THE WONDERFUL STORY OF LINCOLN

C. M. STEVENS

Inspiration Series of Patriotic Americans

THE WONDERFUL STORY OF LINCOLN
AND THE MEANING OF HIS LIFE FOR THE YOUTH
AND PATRIOTISM OF AMERICA

By C. M. STEVENS
Author of “The Wonderful Story of Washington”

NEW YORK
CUPPLES & LEON COMPANY

Copyright, 1917, by
CUPPLES & LEON COMPANY

Printed in U. S. A.

CONTENTS

[Pg 1]

LINCOLN AND AMERICAN FREEDOM

CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTORY CONSIDERATIONS

I. A PERSONAL LIFE AND ITS INTEREST TO AMERICANS

“America First” has probably as many varieties of meaning and use as “Safety First.” It means to every individual very much according to what feelings it inspires in him of selfishness or patriotism. We are inspired as we believe, and, to be an American, it is necessary to appreciate the meaning and mission of America.

American history is composed of the struggle to get clear the meaning of American liberty. Through many years of distress and sacrifice, known as the Revolutionary War, the American people freed themselves from un-American methods and masteries [Pg 2] imposed on them from across the sea. Out of that turmoil of minds came forth one typical leader and American, George Washington. But we did not yet have clear the meaning of America, and through yet more years of even worse suffering, involving the Civil War, we freed ourselves from the war-making methods and masteries entrenched within our own government. Out of that political turmoil of minds appeared another American, Abraham Lincoln, whose life represents supremely the most important possibilities in the meaning and ideal of America. To know the mind-making process that developed Washington and Lincoln is to know not only the meaning but also the mission of America.

Every American child and every newcomer to our shores is in great need to understand clearly and indisputably their interest in American freedom, as being human freedom and world freedom, if they are to realize and fulfill their part as Americans.

The American vision of moral freedom and social righteousness can in no way be made clearer than in studying the process of development that individually prepared Washington and Lincoln to be the makers and preservers of a developing democracy for America and for the American mind of the world.

Lincoln’s early life has interest and meaning only for those who are seeking to understand the pioneer political principles, fundamental in character and civilization, out of which could develop a mind and manhood equipped for the greatest and noblest of human tasks. To take his “backwoods” experiences and their comparatively uncouth incidents, as interesting merely because they happened to a man who became famous, is to miss every inspiration, value and meaning so important in building his way as man and statesman. To read the early incidents of Lincoln’s life for the isolated interest of their being the queer, peculiar or pathetic biography of a notable character has little that is either inspiring or informing to a boy in the light of present experiences and methods of living. Indeed, many social episodes of pioneer customs are seemingly so trivial or coarse, in comparison, as to detract in respect from a boy’s ideal of the historical Lincoln.

The Birthplace of Abraham Lincoln—Hodgensville, Ky.

The pioneer frontier was the social infancy of a new meaning for civilization. Its lowly needs of humble equality were the first social interests of Lincoln, and the wonderful story of his life in that place and time, if told as merely historical happenings, incidentally noticeable only because they happened to Lincoln, becomes more and more frivolous and disesteeming in interest to boyhood, and to the general reader, as current social customs develop away beyond those times. This is why such strained efforts [Pg 3]
[Pg 4] have been made to give the incidents of his social infancy a pathetic interest, or some other sympathetic appeal, where everything was so unromantic, industrious, simple, enjoyable and faithful to the earth.

Those lowly years were sacred privacy to him. He knew there was nothing in them for a biographer, and he said so. His experience is valuable only in showing how it developed a man. True enough, the biographically uninteresting trivialities of his early years were not from him but from his environment. This is proven from the fact that two wider contrasting environments are hardly possible than those of Washington and Lincoln, and yet out of them came the same model character and supreme American.

II. THE PROCESS OF LIFE FROM WITHIN

Standard authorities have already fully recorded Lincoln’s biography and its historical environment. There yet remains the far more difficult, delicate and consequential message from generation to generation, so much needed in patriotic appreciation, to interpret his rise from those vanished social origins, in order that there may be a just valuation of his life by American youth.

[Pg 5]

The schoolboy learns with little addition to his ideals, or to his patriotism, or humanity, when he reads of a person, born in what appears to be the most sordid and pathetic destitution of the wild West, at last becoming a martyr president. The scenes in the making of Lincoln’s life run by too fast in the reading for the strengthening life-interest to be received and appreciated. The human process of Lincoln’s youth, with its supreme lesson of patience and labor and growth, is lost in considering the man solely as a strange figure of American history. If that life can be separated enough from the political turmoil so as to be seen and to be given a worthy interpretation, there is thus a service that may be worth while for the American youth.

Heroes have been made in many a historical crisis and they represent some splendid devotion to a single idea of human worth, but Lincoln’s heroism was the far severer test of a hard struggle through many years. He came near encountering every discouragement and in mastering every difficulty that may befall any American from the worst to the best, and from the lowliest to the most responsible position.

The poet has expressed these valuations arising through the frailties and vicissitudes of his long, tragic struggle in the following lines:

[Pg 6]

Lincoln’s life has much more for American youth than the adventure-story of a backwoods boy of pioneer days on his unknown way to be a hero of American history. What Lincoln thought he was and what he made out of his relations with those around him are only incidental to the inspiring patience with which he kept the faith of high meaning within him, and the labor with which he strove on until his ideal came clear as one of the supreme visions of humanity.

Every really ambitious American boy asks himself the question, How did he do it? The probably correct answer is that he didn’t do it. He made himself the right man and the right people did it.

We do not now hear so much of Lincoln as the “fireplace” student, because that word no longer carries so pathetic a vision as it did to the American boy. “Lincoln the railsplitter” has almost disappeared from the phrases of patriotic eulogy for this great American, because the task and significance of railsplitting no longer bear the force of meaning that they did to the boys of Civil-War days. This means [Pg 7] that, if the American boy is to receive any inspiration from the early life of Lincoln, there must be achieved some new and more significant form of interpretation from the making of his life and character.

Even the strong description of Edwin Markham becomes more figurative than concrete in its illustration more poetic than material, when he says,

III. A LIFE BUILT AS ONE WOULD HAVE THE NATION

Lincoln’s life may be prized as much in what he did for himself as in what he did for his country, because in the course of our interest they mean the same and become the same. He has shown to every American boy that the right desire, no matter what the circumstances and conditions, will invariably lead along the right way to the successful life, because the successful character is a successful career for a successful humanity. Very clearly one thing is sure, he was wonderfully successful in finding the [Pg 8] right thing to do and in finding the right way to do it. That is what humanity wants and such a man is the human ideal. Accordingly, Lincoln’s personal moral development, apart from his historical public career, is an introductory story inspiring an interest for the patriotic study of his statesmanship and the fundamental principles of American life.

Any boy or girl can appreciate the events that entered into the making of Lincoln’s mind and character, but only a student of statesmanship and history can read beyond this and appreciate the almost superhuman task which Lincoln carried through to the extinction of slavery and the preservation of the United States of America.

In that view we are not here writing the biography or history of Lincoln the Statesman, nor of Lincoln the War President, for that work has already been exhaustively and nobly done, but to give the inspiring meaning of his experiences from which arose the boy and man representing above all others the meaning and mission of Americans and America.

[Pg 9]

CHAPTER II

I. THE PROBLEM OF A WORTHWHILE LIFE

Many of the early events entering into Lincoln’s life seem too trivial to mention in the light of his great services to America. But the human struggle and the moral achievement of a supreme American ideal cannot be appreciated or understood unless the experiences buffeting the way to it, and their circumstances, are known for what they mean to his life. Trivial experiences have very much to do with forming our lives and without them we can neither appreciate nor understand the great events that we believe have given us our career and our destiny.

After being nominated for the presidency of the United States, Lincoln was asked for material from his early life out of which to make a biography.

