The Lincoln Story Book
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Title: The Lincoln Story Book
Compiler: Henry Llewellyn Williams
Release date: January 1, 2005 [eBook #7347]
Most recently updated: September 1, 2014
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LINCOLN STORY BOOK ***
Produced by Sandra Bannatyne, Tiffany Vergon, Charles
Aldarondo, Charles Franks and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team
THE LINCOLN STORY BOOK
A Judicious Collection of the Best Stories
and Anecdotes of the Great President,
Many Appearing Here for the
First Time in Book Form
COMPILED BY
HENRY L. WILLIAMS
PREFACE.
The Abraham Lincoln Statue at Chicago is accepted as the typical
Westerner of the forum, the rostrum, and the tribune, as he stood to be
inaugurated under the war-cloud in 1861. But there is another Lincoln
as dear to the common people--the Lincoln of happy quotations, the
speaker of household words. Instead of the erect, impressive,
penetrative platform orator we see a long, gaunt figure, divided
between two chairs for comfort, the head bent forward, smiling broadly,
the lips curved in laughter, the deep eyes irradiating their caves of
wisdom; the story-telling Lincoln, enjoying the enjoyment he gave to
others.
This talkativeness, as Lincoln himself realized, was a very valuable
asset. Leaving home, he found, in a venture at "Yankee notion-pedling,"
that glibness meant three hundred per cent, in disposing of flimsy
wares. In the camp of the lumber-jacks and of the Indian rangers he was
regarded as the pride of the mess and the inspirator of the tent. From
these stages he rose to be a graduate of the "college" of the
yarn-spinner--the village store, where he became clerk.
The store we know is the township vortex where all assemble to "swap
stories" and deal out the news. Lincoln, from behind the counter--his
pulpit--not merely repeated items of information which he had heard,
but also recited doggerel satire of his own concoction, punning and
emitting sparks of wit. Lincoln was hailed as the "capper" of any "good
things on the rounds."
Even then his friends saw the germs of the statesman in the lank,
homely, crack-voiced hobbledehoy. Their praise emboldened him to stand
forward as the spokesman at schoolhouse meetings, lectures,
log-rollings, huskings auctions, fairs, and so on--the folk-meets of
our people. One watching him in 1830 said foresightedly: "Lincoln has
touched land at last."
In commencing electioneering, he cultivated the farming population and
their ways and diction. He learned by their parlance and Bible phrases
to construct "short sentences of small words," but he had all along the
idea that "the plain people are more easily influenced by a broad and
humorous illustration than in any other way." It is the Anglo-Saxon
trait, distinguishing all great preachers, actors, and authors of that
breed.
He acknowledged his personal defects with a frankness unique and
startling; told a girl whom he was courting that he did not believe any
woman could fancy him; publicly said that he could not be in looks what
was rated a gentleman; carried the knife of "the homeliest man";
disparaged himself like a Brutus or a Pope Sixtus. But the mass
relished this "plain, blunt man who spoke right on."
He talked himself into being the local "Eminence," but did not succeed
in winning the election when first presented as "the humble" candidate
for the State Senate. He stood upon his "imperfect education," his not
belonging "to the first families, but the seconds"; and his shunning
society as debarring him from the study he required.
Repulsed at the polls, he turned to the law as another channel,
supplementing forensic failings by his artful story-telling. Judges
would suspend business till "that Lincoln fellow got through with his
yarn-spinning" or underhandedly would direct the usher to get the rich
bit Lincoln told, and repeat it at the recess.
Mrs. Lincoln, the first to weigh this man justly, said proudly, that
"Lincoln was the great favorite everywhere."
Meanwhile his fellow citizens stupidly tired of this Merry Andrew--they
"sent him elsewhere to talk other folks to death"--to the State House,
where he served several terms creditably, but was mainly the fund of
jollity to the lobby and the chartered jester of the lawmakers.
Such loquacious witchery fitted him for the Congress. Elected to the
House, he was immediately greeted by connoisseurs of the best
stamp--President Martin van Buren, "prince of good fellows;" Webster,
another intellect, saturnine in repose and mercurial in activity; the
convivial Senator Douglas, and the like. These formed the rapt ring
around Lincoln in his own chair in the snug corner of the congressional
chat-room. Here he perceived that his rusticity and shallow skimmings
placed him under the trained politicians. It was here, too, that his
stereotyped prologue to his digressions--"That reminds me"--became
popular, and even reached England, where a publisher so entitled a
joke-book. Lincoln displaced "Sam Slick," and opened the way to Artemus
Ward and Mark Twain. The longing for elevation was fanned by the
association with the notables--Buchanan, to be his predecessor as
President; Andrew Johnson, to be his vice and successor; Jefferson
Davis and Alex. H. Stephens, President and Vice-President of the C. S.
A.; Adams, Winthrop, Sumner, and the galaxy over whom his solitary star
was to shine dazzlingly.
A sound authority who knew him of old pronounced him "as good at
telling an anecdote as in the '30's." But the fluent chatterer reined
in and became a good listener. He imbibed all the political ruses, and
returned home with his quiver full of new and victorious arrows for the
Presidential campaign, for his bosom friends urged him to try to
gratify that ambition, preposterous when he first felt it attack him.
He had grown out of the sensitiveness that once made him beg the
critics not to put him out by laughing at his appearance. He formed a
boundless arsenal of images and similes; he learned the American
humorist's art not to parade the joke with a discounting smile. He
worked out Euclid to brace his fantasies, as the steel bar in a cement
fence-post makes it irresistibly firm. But he allowed his vehement
fervor to carry him into such flights as left the reporters unable to
accompany his sentences throughout.
He was recognized as the destined national mouthpiece. He was not of
the universities, but of the universe; the Mississippi of Eloquence,
uncultivated, stupendous, enriched by sweeping into the innumerable
side bayous and creeks.
Elected and re-elected President, he continued to be a surprise to
those who shrank from levity. Lincoln was their puzzle; for he had a
sweet sauce for every "roast," and showed the smile of invigoration to
every croaking prophet. His state papers suited the war tragedies, but
still he delighted the people with those tales, tagging all the events
of what may be called the Lincoln era. The camp and the press echoed
them though the Cabinet frowned--secretaries said that they exposed the
illustrious speaker to charges of "clownishness and buffoonery."
But this perennial good-humor--perfectly poised by the
people--alleviated the strain of withstanding that terrible avalanche
threatening to dismember and obliterate the States and bury all the
virtues and principles of our forefathers.
Even his official letters were in the same vein. Regarding the one to
England which meant war, he asked of Secretary Seward if its language
would be comprehended by our minister at the Victorian court, and added
dryly: "Will James, the coachman at the door--will he understand it?"
Receiving the answer, he nodded grimly and said: "Then it goes!" It
went, and there was no war with the Bull.
Time has refuted the purblind purists, the chilly "wet-blankets"; and
the Lincoln stories, bright, penetrative, piquant, and pertinent are
our classics. Hand in hand with "Father Abraham," the President next to
Washington in greatness, walks "Old Abe, the Story-teller."
LINCOLN CALENDAR.
Abraham Lincoln, born February 12, 1809, Hardin County, Kentucky.
"Lincoln Day."
1817--Settled in Perry County, Indiana; father, mother, sister, and
self.
1818--October 5, Mrs. Thomas Lincoln (Nancy Hanks) died; buried Spencer
County, Indiana. In 1901, a monument erected to her memory, the base
being the former Abraham Lincoln vault. Schooling, a few months, 1819,
'20 and '28, about six months' school.
1819--Thomas (father of A. L.) marries again: Mrs. Johnson (Sally Bush)
of Kentucky.
1830--March, Lincoln family remove into Illinois, near Decatur.
1831--Works for himself: boatbuilding and sailing, carpentering,
hog-sticking, sawmilling, blacksmithing, river-pilot, logger, etc., in
Menard County, Indiana.
1831--Election clerk at New Salem. Captain and private (re-enlisted) in
Black Hawk War. Store clerk and merchant, New Salem. Studies for the
law.
1832--First political speech. Henry Clay, Whig platform. Defeated
through strong local vote. Deputy surveyor, at three dollars a day,
Sangamon County.
1834--Elected to State legislature as Whig. (Resides in Springfield
till 1861. Law partner with John L. Stuart till 1840.)
1835--Postmaster, New Salem; appointed by President Jackson.
1838 to 1840--Reelected to State legislature.
1840--Partner in law with S. T. Logan.
1842--Married Miss Mary Todd, of Kentucky. Of the four sons, Edward
died in infancy; William ("Willie") at twelve at Washington; Thomas
("Tad") at Springfield, aged twenty; Robert M. T., minister to Great
Britain, presidential candidate, secretary of war to President
Garfield. His only grandson, Abraham, died in London, March, 1890.
1844--Proposed for Congress.
1845--Law partner with W. H. Herndon, for life.
1846--Elected to Congress, the single Whig Illinois member; voted
antislavery; sought abolition in the D. C.; voted Wilmot Proviso.
Declined reelection.
1848--Electioneered for General Taylor.
1849--Defeated by Shields for United States senator.
1852--Electioneered for General Scott.
1854--Won the State over to the Republicans, but by arrangement
transferred his claim to the senatorship to Trumbull. October, debated
with Douglas. Declined the governorship in favor of Bissell.
1856--Organized the Republican Party and became its chief; nominated
vice-president, but was not chosen by its first convention; worked for
the Fremont-Dayton presidential ticket.
1858--Lost in the legislature the senatorship to Douglas.
1859--Placed for the presidential candidacy. Made Eastern tour "to get
acquainted."
1860--May 9, nominated for President, "shutting out" Seward, Chase,
Cameron, Dayton, Wade, Bates, and McLean.
1861--March 4, inaugurated sixteenth President; succeeds Buchanan, and
precedes his vice--Andrew Johnson, whom General Grant succeeded. Civil
War began by firing on Fort Sumter, April 12.
1862--September 22, emancipation announced.
1863--January 1, emancipation proclaimed. November 19, Gettysburg
Cemetery address. December 9, pardon to rebels proclaimed.
1864--Unanimous nomination as Republican presidential candidate for
re-election, June 7. Reelected November 8.
1865--March 4, inaugurated for the second term. April 14, assassinated
in Ford's Theater, Washington, by a mad actor, Wilkes Booth. April 19,
body lay in state at Washington. April 26, Booth slain in resisting
arrest, by Sergeant Boston Corbett, near Port Royal. April 21 to May 4,
funeral-train through principal cities North, to Springfield, Illinois.
1871--Temporarily deposited in catacomb.
1874--In catacomb, in sarcophagus. The completed monument dedicated.
1876--To frustrate repetition of body-snatchers' attempt, reinterred
deeper.
1900--A fifth removal; the whole structure solidly rebuilt, containing
the martyred President, his wife, and their three children, as well as
the grandson bearing Abraham's name.
THE LINCOLN STORY BOOK
* * * * *
CHILDISH RIME.
In a copybook, at the age of nine or ten:
Abraham Lincoln,
his hand and pen.
he will be good, but
god knows when.
The small "g" led a public speaker to denounce the sort of men--"sordid
and ignorant"--who write "God with a small g and gold with a big one."
This was a scrapbook in humble imitation of the albums in the East.
Another copybook motto. (A year or so later.)
Good boys who to their books apply
Will all be great men by and by.
* * * * *
THE LITTLE HATCHET DID IT.
In 1823 Abraham Lincoln went briefly to Crawford's school, a log house,
pleasing the teacher by his attention to the simple course. The boy had
read but a small library, principally "Weems' Life of Washington,"
which had impressed him deeply. This is shown by the following anecdote
told by Andrew Crawford, the Spencer County pedagogue: The latter saw
that a buck's head, nailed on the schoolhouse, was broken in one horn,
and asked the scholars who among them broke it. "I did it," answered
young Lincoln promptly. "I did not mean to do it, but I hung on it"--he
was very tall and reached it too easily--"and it broke!" Though lean,
he weighed fairly. "I wouldn't have done it if I had 'a' thought it
would break."
Other boys of that "class" would have tried to conceal what they did
and not own up until obliged to do so. His immediate friends believed
that the hatchet and cherry-tree incident in Washington's life traced
this truthful course.
* * * * *
THE LITTLE HATCHET AGAIN TURNS UP.
In his teens Abraham Lincoln, while not considered a man, was able to
swing an ax with full power. It was the borderer's multifarious tool
and accompanied him everywhere. One time, while sauntering along
Gentryville, his stepsister playfully ran at him of a sudden and leaped
from behind upon him. Holding on to his shoulders, she dug her knees
into his back--a rough trick called fun by these semi-savages--and
brought him to the ground. Unfortunately, she caused him to release the
ax in his surprise, and it cut her ankle. The boy stopped the wound and
bandaged it, while she moaned. Through her cries, he reproached her,
and concluded:
"How could you disobey mother so?" for she had been enjoined not to
follow her brother. "What are you going to tell her about getting hurt?"
"Tell her I did it with the ax," she replied. "That will be the truth?"
she questioned, with the prevarication of her sex inborn.
"Yes, that's the truth, but it is not all the truth. You tell the whole
truth."
The mother was forgiving, and nothing more came of the casualty.
* * * * *
LINCOLN'S WEDDING-SONG.
Abraham Lincoln's own sister Sarah married one Aaron Grigsby, a man in
the settlers' line of life; and Abraham, a youth under age, composed an
epithalamium on the occasion. The title was "Adam and Eve's
Wedding-Song," and the principal verses are given to show what
roughness pervaded the home on the frontier:
The woman was not taken from Adam's feet, we see,
So we must not abuse her, the meaning seems to be.
The woman was not taken from Adam's head, we know;
To show she must not rule him--'tis evidently so.
The woman, she was taken from under Adam's arm,
So she must be protected from injuries and harm.
* * * * *
"RISK THE HOGS AND I WILL RISK MYSELF!"
At the age of seventeen, Lincoln, the strongest and "longest" younker
of the neighborhood, was let out by his father for six dollars a month
and board to a James Taylor, ferryman of Anderson's Creek and the Ohio
River. He was also expected to do the farmwork and other jobs, as well
as the chores in and about the house. This included tending to the
baby--the good wives uniting to pronounce Abe the best of helps as "so
handy," as Mrs. Toodles would say.
He had attained his fixed height, exactly six feet three inches. (This
is his own record.) He really did, with his unusual strength, more than
any man's stint, and failing to gain full man's wages, whether it was
his father or he handled it, he felt the injustice, which soured him on
that point. He enraged his employer's son by sitting up late to read,
so that the young man struck him to silence. But the young giant
refused from retaliating in kind, whether from natural magnanimity
belonging to giants, or from respect for the "young master," or from
self-acknowledgment that he was in the wrong. He learned the craft of
river boatman in this engagement. One day, on being asked to kill a
hog, he replied like the Irishman with the violin, "that he had never
done it, but he would try."
"If you will risk the hog," he said, "I will risk myself!"
Becoming hog-slaughterer added this branch occupation to the many of
"the man of all work." Taylor sub-let him out in this capacity for
thirty cents a day, saying:
"Abe will do any one thing about as well as another."
* * * * *
THE REST WAS VILE.
The Lincoln homestead in Indiana, in 1820-23, had at the first the
primitive corn-mill in the Indian fashion--a burnt-out block with a
pounder rigged to a well-sweep. A water-mill being set up ten miles
off, on Anderson's Creek, that was superseded, as improvement marched,
by a horse-power one. To this Lincoln, as a lad of sixteen or
seventeen, would carry the corn in a bag upon an old flea-bitten gray
mare. One day, on unhitching the animal and loading it, and running his
arm through the head-gear loop to lead, he had no sooner struck it and
cried "Get up, you de----," when the beast whirled around, and, lashing
out, kicked him in the forehead so that he fell to the ground
insensible. The miller, Hoffman, ran out and carried the youth indoors,
sending for his father, as he feared the victim would not revive. He
did not do so until hours after having been carried home. When
conscious, his faculties, as psychologically ordained, resumed
operations from the instant of suspension, and he uttered the sequel to
his outcry:
"----vil!"
Lincoln's own explanation is thus:
"Just before I struck the mare, my will, through the mind, had set the
muscles of my tongue to utter the expression, and when her heels came
in contact with my head, the whole thing stopped half-cocked, as it
were, and was only fired off when mental energy or force returned."
His friends interpreted the occurrence as a proof of his always
finishing what he commenced.
* * * * *
"NO HEAPING COALS OF FIRE ON THAT HEAD."
The wantonly cruel experiment of testing the sensitiveness in reptiles
armored, passed into a proverb out West in pioneer times. Besides
carving initials and dates on the shell of land tortoises, boys would
fling the creatures against tree or rock to see it perish with its
exposed and lacerated body, or literally place burning coals on the
back. In such cases Lincoln, a boy in his teens, but a redoubtable
young giant, would not only interfere vocally, but with his arms, if
needed.
"Don't terrapins have feelings?" he inquired.
The torturer did not know the right answer, and, persisting in the
treatment, had the shingle wrenched from his hand and the cinders
stamped out, while the sufferer was allowed to go away.
"Well, feelings or none, he won't be burned any more while I am around!"
He did not always have to resort to force in his corrections, as he
obtained the title of "Peacemaker" by other means, and the spell in his
tongue, at that age.
* * * * *
STUMPING THE STUMP-SPEAKER.
When Lincoln became a man and, divorced from his father's grasping
tyranny, set up as a field-hand, he lightened the labor in Menard
County by orating to his mates, and they gladly suspended their tasks
to listen to him recite what he had read and invented--or, rather,
adapted to their circumscribed understanding. Besides mimicry of the
itinerant preachers, he imitated the electioneering advocates of all
parties and local politics. One day, one such educator collected the
farmers and their help around him to eulogize some looming-up
candidate, when a cousin and admirer of young Lincoln cast a damper on
him, crying out, with general approval, that Abe could talk him dry!
Accepting the challenge, the professional spellbinder allowed his place
on the stump of the cottonwood to be held by the raw Demosthenes. To
his astonishment the country lad did display much fluency,
intelligence, and talent for the craft. Frankly the stranger
complimented him and wished him well in a career which he recommended
him to adopt. From this cheering, Lincoln proceeded to speak in
public--his limited public--"talking on all subjects till the questions
were worn slick, greasy, and threadbare."
* * * * *
MAKING THE WOOL, NOT FEATHERS, FLY.
The "export trade" of the Indiana farmers was with New Orleans, the
goods being carried on flatboats. The traffic called for a larger
number of resolute, hardy, and honest men, as, besides the vicissitudes
of fickle navigation, was the peril from thieves. Abraham early made
acquaintance with this course as he accompanied his father in such a
venture down the great river. Then passed apprenticeship, he built a
boat for Gentry--merchant of Gentryville--and "sailed" it, with the
storekeeper's son Allen as bow-hand or first officer. He and his crew
of one started from the Ohio River landing and safely reached the
Crescent City--safely as to cargo and bodies, but not without a narrow
escape. At Baton Rouge, a little ahead of the haven, the boat was tied
up at a plantation, and the two were asleep, when they became objects
of an attack from a river pest--a band of refugee negroes and similar
lawless rogues.
Luckily their approach was heard and the two awoke. Having been warned
that the desperadoes would not stand on trifles, the young men armed
themselves with clubs and leaped ashore, after driving the pirates off
the deck. They pursued them, too, with such an uproar that their number
was multiplied in the runaways' mind. Both returned wounded--Abraham
retaining a mark over the right eye, noticeable in after life, and not
to his facial improvement. They immediately unhitched the boat and
stood out in the channel.
"I wish we had carried weapons," sighed Lincoln. "Going to war without
shooting-irons is not what the Quakers hold it to be."
"If we had been armed," returned Allen, as regretfully, "we would have
made the feathers fly!"
It had not been too dark for the shade of the enemy to be perceived, so
his skipper gave one of his earnest laughs, and replied:
"You mean _wool_, I reckon!"
* * * * *
LOG-ROLLING TO SAVE LIVES.
It was in the spring after the deep snow of 1831, that three or four
lumbermen, who had built a large flatboat for carrying a cargo to New
Orleans, were on the Sangamon River, trying the rowboat, or scow, to
accompany the vessel. The river was very high and on the run. Two of
the men leaped into the boat to get the drink for being the first in,
and sent her out into the current. They were unable to stem it and row
back. Lincoln shouted for them to head up and try the sleeping, or dead
water, along shore. But they were mastered, and paddled for a wrecked
boat, which had a pole sticking up. But though the man who grabbed for
it secured his hold, the boat was capsized and the other was flung into
the tide.
Lincoln, as captain, shouted out to him:
"Carman, swim for that elm-tree down there! You can catch it! Keep
calm. Lay hold of a branch."
The tree was at a convenient height, and Carman caught on and swung
himself out; but the icy water chilled him to the bone. But he was safe
for the present, seeing which the captain called out to the other to
let go his pole and let himself be carried down to the tree, also. If
he hung on in the open there much longer, he would become stiff and
unable to swim. The man managed to reach his mate, and the two were
joined at the tree.
The manager of the rescue found a log and, attaching a rope, rolled it
into the stream, with the help of others who had arrived on the scene.
They towed it up some distance to get a good send-off, and a young
daredevil got on it with the intention of being floated down to the
tree, where all three would become passengers and be drawn home. But in
his haste to do so, Jim Dorrell raised himself off his log by the
branch he grasped and, along with the other unfortunates, made three
men to be saved.
