found ourselves engaged in an actual and real war, our first
inquiry was for our General.
For years and years there had been only peace talk and peace valuations
in our market. There had, to be sure, been some frontier skirmishing--a
campaign in Mexico, which drew off our more restless adventurers, and
gave our politicians a little of a smart, martial air, in rounding
their periods, and pointing their allusions. We had played war in
Mexico as we read romances, and the principal interest of it was,
after all, confined to our very small regular army of some twenty-five
thousand men, where some got promotions in consequence of the vacancies
made in this or that battle.
Gen. Scott won European renown and some laurels in this country. We
created an office of Lieutenant General on purpose to do him honor;
but the people, after all, laughed in their sleeves, and irreverently
called our national hero "Old Fuss and Feathers;" a nickname which
went far to show that whatever his talents in the field might be, he
had not succeeded in establishing over the body of his countrymen the
ascendency which strong minds hold over weak ones.
But when the hour of our trial came we had to look to him as our
leader, and Gen. Scott accepted cheerfully the situation, whose reality
and magnitude neither he nor we, nor any mortal living at that time,
perceived, or could estimate. Seward smiled in his cabinet chair, and
spoke of the affair as a little skirmish that would be over in ninety
days. A battle or two, might occur, then an armistice, and then "We, Us
and Company" would walk in with our red tape and circumlocution office,
and tie up everything better than before. So Scott spread his maps
and talked cheerfully, and the Washington cabinet congratulated one
another. "This is to be my last campaign," said Scott, "and I mean it
to be my best."
The country listened with earnest ears now to what our chief military
man said. When the father of a family is lying between life and death,
there is no more laughing at the doctor--and in the solemn hush that
preceded _real_ war, there was no more sneering at old Fuss and
Feathers. People wanted to believe in him. They searched out his old
exploits, talked of his old successes, that they might hope and believe
that they had a deliverer and a leader in their midst.
Slowly, surely, it began to appear through many a defeat, many a
disaster; through days and nights when men's hearts failed them for
fear, and for looking for the things that were coming on the earth;
through all such signs and wonders as usher in great convulsions of
society--it began to be manifested that this nation was in a contest
for which there were no precedents, which was to be as wide as from
ocean to ocean, which was to number its forces by millions, and for
which all former rules and ordinances of war, all records of campaigns
and battles, were as mere obsolete ballads and old songs. The inquiry
began to grow more urgent: Who is to be our General?
General Scott professed that the work was too great for him, but he
called to his right hand and presented to the nation one whom he
delighted to honor, and who was announced with songs and cheerings as
the young Napoleon of America.
The nation received him with acclamation. They wanted a young Napoleon.
A young Napoleon was just what they needed, and a young Napoleon
therefore they were determined to believe that they had; and for a
while nothing was heard but his praises. Every loyal paper was on
its knees in humble expectancy, to admire and to defend, but not
to criticise. Mothers were ready to send their sons to his banner;
millionaires offered the keys of their treasure chests for his
commissariat; the administration bowed to his lightest suggestion,
gave him all he asked, hung on his lightest word. Everywhere he moved
amid victorious plaudits, the palms and honors of victory everywhere
credited to him in advance by the fond faith of the whole nation.
We waited for victories. Our men were burning with enthusiasm--begging,
praying to be led to the field, and yet nothing was done. "It takes
time to create an army," was the first announcement of our chief.
We gave him time, and he spent it in reviews, in preparations, in
fortifications and entrenchments. The time he took gave the enemy just
what they stood in perishing need of--time to organize, concentrate,
drill, arrange with Europe, and get ready for a four years' conflict.
It was God's will that we should have a four years' war, and therefore
when we looked for a leader he sent us Gen. McClellan.
It was God's will that this nation--the North as well as the
South--should deeply and terribly suffer for the sin of consenting
to and encouraging the great oppressions of the South; that the
ill-gotten wealth which had arisen from striking hands with oppression
and robbery, should be paid back in the taxes of war; that the blood
of the poor slave, that had cried so many years from the ground in
vain, should be answered by the blood of the sons from the best hearth
stones through all the free States; that the slave mothers, whose tears
nobody regarded, should have with them a great company of weepers,
North and South--Rachels weeping for their children and refusing to be
comforted; that the free States, who refused to listen when they were
told of lingering starvation, cold, privation and barbarous cruelty,
as perpetrated on the slave, should have lingering starvation, cold,
hunger and cruelty doing its work among their own sons, at the hands of
these slave masters, with whose sins our nation had connived.
General McClellan was like those kings and leaders we read of in the
Old Testament, whom God sent to a people with a purpose of wrath and
punishment.
Slowly, through those dark days of rebuke and disaster, did the people
come at last to a consciousness that they had trusted in vain--that
such a continued series of disasters were not exceptions and accidents,
but evidences of imbecility and incompetence in the governing power.
Meanwhile the magnitude of this colossal war had fully revealed
itself--a war requiring combinations and forces before unheard of, as
different from those of European battles as the prairies of the West
differ from Salisbury Plain, or the Mississippi from the Thames--and we
again feverish
Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/46347