“Why,” he replied earnestly, as if this was a sacred privacy in his own profound struggle, “it is a great folly to attempt to make anything out of me or my early life. It can all be condensed in a single sentence; and that sentence you will find in Grey’s [Pg 10] Elegy: ‘The short and simple annals of the poor.’”

His early friends all agree that he was lazy and idle, but, when we ask closer, they tell us that he spent his time “reading and writing and arguing.” One of his most admiring friends hired him for a certain period and became greatly disgusted at the young man’s preference for idling his time away reading. Another friend one day found him reading, and, with the intention of severely rebuking him, asked what he was doing. “Reading law,” was the reply, without taking his eye from the page.

“Almighty Gosh!” was all the disgusted friend could say. Reading was bad enough waste of time, but to be reading law was beyond all use of words or censure.

So, it merely proves that no one can be understood by the historical student, except as the conditions of mental soil in which the character grew are understood. And especially is it good to learn why the prophet is without honor in his own country, sometimes not even known in his own age. Home people rarely or never understand the unusual worker, because they cannot measure outside of their own experience, and their opinions rarely give much insight into the great laborer born among them, with the great urge, if not the vision, of work and the way.

Lincoln is probably the last Great American who [Pg 11] shall ever have to begin his mind-making as anything less than an “heir of all ages.” In Lincoln’s case it seemed as if all else was banished that a mind might build itself up anew to be a fundamental interpretation of American civilization. Like the great Newton, he built his world of principle out of the particulars of original experience, and found that it was the order of the universe. And yet, it might be said that he was a failure in particulars and minor matters, for he thought in terms of general humanity and swung the world into a new consciousness and vision of the moral law.

As Mr. Herndon says, “His origin was in that unknown and sunless bog in which history never made a footprint.” The social origin and development of Christ were far less obscure, humble and lowly in destitute and helpless environment, before the special task of preserving a meaning in the earth as a home for man.

Julia Ward Howe expresses the seriousness attending the possibilities of every new-born soul, as she says, of Lincoln,

It was certainly impossible for a pioneer of the early frontier to imagine how the rich live now, but it is not so hard for any one now to imagine how people lived then, if he will go into the deep woods with only a few simple tools and try to live. It can be done and it will probably be a healthful experience, but not an experience that any person would be expected to try twice.

It is therefore not needful to the setting of our story about the making of a man, for any extended description to be made of the ignorance and the poverty common to those times.

It is enough for us to say with Maurice Thompson in his lines:

Ida Tarbell, after her extensive original researches into the early life of Lincoln, very thoughtfully, says,

“He seems to have had as nearly a universal human sympathy as any one in history. A man could [Pg 13] not be so high or so low that Lincoln could not meet him and he could not be so much of a fool, or so many kinds of a fool. He could listen unruffled to cant, to violence, to criticism, just and unjust. Amazingly he absorbed from each man the real thing he had to offer, annexed him by showing him that he understood, and yet gave him somehow a sense of the impossibility of considering him alone, and leaving out the multitudes of other men as convinced and as loyal as he was.”

II. THE LINCOLN BOY OF THE KENTUCKY WOODS

We may well believe that the little Lincoln boy was thrilled with stories of noxious “varmints” and wild “Injuns.” As the fire crackled in the wide earthen fireplace and the sparks flew up the broad dirt chimney, we may well suppose the mystic superstitions of the ignorant times thrilled the young mind with vague fears and often with indescribable dread.

Doubtless he often heard his father tell the story of his own desperate boyhood, how Mordecai, the elder brother, had, just in the nick of time, saved his life from the tomahawk.

[Pg 14]

Abe’s father when a child went out to their clearing with his two brothers and their father, whose name was Abraham. We may be sure that their watchful eyes looked closely into every pile of brush or clump of bushes that might hide an Indian. But the Indians were trained to hide like snakes or foxes. So that which was ever expected and feared happened. There was a shot from an unseen form in the bushes, and the father of the family fell dead.

Mordecai, the eldest, ran for the cabin, the other boy ran for help, but the younger boy, too bewildered and not comprehending what had happened, remained by the side of his fallen father.

As Mordecai looked out through the chinks of the cabin to see the enemy, which he supposed to be in numbers, he saw a lone Indian come out and seize the boy. With quick aim he fired and the Indian fell dead. The little boy, now understanding, began to scream, when Mordecai ran to him and carried him into the cabin.

It was in the death of this pioneer that the Lincolns became subjected to such poverty. And yet it is doubtful if their poverty was much worse than most of those around them. In this vision of frontier life we can get some idea at what great cost has been achieved the civilization that composes the foundations of this country.

[Pg 15]

Lives seem insignificant and their experiences trivial, but in them are the making of all that is good and great. In the making of typical lives is to be seen the meaning and the making of the nation. It is said that Lincoln’s first attempts to write his name were made with a stick upon the ground. Those letters have long since vanished and yet that name is written in sentiments and deeds of gold throughout the earth.

Wilbur Nesbit holds up the jewel of Lincoln’s life in the following lines:

III. HOME-SEEKERS IN THE WILD WEST

Thomas Lincoln became a home-seeking wanderer soon after the death of his father. According to the [Pg 16] laws of that time, all the property went to the eldest, and it may be supposed that little attention was paid in that rough destitute life to the raising of Thomas. He grew up simply “a wandering, laboring boy,” whose hard circumstances left little ambition or hope in him. But, in the course of all wondrous events and time, he became a carpenter, well respected, and married his cousin, the niece of the man in whose shop he worked. This niece was Nancy Hanks, daughter of Joseph Hanks, who had married Nannie Shipley, a Quaker girl. From all authentic accounts that can be gathered concerning Nancy Hanks, she was one of God’s great women.

This much at least is sufficiently verified that she was a strong, handsome girl, noted for her religious zeal, and was one of the most sought-for singers at the marvellous camp-meetings of those days. That the marriage of Thomas Lincoln and Nancy Hanks was regarded as an important community event is the testimony of several who were present, for every social enjoyment known to the times was there, and the occasion was celebrated with unusual demonstrations of good will.

The wedding took place June 12, 1806, and the documents of the marriage show that she had enough property left her by her father to require a guardian appointed by the court. The uncle with whom she [Pg 17] lived was her guardian, appointed on the death of her parents when she was nine years old.

Documents in existence also show that Thomas Lincoln owned a large tract of land, that he held responsible public position, and was well respected in his community. The stories of shiftlessness and shame so long told as truth must be cast out as among the curiosities of envious gossip, sometimes accepted even by those it injures as true history.

A year after the marriage of Thomas Lincoln and Nancy Hanks their first child was born, a girl, which they named Nancy. Twelve years later, after the death of her mother and the marriage of her father to Sarah Bush Johnson, this daughter renamed herself Sarah, by which name she was known until her death at the age of twenty.

Sarah was born at Elizabethtown, Kentucky, but soon after the family moved to a farm, bought several years before by Thomas Lincoln, about fourteen miles away. There on February 12, 1809, was born one of the greatest of all Americans, Abraham Lincoln.

The Lincoln home was so rude that descriptions of it, in comparison with present poverty-stricken homes, sounds like distressful destitution, but it was the home of frontiersmen in pioneer days. All testimony agrees that no one suffered and that the boy [Pg 18] grew strong and manly, in the abiding favor of friends, and in the noble aspirations of a superior destiny.

When Abraham Lincoln was seven years old and his sister Sarah was near nine, his father desired to seek a better home, which the pioneer always dreamed of as farther on. He built a flatboat in a creek half a mile from his house, put his household goods upon it, and floated down the Rolling Fork on a voyage of discovery to Salt River, and down Salt River to the Ohio. At Thompson’s Ferry on the Indiana shore he landed, stored his goods, and went back after his family, which he brought through on horseback.

IV. A WONDERFUL FAMILY IN THE DESOLATE WILDERNESS

Lincoln tells us of one thing his mother said to him which he never forgot, though he was not yet nine years old. Her thought for him became his dream of her.