When the riderless log was hauled up inshore, Lincoln mounted it to
make the next cast in person. Having an extra rope with him, he lassoed
the tree and soon drew the log up. Cold as they were, the three men
dropped down and straddled beside him. At his orders the men on the
bank held the rope taut, so that the log, allowed to swing off freely,
slung around with the current to the side, and the four were
disembarked. This made Abraham the hero of the Sangamon River among the
boatmen.
(Narrated by John Rolls, of New Salem, a witness.)
* * * * *
LINCOLN'S FIRST DOLLAR.
As in all farming communities, where the only movement of currency is
when the crop comes in and the debts accumulating during the growth are
settled and the slight surplus spent, the Indiana pioneers little knew
"extra" cash. To obtain it, the men used their off hours in guiding
intending settlers, assisting surveyors and prospectors, felling and
hewing trees, and horse-trading. Another source of income out of bounds
was to send a stock of produce down the river to sell or barter for the
Southern plantation produce. As there was talk at home of furnishing
their house, Abraham bethought him of this resource. His father
consented readily to any notion that might result in gain, and his
mother, though believing nearly two thousand miles of water travel
onerous, allowed her "yes." Besides, the young man, by excessive work
on their place, had piled up a goodly stock of salable stuff. Abraham
had only to make a boat. It was small, merely to hold the "venture" and
his hand-bundle of "plunder" for the trip and land cruise at New
Orleans. Western country boys who had seen the Crescent City talked of
the exploit as the Easterners of seeing Europe.
Abe was maneuvering his boat on the Ohio River, at Rockport, when he
heard the whistle announcing the approach of a steamboat. These craft
were not enabled to make a landing anywhere, even with a run-out
gang-plank--but took passengers and parcels aboard by lighters.
Lincoln's small boat seemed admirably placed to serve as a transport to
a couple of gentlemen who came down to the shore to ship on the
steamboat. Their trunks were taken out of their carriages, and they
selected Lincoln's new boat among some others. In his homespun, the
gawky youth looked what he was--not the owner of the craft and about to
try a speculation on the river, but one of the "scrubs." The "scrubs,"
not from any relation with washing--quite otherwise--were those poor
families on the outskirts of towns who lived in the scrub or dwarfed
pines. Accordingly one of them asked, indicating the flatboat:
"Who owns this?"
The hero relates the story thus:
"'I answered, somewhat modestly: 'I do!'
"'Will you take us and our trunks out to the steamboat?'
"'Certainly,' glad of the chance of earning something. I supposed that
each of them would give two or three _bits_--practically the dime of
nowadays."
Lincoln carried the passengers aboard the vessel and handed up their
trunks. Each of the gentlemen drew out a piece of silver and threw it
on the little deck.
"Gentlemen, you may think it was a very little thing, and in these days
it seems to me a trifle; but it was a most important incident in my
life. I could scarcely believe my eyes as I picked up the two silver
half-dollars. I could scarcely credit that I, a poor boy, had earned a
dollar in less than a day--that by honest work, I had earned a dollar!"
(Lincoln's flatboatman wage was $10 a month.)
(Related by Frank B. Carpenter, the portrait-painter, as given out by
President Lincoln to a party of friends in the White House executive
chamber, Secretary Seward, notably, being among them.)
* * * * *
CONVICTION THROUGH A THRASHING.
In 1831, Abraham Lincoln, returning from a voyage to New Orleans, paid
the usual filial visit to his father, living in Coles County. A famous
wrestler, one Needham, hearing of the newcomer's prowess in wrestling,
more general than pugilism on the border, called to try their strength.
As the professional was in practise, and as the other, from his amiable
disposition and his forbidding appearance was not so, the latter
declined the honor of a hug and the forced repose of lying on the back.
Nevertheless, taunted into the trial, he met the champion and defeated
him in two goes. The beaten one was chagrined, and vented his vexation
in this defiance:
"You have thrown me twice, Lincoln, but you cannot _whip_ me!"
"I do not want to, and I don't want to get whipped myself," was the
simple reply.
"Well, I 'stump' you to lick me!" went on Needham, thinking he was
gaining ground. "Throwing a man is one thing and licking him another!"
"Look here, Needham," said the badgered man, at last, "if you are not
satisfied that I can throw you every time, and want to be convinced
through a thrashing, I will do that, too, for your sake!"
The man "backed out." But he was ever afterward one of the champion's
warmest friends.
* * * * *
BOATING ON GROUND "A LEETLE DAMP."
In a letter of August, 1862, the President alludes to the amphibious
minor navy, which made their tracks "wherever the ground was a little
damp." This is hardly an exaggeration of Western shallow-water
navigation. Lincoln, as pilot on the Sangamon River in 1831, was
engaged to run a steamboat called the _Talisman_, after Sir Walter
Scott's popular romance. It was to test the point whether the Sangamon
River was navigable or not, an important local problem on which
Lincoln, later, got into the legislature. As he had "tried" the river a
good deal with the flatboats, he answered, he would try and do the best
he could. A large crowd flocked in from all sides to witness the
experiment. Lincoln guided the bark well up to the New Salem dam. Here
a gap had been cut to let the vessel slip through. But at a place
called Bogue's Mill, the water was rapidly lowering, and they had to
wheel about and get back, or be shoaled and be held there until the
spring freshets. The return trip was slow, as, though the stream was in
his favor, the high prairie wind delayed the boat. The falling water
had made the broken hole in the dam impracticable. But Lincoln backed
the _Talisman_ off as soon as she stranded and stuck; and, by casting
an anchor so as to act as a gigantic grapnel, to tear away some more of
the dam, the opening sufficed for the boat to "coast" on the stones and
get over into deep water. "I think," says an old boatman--J. R. ("Row")
Herndon--"that the captain gave Lincoln forty dollars to keep on to
Beardstown. I am sure I got that!"
* * * * *
THE INITIATOR INSTALLED.
As a fruit of incessant study Abraham Lincoln fitted himself to accept
the post of clerk at Offutt's store, in New Salem, in 1831. It was a
responsible position, requiring strict honesty, intelligence, glib
talk, attention, and courtesy to the few dames in the population of
twenty households, "with the back settlement to hear from." In fact,
Lincoln's gifts and cultivated acquirements made him such a favorite
that the list of customers from out of town was extensive. This
promotion of a newcomer nettled the bad element of the region. They
were located from congeniality in a suburb termed Clary's Grove. Like
the tail which undertakes to wag the dog, this tag constituted itself
the criterion and proposed "initiating" any accession to the
inhabitants. To take the conceit out of the upstart who had leaped from
the flatboat deck to behind the counter at the store--the acme of a
bumpkin's ambition--they selected their bully. This Jack Armstrong was
held so high by Bill Clary, "father" of the Grove boys, that he bet
with Offutt, over-loud in praise of his help, that Jack could beat Abe,
"and your Abe has got to be initiated, anyway!"
Abraham refused under provocation to have anything to do with
"rough-and-tumble" fighting--as also known as "scuffle and tussle," and
"wooling and pulling"--in short, these agreeable features promise to
include all brutalities save gouging, which was unfashionable so far to
the North. But a man could not live quietly on the frontier without
showing to such ruffians that his hands could shield his head. For the
honor of the store, the clerk had to stand up to the opponent.
The bout came off. In the first attack, Lincoln lifted the foe, though
heavier, clean off his feet, but he was unable to lay him down in the
orthodox manner, consisting in placing him flat on his back, with both
shoulder-blades denting the earth. The semi-victor amicably said:
"Let's quit, Jack! You see I cannot give you the fall--and you cannot
give it me."
The gang shouted for a resumption of the "sport," thinking this was
weakness of the competitor. They joined again, but Armstrong, having
his doubts, resorted to foul play--kicking or "legging," as the
localism stands. Indignantly, Lincoln drew him up again and shook him
in mid-air as a terrier does a rat. The rowdies, seeing their champion
bested, shouted for him to make a _fight_ of it, and probably they
would have "mixed in" and made a "fight for all" in another minute. But
Jack had his doubts set at rest as to the prospect of overcoming a man
who could hold him out and off at arm's length; and, begging to be set
down, grasped his antagonist's hand in friendship and proclaimed him
the best man "who had ever broke into" that section. The two became
friends, and the gang gradually dwindled by this recession from their
ranks of their Goliath.
* * * * *
THE HORRORS FOR THE THIRD TIME!
When Abraham Lincoln was a poor young lawyer from Springfield,
attending the perambulatory court down at Lewiston, Illinois, he found
the place crowded by a Methodist meeting as well as the court having an
attractive case to try. He was obliged--because of exclusion from the
inn--to put up at the sheriff's house. Mrs. Davidson herself could only
offer him shares with Mr. Stephen A. Douglas, also a rising man, and
Peter Cartwright, the noted preacher--on the floor, but on a feather
bed. At that period the wild goose flew low. It may be supposed that
the student of Shakespeare might quote "When shall we three meet
again?" on rising between the famous border worthies in the dawn. The
hospitality was so refreshing that the trio spent the next night there.
They sat up by the large fireside, capping stories. The enmity of
lawyers, and even of politicians, is but skin-deep, and Steve and Abe
clashed not at all to meet the minister's reproof. Lincoln rocked while
story-telling in a cane-bottomed chair, taken from the steamboat
celebrated in Spoon River annals as its first navigator. Lincoln was
the more interested, as he had been boatman and pilot on his river, the
Sangamon. In the 1820's, this toy boat, the _Utility_, struggled into
the high water of Spoon River. It is a tributary of the Illinois. Now,
though the county is named Fulton, none of the inhabitants knew
anything about the inventor of steam navigation, and doubted that a
steamboat existed near them. Hence the snorting, puffing, and clangor
of the vessel as she surged against the freshet, alarmed all the
population in hearing when she ascended the virgin Spoon.
One Sam Jenkins had been on a spree for a week, and even he was roused
by the tremendous sound. As he rushed from his cabin, by the terrific
blaze from the high smoke-stack and the furnace burning pitch-pine, he
sank onto his shaking knees and yelled:
"Boys, I have got 'em for the third time! It is all up with me!"
* * * * *
THE WHISTLE THAT STOPPED THE BOAT.
Lincoln was pitted, as a lawyer, against a brother of the toga who was
of fat and plethoric habit, and who puffed and blowed when most he
wished to get on with his speech. The wag said:
"The gentleman reminds me of a little steamboat I knew about on the
Spoon River. She had been equipped with a whistle disproportionate to
her capacity of steam-power, and every time she blew off it stopped the
boat!"
* * * * *
IT IS THE DEED, NOT THE DOER.
By one of those unaccountable contradictions which disturb one's
calculations upon women's conduct, the fair sex "took to" him with
extraordinary kindness, though he always remained shy in their
presence. This favor on their part was fortified by his striking
honesty in little points which the close-seeing feminine eye never
misses. To cap the climax he defended the purity of social order with a
rarity in those quarters sufficient to single him out. Not that the
roughest Westerner was not excessively gallant, but his restrictions in
the ladies' presence did not always curb his proneness to "tall talk."
Once in the way, a loafer hanging about in the store, and having paid
only attention to the dram counter, the necessary concomitant of the
village center, became garrulous, but unfortunately more than seasoned
the flow with a profanity tolerably rich in variety if not
distinguished for refinement; he was of the Clary's Grove _genus_. As
there was a crowd at the "ladies' department," that is, the dry-goods
and finery, where it happened Lincoln was commonly besieged, the
language was resented by woman's weapons--tosses of the head, affected
deafness, glances into the future, and so on, but the clerk resented it
in another way. He bade him be silent.
Now, the fellow thought, with his kind, that he was entitled to exhale
the breath which was strengthened by the strong waters vended here, and
expressed himself more foully than before.
He had a resentment against the clod rising to be a flower of courtesy,
and here was his opportunity to satisfy the grudge, and before an
audience timid and not apt to intervene.
Singularly, the men who most despise women are the ones who seek to
have her applause. He wished to see the man who would stop him from
uttering his sentiments. He was answered that his business would be
attended to, as soon as the offended ladies had withdrawn.
The undesired witnesses took the hint and quitted the store. Thereupon
the long-limbed clerk verified the taunt of "counter-jumper" by
clearing it at a bound. "Will you engage not to repeat that rowdy
(blackguard) talk in the store while I am the master, and leave
instanter?"
The bully protested in a torrent of unrepeatable words.
"I see," said the champion of decency, "you want a whipping, and _I_
may as well give it you as any other man."
And he forthwith administered the correction; not only did he drag him
outdoors, but laid him out so senseless that nothing less than the
border finish of a knock-down and drag-out encounter--the rubbing the
conquered man's eyes with smart-weed--revived him to beg for mercy, and
a drink. The victor allowed him to rise, converted his appeal into
mockery by offering plain water, which the brute applied solely to his
doubly inflamed eyes, and sent him away in tears. But the shock had a
reparative effect; he became a good neighbor, and a convert to
temperance.
(This or a similar lesson to the village bully is testified to by an
eye-witness of Sangamon, but resident of Viroqua, Wisconsin; his name
is John White. He worked at chopping rails with the rail-splitter on
more than one job.)
* * * * *
TURN OUT OR BE TURNED OUT.
Superintendent Tinker, of the W. U. T., says he heard Secretary Seward
say to President Lincoln:
"Mr. President, I hear that you turned out for a colored woman on a
muddy crossing the other day?"
"Did you?" returned the other laughingly. "Well, I don't remember it;
but I always make it a rule, if people do not turn out for me, I will
for them. If I didn't, there would be a collision."
* * * * *
THE BEST THING TO TAKE.
When Lincoln worked in and kept a grocery-store, it was flanked by a
groggery and he had to supply spirits, but from that fact he saw the
evils of the saloon and early identified himself with the novel
temperance movement. In 1843, he joined the Sons of Temperance. While
he said he was temperate on theory, it was not so--he was practically
abstinent. Not only did he lecture publicly, but, at one such occasion,
he gave out the pledges. In decorating a boy, Cleophas Breckenridge,
with a badge, after he took the pledge, he said:
"Sonny, that is the best thing you will ever _take_."
* * * * *
DRINKING AND SWALLOWING ARE TWO THINGS.
It has been stated that Lincoln, after reigning at the village store,
had become the idol of the settlement. A stranger to whom he was shown
was not properly impressed. One of the clerk's friends, William Greene,
bragged that his favorite was the strongest man in the township--this
was not affecting the critic--and even went on: "The strongest in the
country!"
"H'm! not the strongest in the State!" denied the stranger. "I know a
man who can lift a barrel of flour as easily as I can a peck of
potatoes."
"Abe, there, could lift _two_ barrels of flour if he could get a hold
on them."
"You can beat me telling 'raisers', but--"
"Taking a lift out of you or not, I am willing to bet that Abe will
lift a barrel of spirits and drink out of the bunghole to prove he can
hold it there!"
"Impossible! What will you lay on the thing?"
They made a wager of a new hat--the Sunday hat of beaver being still
costly.
Greene was betting unfairly--on a sure thing--as he had seen his friend
do what he asserted, all but the drinking flourish. Lincoln was averse
to the wagering at all, but to help his friend to the hat, he consented
to the feat. He passed through it, lifting the cask between his two
hands and holding the spigot-hole to his lips while he imbibed a
mouthful. As he was slowly lowering the barrel to the floor, the winner
exclaimed jubilately:
"I knew you would do it; but I never knew you to drink whisky before!"
The barrel was stood on the floor, when the drinker calmly expelled the
mouthful of its contents, and drolly remarked:
"And I have not _drunk_ that, you see!"
As a return for his action to win the hat, he asked Greene not to wager
any more--a resolve which he took to oblige him.
* * * * *
WORSTED IN A HORSE-TRADE.
Until Lincoln--seeing that his decisions created enemies, whichever way
they fell--renounced being umpire for horse-racing and the like events,
momentous on the border, he officiated in many such pastimes. Before he
found them "all wrong," he had a horsy acquaintance in a judge. This
was at a time when he was practising law, which involved riding on
circuit, as the court went round to give sittings like the ancient
English justices, attending assizes. During such excursions, they
played practical jokes, naturally. Among their singular contests was a
bet of twenty-five dollars--as forfeit if, in horse-swapping, the loser
rejected the horse offered on even terms with the one he "put in."
Neither was to know anything of the equine paragon until simultaneously
exhibited.
As good sport was indicated where two such arrant jokers were in
conflict, a vast throng filled the tavern-yard where the pair were to
draw conclusions. At the appointed hour the court functionary dragged
upon the scene a most dilapidated _simulacrum_ of man's noblest
conquest--blind, spavined, lean as Pharaoh's _kind_, creeking in every
joint--at the same time that his fellow wagerer carried on under his
long arm a carpenter's _horse_--gashed with adze and broadax, bored
with the augur, trenched with saw and draw-knife--singed, paint, and
tar-spotted, crazy in each leg of the three still adhering--in short,
justifying Lincoln to reverse his cry at viewing the real animal:
"Jedge (for judge), this is the first time I ever _got the worst_ of it
in a hoss-trade!"
* * * * *
HOW MANY SHORT BREATHS?
In the nearest town to the Lincolns lived a man called "Captain"
Larkins. He was short and fat, and consequently "puffing." He was
logically fond of "blowing." For example, if he bought any object, he
would proclaim that it was the best article of its sort in the
settlement. His favorite orating-ground--in fact, the only theater for
displays was the front of the village store, where, among the farmers
who came in to dicker and purchase stores, he would dilate. Lincoln did
not like the pompous little fellow whose rotund and diminutive figure
was in glaring contrast to his own--a young man, but colossal, while
his stature was augmented by his meagerness.
"Gentlemen," bawled Larkins, "I have the best horse in the county! I
ran him three miles in two-forty each and he never fetched a long
breath!"
"H'm!" interrupted Lincoln, looking down at the man panting with
excitement; "why don't you tell us how many short breaths _you_ drew?"
* * * * *
LINCOLN'S HEIGHT.
One of the committee appointed to acquaint Mr. Lincoln formally with
the decision of the Chicago Presidential Convention of 1860 was Judge
Kelly, a man of unusual stature. At the meeting with the nominee he
eyed the latter with admiration and the jealousy the exceptional
cherish for rivals. This had not escaped the curious Lincoln; he asked
him, as he singled him out: "What is your height?"
"Six feet three. What is yours?"
"Six feet four." [Footnote: This will probably never be exactly settled
now. Speaker Reed agreed with this statement. But Miss Emma Gurley
Adams, in a position to know, published in the New York _Press_: "Mr.
Lincoln told my father that he was exactly six feet three inches." This
was at the end of his life. The contrariety of the assertions simply
baffles one.]
"Then, sir, Pennsylvania bows to Illinois," responded the judge. "My
dear sir, for years my heart has been aching for a President I could
look up to, and I have found him at last in the land where we thought
there were none but _little_ giants."
(Stephen Douglas, leader of the Democratic party, was a pocket Daniel
Webster and bearing the by-name of "the Little Giant.")
* * * * *
MEASURES AND MEN.
The earlier audiences at the White House were inspired by ludicrous
ideas, far between patriotism and interest in the "tall Hoosier." The
habitual attendants and guards soon discovered that the chief was an
unrivaled host, adapting modes of reception to the differing kind of
callers. He noticed once two young men who hung about the door, so
that, sympathizing with the shy--for he had been wofully troubled by
that feeling in his youth--he went over to the pair, and to make them
feel at home, asked them to be seated while they looked on. But they
didn't care for chairs. The shorter of the two stammered that he and
his friend had a talk about the President's unusual height, and would
the host kindly settle the matter, and see whether he were as tall as
his excellency.
Lincoln had been scanning the competitor and, smiling, returned: "He is
_long_ enough, certainly. Let us see about that." He went for his cane
[Footnote: Lincoln's cane. This was the cane he carried, instead of
going armed. But he was forever leaving it anywhere about, so that,
nine times out of ten, he went forth without it on his errant
"browsing" around; and it was a wonder that this time he knew where to
find it.] and, placing the ferule end to the wall, to act as a level,
he bade the young man draw near and stand under. When the rod was
carefully adjusted to the top of the head, Mr. Lincoln continued:
"Now, step out and hold the cane while I go under."
This comparison showed that the young man stood six feet three exactly.
Lincoln's precise figure, too.
"Just my height," remarked the affable President to the herald of the
match; "he guessed with admirable accuracy!"
Giving both a shake of the hand, he gave them the good-by warmly. He
had seen that they were innocents and shrank from letting them know
that they had unconsciously offended his dignity.
* * * * *
THE PRIZE FOR HOMELINESS.
In keeping with his proneness to jest at his own expense rather than
lose a laugh, Lincoln is credited with telling the following story upon
himself:
"In the days when I used to be on the circuit (law), I was accosted on
the road by a stranger. He said: 'Excuse me, sir, but I have an article
in my possession which belongs to you.' 'How is that?' I asked,
considerably astonished.
"The stranger took a 'Barlow' from his pocket.
"'This knife,' said he, 'was placed in my hands some years ago with the
injunction of the community, through its bearer, that I was to keep it
until I struck a man homelier than I. I have carried it from that time
till this. Allow me to say, sir, that you are fairly entitled to the
testimonial.'"
* * * * *
HOW LONG LEGS SHOULD BE.