“Mother wants her little boy to be honest, truthful, and kind to everybody, and always to trust in God.”

[Pg 19]

The words of his “angel mother,” as he named her, were always the guiding star of his life. He always wanted to be what his mother said was her desire for him to be. He often said, “All I am or hope to be I owe to my angel mother,” and yet, as a poet has said it, that mother

An epidemic carried away Lincoln’s mother in 1818 when he was nine years of age. It was the beginning of that great man’s acquaintance with grief, but the impression she had made on him never forsook him. Her last words to the surrounding friends were, “I pray you to love your kindred and worship God.”

When Elizabeth Barrett Browning asked Charles Kingsley for the secret of his splendid life, he answered, “I once had a friend.” So it was with Lincoln. He once had a friend, and he always spoke of her as his “angel mother.”

So deeply had she impressed the nine-year-old boy with her religious faith that he could never be satisfied until he induced a preacher to preach a sermon and offer a prayer over her grave.

In that profoundly earnest incident of sympathy is to be seen the love that leavened his life to the [Pg 20] making of a man nobler than kings among men.

Of these early years Lincoln spoke but little, and the gossip of old people, who might have told interesting incidents, has not proven altogether reliable. One of these personal incidents told by Lincoln of his childhood may be regarded as typical of his life. It was from a dim memory of what he had been taught concerning soldiers and war.

Lincoln said that he had a memory of only one incident relating to the War of 1812. This happened near the close of the war. He had been fishing and had caught a little fish. On the way home he met a soldier returning from the war. He had been told that he must be kind to soldiers. Thinking of this, he went up to the soldier and gave him the fish.

Even the wilderness has a succession of new scenes and offers an endless variety of revelations for the growing mind. Only the will of disordered interests is able to get bad things into the desires of a child. The Lincoln boy was fortunate in living with good people. There was no one to impress him with false ideas of life.

We may be sure that there was something superior in Thomas Lincoln that he sought out only noble women, and that noble women were willing to trust their happiness and welfare to him.

Thomas Lincoln could not hope to make a living [Pg 21] after his wife died and care properly for his household needs, including the two motherless children. His own homeless childhood made him tender toward his little unmothered family, and, presently, he returned to Kentucky and married Sarah Bush Johnson, another of God’s own mother-women.

She came with abundance of household goods and there was soon a comfortable Lincoln home. She loved the little boy she found on her arrival in the Indiana household, and encouraged him in his eager desire to know things.

The ten-year-old Lincoln was eager to learn of the wondrous world beyond the woods and he asked many questions of wayfarers passing that way. One day a very trivial event happened, but in the wondrous revelation of things to the blooming mind it may have been one of the greatest in Lincoln’s life.

An emigrant wagon broke down near their place. The wife and two little daughters staid in Lincoln’s home two or three days, till the wagon was repaired.

“The woman had books,” so Lincoln tells us about it, “and she read us stories.” It was the first books he had ever seen and the first book-stories he had ever heard. In fact, it was also the first educated people he had ever seen. One of the little girls seems to have impressed him deeply, to have awakened in him a spiritual reverence for beautiful girlhood, and [Pg 22] to have given him a never-dying vision of possible sympathy and character for a nobler social life.

V. WAY-MARKS OF RIGHT LIFE

Lincoln’s new mother had three children of her own, but under her management they all lived together, in the one-room house, in perfect harmony and friendship.

Of the little Lincoln boy she said, “His mind and mine, what little I had, seemed to run together.” She said that there had never been a cross word or look between them and that she loved the little fellow as her own child. One thing is sure, to the American people, Sarah Bush Lincoln has forever given a sacred meaning to the name stepmother and hallowed its duties near to the meaning of mother.

In her old age she was visited by a biographer of Lincoln, to whom she said, “I had a son John, who was raised with Abe. Both were good boys, but I must say, both now being dead, that Abe was the best boy I ever saw, or expect to see.”

Lincoln’s sister Sarah, or Nancy, as she was also called, was a noble girl and was of inestimable help to Mrs. Lincoln in the labors of a pioneer home. She was quick to learn and she did her share in helping [Pg 23] her brother in his desire to learn. There was nothing remarkable about that brother, he was not wondrous, except in one thing, and that was his unceasing zeal to have a greater mind, and for that mind to be a right mind.

His first real school life was to travel a deer path through the deep woods, nine miles each day, to school.

He had no time to waste on useless knowledge. Josh Billings once exclaimed, lamenting, “What’s the use of larnin’ so much that ain’t so.” Lincoln thought there was no use in such foolishness, and he sought to fill his mind only with useful information, valuable toward a greater life.

For instance, he got hold of a small dictionary and he read it through and through with the eagerness that many people give to baseball news or a novel. When the book called the “Statutes of Indiana” fell into his hands he could hardly eat or sleep till he had read it through. When he finally got hold of a grammar, it was no dry reading to him and no task. He literally devoured its information and committed its principles to memory, as a value of the finest wealth. He was indeed remarkable or wondrous in nothing but the divine inspiration to enlarge a useful mind. These are the minds that make life worth living and invariably characterize the builders of the world.

[Pg 24]

It appears that the first approach of Lincoln to the formation of a life-ideal, his first patriotic vision of American citizenship, was derived from reading a life of Washington. A friendly neighbor loaned him the book. His book-shelf was a chink in the log house. One night it rained into his book-shelf and the next morning he found his borrowed book bucked up into a most unreadable shape. Lincoln’s introduction to Washington was unhappy and significant. Trivial as the incident might seem, it supplies suggestions of character on the way of superior worth to civilization. Events, one by one, build up or tear down together the structure of self or of the public system.

The Lincoln boy could have shielded himself, as to the damaged book, behind personal irresponsibility for an accident, or he could have flatly refused to make good. If so, we may well guess that he would never have been President of the United States, and would never have served America in its dire peril so as to be honored by the whole world. He was not that kind of a character. As we trace the steps of moral integrity, the trivial incident becomes powerfully significant. The Lincoln boy made good. He worked three days for the owner of the damaged book, so that another should not suffer loss through any kindness or good-will to him; also, beyond that, [Pg 25] he could have no rest nor peace while any wrong existed between him and another man.

From that time on he had before him the vision of a great American. Washington became his ideal type of character, and that ideal no doubt helped much to make him the patient power he was in the great crisis of his nation’s existence.

The rough and hard never hurt any one if they are healthy interests; the rude and uncultured wrong no taste if they are moral; and poverty injures nobody when it is clean and persevering and safe. So the hard requirements, rude living and destitute means only strengthened the boy more and more for the heroic responsibilities requiring such a type of manhood.

It is said that he memorized and often repeated for self-encouragement the homely old verses of the song, “Try, Try Again.”

In a copy book the following lines, still preserved, were written by Lincoln:

This pathetic glimpse of the childhood dream may account for his profound interest in boys and boyhood. When he had reached world-wide fame he said, “The boy is the inventor and owner of the present, and he is our supreme hope for the future. Men and things everywhere minister unto him, and let no one slight his needs.”

Lincoln reading by Firelight.

[Pg 27]

CHAPTER III

I. THE LINCOLN BOY AND HIS SISTER

The wilderness never brought forth a more wonderful being than the child that became one of the greatest names in the history of America. Deep in the wild woods of Kentucky, in the humblest conditions of nature, farthest from the inventions of society, there arose a mind that gave great riches of thought to the making of civilization.

Lincoln and his sister “hired out,” and the position of servant can hardly be servile or menial with such an illustrious American example, unless the master make it so. One woman, whose family had hired them both, testified to their lovable characters. Lincoln slept in the hay-loft during the period of his work, and he was noted for being remarkably considerate in “keeping his place,” and for not coming in “where he was not wanted.” It is said that he would lift his hat and bow when he entered the house, [Pg 28] and that he was reliable, tender and kind, “like his sister.” We wonder if his employers had only known of “the angel” they were “entertaining unawares,” what would have been “his place” and where he would have been “wanted.” Every such soul may, somewhere along the immortal way, be “an angel” “unaware” some time in the meaning of the great moral universe.

As showing the making of Lincoln’s mind, one of his first attempts at essay writing was on the subject of “Cruelty to Animals” and another on “Temperance.”

During his earliest acquaintance with the first lawyer he had known, he wrote a paper on “American Government,” and he anxiously asked the lawyer to read it and pass an opinion on its merits. The lawyer did so, declaring that the “world couldn’t beat it,” and expressing the opinion that some day the people would “hear from that boy.”

His repugnance toward acts of cruelty is shown by the first fist fight he ever had.

Some boys had caught a mud-turtle and were having great sport in putting a coal of fire on its back to see it open up its shell and run. Lincoln was then not as large as some of the tormentors of the poor animal, but, coming by and seeing what they were doing, he dashed in among them, knocked the [Pg 29] firebrand from the boy’s hand, and fought them all away from the turtle. Then he gave them a fierce scolding for their cruelty. With tears in his eyes he declared that the terrapin’s life was as sweet to it as theirs was to them. His appeal was successful and there was freedom henceforth in that community for the American turtle.

II. HOW THE LINCOLN BOY MADE THE LINCOLN MAN

The American boy, seeing anything of great interest accomplished, wants to know how it was done. That is true all the way from winning some game at play to making a million in some great enterprise. But far more, in fact immeasurably more, is the making of a masterful mind, the development of a nation-making character, and of a world-historical man. Such was Abraham Lincoln, who was built up from what seems to be nothing on to the very highest worth of mankind. How did he do it? “If I only knew how,” said a philosopher-mathematician, “I could turn the world over with a lever.” “If I only knew how,” said a philosopher-farmer, “I could make a three-year-old calf between now and next Christmas.” In other words, the belief has [Pg 30] always prevailed that by thought made into will anything can be accomplished, provided thinking perseveres in the right way for the right thing. Successful “might” always promotes the belief that it is right because it is successful, but the “successful” is no more than a temporary expedient toward coming failure, if it is not the righteousness of an immortal social system.

So let us see how Lincoln did it. It is not much of a mystery how he became a masterful man. There must be a beginning place, and, for such a person, it must be a divine beginning place. He had a loving mother and a home. It was the basis of his belief in humanity. The heart of the world he believed to be like the two noble-souled women who mothered his young heart and growing mind. He says himself that he didn’t do it but that they did it. So, the first thing for a boy who wants to be a masterful man is to take the advice of Oliver Wendell Holmes to have the right kind of ancestors. At least, it seems quite necessary for him to choose a loving mother and it will be a lightened task for him to do the rest.

In 1823, while going to the Crawford school, there occurred an incident representing his invariable sense of honor. A buck’s head was nailed to the wall and one day, probably experimenting as all boys do, [Pg 31] he pulled too hard on one of the horns and broke it off. No one saw him and when the teacher inquired for the mischief maker Lincoln promptly told how it happened. The teacher believed him and said no more about it.

The first reprehensible thing known of the Lincoln boy was done soon after the death of his sister. She married at nineteen and died the next year. Lincoln believed, as most others believed, that she died of ill-treatment. There was no way to express his fierce resentment but in writing, and he wrote some scurrilous letters to the ones against whom he was so angry. Some biographers, in the supposed cause of history, have published some alleged copies of those letters, but at worst they merely show what a boy could do in the distress occasioned by what he believed to be the murder of his sister, whom we may believe was the one great love of his life after the death of his mother.

Being a good penman, Lincoln was often called on to write a line in copybooks. Among the proud possessors of a copybook so favored was Joe Richardson. In his book Lincoln wrote these commonplace, yet significant lines:

Lincoln was brought up in the midst of superstitions that prevailed in every act of life, but they seem to have made no impression on him. Many of the most estimable people believed the sun went round the earth, from the indisputable fact that in the morning it was on one side of the house and in the afternoon was on the other side. Many also believed the earth to be flat, because any one trying to go so far as to go around it would naturally become lost, travel in a circle, as all lost people do, and come back to the same place, thinking they had gone around the world.

People who argued otherwise were merely “stuck up” and “just proud to show themselves off.” Doubtless, his belief about the sun and earth lost him his first love affair.

He was going to school to Andrew Crawford, who also taught good manners, when he began to exchange special attention with Miss Roby, a fine lass of fifteen. He especially had her gratitude for some help he gave her in a spelling class. When she was about to spell “defied” with a “y,” he pointed to his eye, just in time to save her from disgrace with the teacher, and from losing her place in the class.

But one day as they were walking along the road she made a remark that brought up an unfortunate subject.

[Pg 33]

“Abe,” said she, “look yonder, the sun is going down.”

“Reckon not,” was the unfortunate reply. “It’s us coming up. That’s all.”

“Don’t you suppose I’ve got eyes,” she answered indignantly.

“Reckon so,” he replied, “but the sun’s as still as a tree. When we’re swung up so’s the shine’s cut off, we call it night.”

“Abe,” said she, “you’re a consarned fool,” and away she went, leaving him to the glory of his “stuck-up larnin’.”

III. SOME SIGNS ALONG THE EARLY WAY

The Lincoln boy impressed all who knew him as being different from other boys, though they did not know just how. We now know that the difference consisted in his having a purpose to have a mind rather than to have a good time. And yet, Lincoln loved joyful sports and he was a favorite in all the social gatherings of the community. But his mind was not composed of sport experience, nor his interest in life inspired by sport success. The world-mind of books contained more value and richer promise [Pg 34] than the turmoil of happenings among companions, or than those who were juggling interests in the hope of events.

Lincoln’s books were very limited in number but exceedingly wide in their humanity. Weems’ “Life of Washington” seems to have given him his ideal of American character and statesmanship, while the “Statutes of Indiana” aroused his interest in civil law and the American government.

When addressing the senate of the state of New Jersey, in 1861, Lincoln said, “May I be pardoned if, on this occasion, I mention that away back in my childhood, the earliest days of my being able to read, I got hold of a small book, such a one as few of the younger members have ever seen, ‘Weems’ Life of Washington.’ I remember all the accounts there given of the battlefields and struggles for the liberties of the country, and none fixed themselves upon my imagination so deeply as the struggle here at Trenton, New Jersey. The crossing of the river, the contest with the Hessians, the great hardships endured at that time, all fixed themselves in my mind more than any single revolutionary event; and you all know, for you have all been boys, how these early impressions last longer than others. I recollect thinking then, boy even though I was, that there must have been something more than common that [Pg 35] these men struggled for. I am exceedingly anxious that that thing shall be perpetuated in accordance with the original idea for which that struggle was made.”

Lincoln told one of his friends that he read through every book he had ever heard of in his surroundings for a distance of fifty miles. The industry with which he sought to learn and his unceasing endeavor to build up his mind were marks of the genius that possessed him, the spirit that made him one of the strongest men of a world-wide work.

In the whole country round there was only one newspaper subscriber, and that was in Gentryville, Indiana, for a weekly paper from Louisville. Lincoln walked to town every week to see that paper and discuss the news. By the time he had become a man, in Menard County, Illinois, his neighbors went to him in order to know things, and he was a good custodian of the knowledge he had gained. His opinions coincided with common sense. So, common sense made him President of the United States, saved a United Nation, and gave Lincoln a never-dying place in the love and honor of mankind.

Lincoln walked six miles to borrow a grammar, and he studied it till he mastered the principles of the English language. Many another boy has thought that he had few troubles more unbearable [Pg 36] than the study of composition, but many another boy has not been prepared to speak the world-stirring speech, such as was spoken by Lincoln at the dedication of the battlefield of Gettysburg.