A quipster, harping on Mr. Lincoln's abnormal tallness, had the mishap
to draw upon himself some quizzing; the President putting the _non
plus_ on him by asking:
"How long, then, ought a man's legs to be?"
The answer was given by the sphinx:
"Long enough to reach from his body to the ground."
* * * * *
LONG METER.
John Sherman will be remembered as originator of the politicians'
"cover" for electioneering activity, "I am going home to mend my
fences." He was fresh from Ohio, but he included in his round of
duties, on visiting the capital, an attendance of a Lincoln reception.
He waited in the long file for his turn to shake hands, and, while
doing so, wondered how he would be received. For the informal
"function" was enlivened by the most untoward incidents, due to the
host's simplicity, spontaneous acts and words, and the homelike nature
of the scene. Truly enough, when his chance came, the meeting was
eccentric.
Lincoln scanned him a moment, threw out his large hand, and said:
"'You're a pretty tall fellow, aren't you? Stand up here to me, back to
back, and let's see which of us two is the taller!'
"In another moment I was standing back to back with the greatest man of
his age. Naturally I was quite abashed by this unexpected evidence of
democracy.
"'You are from the West, aren't you?' inquired Lincoln.
"'My home is in Ohio,' I replied.
"'I thought so', he said; 'that's the kind of men they raise out
there!'"
* * * * *
"HARDSHIPS STRENGTHEN MUSCLES."
As in the old country, kings evade the tiresome features of receptions,
after a time, by retiring and leaving the ceremony to be carried out by
a deputy, so the daintier Presidents before the sixteenth one eluded
the handshaking when possible. But, on the contrary, "the man out of
the West" continued to the last, and the latest visitor had no reason
to cavil at the grip being less hearty to him than the first comer. On
visiting the army hospital at City Point, where upward of three
thousand patients awaited his passing with enrapt respect, he insisted
on no one being neglected. A surgeon inquired if he did not feel lamed
in the arm by the undue exertion, whereupon he replied smilingly:
"Not at all. The hardships of my early life gave me strong muscles."
And as there happened to be in the yard, by the doorway, a
chopping-block with the ax left stuck on the top as usual, he took it
out, swung, and poised it to get the unfamiliar heft, and chopped up a
stick lying handy. When he paused, from no more left to do, he held out
the implement straight, forming one line with his extended arm, and not
a nerve quivered any more than the helve or the blade. The workers, who
knew what hard work was, gazed with wonder at what they could not have
done for a moment. One of them gathered up the chips and disposed of
them for relics to the sightseers who welcomed such tokens of the great
ruler.
(An American visiting Mr. Gladstone's country seat, Hawarden, and
seeing the premier chopping a tree for health's sake, observed
humorously, having also seen Mr. Lincoln employed as above: "Your Grand
Old Man is going in at the same hole ours went out!")
* * * * *
HE USED TO BE "GOOD ON THE CHOP."
In the beginning of 1865, the President was wont to pay visits to the
James River, not merely to inspect the camps and the field-hospitals,
but to have a peep at "the promised _land_"--that is, Richmond, still
held by the rapidly melting and discouraged Southerners as the "Last
Ditch." In one of his strolls he came upon a gang of lumbermen cutting
up logs and putting up stockades and cabins for the wet weather.
Joining one group he chatted freely with the woodmen and as one of
themselves. Presently, he asked for the loan of an ax. The man
hesitating, since his blade had just been fine-edged, he explained that
he was one of the Jacks and "used to be good on the chop." Then seizing
the arm with familiarity he attacked a big log and, using it as a
broad-ax, shaped the rough-hewn sides till it was a perfect slab. He
handed back the tool and stalked off amid cheers.
* * * * *
A MAN WHO CAN SCRATCH HIS SHINS WITHOUT STOOPING.
One of the want-to-knows had the impertinence to inquire of Mr. Lincoln
his opinion of General Sheridan, not yet known, who had come out of the
West early in 1864, to take command of the cavalry under General Grant
as lieutenant-general.
"Have you not seen Sheridan?" The answer was in the negative. "Then I
will tell you just what kind of a chap he is: One of those _long_-armed
fellows, with _short_ legs, that can scratch their shins without having
to stoop over to do it!"
* * * * *
STRUCK BY THE DEAD HAND.
Edwin Booth, the tragedian, brother of the regicide Wilkes, was at a
friend's house. By the purest chance, dallying over the knickknacks, he
picked up a plaster-cast of a hand. It was something more than a
paper-weight, he was intuitively prompted, for he said, handling it
reverently as Yorick's relict:
"By the way, whose is this?"
Before the cue could be given to hush or utter a subterfuge, some one
blurted out:
"Abraham Lincoln's! Don't you know?"
"The murder was out!" and the distinguished guest, who suffered a long
term for a crime wholly out of his ken, was silent for the
evening.--(W. D. Howells.)
* * * * *
THIS CLINCHES IT.
A party accompanying the President to the ground to see experiments
with new ordnance in the Navy Yard, in 1862, were diverted by his
taking up a ship-carpenter's ax from its nick in a spar, and holding it
out by the end of the handle; a feat that none of the group could
imitate.
He said that he had enough of the Dahlgreens, Columbiads, and Raphael
repeaters--and that this was an American institution, which, "I guess,
I understand better than all other weapons!"
* * * * *
LINCOLN'S FIRST LOVE-STORY.
In 1833, when Abraham was just over twenty, he fell in love with Anne,
or Annie Rutledge, at New Salem. Her father kept the tavern where
Lincoln boarded. But the girl was engaged to a dry-goods merchant,
named McNeil. This man, pretending to be of a high old Irish family,
likely to discountenance union to a publican's daughter,
shilly-shallied, but finally went East to get his folks' consent. He
acknowledged that he was parading under borrowed plumes, as he was a
McNamara in reality. He stayed away so long that the maid-forlorn gave
him up and listened to other suitors. Lincoln proposed, but waited till
the apparent jilt was heard from. Then they were espoused. But a block
to the match came in Lincoln having no position. Awaiting his efforts
as a law student, the wedding was postponed; but, meanwhile, death came
quick where fortune lagged. She died and left her lover broken-hearted.
He seems then to have been smitten with the brown study afflicting him
all his life, and by some, like Secretary Boutwell, affirmed to be
independent of the surrounding grounds for depression and grief. Fears
of suicide led his friends to watch him closely; and he was known to go
and lie on the grave of the maid, whose name he said would dwell ever
with him, while his heart was buried with her. The rival, McNamara,
returned too late to redeem his vow, but lived in the same State many
years, "a prosperous gentleman."
* * * * *
A PUT-UP JOB--OR CHANCE?
The ways of the petitioner are deep and mysterious. The Virginia
(Illinois) _Enquirer_, March 1, 1879, had the following:
"John McNamer (Namara?) was buried last Sunday, near Petersburg, Menard
County. He was an early settler and carried on business at New Salem.
Abe Lincoln was the postmaster there and kept a store. It was here
that, at the tavern, dwelt the fair Annie Rutledge, in whose grave
Lincoln wrote that his heart was buried. As the story runs, the fair
and gentle Annie was John's sweetheart, but Abe took 'a shine' to her,
and succeeded in heading off Mac, and won her affections. During the
war, a Kentucky lady went to Washington with her daughter to procure
her son's pardon for being a guerrilla. The daughter was a musician.
Sitting at the piano while her mother was sewing, she sang 'Gentle
Annie.' While it was being charmingly rendered, Abe rose from his seat,
crossed the room to a window, and gazed out for several minutes with
that sad, 'far-away' look noticed as one of his particularities. When
he returned to his seat he wrote a note which, as he said, was the
pardon besought. The scene proves that Mr. Lincoln was a man of fine
feelings, and that, if the occurrence was a put-up job on the lady's
part, it accomplished the purpose all the same."
* * * * *
LINCOLN'S MARRIAGE.
In 1839, another Kentucky belle [Footnote: Addressing Kentuckians in a
speech made at Cincinnati, in 1859, Lincoln said: "We mean to marry our
girls when we have a chance; and I have the honor to say I once did
have a chance in that way."] arrived in Illinois to follow the steps of
her sister, who had found a conquest there. This Mrs. Edwards
introduced Miss Mary Todd, and she became the belle of the Sangamon
bottom. Lincoln was pitted against another young lawyer, afterward the
eminent Stephen A. Douglas, but, odd as it appears, Miss Todd singled
out the Ugly Duckling as the more eligible of the two. Whatever the
reason--strange in a man knowing how to bide his time to win--Lincoln
wrote to the lady, withdrawing from the contest, allowed to be hopeless
by him. His friend Speed would not bear the letter, but pressed him to
have a face-to-face explanation. The rogue--who was in the toils
himself, and was shortly wedded--believed the parley would remove the,
perhaps, imaginary hindrance. But Miss Todd accepted the deliverance;
thereupon they parted--but immediately the reconciliation took place.
The nuptials were settled, but here again Lincoln displayed a
waywardness utterly out of keeping with his subsequent actions. He
"bolted" on the wedding-day--New-year's, 1841. Searching for him, his
friends--remembering the fit after the Rutledge death--found him in the
woods like the Passionate Pilgrim of ancient romance. Luckily he was
inspirited by them with a feeling that an irrepressible desire to live
till assured that the world is "a little better for my having lived in
it." Seeing what ensued, one could say then "Good _Speed_!" to his
bosom friend of that name. But this friend married in the next year,
and in his cold loneliness so doubled, Lincoln harked back to the
flame. She ought never to have forgiven him for the slight, but it was
not possible for her to repay him with poetic justice by rejoicing
Stephen A. Douglas, as that gentleman had looked elsewhere for
matrimonial recompense. Lincoln and Miss Todd, in 1842, renewed the old
plight and never again were divided.
* * * * *
THE BURLESQUE DUEL.
Lincoln was plunged willy-nilly into the society he shunned at home, on
entering the legislature at Springfield. A newspaper there published
the account--from her side--of a young lady's difference with a noted
politician, General James Shields. He married a sister of Lincoln's
wife, and there was a feud between them. Shields flew to the editor to
demand the name of the maligner, as he called the correspondent, or the
editor must meet him with dueling weapon--or his horsewhip. In the
Western States the whip was snapped at literary men as the cane was
flourished in England at the date, 1842.
The editor consulted with Lincoln as a lawyer and a friend. With his
enmity as to Shields, the friend promptly advised him to say "I did
it!" This was, in fact, sheer justice, for it was Lincoln's wife who
uttered the articles. And, by the way, their style and rustic humor
were much in the vein of the "Widow Bedott" and the "Samantha" papers
of later times. Mrs. Lincoln was not the mere housekeeper the scribes
accuse her of being. Lincoln knew what was her value when he read his
speeches first to her for an opinion, as Molière courted his stewardess
for opinions. Sumner heeded her counsel.
Abraham championed the mysterious "Aunt 'Becca," who had characterized
Shields as "a ballroom dandy floating around without heft or substance,
just like a lot of cat-fur where cats have been fighting." Is not this
quite Lincolnian?
Thus put forward, Lincoln received a challenge.
Trial by battle-personal still ruled. The politicians coupled with the
necessity of going out with weapons to maintain an assertion in speech
or publication were Jefferson Davis, Jackson, the President; Henry
Clay, the amiable; Sam Houston, Sergeant S. Prentiss, etc.
Shields naturally challenged the lady's champion. As the challenged
party, Lincoln, who had cooled in the interim, not only chose
broadswords (not at all "the gentleman's arm in an affair of honor"),
but, what is more, descanted on the qualities of the cutlas in such a
droll manner and words that the second went off laughing. He imparted
his unseemly mirth to his opponent's seconds, and all the parties
concerned took the cue to soften down the irritation between two
persons formerly "chums," and relatives so close.
The meeting took place by the river-side out of Alton, where the
leaking out of the gallantry of Lincoln in taking up the cudgels for
the lady led to an explanation, although no such enlightenment ought to
be permitted on the ground. Besides, all was ludicrous--the broadswords
intolerably broad.
The principals shook hands. But the plotters were not content with this
peaceful ending. They had determined that the outside spectators on the
town side of the river should be "in at the (sham) death." They rigged
up a log in a coat and sheet like a man wounded and reclining in the
bottom of a boat, and pretended it was one of the duelists, badly
stricken, whom they were escorting to town for surgical assistance. The
explosion of laughter receiving the two principals when the hoax was
revealed caused the incident to be a sore point to both Lincoln and
Shields.
* * * * *
"WANTING TO DANCE THE WORST WAY."
A Miss Mary Todd had come to visit a sister married in the neighborhood
of Springfield. Lincoln was there as a member of the legislature
sitting. He had eschewed society, though he liked it, in favor of
study, but now rewarded himself for achieving this fruit of application
by joining the movements around him. He made the acquaintance of Miss
Todd, vivacious, sprightly, keenly insighted so as to divine he would
prove superior in fate to Stephen Douglas, also courting her. Although
unsuited by nature and his means to shine in the ballroom, Lincoln
followed his flame thither. Using the vernacular, he asked for her
hand, saying earnestly:
"Miss Todd, I should like to dance with you _the worst way._"
After he had led his partner to her seat, a friend asked how the clumsy
partner had carried himself.
"He kept his word. He did dance the worst way!"
* * * * *
"THE STATUTE FIXES ALL THAT!"
Even Lincoln's marriage was to be accompanied by a diversion of that
merry imp of incongruity always with him--as Shakespeare's most stately
heroes are attended by a comic servant. He married Miss Mary Todd, of
Kentucky, at Springfield, at the age of thirty-three. It was the first
wedding performed with all the ceremonial of the Episcopalian sect.
This was to the awe of the Honorable Judge Tom C. Brown, an old man,
and friend and patron of our Abraham. He watched the ecclesiastical
functionary to the point of Lincoln's placing the ring on his bride's
finger, when the irate old stager exclaimed at the formula: "With this
ring I thee endow with all my goods," etc.
"Grace to Goshen! Lincoln, the statute fixes all that!"
* * * * *
HE DID NOT KNOW HIS OWN HOUSE.
In 1842 Abraham Lincoln married Miss Mary Todd, a Kentucky lady, at
Springfield, where he took a house for the wedded life. Previously,
while qualifying for the bar, he had dwelt for study over a
furniture-store.
On account of his attending the traveling court, which compelled a
horse, since he could not afford the gig associated with the chief
lawyers' degree of respectability, he was frequently and for long
spells away from home. In one of these absences his wife deemed it fit
for his coming dignity of pleader to have a second story and roof of a
fashionable type set upon the old foundations. Under a fresh coat of
paint, too, this renovation perplexed the home-comer when he drew up
his horse before it. At the sound of the horse's steps he knew that
some one was flying to the parlor window, but, affecting amazement, he
challenged a passer-by:
"Neighbor, I feel like a stranger here. Can you tell me where Abraham
Lincoln lives? He used to live here!"
* * * * *
THE ONLY ONE WHO DARED "PULL WOOL OVER LINCOLN'S EYES."
While Mr. Lincoln was living in Springfield, a judge of the city, who
was one of the leading and most influential citizens of the place, had
occasion to call upon him. Mr. Lincoln was not overparticular in his
matter of dress, and was also careless in his manners. The judge was
ushered into the parlor, where he found Mr. Lincoln sprawled out across
a couple of chairs, reclining at his ease. The judge was asked to be
seated, and, without changing his position in the least, Mr. Lincoln
entered into conversation with his visitor.
While the two men were talking, Mrs. Lincoln entered the room. She was,
of course, greatly embarrassed at Mr. Lincoln's offhand manner of
entertaining his caller, and, stepping up behind her husband, she
grasped him by the hair and twitched his head about, at the same time
looking at him reprovingly.
Mr. Lincoln apparently did not notice the rebuke. He simply looked up
at his wife, then across to the judge, and, without rising, said:
"Little Mary, allow me to introduce you to my friend, Judge So-and-so."
It will be remembered that Mrs. Lincoln's maiden name was Mary Todd,
and that she was very short in stature.--_Leslie's Monthly._
* * * * *
THE LONG AND SHORT OF IT.
The contrast between the statures of the Lincolns, man and wife, was
palpable, but this hardly substantiates the story of the President
appearing with his wife on the White House porch in response to a
serenade, and his saying:
"Here I am, and here is Mrs. Lincoln. That's the long and short of it!"
* * * * *
"ALL A MAN WANTS--TWENTY THOUSAND DOLLARS!"
In one of his messages to Congress, the President foretold and
denounced the tendency of wealth acquired in masses and rapidly by the
war contractors and the like as "approaching despotism." He saw liberty
attacked in "the effort to place capital on an equal footing with--if
not above--labor in the structure of government." It is never to be
forgotten that neither he nor his Cabinet officers were ever upbraided
for corruption; [Footnote: It is true that Lincoln's first war
minister, Simon Cameron, was accused of smoothing the way to certain
fat war contracts, a wit suggesting Simony as the term, but no charges
were really brought. Lincoln said that if one proof were forthcoming,
he would have the Cameronian head--but Mr. Cameron died intact.] some,
like Secretary Stanton, though handling enormous sums, died poor men
comparatively. It is in accordance with this honesty of the "Honest Old
Abe" rule that he said to an old friend whom he met in New York in 1859:
"How have you fared since you left us?"
The merchant gleefully replied that he had made a hundred thousand
dollars in business. "And--lost it all!" with a reflection of Lincoln's
and the Western cool humor. "How is it on your part?"
"Oh, very well; I have the cottage at Springfield, and about eight
hundred dollars. If they make me vice-president with Seward, as some
say they will, I hope I shall be able to increase it to twenty
thousand. That is as much as any man ought to want!"
* * * * *
"I'LL HIT THE THING HARD!"
In Coffin's "Lincoln," it is stated that when Lincoln and Offutt,
boating to New Orleans, attended a slave auction for the first time,
the former said to his companion:
"By the Eternal, if ever I get a chance to hit this thing, I'll hit it
hard!"
The oath was General-President Jackson's, and familiar as a household
word at the day. The promise is premature in a youth of twenty.
Herndon, twenty-five years associated with Lincoln, doubts, but says
that Lincoln did allude to some such utterance. But it is Dennis Hanks,
cousin of Lincoln, who affirms that they two saw such a sight, and that
he knew by his companion's emotion that "the iron had entered into his
soul."
In 1841 Lincoln and Speed had a tedious low-water trip from Louisville
to St. Louis. Lincoln says: "There were on board ten or a dozen slaves
shackled together with irons. That sight was a continual torment to me
... a _thing_ which has and continually exercises the power of making
me miserable."
But his acts show that he "hit the thing hard." It could not recover
from the telling stroke which rent the black oak--the Emancipation Act.
* * * * *
THE "LEX TALIONIS" CHRISTIANIZED.
Frederick Douglass, the colored men's representative, called on the
President to procure a pledge that the unfair treatment of negro
soldiers in the Union uniform should cease by retaliatory measures on
the captured Confederates. But his hearer shrank, from the bare thought
of hanging men in cold blood, even though the rebels should slay the
negroes taken.
"Oh, Douglass, I cannot do that! If I could get hold of the actual
murderers of colored prisoners, I would retaliate; but to hang those
who have no hand in the atrocities, I cannot do _that_!"--(By F.
Douglass, in _Northwestern Advocate_.)
* * * * *
THE SLAVE-DEALER.
"You have among you the class of native tyrants known as the
slave-dealer. He watches your necessities, and crawls up to buy your
slave at a speculating price. If you cannot help it, you sell to him;
but, if you can help it, you drive him from your door. You despise him
utterly; you do not recognize him for a friend, or even as an honest
man. Your children must not play with his; they may rolick freely with
the little negroes, but not with the slave-dealer's children. If you
are obliged to deal with him, you try to go through the job without so
much as touching him. It is common with you to join hands with the men
you meet; but with the slave-dealer you avoid the
ceremony--instinctively shrinking from the snaky contact. If he grows
rich and retires from business, you still remember him, and still keep
up the ban of non-intercourse with him and his family."
"Those who deny the poor negro's natural right to himself and make mere
merchandise of him deserve kickings, contempt, and death."--(Speech;
Reply to Douglas, Peoria, Illinois, October 16, 1854.)
* * * * *
THE NEGRO HOME, OR AGITATION!
Lincoln was admitted to the law practise in 1837; he went into
partnership with John F. Stuart. The latter elected to Congress, he
united his legal talents with S. T. Logan's, a union severed in 1843,
as both the associates were aiming to be congressmen also. Not being
nominated, the consolation was in the courts, with Judge Herndon as
partner. It was from this daily frequentation that the latter was
enabled to write a "Life of Lincoln."
An old colored woman came to them for legal aid. Her case was a sad
one. Brought from Kentucky, Lincoln's natal State, by a planter,
Hinkle, he had set her and children free in Indiana, not fostering the
waning oppression. Her son, growing up, had the rashness to venture on
the steamboat down to New Orleans. His position was as bad as that of
an Americanized foreigner returning into a despotic land. He was
arrested and held for sale, having crossed a Louisiana law framed for
such intrusions: a free negro could be sold here as if never out of
bond. There was little time to redeem him, and Lincoln--whose view of
the institution had not been enchanting--seized the opportunity to hit
"and hit hard!" as he said in the same city on beholding a slave sale.