IV. ILLUSTRATIONS SHOWING THE MAKING OF A MAN

Lincoln, very early in life, believed that witnesses must tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

Matilda Johnson, his stepsister, was very fond of him, and she often ran away from the house to be with him where he was at work. Lincoln would rather tell her stories than work, so the mother forbade the child from following him to work. But, one morning, she disobeyed and ran after him. She tried to surprise him by jumping up at his back, and catching him by the shoulders. In doing so the axe was swung around so that it severely cut her ankle. Matilda screamed with pain but Lincoln soon had the bleeding stopped and the wound bound. Then came the problem.

“Tilda,” he exclaimed, “I am astonished at you. How could you disobey your mother? Now, what are you going to tell her?”

[Pg 37]

“I’ll tell her I did it with the axe,” she said in the midst of her crying. “That will be the truth, won’t it?”

“Yes,” replied the boy, “that’s the truth as far as it goes, but it is not all of the truth. You tell the whole truth and trust your mother for the rest.”

Tilda went home limping and weeping with the whole truth, and the good mother thought she had been punished enough.

The self-possessed way in which Lincoln conducted himself is well illustrated in his experience with the boaster who was telling of his horse-race, and especially endeavoring to impress his story upon the youthful Lincoln.

Uncle Jimmy Larkins, the boastful owner of the fast horse, was much of a hero in the eyes of a small boy who grew up to be Captain John Lamar, the man who tells the story.

Lincoln paid no attention to the boasting. Uncle Jimmy did not like this and the Lamar boy thought it very rude in Lincoln. Finally Uncle Jimmy said, “Abe, I’ve got the best horse in the world: he won that race and never drew a long breath.”

But Abe still paid no attention. Uncle Jimmy didn’t like it some more and the Lamar boy was disgusted that Lincoln did not give due respect for something so important.

[Pg 38]

“I say, Abe,” repeated Uncle Jimmy emphatically, “I have the best horse in the world; after all that running he never drew a long breath.”

Then Abe had to say something, so he said, “Well, Uncle Jimmy, why don’t you tell us how many short breaths he took.”

“Everybody laughed and Uncle Jimmy got all-fired hot,” says Captain Lamar. “He spoke something about fighting Abe, and Abe said, ‘If you don’t shut up, I’ll throw you into the pond,’ and Uncle Jimmy shut up.”

Captain Lamar, in concluding his comments, said, “I was very much hurt at the way my hero was treated, but I have lived to change my ideas about heroes.”

V. LINCOLN’S FIRST DOLLAR

Lincoln enjoyed the commonplace interests of ordinary life, and much that we know of him is from conversations with friends over the early lessons of his youth.

One day while he was president, as he was talking with Secretary Seward over weighty affairs of state, [Pg 39] he suddenly broke from the subject they were discussing and said, “Seward, do you know how I earned my first dollar?”

The well-to-do and rather aristocratic Secretary of State replied that he did not know.

“It was this way,” Lincoln continued. “I was about eighteen years of age and had succeeded in raising enough produce to justify a trip down the Ohio to the markets at New Orleans. I made a flatboat big enough to hold the barrels containing our things and was soon ready for loading up and starting on our journey.

“There were few landing places for steamers, and, where passengers desired to get on to one of the passing boats, they had to be taken out into the river in order to get aboard.

“While I was looking my boat over to see if anything more could be done to strengthen it, two men came down to the shore in a carriage, with their trunks, for the purpose of boarding a passing steamer. They looked the boats over and came down to me.

“‘Who owns this boat?’ they asked.

“I very proudly answered, ‘I do.’

“‘Will you take us and our trunks out to the steamer?’

“I was glad for a chance to earn something and I [Pg 40] soon had them and their trunks loaded into my boat. I soon sculled them out to the steamer. They climbed aboard and I lifted their trunks on deck. I expected them to hand me a couple of bits for my work, but both seemed to have forgotten their dues to me. The steamer was about to start, when I called out to them, ‘You have forgotten to pay me.’

“Each took a silver half-dollar and threw it over into the bottom of my boat. I could scarcely believe my good fortune. That seems like a little thing but it was one of the most important incidents in my life. I could hardly believe that I had been able to earn, by my own work, a dollar in less than a day. I now knew that such things could be done. I was a more hopeful and thoughtful boy from that time.”

Lincoln received eight dollars a month for his trip down the Ohio and Mississippi from Indiana, but he probably got much priceless value out of it in the broader view of life it gave him. He had already prepared himself to think on what he saw, and, from all attainable evidence from every side, to reach reasonable and justified conclusions.

This voyage was comparatively uneventful except that one night, after the little boat crew of three men had sold their goods, they were attacked by seven negroes, who came aboard intending to kill and rob them. But, after a lively fight, the assailants [Pg 41] were driven off and the boat was swung out into the river.

One cannot help thinking about what a difference it would have made to the negro race if those negroes had killed the man whom destiny had then started on the way to make their people free.

VI. THE CHARACTERISTICS OF A SUPERIOR MIND

The boy who reads the story of Lincoln, desiring to get real help in building his life, will find no miracle nor any short-cuts to get easily the ambitions of life. Lincoln did not know the office he wanted to hold, but he knew the kind of man he wanted to be and he worked unceasingly to reach that ideal of mind and manhood. In proportion, it is no harder now to know more than others, in order to be correspondingly useful to others, than it was in Lincoln’s time.

Lincoln said that he went to school by “littles” altogether not more than a year, but no one ever thinks of him as anything less than a learned man. All records show that he was intellectually at home in company with any worldly-wise men. It was in the prudent selection of interests nobly directed in honorable [Pg 42] ways that gave him world-wisdom from the most limited supply, while now the multiplication of great books has made the diffusion of knowledge almost unlimited for anyone who seeks to be worth while. But it was in his high moral nature where was to be found the secret of his unwavering progress. Numerous characteristic incidents illustrate how little he was disturbed by the ill-nature of others.

That Lincoln was above “holding spite” or “bearing a grudge” is shown in his experience with the noted Kentucky lawyer, John Breckenridge.

There had been a murder at Boonville, Indiana, and Lincoln went to hear the speech made to the jury by the defense. He had never before heard a learned and eloquent man. The powerful plea of the silver-tongued John Breckenridge went through the sensitive soul of Lincoln like heavenly music. Forgetting his backwoodsman appearance, he rushed forward with others at the close of the speech to express his admiration.

Breckenridge was a “gentleman” of the South, not used to being familiarly addressed by anyone having the appearance of being “poor white trash.” He gazed in insulted amazement at the presumptuous youth and strode indignantly away.

This was probably the first knowledge Lincoln [Pg 43] had of the artificial social barriers set up by men developing antagonizing classes. Here he first met the great problem of the ages in a land where all are born free and equal before life and law. It was a social partisanship not only contrary to common sense and moral law, but in violation of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States, and the entire meaning of America. This is the great significance of Lincoln, that his life so unmistakably refuted so many un-American ideas of society and civilization.

In 1862 this same Breckenridge, now an humble petitioner for presidential favors, was introduced to President Lincoln, who then completed his expression of admiration for the excellent speech made by Mr. Breckenridge in the Indiana murder case. The able lawyer was indeed dumbfounded and it gave him a new vision of Lincoln, if not of the relationship of men. That equality of mind and opportunity which Lincoln represented was the master meaning of America, disclosing that in its freedom there is opportunity for the poorest to become the greatest through human values the most lasting and worthwhile.

Lincoln could have satisfied a righteous resentment against such haughty treatment toward the poor as was shown by Breckenridge to him at Boonville, [Pg 44] and he could have given a deserved rebuke to pride in a land where pride of that kind is unpatriotic as well as immoral, but Lincoln chose the better part. It reminds us of the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Lincoln’s heart was as large as the world, but nowhere had any room for the memory of a wrong.”

[Pg 45]

CHAPTER IV

I. THE WILDERNESS AS THE GARDEN OF POLITICAL LIBERTY

The pioneer and frontiersman of early America are very strange beings when viewed from our present social customs, or as studied from the so-called refinements of modern interests and conveniences, but, no doubt, the problem is now before us, which shall be the makers of America, the pioneer view of freedom and right, or influence from the present methods of material distinctions and individual success. We may be sure that whichever one of these ideas gets first to the heart of the American boy, that is the ideal that will make of him the resulting man. The American boy loves to go to the bottom of things and so the submarine idea of interests is full of fancies. He likes to get to the top of things and the airship carries him away on the wings of adventure. But this all is merely because he likes freedom and conquest. There is a limit to the submarine and the airship, as there is to all machinery ideals, but there [Pg 46] was no limit to the frontiersman and the pioneer. The boy wants no limit, and there is the same opening now to be a frontiersman and a pioneer in human values as there ever was, provided they are human values and not individual aggrandizement. The only consideration is that the scenes have changed and the obstacles known as “things in the way” are different.

The pioneer and the frontiersman were laboring to achieve something far more important than clearing away trees, killing wildcats or subduing the wild men of the wilderness. Such dangerous and exciting work was but an incident in the great struggle. They were striving for a safe, free and sufficient living for family and home. But far greater than the economic interest was the ideal interest of freedom from the will of overlords. That sublime goal of human endeavor is probably no nearer the heart’s desire now than it was then. Society is not yet out of the wilderness of wildcat schemers and wild men monopolists.

The American boy has an immeasurably greater opportunity to continue the heroic and patriotic work of the frontiersman and pioneer. The safety, freedom and sufficiency of America is merely well started on its second period. The first great epoch of American humanity became symbolized in the life [Pg 47] of Washington and the second in the life of Lincoln. If there is a third great symbolic character, it is yet to come. The American boy must feel the meaning combined in Washington and Lincoln if he is to be a pioneer civilizing, socially and politically, the frontier of America for a nobler world.

II. SMALL BEGINNINGS IN PUBLIC ESTEEM

The wilderness family was humble as its needs. It was as least as good as its neighbors. One thing we should appreciate as significant, in the destitution of the times, the Lincoln family was adventurous and enterprising until it arrived for final settlement in the richest soil-regions of the Mississippi valley, and the freest mind-regions of political America.

In the spring of 1830, on account of ill health in the neighborhood, Lincoln’s father decided to move from the unpromising forests of Indiana to the fertile prairies of Illinois. Friends and relatives had already preceded him, and had sent back glowing accounts of the prairie lands. When the family arrived in Illinois, Lincoln was probably as near destitute as ever in his life, and he entered into a contract [Pg 48] “to split four hundred rails for every yard of brown jeans dyed with white walnut bark that would make a pair of trousers.”

Lincoln was now past twenty-one, and, it may be said, not until his arrival at New Salem had he found firm ground on which to begin building to some plan of life. Undoubtedly, his vision of the future was one of very vague dreams. That he was adventurous and looked beyond his community for the fulfillment of his fortunes is shown in his effort at commercial enterprise with nothing as his capital. He now arranged to take a second raft of home goods to New Orleans. Such a venture required no small amount of courage and self-reliance.

Wide observation with suitable thinking seems to give one prudence and steadiness of mind in emergencies. In several trying instances this proved to be true in Lincoln’s experience, long before the civilization of America was depending upon his warm heart and clear head. Many such instances seem as trivial as the trimmings of a sapling, but they are the perfecting process that makes possible the great oak.

When his flatboat was finished at New Salem, it was necessary to have a canoe that was to trail along behind the boat. The canoe was made from a dugout log. When it was shoved into the booming Sangamon [Pg 49] river, his two friends, John Seamon and Walter Carmon, sprang into it for the first ride, but the stream was too swift for them. The current began to sweep them away down stream.

“Head up stream,” Lincoln shouted, “and work back to shore.”

But they could not beat the rush of water. Nearing the wreck of an old flatboat, they tried to pull the canoe in among the timbers and hold themselves fast. Seamon caught hold of a stanchion as they came by and the canoe was overturned, leaving Seamon clinging to the timber and Carmon being borne down stream, clinging to the slippery log.

Lincoln yelled for Carmon to swim for the branches of an elm tree that swung in the high water near the shore. Carmon did this. Lincoln then called to Seamon to swim for the tree with Carmon and they could be rescued together.

It was a very cold April day and the men were in danger of becoming too benumbed to hold on. By this time the whole village of New Salem was gathered at the bank.

Lincoln procured a rope, which he fastened to a large log. The log was pushed into the water and a venturesome young fellow named Jim Darrell bestrode the log that was to be floated down stream to the rescue.

[Pg 50]

The log went straight to the tree all right, but the young man was too eager to help his fellows. In the struggles the log was turned and so caught in the current that it was swept away from them and there were now three to be rescued from the tree.

The log was towed back. Lincoln tied another rope to it, and held the end of the rope in his hand. He then mounted the log to take the dangerous ride himself. As the log came into the tree, he threw the rope around a limb and held fast. In another minute all three of the shipwrecked men were safely astride the log. He then told the people to let go the guiding rope. The well-calculated result was that the current against the log, and the pull on the rope fastened to the limb, swung them safely around to the shore.

Strange and foreign as it may seem, numerous clear-headed exploits like this made his neighbors believe in him. Such belief encouraged him to believe in himself, and, trivial as the analogy may seem, and unworthy as the comparison might be, it doubtless had much to do in strengthening his ambition to surpass his surroundings and gain the larger fields of service. It is said that no one ever learned faster in any situation than Lincoln. He never “lost his head” in any whirl of events, and always before the crisis arrived he was facing it as master.

Lincoln's Residence at Springfield, Illinois.

Lincoln’s raft from New Salem arrived in New Orleans in May, 1831. At that time it seemed as if all the adventurers in the world had gathered there, and it was probably the wickedest city on earth. It was the gathering place of pirates, robbers and wild boatmen of the river and gulf.

The city in its wild prosperity and barbarity must have made a strong impression on Lincoln. Worst of all was its hideous slave market. Here men and women were herded together like animals and sold like cattle. Here he saw negro girls, many of them nearly white, treated like beasts. At the auctioning off of a mulatto girl he turned away from the revolting spectacle, saying to his companions, “Boys, let’s get away from this. If I ever get a chance to hit that thing (meaning slavery), I’ll hit it hard.”

And to him was given the chance, through the terrible ordeal of civil war, to drive that shame forever from the land of freedom. Only in the light of twentieth century developments can we look back and see what a desperate condition America would be in if the Southern half of the United States had succeeded in becoming a separate slave-nation. Great evils were involved and great wrongs had to be worked out from among the passions and prejudice of the times, but we can now all believe, no matter how meritorious was state patriotism, or how sincere the [Pg 51]
[Pg 52] faith of the people, or how correct their interpretation of the original Union, that we have a greater America, destined to take a better part in making a nobler civilization for a more progressive world.

III. TESTS OF CHARACTER ON THE LAWLESS FRONTIER

There were gangs of good-natured rowdies, and there were roughhouse communities in pioneer days.

Such a community and such a gang was in the neighborhood of New Salem, known as Clary’s Grove and the Clary Grove Boys. They delighted in being rough and coarse, though, it is said, to their credit, that they were generous and most faithful friends.

Denton Offutt for some reason liked to boast to them of his hired man. He seemed to believe that it shed glory on himself as an employer. He told the Clary Boys that his man could lift more, throw farther, run faster, jump higher and wrestle better than any man in Sangamon County. This hurt the Clary boys’ sense of superiority. They decided to test it out. Accordingly, they appointed Jack Armstrong as their best man to prove their right to the championship.

Lincoln objected to the “tussle and scuffle” ideas [Pg 53] of the time, he disbelieved in the honors won by “wooling and pulling,” but the age of “fist-and-skull” duels was not yet at an end, and the question of best man had to be tried out.