The office was in Springfield, the capital, and the state-house was
over the way. While Lincoln continued to question and console the poor
sufferer, his partner went over to learn of the governor what he could
do in the matter. But there was no constitutional or even legal right
to interfere with the doings of a sovereign State. This omission as
regards humanity stung Lincoln, always tender on that score, and he
excitedly vowed:
"By virtue of freedom for all, I will have that negro back--or a twenty
years' agitation in Illinois, which will afford its governor a legal
and constitutional right to interfere in such premises."
The only way to rescue the unfortunate young man was to make up a purse
and recompense a correspondent at the city below, to obtain the captive
and return him to his mother.
Such cases, of more often fugitive-slave matters, were not uncommon in
the State. Lincoln was already linked with the ultras on the question,
so that it was said by lawyers applied to, afraid as political
aspirants:
"Go to that Lincoln, the liberator; he will defend a fugitive-slave
case!"
* * * * *
LINCOLN'S VOW.
On the 17th of September, 1862, the Confederate inroad into Maryland
was stopped by the decisive defeat of Antietam, and the raiders were
sent to the retreat. Lincoln called the Cabinet to a special meeting,
and stated that the time had come at last for the proclamation of
freedom to the slaves everywhere in the United States. Public sentiment
would now sustain--after great vacillation, and all his friends were
bent upon it.
"Besides, I promised my God I would do it. Yea, I made a solemn vow
before God that, if General Lee was driven back from Pennsylvania, I
would crown the result by the declaration of freedom to the slave!"
It was remarked that the signature appeared tremulous and uneven, but
the writer affirmed that that was not "because of any uncertainty or
hesitation on my part."
It was done after the public reception, and "three hours' handshaking
is not calculated to improve a man's chirography."
He said to the painter of the "Signing the Emancipation Act," Mr.
Carpenter:
"I believe that I am about as glad over the success of this work as you
are!"
The original was destroyed in the great fire at Chicago, where it was
under exhibition. The pen and the table concerned should be in the
Lincoln Museum. The ink-stand was a wooden one, in private hands, and
bought at public sale when Lincoln relics were not at the current high
price.
* * * * *
"DEN I TAKES TO DE WOODS!"
Secretary Seward, as manager of the foreign relations, met much trouble
from the disposition of the aristocratic realms of Europe to await
eagerly for a breach by which to enter into interference without
quarreling. He was also a great trouble-maker, having the innate
repugnance of men of letters and voice to play second fiddle--since he
was nominated on the trial ballot above Lincoln in the Presidential
Convention. The black speck in the political horizon was San Domingo;
the Abolitionists wanted to help her to attain liberty, in which case
Mother Spain would assuredly come out openly against the United States
and consequently ally with the Confederacy.
The statement of the dilemma--side with Spain, or the black
republic--reminded the President of a negro story, quite akin.
A colored parson was addressing his hearers and drew a dreadful picture
of the sinner in distress. He had two courses before him, however. But
the exhorter asserted in a gush of novelty that:
"Dis narrer way leads on to destruction--and dat broad one to
damnation--"
Feeling he was overshooting the mark by the dismay among his
congregation, he paused, when an impulsive brother started up with
bristling wool and staring eyes, and, making for the door, hallooed:
"In dat case, dis chile he takes to de woods!"
Mr. President elucidated the black prospect.
"I am not willing to assume any new responsibilities at this juncture.
I shall, therefore, avoid going to the one place with Spain or with the
negro to the other--but shall take _to the woods_!"
A strict and honest neutrality was therefore observed, and--San Domingo
is still a bone of contention, though not with Spain, for it is an eye
on our canal.
* * * * *
THE UNPARDONABLE CRIME.
The mass of examples of Lincoln's leniency, mercifulness, and lack of
rigor, lead one to believe he could not be inexorable. But there was
one crime to which he was unforgiving--the truckling to slavery. The
smuggling of slaves into the South was carried on much later than a
guileless public imagine. Only fifty years ago, a slave-trader
languished in a Massachusetts prison, in Newburyport, serving out a
five years' sentence, and still confined from inability to procure the
thousand dollars to pay a superimposed fine. Mr. Alley, congressman of
Lynn, felt compassion, and busied himself to try to procure the
wretch's release. For that he laid the unfortunate's petition before
President Lincoln. It acknowledged the guilt and the justice of his
condemnation; he was penitent and deplored his state--all had fallen
away from him after his conviction. The chief arbiter was touched by
the piteous and emphatic appeal. Nevertheless, he felt constrained to
say to the intermediary:
"My friend, this is a very touching appeal to my feelings. You know
that my weakness is to be, if possible, too easily moved by appeals to
mercy, and if this man were guilty of the foulest murder that the arm
of man could perpetrate, I might forgive him on such an appeal. But the
man who could go to Africa, and rob her of her children, and sell them
into interminable bondage, with no other motive than that which is
furnished by dollars and cents, is so much worse than the most depraved
murderer, that he can never receive pardon at my hands. No! he may rot
in jail before he shall have liberty by any act of mine!"
* * * * *
BEYOND THE BOON.
The other slave-trade case is more tragic than the above.
It roused much excitement, as the conviction for slave-trading was the
first under the special law in any part of the land. The object of the
unique process was William Gordon. Sentenced to be hanged like a
pirate, the most prodigious effort was made to have the penalty relaxed
with a prospect that the term of imprisonment would be curtailed as
soon as decent. It would seem that merchant princes were connected with
the lucrative, if nefarious, traffic in which he was a captain. But the
offense was so flagrant that the New York district attorney went to
Washington to block mistaken clemency. He was all but too late, for the
President had literally under his hand the Gordon reprieve. The
powerful influence reached even into the executive study. Lawyer
Delafield Smith stood firmly upon the need of making an example, and
Mr. Lincoln gave way, but in despair at having to lay aside the pen and
redoom the miserable tool to the gallows, where he was executed, at New
York. "Mr. Smith," sighed the President, "you do not know how hard it
is to have a human being die when you know a stroke of your pen may
save him."
* * * * *
VAIN AS THE POPE'S BULL AGAINST THE COMET.
The potency of the Emancipation Act was so patent to the least
politician that, long before 1863, when its announcement opened the
memorable year for freedom, not only had its demonstration been
implored by his friends, but some of his subordinates had tried to
launch its lightning with not so impersonal a sentiment. To a religious
body, pressing him to verify his title of Abolitionist, he replied:
"I do not want to issue a document that the whole world will see must
necessarily be inoperative, like the pope's bull against the comet."
* * * * *
A VOLUNTEER CAPTAINCY WORTH TWO DOLLARS.
While he was a lumberer, Lincoln was in the employ of one Kirkpatrick,
who "ran" a sawmill. In hiring the new man, the employer had promised
to buy him a dog, or cant-hook, of sufficient size to suit a man of
uncommon stature. But he failed in his pledge and would not give him
the two dollars of its value for his working without the necessary
tool. Though far from a grudging disposition, Lincoln cherished this in
memory. When the Black Hawk War broke out and the governor called out
volunteers, Sangamon County straightway responded and raised a company
of rangers. This Kirkpatrick wished and strove to be elected captain,
but Lincoln recited his grievance to the men, and said to his friend
William Green (or Greene):
"Bill, I believe I can now make even with Kirkpatrick for the two
dollars he owes me for the cant-hook."
Setting himself up for candidate, he won the post. It was a triumph of
popularity which rejoiced him. As late as 1860, he said he had not met
since that success any to give him so much satisfaction.
* * * * *
GETTING THE COMPANY COLUMN THROUGH "ENDWISE."
Captain Lincoln was drilling his men, marching the twenty or so "by the
front," when he found himself before a gap in the fence through which
he wanted to go.
He says: "I could not for the life of me remember the proper words of
command--("By the right flank--file left--march.--Hardee's
Tactics")--for getting my company endwise so that it could get through
the gateway; as we came near the passage, I shouted:
"'Company, halt! break ranks! you are dismissed for two minutes, when
you will fall in again on the other side of the gap!'"
* * * * *
REGULAR AND IRREGULAR.
In the Black Hawk War, Captain Lincoln came to cross-purposes with the
regular army commissariat. The latter insisted on the fare and other
service for the army being superior to what the Bucktail Rangers got;
the latter, however, were empowered by the governor to forage rather
freely, so that the settlers were said to fear more for their fowls
through their protectors than from the Indians for their scalps. Once,
when Lincoln's corps were directed to perform some duty which he did
not think accrued to them, he did it. But he went to the army officer,
to whom he reported, and said plainly:
"Sir, you forget that we are not under the orders and regulations of
the War Department at Washington, but are simply volunteers under those
of the governor of Illinois. Keep in your own sphere and there will be
no difficulty! But resistance will be made to your unjust orders.
Further, my men must be equal in all particulars to the regular
army."--(William Greene, who was in the Rangers.)
* * * * *
KNOWING WHEN TO GIVE IN.
If you will refer to the table of the Presidents, you will see that
Lincoln's origin is set down as "English." But with the noted English
love of fair play is coupled the art of not knowing when a man is
beaten. This descendant of John Bull differs from his ancestors on this
head.
During the Black Hawk War, the soldiers in camp entertained themselves
by athletic contests. The captain of the Sangamon company excelled all
the others, regulars and volunteers, in bodily pastimes. This induced
the men to challenge all the army, pitting Lincoln against the whole
field, one down t'other come up! A man of another regiment, named
Thompson, appeared, with whom the preliminary tussle to feel the enemy
gave Lincoln a belief that he had tackled more than he could pull off
this time. He intimated as much to his backers, who, with true Western
whole-souledness, were betting not only all their money, but their
"possibles" and equipment. Disbelieving him, though he had never shown
the white feather, the first bout did terminate disastrously for
Illinois. Lincoln was clearly "downed." The next, or settling bout,
ended the same way--only Lincoln's supporters would not "see," and
refused to pay up their bets. The whole company was about to lock horns
on the decision, when Captain Lincoln spoke up:
"Boys, Thompson threw me fair and clean, and he did the same the next
time, but not so clearly."
"In peace or in war," it was always the same "Honest Abe" of Sangamon.
* * * * *
A FRUITFUL SPEECH.
At the age of twenty, Lincoln was studying law in off hours, and used
to walk over to Boonville, ten or twelve miles, the county court
center, to watch how law proceedings were conducted. He was interested
in one murder case, ably defended by John Breckenridge; in fact,
Lincoln hanging around the court-room doors to see the lawyers come
out, was impelled by his ingenuous admiration to hail him, and say:
"That was the best speech I ever heard." The advocate was naturally
surprised at this frank outburst of the simple country lad. Years
afterward, Breckenridge, [Footnote: Not the ex-vice-president and
Confederate Cabinet officer of that name.] belonging to Texas, and
having been an active Confederate, was in the position to implore the
executive's clemency. It was granted him, while the donor reminded him
of the far-off incident--which he still insisted included "the best
speech I ever heard!" The beneficiary might have retorted that the plea
for his own pardon was, in his mind, more effective in sparing a life.
* * * * *
A CAPTAIN CHALLENGED BY HIS MEN.
At the outset of the Black Hawk War, an outbreak of Indians in
Illinois, the popularity of Abraham Lincoln induced the young men of
the Sangamon Valley, in forming a company of mounted riflemen, to vote
him as their captain. The forces were very irregular _irregulars_, did
no fighting as a body, and were insubordinate to the last. Once it was
in an ironically amusing manner. The commander had saved a friendly
Indian from a beating, that being General Cass' order, as well as what
his humanity prompted, though at the same time there had been Indian
tragedy in his own family, and he had the racial Indian hatred in his
blood. The mutineers threatened still to shoot the captive.
"Not unless you shoot _me!_" rejoined the taunted commander.
The men recoiled; but one voiced the general sentiment in:
"This is cowardly on your part, Lincoln, presuming on your rank!"
"If any of you think that, let him test it here and now!" was the
reply, equally as oblivious of military decorum.
But they flinched, for he was larger and lustier than anybody else.
"You can level up," he said, guessing their reasoning; "choose your own
weapons."
The more sane roared with laughter at this monstrous offer on the
superior's part, and the good feeling was renewed between chief and
file.
* * * * *
GENERAL McCLELLAN'S OPINION OF LINCOLN AS A LAWYER.
The whirligig of time brings about strange revenges, for a truth.
General McClellan was chosen to visit the seat of the Crimean War to
study the siege operations about Sebastopol. Returning and seeing no
prospects in the air--of his professional line--he became
superintendent of the Illinois Central Railroad Company. He was acting
for its president in December, 1855, when a bill was laid under his
eyes. It was the demand of Abraham Lincoln, of the law firm of Lincoln
& Herndon, Springfield, Illinois.
The firm had offered in October to act for the company to defend a suit
brought by McLean County. Lincoln had won it. To prevent any demurrer
about the fee of one thousand dollars, a fourth of that having been
paid for the retainer, he had six members of the bar append their names
to testify the charge was usual and just. Nevertheless Superintendent
McClellan refused to pay, alleging that:
"This is as much as a first-class lawyer would charge!"
You see, Mr. Lincoln was still but "the one-horse lawyer of a one-horse
town."
* * * * *
KENTUCKIANS ARE CLANNY.
Senator John C. S. Blackburn, of the United States Supreme Court, began
his life as a lawyer at the age of twenty. This should have won him
sympathy in his first case. It was before Justice McLean. Opposed to
Mr. Blackburn was the chief of the Chicago bar, I. N. Arnold, afterward
member of Congress, and author of the first biography of Abraham
Lincoln. Blackburn was a Kentuckian, but the stereotyped reputation for
courage does not include audacity in a court of law. He was nervous
with this first attempt and made a mull of his presentment, when a
gentleman of the bar, rising, and extending a tall, ungraceful figure,
intervened and laid down the case on the young Kentuckian's lines so
feebly offered and entangled that the hearers might be glad to be so
disembarrassed of a feeling for the novice floundering. The bench
sustained Blackburn's demurrer. Arnold was so vexed that he objected to
the volunteer intervener, whereupon the befriended man learned it was
one Abraham Lincoln, as unknown to him as he was to fame. Lincoln
defended himself against the senior's spite, by saying he claimed the
privilege of giving a newcomer the helping hand. No doubt the fellow
Stateship backed his prompting. --(Related by Judge Isaac N. Arnold,
member of Congress.)
* * * * *
NOT TO BE THOUGHT OF!
It has been seen that creditors treated the struggling Lincoln with the
utmost forbearance, countering the adage that "forbearance is not
acquittance." He was given the occasion to show how he was neighborly
when the turn came. A client of his was long deferring settlement when
the lawyer met him by chance on the courthouse steps, at Springfield.
He accosted him cordially, and remarked about an accident that had
befallen him.
Cogdale had been blown up by gunpowder and lost a hand. He began to
apologize for the business delay, showing that he was crippled manually
as well as in his pursuits.
Lincoln plainly expressed his sympathy and sorrow.
"I have been thinking about that note of yours," faltered the unhappy
man.
The lawyer drew the paper in question out of his wallet and forced it
upon him.
"It is not to be _thought of!_" replied he, laughing in his droll yet
saturnine mode.
Cogdale honestly added that he did not know when he really could pay.
But the donee hurried away, saying:
"If you had the money, I would not take it out of your only hand!"
* * * * *
"SKIN WRIGHT AND CLOSE!"
In more than one event the Lincolnian snappy and headlong manner was
the fruit of study and deliberation. Apparently holding aloof from
politics after his return from Washington, in 1849, Lincoln was earning
a great name at the bar. His popularity was the wider as he did not
disdain poor clients and often won a case without permitting any
remuneration. There came to Lincoln & Herndon's office one day a poor
widow. She was entitled to a pension of four hundred dollars, but the
agent, one Wright, who had drawn it for her, retained one-half as his
fee. This greed so stirred Mr. Lincoln that he at once went to the
agent to demand disgorging of the money. On refusal, a suit was
instituted for the recovery.
At the trial, with his buoyancy, Lincoln said to his partner:
"You had better stay, and hear me address the jury, as I am going to
_skin_ Wright and get the money back."
He pleaded that there was no contract between the parties; that the man
was not an authorized agent; his charge was unreasonable; he had never
given the money due to the soldier's widow, but retained one-half. Next
he expatiated on her husband, during the Revolutionary War,
experiencing the hardships of the old Continentals at Valley Forge in
the winter; barefoot in the deep snows; ill-clad against the rigors;
their feet, cut by ice staining the ground, and so on.
The men in the box were also affected to tears, like the spectators,
while the pension "shark" wriggled under the invectives. The verdict
was in favor of the relict. Her advocate not only remitted his costs,
but paid her fare home and for her stay in Springfield, so that she
went off rejoicing.
Lincoln's partner had the curiosity to look at his brief, which
concluded:
"_Skin Wright!_ Close!"--(Related by Mr. Herndon, present at the trial.)
* * * * *
HOOKING HENS IS LOW!
Mr. Lincoln had assisted in the prosecution of a fellow who stole some
fowls. The lawyer jogged homeward in the company of the jury foreman.
He eulogized the young man for his good work in the prosecution, and,
when the other returned the compliment by speaking warmly of the jury's
prompt and speedy deliverance of the verdict, the fereman replied:
"Yaas, the vagabond ought to be locked up. Why, when I was young and
pearter than I am now, I didn't mind packing a sheep or two off on my
back--but stealing hens--faugh! It is low and shows what the country is
coming to!"
* * * * *
"THE STATE AGAINST MR. WHISKY!"
When Lincoln was a briefless barrister, frequenting the courts on their
own peregrinations, to catch the eye of client or judge, he was at
Clinton, Illinois, where a case came up of a very modern nature. To be
sure, "the Shrieking Sisterhood" was then invented for the advocates of
female suffrage and anti-slavery. But these twelve or fifteen young
women presented themselves in custody for a novel charge. They had
failed to induce a liquor dealer to restrict his license, and "smashed"
his wine-parlor incontinently. Although public sympathy was theirs for
the act, as well as for their youth, prettiness, and sex, none of the
lawyers would take up their defense on account of the influence of the
brewers' and distillers' agent. In this emergency, Abraham Lincoln
stepped into the breach and volunteered to defend the defenseless.
"I would suggest, first," began he, "that there be a change in the
indictment so as to have it read 'The State against Mr. Whisky!'
instead of 'The State against these women.' This is the defense of
these women. The man who has persisted in selling whisky has had no
regard for their well-being or the welfare of their husbands and sons.
He has had no fear of God or regard for man; neither has he any regard
for the laws of the statute. No jury can fix any damages or punishment
for any violation of the moral law. The course pursued by this liquor
dealer has been for the demoralization of society. His groggery has
been a nuisance. These women, finding all moral suasion of no avail
with this fellow, oblivious to all, to all tender appeal and a like
regardless of their tears and prayers, in order to protect their
households and promote the welfare of the community, united to suppress
the nuisance. The good of society demanded its suppression! They
accomplished what otherwise could not have been done."--(_The Lincoln
Magazine_.)
* * * * *
AS CLEAR AS MOONSHINE.
In 1858, Lincoln was committed to the political campaign which was a
passing victory, superficial, to his opponent, Senator Douglas, to
eventuate in his accession to the Presidency. So he had let legal
strife fall into abeyance, during two years. He was, therefore, vexed
to have an applicant for his renewing that line of business, but at
once welcomed the suitor on learning her name. It was Hannah Armstrong.
He was eager to see her. She was the wife of the bully of Clary's
Grove, the locally noted wrestler, Jack Armstrong. After they had
become friends, Lincoln had been harbored in their cottage, in the days
when poverty held him down so he scarcely could get his head above
water. The good soul had repaid his doing chores about her house, such
as minding the baby, getting in the firewood, and keeping the highway
cows out of her cabbage-patch, after her husband died, by darning his
socks, filling up a bowl with corn-mush, at the period when it was a
feast to have "cheese, bologna, and crackers," in the garret where he
pored over law-books. Her news was painful. The baby, whose cradle
Lincoln had rocked, was a man now, and was in what the vernacular
phrased "pretty considerable of a tight fix."
It looked as though Mr. Lincoln would have difficulty in loosening the
fix, far more to remove it.
At a camp-meeting, the young men had been riotous. Armstrong and a
companion had been entangled in a fight for all comers, in which one
man was seriously injured by some weapon. The companion, Norris, was
tried and convicted for manslaughter of Metzgar, receiving the sentence
of eight years' imprisonment. But Armstrong was to be indicted for
murder, as the injuries were indicated as inflicted with a blunt
instrument, and a witness affirmed that they were done by a slung-shot
in Armstrong's hands. It was little excuse that he, like the rest
implicated, was drunk at the time. Nevertheless, dissolute as was the
young man of two-and-twenty, Lincoln did not need the woman's assurance
that her son was incapable of murder so deliberate. Armstrong averred
that any blow he struck was done with the naked fist. Furthermore, it
was said that Metzgar was not left insensible on the field of battle,
but was going home beside a yoke of oxen when the yoke-end cracked his
skull; it was this, and no slung-shot, that caused his death the
following day.
Recognizing that the complication forebode a strenuous task, Lincoln
none the less accepted it and, assuring his old "Aunt Hannah" that he
would not suffer her to talk of remuneration, he resumed the toga to
contest the effort to take away Armstrong's life and release Norris, as
convicted under error.
He closeted himself with the prisoner to hear his account, and upon
that concluded he was guiltless. It has been said that Lincoln would
never undertake a defense of a man he believed guilty. This held good
in the present instance.
As the statement about the slung-shot blow was made by a man who
disputed the ox-yoke accident, and that the fatal hurts were received
in the free fight at the camp-meeting, it was necessary that he should
be explicit. He had seen the blow and distinguished the weapon by the
light of the moon.
Lincoln was accustomed from early life to relieve his brain when
toiling or distressed, by the turning to a vein utterly opposed to
those moods. His chief diversion from Blackstone and the statutes was
his favorite author, Shakespeare. Hackett, the _Falstaff_ delighted in
by our grandfathers, pronounced the President a better student of that
dramatist than he expected to meet.
As the ancients drew fates, as it is called, from Virgil, and the
medievals from the Bible, so the lawyer drew hints from his author. The
process is to open at a page and read as a forecast the first line
meeting the eye. The play-book opened at "Midsummer Night's Dream." To
refresh himself after his speeches in rehearsal, Lincoln had been
enjoying the humor of the amateur-actor clowns. So the line "leaping
into sight" was on parallel lines with his thought.
"Does the moon shine that night?" So the text. Whereupon, _Nick
Bottom_, a weaver, cries out: "A calendar! look in the almanack! find
out moonshine!"
The pleader had his cue!
It was not necessary to postpone the trial on the ground that the
debate upon the new charge prevented a fair jury in the district.
Besides, the widow would grow mad in the long suspense, even if the
prisoner bore it manfully, though sorrowing for her and his misspent
life. The trial was indeed the event of the year at the courthouse. The
witnesses for the prosecution repeated about Armstrong much the same
story as had convicted Norris: Armstrong had led a reprehensible
career, and the deliberate onslaught with a weapon after the fight
could hardly have been made by an intoxicated man. It was
vindictiveness from being worsted by the unhappy Metzgar in a fair
fight. In vain was it cited that he and Metzgar had been friends and
that the accuser was a personal enemy of the former.
The case looked so formidable--unanswerable, in short--that the State
proctor's plea for condemnation might all but be taken for granted.
However highly the prisoner had been elated by his father's friend, his
own, having promised to deliver him before sundown, he must have lost
the lift-up. For he wore the abandoned expression of one forsaken by
his own hopes as by his friends. Norris, in his cell, could have not
been more veritably the picture of despair.
Lincoln rose for the final, without eliciting any emotion from him. He
dilated on the evidence, which he asserted boldly was proof of a plot
against an innocent youth. He called the principal witness back to the
stand, and caused him definitely to repeat that he had _seen_ Armstrong
strike the fatal stroke, with a slung-shot undoubtedly, and by "the
light of the moon." The proof that his accusation was false was in the
advocate's hand--the almanac, which the usher handed into the jury,
while the judge consulted one on his desk.
The whole story was a fabrication to avenge a personal enmity, and the
rock of the prosecution was blasted by the defense's fiery eloquence.
The arbiters went out for half an hour, but the audience, waiting in
breathless impatience, discounted the result. The twelve filed in to
utter the alleviating "Not guilty!" and the liberator was able to
fulfil his pledge.
It was not sunset, and the prisoner was free to comfort his mother.
In vain did she talk of paying a fee, and the man supported the desire
by alleging his intention to work the debt out. Lincoln said in the old
familiar tongue:
"Aunt Hannah, I sha'n't charge you a _red_--I said 'without money or
price!' And anything I can do for you and yours shall not cost you a
cent."
Soon after, as she wrote to him of an attempt to deprive her of her
land, he bade her force a case into the court; if adverse there, appeal
to the Supreme Court, where his law firm would act, and he would fight
it out.
(Regarding the rescued man, he enlisted in the war at the first call.
He was still in the ranks two years later, when his mother, in her
loneliness, begged for him of the President-commander-in-chief, for his
release to come home. His leave was immediately written out by
Lincoln's own hand, and the soldier went home from Kentucky. He
remained a valuable citizen. It was Lincoln's speech and the moonbeam
of inspiration that saved him.)
* * * * *
"NICE CLOTHES MAY MAKE A HANDSOME MAN--EVEN OF YOU!"
In 1832, Lincoln, elected to the Illinois legislative chamber, found
himself in one of those anguishing embarrassments besetting him in all
the early stages of his unflagging ascent from the social slough of
despond. Unlike eels, he never got used to skinning. For the new
station, however well provided mentally, he had no means to procure
dress fit for the august halls of debate.
He was yet standing behind the counter in Offutt's general shop at New
Salem, when an utter stranger strolled in, asked his name, though his
exceptional stature and unrivaled mien revealed his identity, and
announced his own name. Each had heard of the other. The newcomer was
not an Adonis, perhaps, but he was one compared with the awkward,
leaning Tower of Pisa "cornstalk," who carried the jack-knife as "the
homeliest man in the section." Lincoln was doubly the _plainest_
speaker there and thereabouts.
"Mr. Smoot," began the clerk, "I am disappointed in you, sir! I
expected to see a scaly specimen of humanity!"
"Mr. Lincoln, I am sorely disappointed in you, in whom I expected to
see a _good-looking_ man!"
After this jocular exchange of greeting, the joke cemented friendship
between them. The proof of the friendship is in the usefulness of it.
Lincoln turned to this acquaintance in his dilemma.
This future President may have divined the saying of the similarly
martyred McKinley--about "the cheap clothes making a cheap man." He
summed up his situation:
"I must certainly have decent clothes to go there among the
celebrities."
No doubt, the State capital had other fashions than those prevailing at
Sangamon town, where even the shopkeeper's present attire, in which he
had solicited suffrages, was scoffed at as below the mark. It was
composed of "flax and tow-linen pantaloons (one Ellis, storekeeper,
describes from eye-witnessing), I thought, about five inches too short
in the legs, exposing blue-yarn socks (the original of the Farmers'
_Sox_ of our mailorder magazines); no vest or coat; and but one
suspender. He wore a calico shirt, as he had in the Black Hawk War;
coarse brogans, tan color."
"As you voted for me," went on the ambitious man about to exchange the
counter for the rostrum, "you must want me to make a decent appearance
in the state-house?"
"Certainly," was the reply, as anticipated, Lincoln was so sure of his
wheedling ways by this time.
And the friend in need supplied him with two hundred dollars currency,
which, according to the budding legislator's promise, he returned out
of his first pay as representative.
* * * * *
THE ABUTMENT WAS DUBERSOME.
President Lincoln was told that the Northern and Southern Democrats had
at last accomplished a fusion.
"Well, I believe you, of course," said he to the informant, "but I have
my doubts of the foundation, like my friend Brown. Brown is a sound
church member. He was member, too, of a township committee, having to
receive bids for building a bridge over a deep and rapid river. The
contractors did not seem to like the proposition, so Brown called in an
architectural acquaintance, named--we will say, Jones. At the question
'Can you build this bridge?' he was overbold, and replied: 'Yes, sir,
or any other. I could build a bridge from Sodom to Gomorrah with
abutment below.' The committee being good and select men were shocked
at the strong language, and Brown was called upon to defend his protégé.
"'I know Jones well enough,' he rejoined, 'and he is so honest a man
and good a builder, that if he states positively that he can build a
bridge from Sodom to Gomorrah, why, I believe him! But--I feel bound to
state that I am in some doubt as to the abutment on the other side!'
"My friend, I reassert I have my doubts about the abutment!"
* * * * *
"GOOD ENOUGH FOR THE PRESIDENT."
It was while at the store in New Salem that Lincoln made the
acquaintance of Richard Yates, contemporarily in office with him as war
governor of Illinois. So proud were the citizens of the colloquial
abilities of their rising young man that they used to show him to
visitors as their lion. Yates was introduced and stayed to hear him
roar. Later, Lincoln asked him to join him in his noon meal at the
cabin where a woman boarded him. The latter was one of those good souls
who give the best in the larder, but are all the time apologizing. They
had happened upon the ordinarily plain repast of bread--home-made, and
of the sweetest corn--and milk from the cow. Flurried by the unknown
company, the auntie, in dealing out the bowls to a numerous family,
somehow, between herself and Lincoln, let the vessel slip, and, falling
to the floor, it was smashed and the milk wasted. Lincoln disputed it
was her fault, as she politely averred. She continued to argue for her
guiltiness.
"Oh, very well," said Lincoln, at last, "we will not wrangle on whose
was the slip, or if it does not trouble you it will not trouble _me_.
Anyway, what is a basin of pap?--nothing to fret about!"
"Mr. Lincoln, you are wrong"--the woman remembered the children to whom
a lesson ought to be given--"a dish of bread and milk is fit for the
President of these United States."
Both the guests acquiesced. The cream of a story is in the application.
Years afterward, when the man from Sangamon, the unknown, occupied the
curule chair, an elderly woman from Illinois called at the White House
and requested an interview. It was the Aunt Lizzie of the above
episode. Her mere mention of being "home folks" won her admittance, and
her recognition the best of the Executive Mansion lard-pantry. When she
had finished the elegant collation, and intermingled the tasty morsels
with reminiscences, the host slyly inquired if now in the Presidential
dwelling she stuck to the sentiments about the diet enunciated in her
log cabin.
"Indeedy, I do! I still stick to it that bread and milk is a good
enough dish for the President."
Lincoln smiled with his sad smile. He had been long--not to say a
lengthy--martyr to dyspepsia, and she uttered a truism that struck him
to the--the digestive apparatus!
* * * * *
LINCOLN'S FIRST POLITICAL SPEECH.
In 1831, or '32, Abraham Lincoln made his maiden political speech at
Pappsville (or Richland), Illinois. He was twenty-three, and timid, and
the preceding speakers had "rolled the sun nearly down." The speech is,
therefore, short and agreeable:
"Gentlemen, fellow citizens: I presume you all know who I am. I am
humble Abraham Lincoln. I have been solicited by my friends to become a
candidate for the legislature. My politics are short and sweet--like an
old woman's dance! I am in favor of a national bank, the international
improvement scheme, and a high protective tariff. These are my
sentiments and political principles. If elected, I will be thankful. If
defeated, it will be all the same!"--(Springfield _Republican_.)
* * * * *
A LIGHTNING-ROD TO PROTECT A GUILTY CONSCIENCE!
One term in the Illinois State legislature only whetted the predestined
politician for a seat again at that table, though it was not he who won
the loaves and the fishes. He was to speak at Springfield, the more
gloriously welcomed as he was prominent in the movement hereafter
realized, of changing the capital from Vandalia to this more energetic
town.
The meeting had foreboded ill, as a serious wrangle between two of the
preceding speakers threatened to end in a challenge to a duel, still a
fashionable diversion. But Lincoln intervened with a speech so
enthralling that the hearers forgot the dispute and heard him out with
rapture. He had found the proper way to manage his voice, never
musical, by controlling the nasal twang into a monotonous but audible
sharpness, "carrying" to a great distance. He was followed by one
George Forquer (Farquhar or Forquier), a facing-both-ways,
profit-taking politician, who had achieved his end by obtaining an
office. This was the land-office register at this town. He had been a
prominent Whig representative in 1834. The turncoat assailed Lincoln
bitterly (much as Pitt was derided in his beginning) and had begun his
piece by announcing that "the young man (Lincoln) must be taken down."
As if to live up to the lucrative berth, Mr. Forquer had finished a
frame-house--Springfield still had log houses, and not only in the
environs, either!--and to cap the novelty, had that other new feature,
a lightning-rod, put upon it. The object of the slur at youth had
listened to the diatribe, flattering only so far as he was singled out.
Mr. Joshua F. Speed, a bosom friend of Lincoln, reports the retort as
follows:
"The gentleman says that 'this young man must be taken down.' It is for
you, not for me, to say whether I am up or down. The gentleman has
alluded to my being a young man; I am older in years than in the tricks
and trades of politicians.
"I desire to live, and I desire place and distinction as a politician;
but I would rather die now than, like the gentleman, live to see the
day that I would have to erect a lightning-rod to protect a guilty
conscience from an offended God!"
Mr. Speed says that the reply was characterized by great force and
dignity. The happy image of the lightning-rod for a conscience has
passed into the fixed-star stage of a household word throughout the
West.
* * * * *
FIRING ON A FLEA FOR A SQUIRREL.
In 1841, while serving a term in the Illinois legislature, Lincoln was
the longest of the Sangamon representatives, distinguished as the Long
Nine. They were much hampered by an old member who tried to put a
stopper upon any measure on the set ground that it was
"un-con-sti-tu-tional." Lincoln was selected to "spike his gun." A
measure was introduced benefiting the Sangamon district, so that its
electee might befittingly push it, and defend it. He was warrantably
its usher when the habitual interrupter bawled his stereotyped:
"Unconstitutional!"
The "quasher" is reported as follows in the local press, if not in the
journal of the House, which one need not, perhaps, consult:
"Mr. Speaker," said the son of the Sangamon Vale, "the attack of the
member from Wabash County upon the un-con-sti-tu-tion-al-i-ty of this
measure reminds me of an old friend of mine.
"He k a peculiar-looking old fellow, with shaggy, overhanging eyebrows,
and a pair of spectacles under them. (This description fitted the
Wabash member, at whom all gaze was directed.)
"One morning just after the old soul got up, he imagined he saw a gray
squirrel on a tree near his house. So he took down his rifle, and fired
at the squirrel, as he believed, but the squirrel paid no attention to
the shot. He loaded and fired again and again, until, at the thirteenth
shot, he set down his gun impatiently, and said to his boy, looking on:
"'Boy, there's something wrong about this rifle.'
"'Rifle's all right--I know it is,' answered the boy; 'but where's your
squirrel?'
"'Don't you see him, humped up about half-way up the tree?' inquired
the old man, peering over his spectacles and getting mystified.
"'No, I don't,' responded the boy; and then turning and looking into
his father's face, he exclaimed: 'Yes, I spy your squirrel! You have
been firing at a flea on your own brow!'"
This modern version of seeing the mote and not the beam in one's own
eye smothered the member for Wabash in laughter, and he _dropped_ the
standard objection of "unconstitutional" as he had not his mark.
* * * * *
THE CREAM OF THE JOKE.
By reason of the distances and the lonesomeness, it was the pleasant
habit of candidates to make their electioneering tours together. In
seeking reelection in 1838, Lincoln was accompanied by Mr. Ewing. They
stopped at one country house about dark, when the good wife was going
a-milking, while her husband was still a-field. Intent on securing her,
as she had the repute of being "the gray mare," the two partizans
accompanied her to the paddock. Ewing, to show his gallantry as well as
his familiarity with farm work--a main point in such
communities--offered to relieve the dame of the pail and fill it, while
she rested. In the meantime, Lincoln chatted with her, so that Ewing
could hardly get a word in. At his finishing his self-chosen task, he
beheld the pair deeply absorbed, for Lincoln had exercised his glib
tongue to such advantage as to secure her influence over her man's vote.
* * * * *
PARALLEL COURSES.
In the thirteenth Congress, Jefferson Davis was in the Senate, while
Lincoln and Alexander Stephens were in the House.
* * * * *
JUMPING JIM CROW!
When in Congress, he was a conscience Whig, as opposed to the cotton
ones--that is, for the anti-slavery doctrine and not "cottoning" for
the South. He wrote home:
"As you (at Springfield) are all so anxious for me to distinguish
myself, I have concluded to do so before long." He nearly ex-tinguished
himself, for suddenly he went right about face--according to the
popular song--quite a political if not a politic course:
You wheel about and jump about, and do just so!
And ebery time you jump about, you jump Jim Crow!
He had gone against the general tide in hindering the Mexican War as
sure to bring Texas into the Union as a slave State, yet now he
espoused its hero, "Rough and Ready" Taylor. He had to excuse himself
as recognizing that the general was the Whigs' best candidate, and as
the Whig National Convention agreed with him, the apparent truckling
was condoned.
* * * * *
FACTS ARE STUBBORN THINGS.
"Your letter on McClellan reminds me of a story that I (A. Lincoln)
heard in Washington, when I was here before. There was an editor in
Rhode Island noted for his love of fun--it came to him
irresistibly--and he could not help saying just what came to his mind.
He was appointed postmaster by Tyler. Some time after Tyler vetoed the
Bank Bill, and came into disrepute with the Whigs, a conundrum went the
round of the papers. It was as follows: 'Why is John Tyler like an
ass?' This editor copied the conundrum and could not resist the
temptation to answer it, which he did thus: 'Because he _is_ an ass!'
This piece of fun cost him his head--but it was a fact!"--(_Chatauque
Democrat_.)
* * * * *
THE PARTY GAD.
"In 1846, General Cass was for the (Wilmot) Proviso [Footnote: Wilmot
Proviso: that money to buy Mexican land should not go toward
slave-buying.] at once; in March, 1846, he was still for it, but not
just then; and in December, 1847, he was against it altogether. When
the question was raised in 1846, he was in a blustering hurry to take
ground for it. He sought to be in advance, and to avoid the
uninteresting position of a mere follower; but soon he began to see a
glimpse of the great Democratic ox-gad waving in his face, and to hear
indistinctly a voice saying:
"'Back, back, sir; back a little!'
"He shakes his head and bats his eyes, and blunders back to his
position of March, 1847; and still the gad waves and the voice grows
more distinct and sharper still:
"'Back, sir! back, I say! farther back!' And back he goes to the
position of December, 1847, at which the gad is still, and the voice
soothingly says:
"'So! stand still at that!'"--(Speech by A. Lincoln, House of
Representatives, Washington, July 27, 1848.)
* * * * *
HARD TO BEAT!
Of his Washington experience in 1848, Lincoln brought a pack of tales
about the statesmen then prominent. He declared to have heard of Daniel
Webster the subjoined:
In school little Dan had been guilty of some misdoing for which he was
called up to the teacher to be caned on the hand. His hands were dirty,
and to save appearance he moistened his right hand, on his way up, and
wiped it on his pants. Nevertheless, it looked so foul on presentation
to the ferule that the teacher sharply protested:
"Well, this is hard to beat! If you will find another hand in this room
as filthy, I will let you off!"
Daniel popped out his left hand, modestly kept in the background, and
readily cried:
"Here it is, sir!"
(Told by Lincoln before "the Honorable Mr. Odell, and others." This is
not the ex-governor, Mr. Odell, of New York, who pleads guilty to the
editor of "being too young to have the honor of speaking with Mr.
Lincoln." The worse luck--both would have profited by the mutual
pleasure.)
* * * * *
"I RECKON I TOOK MORE THAN MY SHARE."
Lincoln confessed at the outset of life that he was going to avoid
society, as its frequentation was incompatible with study. He avowed at
the same time that he liked it, which enhanced the sacrifice. No doubt
so, since his Washington sojourn and his legal and legislative company
earned him the title of the prince of good fellows. To be coupled with
the genial Martin van Buren with the same epithet was, indeed, a
compliment.
At Washington he had, in 1848, made acquaintance with the fashionable
world. He preferred the livelier and less strait ways of the
Congressional boarding-house table, the Saturday parties at Daniel
Webster's, and the motley crowd at the bowling-alley, as well as the
chatterers' corner in the Congressional post-office. Still, as chairman
of a committee, and by reason of his being a wonder from the hirsute
West, he was invited to the receptions and feasts of the first
families. Green to the niceties of the table, he committed errors--so
frankly apologized for and humorously treated that he lost no standing.
At one dinner the experience was new to him of the dish of currant
jelly being passed around for each guest to transfer a little to his
plate. So he took it as a sweet, oddly accompanying the venison, and
left but little on the general plate. But after tasting it, he
perceived that the compote-dish was going the rounds, and suddenly
looking pointedly at his plate and then at the hostess, with a troubled
air, he said, with convincing simplicity:
"It looks as though I took more than my share."--(Supplied by the
hostess, and collected by J. R. Speed.)
* * * * *
LINCOLN WAS LOADED FOR BEAR.
An eminent man of politics has said that the similes of the learned
which liken Abraham Lincoln to King Henry IV. of France and other
historical notables are far from the mark and reveal their
miscomprehension of the Machiavel redeemed by moral goodness. He thinks
that without the hypocrisy being censurable he was more of the type of
Pope Sixtus the Fifth. This celebrity, who, like Lincoln, was in the
hog business at one time, pretended silliness to be elected pontiff.
The die cast, he stood forth in all his native strength, keeping the
friends who did not try to sway him, and becoming a rod of steel where
he had been rated as lead. [Footnote: Greeley stamped Lincoln as "the
slowest piece of lead that ever crawled."] At the same time as he
dispraised himself--mocked and laughed--he let out glimpses of true
ambition. When his short-sighted advisers warmly crossed his ground of
setting himself with freedom against the pro-slavery party, assuring
him that he would thereby lose the senatorship as against Douglas, he
confessed:
"I am after larger game. The battle of 1860 (for the chair of
Washington) is worth a hundred of this."
* * * * *
"A BOUNTEOUS PRESIDENT--IF ANYTHING IS LEFT!"
"Mr. Speaker, we have all heard of the animal standing in doubt between
two stacks of hay and starving to death; the like of that would never
happen to General Cass. Place the stacks a thousand miles apart; he
would stand stock-still, midway between them, and eat both at once; and
the green grass along the line would be apt to suffer some, too, at the
same time. By all means, make him President, gentlemen. He will feed
you bounteously--if--if--there is anything left after he shall have
helped himself."--(Speech, House of Representatives, July 27, 1848.)