Clary’s Grove came one day to back their man as representative of themselves, and New Salem turned out to back the other. It was to be “catch-as-catch-can and the best man wins.”

The task to represent New Salem against the neighboring rowdydom was not an easy one. But such is human nature that who can say what effect it would have had on Lincoln’s future if he had been beaten and bullied over in that fight. Perhaps it shows how needful it is to do well everything at hand to be done, because we do not know how it may be part of our way to the unknowable future.

The champions came together according to the “fair play” of the time. They clinched and swayed, those two strong men, but neither could be moved from his feet. Each side was yelling itself hoarse, as the one who was to be the greatest of Americans strove with the one who would long ago be as forgotten as his dust, except for the struggle he made and for the conquest.

Feeling himself being defeated, one of them did not play the game fair. It was not Lincoln. The champion of the Clary gang played a trick, and [Pg 54] Lincoln caught him by the throat, holding him out at arm’s length, where he could only kick, and squirm and beat the air, but could do nothing against that long, strong right arm. The Clary gang rushed to the rescue, and it looked as if he would have to fight them all when Armstrong declared that he had enough, and that Lincoln was the “best fellow that ever broke into camp.”

Not long after this the Clary gang elected Lincoln as Captain of their sports and henceforth were among his most faithful friends. The fact that Lincoln could hold the political support and good-will of both the best and the worst shows that there was a reliability in his character to which they could together safely give allegiance.

The friendship of Jack Armstrong and his family, after the fight, never swerved, and the time came when Lincoln repaid their kindness and their simple loyalty in a great way. Years afterward, when Lincoln had become a renowned lawyer, Jack Armstrong’s son was accused of murder. They went for Lincoln and Lincoln came. He studied the case and became convinced that the son of his old friend was innocent.

There had been a quarrel among some young men one night near an out-of-door camp meeting, and one had been stabbed to death.

[Pg 55]

Young Armstrong was arrested on the testimony of one who claimed to have seen the blow struck by the light of the moon.

Lincoln made the witness repeat his testimony about the moon and then began his address to the jury. He told of his relations to the prisoner’s father, of the kindness of the mother, and how he had played with the boy as a child. Then he said that he was not there as paid attorney but as a friend of the family. With that explanation, he reviewed the testimony showing that all the evidence depended on what the witness had seen by the light of the moon. At this point he produced an almanac showing that there was no moon on the night of the murder. The jury took only a very short consultation to bring in a verdict of “Not Guilty.”

This story has often been told in which the almanac is represented as having been an old one, thus winning the case by a trick of falsehood, but investigation has proven this to be untrue, accordingly supporting the statement that Lincoln never used such tactics to win a case.

We have learned that no character in history can be understood except in relation to its surroundings. Otherwise, Lincoln’s fight with the backwoods’ ruffians might now seem vulgar and lawless, but it was in truth a powerful factor in building his life for [Pg 56] its supreme service. It not only helped to establish his own conscious integrity, but it was planting respect for him among his neighbors, which was as necessary for his growth of reputation as anything at any time in his career. The time when a boy can afford not “to care what people think” depends very much not only upon the boy and the people, but also upon what is meant by the “care” and the “think.”

IV. THE PIONEER MISSIONARY OF HUMANITY

The pioneer West was indeed uncouth, but there were many noteworthy redeeming features in the zeal of the better classes for ideal interests. Doubtless, Lincoln was often inspired by such a fair view of humanity. Many an incident is told of the unselfish devotion among the people with whom Lincoln lived.

The zeal in having a mission in those days was something that is almost unimaginable in these days. It is illustrated by the following incident told by Milburn of the useful men of those days in touch with the Lincoln life.

A young travelling preacher, and the preachers of that period in those regions were really all travelling [Pg 57] if they were preachers, for they had no abiding place, was so much beloved by a man who had acquired a large amount of land, that the man made the young preacher the present of a deed to half a section of land. The young man, being destitute, was much rejoiced to receive the gift of three hundred and twenty acres of good prairie soil. He went away with a grateful heart toward his generous benefactor. Three months later he returned, and, as he greeted the generous friend at the door, he handed back the deed, saying, “Here, sir, I want you to take back your title-deed.”

“What’s the matter,” asked the surprised friend. “Anything wrong with it?”

“No,” replied the young man, as if somewhat ashamed to give his reason.

“Isn’t the land good enough?”

“Good as any in the state.”

“Are you afraid it is a sickly place?”

“Healthy as anywhere.”

“Do you think I am sorry I gave it to you?”

“I haven’t the slightest reason to doubt your whole-hearted generosity.”

“Then why in the thunder don’t you keep it?” inquired the dumbfounded benefactor.

“Well, sir, if I must tell you,” said the young preacher, “you know I am very fond of singing, [Pg 58] and there’s one hymn in my book, which has been one of my greatest comforts in life, and it is not so any more. I have lost the joy of singing it, and it has killed so much other joy that I can no longer endure the privation. I will sing you one verse.”

Then he sang:

“Please take your title-deed,” he exclaimed. “I want to have the joy I used to have in singing that song. I’d rather sing it with a clear conscience than to own America.”

It was among such people sacrificing themselves for humanity that Lincoln found his great inspiration from the sordid and mean that are ever to be found muckraking at the bottom. The family may be in a good home, safe for its children, but the good home must be in a good community or they are not [Pg 59] safe. In fact, we cannot be sure of a good home unless its good community is in a good world. Good people in a good community are of priceless help to a good mother bringing up a good boy, with the biggest meaning of life in the word good.

V. EXPERIENCES IN THE INDIAN WAR

Great events probably have less effect in shaping one’s life than the little incidents that compose them. It seems so with Lincoln.

The confidence and appreciation of his friends (note that it was not his self-seeking aggressiveness) caused him to believe that he should try to become their representative in the state legislature. He was in the midst of this, his first political campaign, which was at the age of twenty-three, when Black Hawk, the Indian warrior, crossed the Mississippi River, April 6, 1832, with his five hundred followers and began what is known as the Black Hawk War.

The white settlers had gradually occupied the Indians’ land, and the government by treaties had caused the Indians to be removed to territory west of the Mississippi. Black Hawk, a leader of the Sacs and Foxes, believed the Indians to be mistreated [Pg 60] and so resolved to drive the white settlers back to the treaty line.

“My reason teaches me,” he wrote to the government, “that land cannot be sold. The Great Spirit gave it to his children to live upon, and cultivate, as far as is necessary for their living; and so long as they occupy and cultivate it they have a right to the soil, but, if they willingly leave it, then any other people have a right to settle on it. Nothing can be sold but such things as can be carried away.”

There are now several social theories based on this idea that the earth belongs to the people who use it. The theory of right things governs the minds of all who think, even of the wild men in the wilderness.

When the news arrived that the Indians had declared war against the whites, with the appeal from Governor Reynolds for volunteers, Lincoln dropped his canvass for the legislature in order to enlist for the defense of his country.

The man-making incident in this important event was Lincoln’s election as captain of his home company. If there had been one thing which Lincoln had not studied, that was the tactics of a soldier. He knew nothing about military orders, and yet the time was coming, all too soon, when he was to be chief of the greatest military organization then in the world.

[Pg 61]

A sawmill owner named Kilpatrick was pushing himself forward to be made captain. This man owed Lincoln two dollars for work and would not pay it.

Lincoln got an idea and he said to his friend Greene, “Bill, I believe I can now make Kilpatrick pay that two dollars he owes me. I’ll run against him for captain.”

When it came to the vote, the two candidates stood out in the open, and the men were told to stand up by the man they wanted to be captain. More than three-fourths of them gathered around Lincoln, and he became Captain Lincoln. He tells us himself that he never had any success in life which gave him more satisfaction. It was a vote of confidence in the reality of a man.