* * * * *
THE ART OF BEING PAID TO EAT.
"I have introduced General Cass' accounts here chiefly to show the
wonderful physical capacities of the man. They show that he not only
did the labor of several men at the same time, but that he often did it
at several places many hundred miles apart, at the same time! And at
eating, too, his capacities are shown to be quite as wonderful. From
October, 1821, to May, 1822, he ate ten rations a day in Michigan, ten
a day here in Washington, and near five dollars' worth a day besides,
partly on the road between the two places. And then there is an
important discovery in his example: 'The art of being paid for what one
eats, instead of having to pay for it.' Hereafter, if any nice man
shall owe a bill which he cannot pay, he can just board it
out!"--(Speech, House of Representatives, July 27, 1848.)
(A tilt at a general drawing rations for himself and staff.)
* * * * *
A VICE NOT TO SAY "NO!"
Mr. Lincoln said to General Viele: "If I have got one vice, it is not
being able to say 'No.' And I consider it a vice. Thank God for not
making me a woman! I presume if He had, He would have made me just as
homely as I am, and nobody would have ever tempted me!"
* * * * *
THE BEST CAR!
From his previous sojourn in the capital, President Lincoln had a fund
of good stories upon his predecessors. Among them was the following
tale about President Tyler, one of the weakest chiefs the republic has
ever known, with the exception of Franklin Pierce. Lincoln said that
this President's son "Bob" was sent by his father to arrange about a
special train for an excursion. The railroad agent happened to be a
hard-shell Whig, and having no fear of the great, and wanting no favor,
shrank from allowing him any. He said that the road did not run any
"specials" for Presidents.
"Stop!" interrupted Bob, "did you not furnish a special for
General-President Harrison?" (Died 1841.)
"S'pose we did," answered the superintendent; "well, if you will bring
your father here in that condition, you shall have the best train on
the track!"
* * * * *
SELF-MADE.
"Self-made or never made," says one of the apologists for Lincoln's
ruggedness of character and outward air; at an early political meeting,
when asked if he were self-made and he answered in the affirmative, the
rough critic remarked: "Then it is a poor job," as if it were by
nature's apprentice. But in 1860, when friends reproached him for the
lack of "Old Hickory" Jackson's sternness, he replied nobly:
"I am just as God made me, and cannot change."
* * * * *
HIS HIGH MIGHTINESS.
The little "court" of the White House wrangling about a fit title for
the Chief, that of "excellency" not being taken as sufficient, one
disputant suggested that the Dutch one of "high mightiness" might fit.
Speaker Mullenberg, at the first Presidency, pronounced on the question
at a dinner where Washington was sitting.
"Why, general, if we were certain the office would always be held by
men as large as yourself (how cleverly he shunned the use of either
"great" or "grand!") or Mr. Wynkopp there, it would be appropriate
enough! But, if by chance a President as small as my opposite neighbor
should be elected, his high mightiness would be ridiculous!"
The quarrelers were hushed, thinking if Douglas, the Little Giant, had
preceded or should follow their colossus of six feet three!
* * * * *
LINCOLN'S OPINION AT THIRTY.
Diffident, but having been twice disappointed in love-making, Abraham
wrote in support of a Miss Owen rejecting him: "I should never be
satisfied with any one blockhead enough to have me."
* * * * *
THE BLANK BIOGRAPHY.
Lincoln had been reading from Edmund Burke's life, when he threw down
the book with disrelish. He fell into his habit of musing, and on
reviving, said to his associate, Herndon:
"I've wondered why book publishers do not have blank biographies on
their shelves, always ready for an emergency; so that if a man happens
to die, his heirs or his friends, if they wish to perpetuate his
memory, can purchase one already written--but with blanks. These blanks
_they_ can fill up with rosy sentences full of high-sounding praise."
He sent the "Dictionary of Congress" his autobiography in a single
paragraph of fifty words--as an example(?).
* * * * *
"THE HOMELIEST MAN UNDER GOVERNMENT."
When General Lee surrendered to General Grant, one point was noticed by
the spectators which, it was held, distinguished the Cavalier from the
Puritan. Grant was in his fighting clothes and his every-day sword by
his side, while General Lee, dressed faultlessly as a soldier should
always be, carried a court sword, presented him as a honor by the
Southerners. So, in wars, Providence does not flourish the showy
weapon, but uses a strong and sharp blade without ornamental hilt.
Abraham Lincoln was the instrument of Heaven for work--ceaseless,
bloody work, hard, for it was that least to his taste.
From boyhood the looks of the wood-chopper and river boatman were
subjects of jeering. Whether the budding genius spurned such
adventitious aids as graces of person in his career, or was already a
philosopher who believed that handsome is that handsome does is a
winning motto, we may never know. It is enough that he joined in the
laugh and kept the ball rolling.
On the loss of a first love, one Annie Rutledge--a name he said he
always loved--his friends were alarmed for his health and sanity. They
took away the knife every man carried in the West, and discovered it
was the obligatory one presented to the ugliest man and not to be
disposed of otherwise than to one still homelier.
There is a record of the clerical gentleman to whom Lincoln was
justified in offering it, who died with it in his uncontested
possession, in Toronto.
As is the custom, an office-holder going out of his seat calls on the
President with his successor to transfer the seals and other tokens.
The unlucky man enumerated the good qualities of his substitute, and
was surprised that Mr. Lincoln should dilate upon his with excessive
regrets that he was going to leave the service. This Mr. Addison was
indeed a first-class servant, but uncommonly ill-favored.
"Yes, Addison," said the chief, "I have no doubt that Mr. Price is a
pearl of price, but--but nothing can compensate me for the loss of
_you_, for, when you retire, I shall be the homeliest man in the
government!"
* * * * *
BETTER LOOKING THAN EXPECTED.
(Related by the President to Grace Greenwood):
"As I recall it, the story, told very simply and tersely, but with
inimitable drollery, ran that a certain honest old farmer, visiting the
capital for the first time, was taken by the member of Congress for his
'deestrict,' to some large gathering or entertainment. He went in order
to see the President. Unfortunately, Mr. Lincoln did not appear; and
the congressman, being a bit of a wag, and not liking to have his
constituent disappointed, designated Mr. R., of Minnesota. He was a
gentleman of a particularly round and rubicund countenance. The worthy
agriculturist, greatly astonished, exclaimed:
"Is that old Abe? Well, I du declare! He's a better-lookin' man than I
expected to see; but it do seem as how his troubles have druv him to
drink!'"
* * * * *
LINCOLN AND SUPERSTITION.
Childhood's impressions are ineffaceable, though they may be for a time
set aside. Abraham Lincoln with all his lofty mind, acquiesced in the
vulgar belief when he took his son Robert to have the benefit of a
"madstone," at a distance from where the boy was dog-bitten. He made
the pact with the Divine Power as to the Emancipation Act, with a
sincerity which robbed worldly wisdom of its sting, and he had dreams
and visions like a seer.
* * * * *
LINCOLN'S DREAM.
"Before any great national event I have always had the same dream. I
had it the other night. It is a ship sailing rapidly."--(To a friend,
in April, 1865. See "Ship of State," a pet simile.)
* * * * *
LINCOLN'S VISION.
Abraham Lincoln had been nominated for the Presidency. The consummation
of his ambition had naturally a deep impression upon him. He came home
and threw himself on the lounge, expressly made to let him recline at
full-length. It was opposite a bureau on which was a pivoted mirror
happening to be so tilted that it reflected him as he lay.
"As I reclined," he says, "my eye fell upon the glass, and I saw two
images of myself, exactly alike, except that one was a little paler
than the other. I arose and lay down again with the same result. It
made me quite uncomfortable for a few minutes, but some friends coming
in, the matter passed out of my mind.
"The next day, while walking in the street, I was suddenly reminded of
the circumstances, and the disagreeable sensation produced by it
returned. I determined to go home and place myself in the same
position--as regards the mirror--and if the same effect was produced, I
would make up my mind that it was the natural result of some principle
of refraction or optics, which I did not understand, and dismiss it. I
tried the experiment with the same result; and as I had said to myself,
accounted for it on some principle unknown to me, and it then ceased to
trouble me. But the God who works through the laws of nature, might
surely give a sign to me, if one of His chosen servants, even through
the operation of a principle of optics."
This, seeing one's simulacrum, or double, was so common, especially
when looking-glasses were full of flaws, designedly cast faulty to give
"magical" effects for conjurors, that old books on the black art teem
with instances. Lincoln was right to demonstrate that the vision was
founded on fact, and no supernatural sight at all. His trying the
repetition was like Lord Byron's quashing a similar illusion, but of a
suit of clothes hung up to look like a friend whom he believed he saw
in the spirit. A more widely read man would have dismissed the "fetch"
like the President-elect, but with a laugh.
* * * * *
"IT IS A POOR SERMON THAT DOES NOT HIT SOMEWHERE."
President Lincoln was wont to carry his mother's old Bible about with
him in the Capital City. Often he would be consulting it in mental
plights. He said that the Psalms was the part he liked best. "The
Psalms have something for every day in the week, and something for
every poor fellow like me."
* * * * *
THE RELIGION OF FEELING.
Lincoln told a friend that he heard a man named Glenn say at an Indiana
church-meeting:
"When I do good, I feel good; when I do bad, I feel bad; that is my
religion!"
* * * * *
THE TWO PRAYERS.
In Lincoln's inaugural address will be found the passage about the sad
singularity of the two contendants in the fratricidal combat being
Christians alike: "Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God."
The example is forthcoming. There is plenty of evidence that the
speaker always "took counsel of God." His words are: "I have been
driven many times to my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I
have nowhere else to go." [Footnote: No longer was Lincoln's piety held
as hypocrisy, as in 1860, when a campaign song sneers at
How each night he seeks the closet,
There, alone, to kneel and pray.]
(Connect with the Confederate commander, Robert E. Lee's avowal: "I
have never seen the day when I did not pray for the people of the
North.")
"Everybody thinks better than anybody."--(Lincoln.) (This is also
ascribed to Talleyrand. "It is only the rich who are robbed.")
* * * * *
"WE SHALL SEE OUR FRIENDS IN HEAVEN!"
For weeks after the death of his son Willie the inconsolable father
mourned in particular on that day in each week, and even the military
sights at Fortress Monroe to court a change failed to distract him. He
was studying Shakespeare. Calling his private secretary to him, he read
several passages, and finally that of Queen Constance's lament over her
lost child:
And, father cardinal, I have heard you say
That we shall see, and know, our friends in heaven.
(_King John, III., 4._)
"If that be true, I shall see my boy again!" He said:
"Colonel, did you ever dream of a lost friend, and feel that you were
holding sweet communion with that friend, and yet have a sad
consciousness that it was not reality? Just so I dream of my boy
Willie!"
(Colonel Lamon, the presidential body-guard-in-chief, was the recipient
of this spiritual confidence.)
* * * * *
MORE PRAYING AND LESS SWEARING!
On accompanying Mrs. Pomeroy, military nurse, to her hospital, the
President discovered that the authorities of the house had forbidden
praying to the patients, or even reading the Bible to them, as it was
denominational. He promptly removed the restriction, and furthered the
visiting missionaries in holding prayer-meetings, read the Scriptures
to "his boys in blue," and pray with them as much as they pleased.
"If there was more praying," he said, "and less swearing, it would be
far better for our country."
* * * * *
GLOVES OR NO GLOVES.
An old acquaintance of the President's visited him at Washington. Each
man's wife insisted on the gentleman, her lord, donning gloves. For
they were going as a square party out in the presidential carriage, and
the Washingtonians would not accept a king as such unless he dressed as
a king. Mr. Lincoln, as a shrewd politician, and married man, put his
gloves in his pocket, not to don them until there was no wriggling out
of the fix; the other one had his on at the hotel where the carriage
came to take that couple up.
They went out and took seats in the vehicle, whereupon the newcomer,
seeing that his host was ungloved, went on the rule of leaving the
fence bars as you find them. He set to drawing off his kids at the same
time as Mr. Lincoln commenced to tug at his to get them on.
"No, no, no!" protested the caller, fetching away his kids, one at a
time, "it is none of my doings! Put up your mittens, Lincoln!"
And so they had their ride out without their hands being in guards.
* * * * *
THE USE OF BOOKS.
"Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren't
very new, after all."--(By an Illinois clergyman, knowing Lincoln in
the 'Fifties.)
* * * * *
LINCOLN'S BOOK CRITICISM.
"For those who like this kind of book, this is the kind of book they
will like."--(New York _Times Book Review_, July 7, 1901.)
* * * * *
THE HAND-TO-HAND ENCOUNTER.
Toward the evident close of the struggle an English nobleman came to
Washington, credited to the embassy. This was somewhat impudent and
imprudent of him, too, as, in early times, he was prominent among the
British aristocrats who had supported the Confederate States. He had
assisted in their being declared belligerents--a sore point. He had
invested in the "Cotton Loan," and voted in sustenance of the Lairds
getting the rebel pirates out of the Mersey. Altogether, he must have
attended the regular White House reception from thinking his hostility
was unrecorded. But the President was clearly prepared for the
_fox-paw_! He spoke to the Briton smoothly enough, but when the
unsuspecting hand was placed in his grasp he gave it one of those
natural and not formal grips which left an impression on him forever.
The balladist's line was realized for him: "It is _hard_ to give the
hand where the heart can never be."
* * * * *
BETTER SOMETIMES RIGHT THAN ALL TIMES WRONG.
In 1832, when candidate for the Illinois legislative chambers, Lincoln
said he held it "a sound maxim better only sometimes to be right than
at all times wrong."
* * * * *
MAKING THE DAGGER STAB THE HOLDER.
Upon the first debate of the Lincoln-Douglas series, an admirer of the
former, having no doubt now "the stump speaker" would defeat the
meretricious parliamentarian, said:
"I believe, Abe, you can beat Douglas for the Senate."
"No, Len, I can't beat him for the Senate, but I'll make him beat
himself for the Presidency."
Douglas did gain the prize, but he lost his chances in the presidential
race by alienating the whole Southern vote.--(Related by Mr. Leonard
Swett, the "Len" above, to Mr. Augustus C. Buell.)
* * * * *
THE TAIL OF THE KITE.
"Congress, like the poor, is always with us!"--(To General Grant.
"Grant's Memoirs.")
* * * * *
NO DAY WITHOUT A LINE.
"I don't think much of a man not wiser to-day than he was
yesterday."--(A. Lincoln.)
* * * * *
TRUTH AND THE PEOPLE.
"The people are always much nearer the truth than politicians
suppose."--(A. Lincoln.)
* * * * *
"CALL ME 'LINCOLN.'"
Like the Friends, Abraham Lincoln had a dislike for handles to a name,
and at the first incurred criticism in fastidious Washington circles by
his using the last name and not the Christian one to familiars. To an
intimate friend he appealed:
"Now, call me 'Lincoln,' and I'll promise not to tell of the breach of
etiquette, if _you_ won't (Ah, how well he knew the vanity of great
men's Horatios!), and I shall have a resting spell from _Mister_
Lincoln!"
* * * * *
THE ELOQUENT HAND.
The colonel of the famous Massachusetts Sixth, which fought its way
through Baltimore, risen in riot, B. F. Watson, led fifty men to cleave
their way through "the Plug-uglies," vile toughs. On reporting at the
capital he found Commanding General Scott receiving the mayor of
Baltimore, hastening to sue for the sacred soil not being again trodden
on by the ruthless foot of the Yankees. President Lincoln happened in
and, recognizing Colonel Watson, who was only second in command then,
complimented him on his "saving the capital," and introduced him to the
company. Presuming that his quality would awe a young and amateur
soldier, the unlucky mayor had the audacity to require his confirmation
of his story. He said that he had dared the mob, and, to shield the
soldiers, marched at their head, etc. But the officer, still warm from
his baptism of fire, truly replied that he could not give a certificate
of character. He related how the riff-raff had assailed the volunteers,
wonderfully forbearing about not using their guns, and that the police
and other officials had sworn that they should not pass alive, while
the head and front, as he called himself, marched only a few
yards--quitting on the pretext that it was too hot for him!
"Many times," said Colonel Watson, "have I recalled the mayor's look of
intense disgust, the astonishing dignity of the commanding general, and
the expression, half-sad, half-quizzical, on the face of the President
at the evident infelicity of his introduction. If I did not leave that
distinguished presence with my reputation for integrity unimpaired, the
pressure of Abraham Lincoln's honest hand, as we parted, deceived me."
* * * * *
WOMAN.
"Woman is man's best present from his Maker."--(A. Lincoln.)
* * * * *
TO THINK AND TO DO WELL.
"It is more than mortal to think and to do well on all occasions and
subjects."--(To Senator James F. Wilson.)
* * * * *
"SET THE TRAP AGAIN!"
To fix extreme abolition upon Abraham Lincoln, Senator Douglas lent
himself to assuring that his rival had taken part in a convention and
helped pass a certain resolution. This was a fraud, as there was no
such resolution passed, and Lincoln was not present.
"The main object of that forgery was to beat Yates and elect Harris for
Congress, object known to be exceedingly dear to Judge Douglas at the
time.... The fraud having been apparently successful, both Harris and
Douglas have more than once since then been attempting to put it to new
uses. As the fisherman's wife, whose drowned husband was brought home
with his body full of eels, said, when asked what was to be done with
him: 'Take out the eels and set him again!' [Footnote: See Colman's
"Broad Grins."] So Harris and Douglas have shown a disposition to take
the eels out of that stale fraud by which they gained Harris' election,
and set the fraud again, more than once."--(Speech by A. Lincoln,
Jonesboro, Illinois, September 15, 1858.)
* * * * *
"NO ROYALTY IN OUR CARRIAGE."
From August to mid-October, 1858, Lincoln and Douglas warred on the
platform throughout Illinois, in a celebrated series of debates. As the
senator was in a high position, and expected to reap yet more important
honors, the Central Railroad corporation extended to him all graces. A
special car, the Pullman in embryo in reality, was at his beck, and a
train for his numerous friends if he spoke. On the other hand, his
rival, becoming more and more democratic in his leaning to the
grotesque, gloried in traveling even in the caboose of a freight-train.
He had no brass bands and no canteen for all comers; on one occasion
his humble "freighter" was side-tracked to let the palace-cars sweep
majestically by, a calliope playing "Hail to the Chief!" and laughter
mingling with toasts shouted tauntingly through the open windows. The
oppositionist laughed to his friends, and said:
"The gentleman in that decorated car evidently smelled no royalty in
our scow!"
He scoffed at these "fizzlegigs and fireworks," to employ his phrase.
But his keen sense of the ludicrous was not shared with his admirers.
On the contrary, the women saw nothing absurd in drowning him with
flowers and the men in "chairing him." Henry Villard relates that he
saw him battling with his supporters literally, and beseeching them who
bore him shoulder-high, with his long limbs gesticulating like a
spider's, for them to "Let me down!"
In another place, after Douglas had been galloped to the platform in
his carriage and pair, his antagonist was hauled up in a hayrack-wagon
drawn by lumbering farm-horses.
* * * * *
THE TRAP TO CATCH A DOUGLAS.
In the course of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, the former, among his
friends, announced that at the next meeting he would put a "settler" to
his contestant, and "I don't care a continental which way he answers
it."
As he did not explain, all awaited the evening's speeches for
enlightenment. In the midst of Douglas' "piece," Lincoln begged to be
allowed a _leetle_ question. The Lincolnian "leetle questions" were
beginning to be rankling darts.
Formally, the question was: "Can the people of a United States
territory, in a lawful way, against the wishes of any citizen of the
United States, exclude slavery from its limits, prior to the foundation
of a State constitution?"
In the homely way Lincoln put it, it ran:
"Suppose, _jedge_ (for Judge Douglas) there was a new town or colony,
just started in some Western territory; and suppose there was precisely
one hundred householders--voters, there--and suppose, jedge, that
ninety-nine did not want slavery and the one did. What would be done
about it?"
This was the argument about "Free Soil" and "squatter sovereignty" in a
nutshell.
The wily politician strove to avoid the loop, but finally admitted that
on American principles the majority must rule. This caused the
Charleston Convention of 1860 to split on this point, and Douglas lost
all hope of the Presidency.
* * * * *
PRACTISE BEFORE AND BEHIND "THE BAR."
The debate between Douglas and Lincoln, while marked by speeches severe
and stately, was interspersed with repartees and innuendoes as might be
awaited from former friends and become, by double rivalry, fierce
enemies.
The senator did not disdain to stoop to casting back at Lincoln's
humble beginning, and taunted him with having kept store and waited
_behind the bar_ before waiting before the bar judicial for his turn to
practise law. His adversary rose amid the laughter, and rejoined:
"What the jedge (Judge Douglas) has said, gentlemen, is true enough. I
did keep a grocery, and sometimes I did sell whisky; but I remember
that in those days Mr. Douglas was one of my best customers for the
same. But the difference between us now is that I do not practise
behind the bar at present, while Mr. Douglas keeps right on _before_
it."
* * * * *
CONNUBIAL AMITY.
"Mr. Douglas has no more thought of fighting me than fighting his
wife."--(Said during the Lincoln-Douglas debates, at a rumor that the
senator would challenge him for some personality.)
* * * * *
THE MODEL WHISKY-BARREL.
During the Douglas-Lincoln series of debates, the former made a jest
counting upon his being President some day. He said that his father was
a cooper, yet, with prescience, had not taught him the paternal craft,
but made him a _cabinet_-maker. His adherents who counted on office if
he won loudly applauded. Douglas was a thick-set, rotund man, whose
florid gills revealed that he was a host for boon companions. Lincoln
was his antithesis, as tall, long-drawn, and somber as the cold-water
man he was rated. He rose, and at once shot his shaft:
"I was not aware that Mr. Douglas' father was a cooper, but I doubt it
not, or that he was a good one. In fact, I am certain that he has made
one of the best whisky-casks I have ever seen!"
* * * * *
FIGHTING OUT OF ONE COAT INTO THE OTHER.
"I remember being once much amused at seeing two partially intoxicated
men engaged in a fight, with their greatcoats on, which fight, after a
long and rather harmless contest, ended in each having fought himself
out of his own coat and into that of the other! If the two leading
parties of to-day are really identical with the two in the days of
Jefferson and Adams, they have performed the same feat as the two
drunken men."--(Letter declining a Jefferson banquet invitation,
Springfield, Illinois, April 6, 1859.)
* * * * *
THE PROMISING FACE!
"Senator Douglas is of world-wide renown. All the anxious politicians
of his party 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, chargé-ships and foreign missions, bursting
and sprouting out in wonderful exuberance, ready to be laid hold of by
their greedy hands.... 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."--(Speech by A. Lincoln, Springfield,
Illinois, July 17, 1858.)
* * * * *
"A HOUSE DIVIDED CANNOT STAND."
This often-quoted passage was uttered in June, 1857, at Springfield,
Illinois, during Lincoln's congressional campaign:
"A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe that this
government cannot endure permanently, half-slave and half-free. I do
not expect this house to fall: I do not expect the Union to be
dissolved. But I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become
one thing or the other."
* * * * *
THE CONCERT ON "DRED SCOTT."
The Supreme Court of the United States decided in a fugitive-slave
case, one Dred Scott, that no negro slave could be any State citizen;
that neither Congress nor a territorial organization can exclude
slavery; that the United States courts would not decide whether a slave
in a free State becomes free, but left that to the slave-holding State
courts. Lincoln, in debate with Senator Douglas, asserted that the
latter, Chief Justice Taney, and others, were in a league to perpetuate
slavery and extend it.
"We cannot absolutely know, but when we see a lot of framed timbers,
different portions of which we know have been gotten out at different
times and places, and by different workmen--as Stephen, Franklin,
Roger, and James (Douglas, President Pierce, Taney, Buchanan), and when
we see these timbers joined together, and see they exactly make the
frame of a house or mill ... in such a case we find it impossible not
to believe that Stephen, and Franklin, and Roger, and James all
understood one another from the beginning, and all worked upon a common
plan or draft, drawn up before the first blow was struck." --(The
"Divided House" Speech, June 17, 1858, Springfield, Illinois.)
* * * * *
PLAYING CUTTLEFISH.
"Judge Douglas is playing cuttlefish!--a small species of fish that has
no mode of defending itself when pursued except by throwing out a black
fluid which makes the water so dark the enemy cannot see it, and thus
it escapes."--(Lincoln in Lincoln-Douglas Debate, Illinois, 1858.)
* * * * *
A VOICE FROM THE DEAD.
"Fellow citizens, my friend, Mr. Douglas, made the startling
announcement to-day that the Whigs are dead. If that be so, you will
now experience the novelty of hearing a speech from a dead man." With
his arms waving like windmill-sails, and his frame vibrating in every
one of the seventy-five inches perpendicular, he shrilled: "And I
suppose you might properly say, or sing, in the language of the old
hymn: 'Hark, from the tombs a doleful sound!'"--(Lincoln-Douglas
Debate, 1858.)
* * * * *
"IF I MUST GO DOWN, LET IT BE LINKED TO TRUTH."
In 1856, a red-letter day in American politics, the Republican party
was organized at Bloomington, Illinois, and, after his speech at the
inauguration, Abraham Lincoln was hailed as the foremost of the league
throughout the West. A civil war raged, as he had foretold, in Kansas,
through repeal of the Missouri Compromise, and Douglas was forced to
about face and actually vote, as senator in Congress against the very
measures he advocated, with the Republicans. He sought reelection, and
so believed he would allure them over to his side. At the Republican
State Convention in June, however, Lincoln was the unanimous
representative for Cook County, and he made the celebrated speech known
as "The House Divided Against Itself." This discourse had been
rehearsed before his clique of friends--the men who afterward boasted
that they made the President out of the "little one-horse lawyer of a
little one-horse town!" They agreed that it was sound and energetic,
but that it would not be politic to speak it then. The Republicans were
cautious, and shrank from uniting with the advanced theorists known as
the Abolitionists.
Lincoln slowly repeated the debated passage:
"'A house divided against itself cannot stand.' I will deliver it as
written. I would rather be defeated with this expression in the speech
than be victorious without it."
Before the persistence the advisers again implored him to moderate the
lines. "It would defeat his election--it will kill the embryo party!"
and so on.
But after silent reflection, he suddenly and warmly said:
"Friends, if it must be that I must go down because of this speech,
then let me go down linked to truth--_die_ in the advocacy of what is
right and just."
That famous utterance of what was fermenting in the great heart of the
people, and which perfect oneness with it and his own, enabled him to
be the touchstone of the Satan yet disguised, cleared the sky, and all
saw the battle, if not the doom, of the black stain on the United
States.
* * * * *
COME ONE, COME ALL!
On his road to inauguration, Lincoln held a reception at Chicago. The
autograph fiend was not prominent in the thick crowd, but still several
little girls were pushed forward by their besieging mamas and, under
pretense of one gift deserving a return, gave flowers, and the
spokesgirl said as she waved a sheet of paper:
"Your name, Mr. President, please!"
"But here are several other little girls----"
"They come with me," replied the little miss, with the intention of
gaining her end alone.
"Oh, then, as my signature will be little among eight--more paper!"
And he wrote a sentiment on each of eight sheets and affixed his sign
manual.
* * * * *
ASSISTING THE INEVITABLE.
In 1854, the Missouri Compromise Bill of 1820, made to shut out the
free States from the invasion of slavery, was repealed. The author of
this yielding on a vital question to the pro-slavery party was Stephen
A. Douglas, leader of the Democrats. He had been Lincoln's early
friend, and they were rivals for the hand of the Miss Todd who wedded
Lincoln, with spoken confidence, and woman's astonishing art of reading
men and the future, that he would attain a loftier station in the
national Walhalla than his brilliant and more bewitching adversary.
Indignant at this revoke in the great game of immunity which should
have been played aboveboard, the lawyer sprang forth from his family
peace and studious retirement to fall or fulfil his mission in the
irrepressible conflict.
Lincoln delivered a speech at Springfield when the town was crammed by
the spectators attending the State Fair. It was rated the greatest
oratorical effort of his career, and demolished Douglas' political
stand. The State, previously Democratic, slid upon and crushed out
Douglas' Kansas-Nebraska Bill, and a Whig legislature was chosen.
Having "the senatorship in his eye," or even a dearer if not a nearer
object, Lincoln resigned the seat he won in this revolutionary house.
On the other hand, a vacancy in the State senatorship at Washington
falling pat, he was set up as Whig candidate. Douglas had selected
General James Shields, who had married Miss Todd's sister, but was as
antagonistic to his brother-in-law as Douglas himself. The fight was
made triangular, by the Anti-Kansas-Nebraska Bill party advancing Lyman
Trumbull. Although Shields was not strong enough, a substitute in
Governor Mattheson, "a dark horse," uncommitted to either side, came
within an ace of election in the ballotage.
* * * * *
SELF-SACRIFICE.
Mr. Lincoln had the finished art of the politician; he had also a
magnanimous heart, ready to sacrifice all personal gain to the party.
He proposed withdrawing, and throwing all his supporters' votes over to
Mattheson--anything to beat Douglas! His friends resisted; he had
distinguished himself sufficiently as a "retiring man" in letting Baker
get the seat over his head. But he was terribly bent on this stroke of
victory. He gave up the reins and, in his great self-sacrifice,
passionately exclaimed:
"It _must_ be done!"
He was said to be, then, a fatalist, and so vented this command as if
he believed "What must be, must be!" unlike the doubter who said: "No!
what must be, won't be!" The Douglasites could not meet this change of
base, and Trumbull became senator by the Lincolnites' coalition.
Lincoln publicly disavowed any such formal compact.
* * * * *
A FIGHT PROVES NOTHING.
Stung by the repetition here in the West by Horace Greeley's quip upon
Douglas, whose trimming lost him supporters, "He is like the man's pig
which did not weigh as much as he expected, and he always knew he
wouldn't," a partizan of the senator's wanted to challenge Lincoln. The
latter declared that he would not fight Judge Douglas or his second.
"In the first place, a fight would prove nothing in issue in this
contest. If my fighting Judge Douglas would not prove anything, it
would prove nothing for me to fight his _bottle_-holder."
(It is to be borne in mind that the senator had a high reputation as a
convivial host, and the toady was believed to be his familiar --"the
Bottle Imp.")
* * * * *
"WIN THE FIGHT, OR DIE A-TRYING."
Though Douglas had his misgivings from knowing Lincoln is "the ablest
of the Republican party," he was forced by his standing and the
pressure of his less dubious followers to accept the oratorical
challenge of the other. The trumpeteers at once boasted the Little
Giant could make small feed of the animated fence-rail. Lincoln said on
the subject to Judge Beckwith, of Danville, on the eve:
"You have seen two men about to fight? Well, one of them brags about
what he means to do. The other fellow, he says not a word. He is saving
his wind for the fight, and as sure as it comes off, he will win it--or
die a-trying!"
* * * * *
PILLS TO PURGE MELANCHOLY.
The Puritanic and classically sedate critics blamed the President for
finding recreation in reading and hearing comic tales, used to
illustrate grave texts. He said to a congressman who brought up the
censure at a time when the country was profoundly harried:
"Were it not for this occasional vent, I should die!"
* * * * *
"DOWN TO THE RAISINS!"
It was the regular habit of President Lincoln to read the day's
telegrams in order in the "flimsy" triplicates. They were kept in a
drawer at the White House telegraph-office. As he handled the papers
almost solely, each addition would come to be placed on the last lot of
the foregoing day. When this was attained, he would say with a sigh:
"There, I have got down to the raisins!"
It was due to the story, which amused him, of the countryman. This
tourist entered a fashionable restaurant, and on viewing the long menu,
and concluding that all the dishes were for the customer at the fixed
price, manfully called for each in turn. When he arrived at the last
line, he sighed in relief, and cried:
"Thanks be! I have got down to the raisins!"
* * * * *
GIANT AND GIANT-KILLER.
As Stephen A. Douglas, from his concentrated force and limited height
was nicknamed "the Little Giant," his opponent, the elongated Lincoln,
was dubbed "the Giant-Killer."
* * * * *
LINCOLN'S "SENTIMENTS" ON A MOOTED POINT.
The President's reply to an autograph fiend who sought his signature,
appended to a sentiment, was:
"DEAR MADAM: When you ask a stranger for that which is of interest only
to yourself, always enclose a stamp."
* * * * *
CHESTNUTS UNDER A SYCAMORE.
The President, on his way to the Department of War, perceived a
gentleman under a tree, scraping among the heaped leaves with his cane.
He knew him, a Major Johnson, of the department, an old District of
Columbia man who had never been out of the district.
"Good morning, major!" hailed the executive officer. "What in the world
are you doing there?"
"Looking for a few horse-chestnuts."
"Eh? Do you expect to find them under a sycamore-tree?" The President
laughed freely and passed on. He ought to have removed the misguided
botanist into the Department of Agriculture, where he might have
learned something.
* * * * *
STILL OF LITTLE NOTE.
On hearing that a man had been arrested in Philadelphia for trying to
procure $1,500 by a forgery of Lincoln's name, he humorously said: "It
is surprising that any man could get the money!"
The secretary pointed out that use might have been made of a signature
given to a stranger as an autograph on a blank paper, the body of which
had been improperly filled up as a note.
"Well," answered the President, then, as to interfering, "I don't see
but that he will have to sit on 'the blister-bench.'"
* * * * *
THE TREE-TOAD AND "TIMOTHEUS."
In the early days when Abraham Lincoln went with his pioneer father to
settle in wild Indiana, the chief diversion of the rude inhabitants was
from the preaching of the traveling pastors. They were singular
devotees whose sincerity redeemed all their flaws of ignorance,
illiteracy, and violence. Abraham, with his inherent proneness toward
imitation of oratory, used to "take them off" to the hilarity of the
laboring men who formed his first audiences. Out of his recollections
came this tale, which he liked to act out with all the quaint tones and
gestures the subject demanded.
The itinerant ranters held out at a schoolhouse near Lincoln's cabin;
but in fine weather preferred the academy--as the Platoists would
say--what was left of an oak grove, only one tree being spared, making
a pulpit with leafy canopy for the exhorter. This man was a Hard-shell
Baptist, commonly imperturbable to outside sights and doings when the
spirit moved him. His demeanor was rigid and his action angular and
restricted. He wore the general attire, coonskin cap or beaver hat,
hickory-dyed shirt, breeches loose and held up by plugs or makeshift
buttons, as our ancestors attached undergarments to the upper ones by
laces and points. The shirt was held by one button in the collar.
This dress little mattered, as a leaf screen woven for the occasion hid
the lower part of his frame and left the protruding head visible as he
leaned forward, standing on a log rolled up for the platform.
He gave out the text, from Corinthians: "Now if Timotheus come, see
that he may be with you without fear; for he worketh the work of the
law." The following runs: "Let no man despise him," etc.
As he began his speech, a tree-toad that had dropped down out of the
tree thought to return to its lookout to see if rain were coming. As
the shortest cut it took the man as a post. Scrambling over his
yawning, untanned ankle jack-boots, it slipped under the equally
yawning blue jeans. He commenced to scale the leg as the preacher
became conscious of the invasion. So, while spooning out the text, he
made a grab at the creature, which might be a centipede for all he
knew; and then, as it ascended, and his voice ascended a note or two,
with the words "be without fear," he slapped still higher. Then, still
speaking, but fearsomely animated, he clutched frantically, but always
a leetle behindhand, at the unknown monster which now reached the
imprisoning neckband. Here he tore at the button--the divine, not the
newt--and broke it free! As he finally yelled--sticking to the sermon
as to the hunt, "worketh the work of the law!" an old dame in among the
amazed congregation rose, and shrieked out:
"Well, if you represent Timotheus and that is working for the law--then
I'm done with the Apostles!"
* * * * *
"IF IT WILL DO THE PRESIDENT GOOD--"
G. H. Stuart, chief of the Christian Commission, was a Bible
distributer during the war. The organization had a special soldiers'
Bible called the Cromwell one, whose mixture of warrior and preacher
seemed to couple him with Abraham Lincoln. The soldiers usually
accepted a copy without pressing, though some said they preferred a
cracker. But one man, a Philadelphian, like Stuart himself, rejected
the offer. Among the colporteur's arguments, however, was one that
overcame him.
"I'll tell you that I commenced my tract distribution at the White
House, and the first person I offered one to was Abraham Lincoln. He
took it and promised to read it."
"I'll take one," promptly cried the man; "if the President thought it
would do _him_ good, it won't hurt me!"
* * * * *
GROUNDS FOR A FINANCIAL ESTIMATE.
When the mercantile agencies were young, they acquired a consensus of
opinion upon a business man by annoying his acquaintances with
inquiries. One such house queried of Lincoln about one of his
neighbors. His reply was a smart burlesque on the bases on which they
rated their registered "listed."
"I am well acquainted with Mr. X----, and know his circumstances. First
of all, he has a wife and baby; together, they ought to be worth
$50,000 to any man. Secondly, he has an office in which there is a
table worth $1.50, and three chairs worth, say, $1. Last of all, there
is in one corner a large rat-hole, which will bear _looking into!_
Respectfully, etc."
* * * * *
"I WANTED TO SEE THEM SPREAD!"
It is related that the ushers and secret service officials on duty at
the Executive Mansion during the war were prone to congregate in a
little anteroom and exchange reminiscences. This was directly against
instructions by the President.
One night the guard and ushers were gathered in the little room talking
things over, when suddenly the door opened, and there stood President
Lincoln, his shoes in his hand.
All the crowd scattered save one privileged individual, the Usher
Pendel, of the President's own appointment, as he had been kind to the
Lincoln children.
The intruder shook his finger at him and, with assumed ferocity,
growled:
"Pendel, you people remind me of the boy who set a hen on forty-three
eggs."
"How was that, Mr. President?" asked Pendel.
"A youngster put forty-three eggs under a hen, and then rushed in and
told his mother what he had done.
"'But a hen can't set on forty-three eggs,' replied the mother.
"'No, I guess she can't, but I just wanted to see her spread herself.'
"That's what I wanted to see you boys do when I came in," said the
President, as he left for his apartments.--(By Thomas Pendel, still
usher, in 1900.)
* * * * *
THE LINCOLN NON SEQUITUR.
Though a Democrat, Member of Congress John Ganson, of New York,
supported the President, and he thought himself entitled to enjoy what
no one had surprised or captured--the confidence of Abraham's bosom, as
was the current phrase. He, calling, insisted that he ought to know the
true situation of things military and political, so that he might
justify himself among his friends. Ganson was bald as the egg and was
the most clean-shaven of men. The "Northern Nero" eyed the presumptuous
satrap fixedly, and drawled:
"Ganson, how clean you shave!"
He had escaped another inquisition by his close shave. (Told by Senator
C. M. Depew.)
* * * * *
WHY SO MANY COMMON PEOPLE.
Like another Daniel, Lincoln interpreted dreams. He said that he had
one in this guise:
He imagined he was in a great assemblage like one of his receptions
multiplied. The mass described a hedge to let him pass. He thought that
he heard one of them remark:
"That is a common-looking fellow!"
To whom Lincoln replied--still in the dream:
"Friend, the Lord loves common-looking people--that is why He made so
many of them."
(NOTE.--Another current saying substitutes "the poor" for "common.")
* * * * *
ENVY OF A HUMORIST.
It is difficult for the present generation to perceive the streak of
fun in "the Petroleum V. Nasby Papers" which regaled our grandfathers,
and Mr. Lincoln above others, who waited eagerly for the next letter in
the press. He requested the presentation of the author, John Locke, and
thanked him face to face--neither, like the augurs, able to keep his
_face_--for such antidotes to the blues. He said to a friend of "the
Postmaster at Confedrit X-rodes":
"If 'Petroleum' would impart his talent to me, I would swap places with
him!"
* * * * *
THE STOPPER ON JOURNALISTIC "GAS."
Having examined a model cannon devised not to allow the escape of gas,
he quizzically glanced at the group of newspaper reporters, and said:
"I really believe this does what it is represented to do. But do any of
you know of any machine or invention for preventing the escape of _gas_
from newspaper establishments?"
* * * * *
SALT BEFORE PEPPER.
The Cabinet being assembled in September, 1862, to consider the first
draft of the Emancipation Act, those not yet familiar with the
chairman's habit to supply a whet before the main dish, were startled
that he should preface the business by reading the New York
paper--_Vanity Fair_--continuing the series of "Artemus Ward's" tour
with his show. This paper was the "High-handed Outrage at Utica." He
laughed his fill over it, while the grave signiors frowned and yet
struggled to keep their countenances.
If they had more experience, they would have heard him read "Josh
Billings," particularly "On the Mule," from the New York _Weekly_
columns. It was as "good as a play," the stenographers said, to see the
President dart a glance over his spectacle-rims at some demure
counselor whose molelike machinations were more than suspected, and
with mock solemnity declaim:
"'I hev known a mewl to be good for six months jest ter git a chance to
kick his owner!'" In allusion to those remarkable feats of arms
and--legs--Early's or Stuart's raids and Jackson's forced rapid
marches, almost at horse-speed, when the men carried no rations, but
ate corn-ears taken from the shucks and roasted them "at their pipes,"
the droll ruler would bring in that "mewl" again:
"'If you want to find a mewl in a lot, you must turn him into the one
next to it.'"
Only the rebel "fly-by-nights" were more like the Irishman's
flea--"when you put your hand on him, he was not there!"
* * * * *
"MATCHING" STORIES.
The President looking in at the telegraph-room in the White House,
happened to find Major Eckert in. He saw he was counting greenbacks. So
he said jokingly:
"I believe you never come to business now but to handle money!"
The officer pleaded that it was a mere coincidence, and instanced a
story in point:
"A certain tailor in Mansfield, Ohio, was very stylish in dress and
airy in manner. Passing a storekeeper's door one day, the latter puffed
himself up and emitted a long blow, expressive of the inflation to
oozing-point of the conceited tailor, who indignantly turned and said:
'I will teach you to blow when I am passing!' to which the storekeeper
replied: 'And I'll teach you not to pass when I am blowing!'"
"Very good!" returned the hearer. "That is very like a story _I_ heard
of a man driving about the country in an open buggy, caught at night by
a pouring rain. Passing a farmhouse, a man, apparently struggling with
the effects of whisky, thrust his head out of a window, and shouted
loudly:
"'Hello!'
"The traveler stopped for all of his hurry for shelter and asked what
was wanted.
"'Nothing of you!' was the blunt reply.
"'Well, what in the infernals are you shouting 'Hello' for when people
are passing?' angrily asked the traveler.
"'Well, what in the infernals are you passing for when people are
shouting hello?'"
The rival story-tellers parted "at evens."
* * * * *
THE ONLY DISCREDIT.
A backhanded compliment of the acutest nature is credited to Lincoln as
a lawyer and gentleman. A Major Hill accused him of maligning Mrs.
Hill, upon which Lincoln denied the accusation and apologized with
"whitewash" which blacked the bystander:
"I entertain the highest regard for Mrs. Hill, and the only thing I
know to her discredit is that she is Major Hill's wife!"
* * * * *
NO RE-LIE-ANCE OF THEM!
Mrs. Secretary Welles, more susceptible about press attacks on her
idol--and everybody in Washington officialdom's idol--the President,
called attention to fresh quips and innuendoes.
"Pshaw! let pass; the papers are not always reliable. That is to say,
Mrs. Welles," interposed the object of the missiles, "they lie, and
then they _re-lie_!"
* * * * *
NO VICES--FEW VIRTUES.
Some one was smoking in the presence of the President, and had
complimented him on having no vices--such as drinking or smoking.
"That is a doubtful compliment," said the host. "I recollect being once
outside a coach in Illinois, and a man sitting beside me offered me a.
cigar. I told him I had no vices. He said nothing, smoked for some
time, and then grunted out:
"'It's my experience that folks who have no vices have plaguey few
virtues.'"
(Mrs. General Lander--Miss Jean Davenport, of stage life, the original
of Dickens' "Miss Crummies"--must have heard this in the presidential
circle, for she would say: "If a man has no petty vices, he has great
ones.")
A later version ascribes the reproof to a brother Kentuckian, also a
stage companion, variation sufficient to prove the happening.
* * * * *
THE APPLES OF HIS EYE.
"Up in the State, out my way," says the narrator, "there was a farmer
in the days when his sort were not called agriculturists; he kep' an
orchard, at the same time, without being called a horticulturist. He
was just another kind of 'Johnny Appleseed,' for he doted on apples and
used to beg slips and seeds of any new variety until he had one hundred
and eighty-two trees in his big orchard. I have counted them and longed
for them, early, mid, and late harvest--he fit off the bug and the
blight and the worm like a wizard. If there was any one thing save his
orchard he doted upon it was a daughter o' his'n, her name being Rose,
and all that you can cram of lush and bright-red and rosy-posy nicety
into that name. An' yet he hankered much on the latest addition to his
garden--a New York State apple as he sent for and 'tended to at great
outlay of time, anyway. 'This here daughter' and 'that there
apple-tree' were his delights. You might say the Rose and the Baldwin,
that were the brand of the fruit, were the apples of his two eyes!
"Well, there were two men around there, who cast sheep's eyes, not to
say wolfish ones, at the fruit and the girl. They Both expected to have
the other by getting the one. Well, one of those days the pair of young
fellers lounged along and kinder propped up the old man's fence around
the orchard. They was looking out of the tail of the eye more for the
Rose than the other thing in the garden. But they could not help spying
the Baldwin. It was the off year, anyhow, for apples, and this here one
being first in fruiting had been spared in but one blossom, and so the
old man cared for it with prodigious love. As mostly comes to pass with
special fruit, this one being petted, throve--well, you have no idea
how an apple tended to can thrive. It was big and red and meller! Well,
one of the fellers, being the cutest, he saw the other had his cane
with him and was spearing a windfall every now and then, and seeing how
close he could come to flipping the ears of a hog wallering down the
lane, or mayhap a horse looking over the paddock fence. Then a notion
struck him.
"'Lem,' said he, for the rival's name was Lem, for Lemuel; 'Lem,' he
says, 'I bet you a dollar you can't fire at that lone apple and knock
it off the stem--a dollar coin!' For they were talking in coonskins
them times. So Lem he takes the bet, and, sticking an apple on the
switch, sends it kiting with such accuracy of aim that it plumps the
Baldwin, ker-chung! in the plum center, and away fly both apples. Then,
while he grabbed the dollar--the girl and the old soul come out, and
the old soul see the pet apple rolling half-dented at his feet, and the
girl ran between him and the two men. But the feller who was such a
good shot, he sees a leetle too late what he had lost for a dollar and
he scooted, with the old man invoking all the cusses of Herod agin' him.
"The other feller he opened the gate as bold as a brazen calf, and
said, anticipating the old man:
"'Oh, _I_ don't come for apples--I want to spark your darter!'"
* * * * *
THE WHETSTONE STORY.
Abraham Lincoln was not given to boasting, but he did pride himself on
his gift of memory of faces. It included all sorts of things. Among the
soldiers calling at the White House was one from his section. He knew
him at sight, used his name, and said:
"You used to live on the Danville road. I took dinner with you one time
I was running for the legislature. I recollect that we stood talking
together out at the barnyard gate while I sharpened my jack-knife on
your whetstone."
"So you did!" drawled the volunteer, delighted. "But, say, whatever did
you do with that stone? I looked for it mor'n a thousand times, but I
never could find it after the day you used it! We 'lowed that mebby you
took it along with you."
"No," replied the presumed purloiner seriously, "I sot it on the top of
the gate-post--the high one."
"Thunder! likely enough you did! Nobody else couldn't have boosted it
up there! and we never thought to look there for it!"
When the soldier was allowed to go home, the first thing he did was to
look up to that stone. Surely enough it was on the gate-post top! It
had lain there fifteen years, since the electioneerer had stuck it
there as easily as one might place it on a table.
* * * * *
"THE MONARCH OF ALL HE SURVEYED."
Lincoln's coquetting with the science of Gunter, Jack of all trades
that he was, empowered him to perpetrate a fine pun on the United
States surveyor-general in California, General Beall. This official
acquired in his course so much real estate of the first quality that on
a reference being made to it in the President's hearing, he observed:
"Yes, they say Beall is 'monarch of all he _surveyed_.'" (New York
_Herald_.)
* * * * *
MEN HAVE FAULTS LIKE HORSES.
While riding between the court towns, Menard and Fulton Counties,
Illinois, Lincoln rode knee to knee with an old settler who admitted
that he was going to Lewiston to have some "lawing" out with a
neighbor, also an old-timer. The young practitioner already preached,
as a motto, that there would always be litigation enough and again
exerted to throw oil on the riled water.
"Why, Uncle Tommy, this neighbor has been a tolerable neighbor to you
nigh onto fifteen year and you get along in _hunk_ part of the time,
don't 'ee?"
The rancantankerous man admitted as much.
"Well, now, you see this nag of mine? He isn't as good a horse as I
want to straddle and I sometimes get out of patience with him, but I
know his faults as well as his p'ints. He goes fairly well as hosses
go, and it might take me a long while to git used to another hoss'
faults. For, like men, all hosses hev faults. You and Uncle Jimmy ought
to put up with each other as man and his steed put up with one another;
see?"
"I reckon you are about right, Abe!"
And he went on to town, but not to "law."
* * * * *
LINCOLN'S PUNS ON PROPER NAMES.
Though as far back as Doctor Johnson, punning was regarded as obsolete,
it was still prevalent in the United States and so up to a late date.
Mr. Lincoln was addicted to it.
Mr. Frank B. Carpenter was some six months at the presidential mansion
engaged on the historical painting of "The President and the Cabinet
Signing the Emancipation Act," when the joke passed that he had come in
there a _Carpenter_ and would go out a _cabinet-maker_. An usher
repeated it as from the fountain-head of witticism there.
At a reception, a gentleman addressed him, saying: "I presume, Mr.
President, you have forgotten me?"
"No! your name is Flood. I saw you last, twelve years ago, at ----. I
am glad to see that _the Flood_ still goes on."
The Draft Riots in New York, mid-July, 1863, had, at the bottom, not
reluctance to join the army, but a belief among the Democrats, notably
the Irish-Americans, that the draws were manipulated in favor of
letting off the sons of Republicans. However, the Irish were prominent
in resistance. The President said: "General _Kilpatrick_ is going to
New York to put down the riots--but his name has nothing to do with it."
In 1856, Lincoln was prosecuting one Spencer for slander. Spencer and a
Portuguese, Dungee, had married sisters and were at odds. Spencer
called the dark-complexioned foreigner a nigger, and, further, said he
had married a white woman--a crime in Illinois at that era. On the
defense were Lawrence Weldon and C. H. Moore. Lincoln was _teasled_ as
the court sustained a, demurrer about his papers being deficient. So he
began, his address to the jury:
"My client is not a negro--though it is no crime to be a negro--no
crime to be born with a black skin. But my client is not a negro. His
skin may not be as white as ours, but I say he is not a negro, though
he may be a _Moore!"_ looking at the hostile lawyer. His speech was so
winning that he recovered heavy damages. But being a family quarrel,
this was arranged between the two. Mr. Weldon says that he feared Mr.
Lincoln would win, as he had said with unusual vehemence:
"Now, by Jing! I will beat you, boys!"
By Jing! (Jingo--St. Gengulphus), was "the extent of his expletives."
Byron found a St. Gingo's shrine in his Alpine travels.
On paying the costs, Lincoln left his fee to be fixed by the opposing
pair of lawyers, saying: "Don't you think I have honestly earned
twenty-five dollars?"
They expected a hundred, for he had attended two terms, spent two days,
and the money came out of the enemy's coffer.
* * * * *
NOT SO EASY TO GET INTO PRISON.
William Lloyd Garrison, the premier Abolitionist, was imprisoned in
Baltimore for his extreme utterances when a stronghold of the
pro-slavery party. After the war, he visited the regenerated city, and,
for curiosity, sought unavailingly the jail where he had been confined.
On hearing the fruitlessness of his quest, the President said:
"Well, Mr. Garrison, when you first went to Baltimore, you could not
get out of prison--but this second time you could not get in!"
* * * * *
"THEM THREE FELLERS AGIN!"
The gamut of possible atrocities in connection with fulfilment of the
threats of secession being run through the rumors became stale and
flat. Lincoln, receiving one deputation of alarmists with considerable
calm, no doubt thought to excuse it by saying:
"That reminds me of the story of the schoolboy. He found great
difficulty in pronouncing the names of the three children in the fiery
furnace. Yet his teacher had drilled him thoroughly in 'Shadrach,
Meshach, and Abednego,' so that, one day, he purposely took the same
lesson in Bible reading, and managed to have the boy read the passages
containing these names again. As the dull pupil came to them he
stopped, looked up, and said:
"'Teacher, there's them three fellers ag'in!'"
* * * * *
LINCOLN THE GREAT AND LINCOLN THE LITTLE.
In 1856, the new Republican party tested its strength by offering a
ticket: General Fremont, popular through his invasion of California and
Rocky Mountain exploration, was selected as the presidential nominee,
with Dayton as vice. But during the balloting, Lincoln was opposed to
the latter, and received over a hundred votes. This news was despatched
to Illinois as a compliment to her "favorite son."
But on going to congratulate "our Lincoln," the deputation found him
easy and incredulous on the felicitation.
"You are barking up the wrong tree, neighbors," he said gravely; "that
must be the great Lincoln--of Massachusetts."
There was a Levi Lincoln, to whom he had been introduced as a form and
as a kinsman of the Massachusetts Lincolns. So the namesake's mistake
in modesty was pardonable in one who studied the train of politics most
thoroughly since he had said he would be President of these United
States. It was in his teens, but the saying is common property of young
America, and it is more notable that before he left Indiana, and early
in his new and unalterable one in Illinois, his astounded admirers
prophesied the same goal; it is a fact that his own hand proves; that
in 1854, he says, "I have really got it into my head to be United
States senator." [Footnote: Nevertheless, a friend, Speed or Herndon,
says, a year or two later, that Lincoln had no more founded idea that
he would be President than Emperor of China. It may be permitted to
believe that no man is a confidant to his valet or friend.]--(Letter to
Joseph Gillespie, preserved in Missouri Historical Society Library.)
* * * * *
"GO, THOU, AND DO LIKEWISE."
Lord Lyons was the British ambassador at Washington when the Prince of
Wales--now King Edward--was betrothed to the Princess Alexandra, of
Denmark, since queen regent of England. He used the most stilted,
ornate, and diplomatic language to carry the simple fact. The President
replied offhand with trenchant advice to the bearer, who was unmarried:
"'Go, thou, and do likewise!'"
This did not alter the amity existing between the two, for Lincoln so
won upon the envoy that he notified his premier, Lord Russell, at a
critical instant when England and France were expected to combine to
raise the Southern blockade, that it was wrong to prepare the American
Government for recognition of the Confederacy. As for the Russian
alliance with the powers, that was a fable, since the czar had sent a
fleet to New York, where the admiral had sealed orders to report to
President Lincoln in case the European allies' declared war.
In consequence of Lord Lyons opposing the English move, he had to
resign.--(A later account in Malet's "Shifting Scenes.")
* * * * *
"IS THE WORLD GOING TO FOLLOW THAT COMET OFF?"
Two gentlemen going by stage-coach from Terre Haute to Indianapolis, in
1858, found one part of the vehicle occupied fully by a tall,
countrified person, in a cheap hat and without coat or vest, but a farm
roundabout. They had to wake him up, but he was civil and polite enough
in his unkempt way. They thought he would be a good butt for play, as
educated folk were uncommon out there in 1847, and considered the
untaught as their legitimate prey. So they bombarded the poor bumpkin
with "wordy pyrotechnics," at which the stranger bewilderingly added
his laugh and finally was emboldened to ask what would be the upshot of
"this here comet business?"
The comet was the talk, especially in the evening, of the world, as it
was taken to forerun disasters. If the editor remembers aright it was
sword-shaped. That portends war. The intelligent jesters answered him
to confuse still more, and left him at Indianapolis. One of the two
travelers was Judge Abram Hammond, and his companion, who tells the
story, Thomas H. Nelson, of Terre Haute. The latter, coming down after
preening up, found a brilliant group of lights of the law in the main
room. They were judges and luminaries of the bar--but who should be the
center of the galaxy but the uncouth fellow traveler! All were so
interested in a story he was telling that Mr. Nelson could, unnoticed,
inquire of the laughing landlord as to the entertainer of these wits.
"Abraham Lincoln, of Sangamonvale, our M. C.!"
He was so stupefied that, on recovery, he hurried upstairs and got
Hammond to levant with him. But he was not to remain unpunished. Years
after, when Hammond was governor of the State, and he to become
minister to Chile, Nelson, was at the same hotel-Browning's--at the
capital, when looking over the party welcoming and accompanying the
President-elect to Washington, he saw a long arm reached out to his
shoulder; a shrill voice pierced his ear:
"Hello, Nelson! do you think, after all, the whole world is going to
follow that darned comet [Footnote: Donati's comet.] off?"
The words were Nelson's own in reply to the supposed Reuben's question
in the stage-coach twelve years before!
No joke of a memory, that--for a joke!
* * * * *
A GOOD LISTENER.
The invidious who would themselves get a word in, accused Lincoln of
monopolizing the conversation where he wished to reign supreme. This is
contradicted in several instances. Rather his confraternity describe
their meetings as "swapping stories," the flow circulating.
Mr. Bowen pictures Lincoln as getting up half-dressed, after a speech
at Hartford, in his hotel bedroom at Mr. Trumbull, of Stonington,
rapping at the door. Trumbull had just thought of "another story I want
to tell you!" And the tired guest sat up till three in the morning
"exchanging stories." This does not resemble monopoly.
A clerk, Littlefield, in the Lincoln-Herndon office, prepared a speech,
and said to his senior employer:
"It is important that I get this speech correct, because I think you
are going to be the presidential candidate. I told him I would like to
read it to him. He consented, sitting down in one corner of the room,
with his feet on a chair in front of him.
"'Now,' said he, in his hearty way, 'fire away, John! I think I can
stand it.' As I proceeded, he became quite enthusiastic, exclaiming:
'You are hitting the nail on the head.' He broke out several times in
this way, finally saying: 'That is going to go.'"
It did go, as the fellow clerk, Ellsworth, of Chicago Zouaves fame,
borrowed it, and it disappeared--wads for his revolver, perhaps.
* * * * *
CARRIED THE POST-MATTER IN HIS HAT.
It is to Abraham Lincoln is fastened the joke that as postmaster he
carried the mail in his hat. This was at New Salem, postmaster of which
he was appointed by President Jackson, as he was the best qualified of
any of the burgesses. Indeed, he often had to read letters to their
ignorant receivers, and habitually acted as town clerk in reading out
newspapers for the general good, on the stoop.
* * * * *
PRESIDENT LINCOLN DUBBED THEM THE "WIDE-AWAKES."
In looking over the illustrated newspapers of the war, one may find
drawn the processions anterior to election of the various political
parties. Gradually the lines, at first only uniform in certain
organizations, became regular as a body. The Republicans at rich
Hartford, having funds for the purpose, formed a corps of three or four
hundred young men. They drilled to march creditably, assumed a kind of
uniform: a cape to shed sparks and oil from the torches, and swinging
lamps carried; and a hat, proof also to fire, water, and missiles!
In March, 1860, Mr. Lincoln paid a visit to the college city to speak
at the old City Hall. He was introduced as one who had "done _yeoman_
service for the young party (the Republican)." The word yeoman was
under stood in the old English sense of the small independent farmers.
Old Tom Lincoln's boy came into this class. He assented to it and even
lowered the level by presenting himself as a hard worker in the
cause--"a dirty shirt" of the body. After the meeting, the marchers
surrounded the speaker's "public carriage" to escort him to the mayor's
house. His introducer was Sill, later lieutenant-governor of the State.
To him the guest observed on the ride:
"Those boys are wide-awake! Suppose (they were seeking a name) we call
them, the Wide-awakes?"
The name was enthusiastically adopted. The wide felt hat, with one flap
turned up, was called the Wide-awake, but the election marchers did not
wear them at all. Lincoln had added a new word to the language.
* * * * *
TRUST TO THE OLD BLUE SOCK.
Several incidents in Lincoln's early career earned him the title of
"honest," confirmed by his uncommon conduct as a lawyer; [Footnote: The
Honest Lawyer. It is said that he was amused by the conjunction, which
he observed, to an adviser who turned him into the legal field, was
rather a novelty. He thought of the story of the countryman who saw a
stranger by the God's acre, staring at a gravestone, without however
any emotion on his face to betray he was a mourner. On the contrary,
the man wore a puzzled smile, which piqued him to inquire the cause.
"Relative of yours?" asked the native.
"No, not at all, except through Adam. But," reading the epitaph, "'X.,
an honest man, and a lawyer.' Why, how did they come to bury those
_two_ men in one grave?'"] but a principal event was in connection with
his postmastership. It was in 1833. After renouncing the position, he
removed to Springfield to take up the study of the law. An agent from
the Post-office Department called on him to settle his accounts;
through some oversight he had been left undisturbed for some years. He
was living with a Mr. Henry, who kept a store, anterior to his lodging
in Mr. Speed's double-bedded room. As he was poverty-stricken and had
been so since quitting home. Mr. Henry, hearing that a matter of
fifteen or twenty dollars was due the government, was about to loan it,
when Lincoln, not at all disquieted, excused himself to the man from
headquarters to go over to his boarding-house. Usually when a debtor
thus eclipses himself the official expects to learn he is a defaulter
and has "taken French leave," as was said on the border. But the
ex-postmaster immediately came over, and, producing an old blue woolen
sock, such as field-hands wore, poured out coin, copper and silver, to
the exact amount of the debit. Much as the poor adventurer needed cash
in the interval, the temptation had not even struck him to use the
trust--the government funds. He said to partner Herndon he had promised
his mother never to use another's money.
* * * * *
IF ALL FAILED, HE COULD GO BACK TO THE OLD TRADE!
The Illinois Republican State Convention of 1860 met at Decatur, in a
_wigwam_ built for the purpose, a type of that noted in the Lincoln
annals as at Chicago. A special welcome was given to Abraham Lincoln as
a "distinguished citizen of Illinois, and one she will ever be
delighted to honor." The session was suddenly interrupted by the
chairman saying: "There is an old Democrat outside who has something to
present to the convention."
The present was two old fence-rails, carried on the shoulder of an
elderly man, recognized by Lincoln as his cousin John Hanks, and by the
Sangamon folks as an old settler in the Bottoms. The rails were
explained by a banner reading:
"Two rails from a lot made by Abraham Lincoln and John Hanks, in the
Sangamon Bottom, in the year 1830."
Thunderous cheers for "the rail-splitter" resounded, for this slur on
the statesman had recoiled on aspersers and was used as a title of
honor. The call for confirmation of the assertion led Lincoln to rise,
and blushing--so recorded--said:
"Gentlemen: I suppose you want to know something about those things.
Well, the truth is, John and I did make rails in the Sangamon Bottom."
He eyed the wood with the knowingness of an authority on "stumpage,"
and added: "I don't know whether we made those rails or not; the fact
is, I don't think they are a credit to the makers!" It was John Hanks'
turn to blush. "But I do know this: I made rails then, and, I think, I
could make better ones now!"
Whereupon, by acclamation, Abraham Lincoln was declared to be "first
choice of the Republican party in Illinois for the Presidency."
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