In telling of his ignorance of military command, he says that he was marching his company across a field when they came to a gate. “I could not for the life of me remember the proper word of command for getting my company endwise, so that the line could get through the gate; so, as we came up to the gate, I shouted, ‘This company is dismissed for two minutes, when it will fall in again on the other side of the gate.’”

He was also totally unfamiliar with camp discipline, and he once had his sword taken from him for shooting off his rifle within limits. At another time [Pg 62] his company stole some whisky, and, during the night, became so drunk that they could not fall in line the next morning. For this neglect of discipline Lincoln had to wear a wooden sword for two days. But his men respected him and were his devoted friends. They knew he meant what he said, and whatever they saw of him was the truth.

His firmness in the right “as God gives us to see the right,” even against his associates, is illustrated in the incident of saving an Indian’s life.

The frontiersman’s standard of morality toward an Indian was that the only good Indian is a dead Indian.

One day an Indian was brought into camp. He was trying to cross the country and return to his tribe. To do this was his privilege and General Cass had given him an order of safe conduct. But the frontiersmen had come out to kill Indians and this was their first chance. Lincoln stood up by the side of the red man, and boldly took the Indian’s part. Some rebellious ones determined to take the Indian and kill him, even if they had to fight Lincoln to do it. But Lincoln stood up by the side of the red man and gave them to understand that it could be done only over his dead body. They knew that he meant it. The result was that the Indian was allowed to go his way, and the resolute Captain never lost a [Pg 63] friend for it. Many an act of mercy in keeping with this one has made his name beloved throughout the earth. His soldiering lasted three months, but it doubtless gave him many ideas for use in the greater events of after years.

VI. LIFE-MAKING DECISIONS

At the close of his unsuccessful canvass, in August of 1832, for the Illinois Assembly, he was out of anything to do, and he seriously considered the advice of his friends to become a blacksmith. This was a suitable trade for him, they said, because he was so strong armed. But this work gave him no leisure for study and he decided against it. The only thing he knew was store-keeping and he decided to buy a store. The opportunity was open for him to buy a half interest with William Berry and he did so, giving notes for the goods. Business prospered rapidly while the enthusiasm was on, but Berry loved whisky as much as Lincoln loved books, and between the one who squandered time and money on liquor, and the one who neglected business for books, there could not be expected any results more natural than that business should finally go to pieces.

It was in the midst of these conditions that Berry [Pg 64] took out a tavern license for the firm. It is understood that this was not for the purpose of keeping a liquor grocery, but to enable them to sell the stock on hand that had come to them from the stores they had bought out, and probably to get the much needed money to conduct their business. In those days a store could get no business if it had no liquor to sell. The personal morality of a thing must be considered in relation to the times. The selling of liquor by the quart was then as unquestioned propriety as selling potatoes or flour. Liquor was sold in all grocery stores as a part of the general business of the store the same as tobacco or sugar.

But it should be noted that the license was taken out in the name of Berry and that Lincoln’s name was signed by some other person to the bond.

Among the characteristic incidents told of Lincoln during this period is that of his encounter with a swaggering stranger who came into the store and used his choicest oaths in the presence of some women. Lincoln asked him to stop but he paid no attention. At the second request, more firmly given, he declared that nobody could dictate his style of language in a free country.

“Well,” said Lincoln, as the newcomer continued swearing, “if you must be whipped, I suppose I might as well whip you as any other man.”

[Pg 65]

The man believed he could “whip” Lincoln and vindicate the freedom of speech and the rights of man. According to his theory, right was on his side, and it could be vindicated by battle. Lincoln’s more concrete object was to prevent swearing in the presence of women. So they went outside to begin the war. The obliging persons present formed a ring around the combatants to insure fair play, and the freedom of decency began its war with the freedom of speech, according to the ancient wager of battle.

New Salem had little doubt about which would win. In a minute Lincoln was rubbing smartweed into the eyes of the freedom of speech, and the rights of man was bellowing for mercy.

New Salem was at bottom composed of real men and they liked that sort of thing. The champion of genuine human freedom and real rights in New Salem was building his unknown way to be the champion of the same fundamental human interests in the capital of his nation.

It is very likely that those who feel little think even less, because those wideawake enough to think much must have imagination, which is the mother of sympathy. Many stories are told of Lincoln’s deep feeling of sympathy for those about him, and especially he was the friend who believed in decency and loved moral order.

[Pg 66]

“Honest Abe” is a name that would be generally regarded now as a “nickname” expressing a kind of good-natured contempt. Justice now wades deep streams in the adjustments of big business. But Abraham Lincoln had a musical soul and the color harmony of a great scenic artist for humanity. He might not have an eye for fitness in clothes or the idealism of pretty things, but his soul was in pain over any mistreatment of human beings. He could not endure the discordant note in any dishonest transaction, and he could not stand for any blur on the canvas in the scenes of mercy and justice. Like great standards of right-life waving in the breeze were many acts of Lincoln endearing him to the confidence of his people. As an illustration may be mentioned the incident of his taking six and a quarter cents too much from a customer. He walked three miles in the evening after the store closed, in order to restore the money. Another time he weighed out half a pound of tea and afterward discovered that a four-ounce weight had been on the scales. He weighed out the extra four ounces and closed the store so he could promptly deliver the remainder of the tea. This was probably poor business, but it meant much for human liberty that the people believed in him, and that he always made good in fulfillment of that belief.

[Pg 67]

Any one doing these things now would very likely be playing the game of getting a reputation for honesty as the best policy for the sake of the policy, and if he required such strictness of dealing with himself he would be regarded merely as a miser. Only bankers, the post office and big business are expected legitimately to hunt for the lost cent all night before the account books can be closed. But this was Lincoln’s whole life and his neighbors knew it. They told other people that he was a man to be trusted until at last the whole world knew it, and the historians recorded it among the imperishable records of civilization.

A nation is rich as it has such ideals of character, especially in this kind striving on from the lowliest to the highest, through the destitution and discouragement that may drag down the aspiring dream of better life.

Robert Browning appreciates the honored names when he says,

[Pg 68]

CHAPTER V

I. BUSINESS NOT HARMONIOUS WITH THE STRUGGLE FOR LEARNING

The people believed in Lincoln and that made him believe in himself, but they would never have believed in him if they had not seen the unchanging conduct that is necessary for human confidence. If the people had not believed in him he would never have had the confidence to develop his way of life, able at last to face the world-making problems of the great Civil War, and thus to hold to a course of conduct, which he knew to be right, against the hisses, slander and desperate intrigue of men and masses, who knew that he was making a civilization in America contrary to their mercenary interests and their customary moral standards.

Business men are devoted to the business game. Otherwise the play is poor business. So, the man whose happiness was in learning could not be a business man. The store did not pay. As Lincoln was compelled to earn his living at other work, the management [Pg 69] of the store was entirely in the hands of Berry, with whom it went from bad to worse until two brothers offered to buy out the business. The store was sold, not for cash, but for notes covering the amount.

When the notes became due, the two brothers fled. The store was closed by the creditors, the goods were auctioned off, and a heavy remaining debt was against Berry and Lincoln. Soon after this Berry died and all the debt was against Lincoln. Now was the time for him “to skip the country,” as was the custom. But he did not “clear out” and therewith beat his creditors out of the debt of eleven hundred dollars.

Lincoln told a friend that this debt, in many ways an unjust one, because he did not make it, was “the greatest obstacle I ever met in life. I had no way of speculating, and could not earn money, except by labor; and to earn by labor eleven hundred dollars, besides the interest and my living, seemed the work of a lifetime.” It did, indeed, take all he could earn above his living for seventeen years. But he did it. He paid the debt in full. The moral system in his soul was never sold for the mess of pottage in any temporary distress. “To thyself be true,” says Shakespeare, “and it follows, as the night the day, thou canst not be false to any man.” Many think [Pg 70] themselves to be an emotion, or a tired feeling, or a fool ambition, or a will to do something, but it is not so. My self is a system, an identity, an integrity, a consistency, that has no hour, or day, or year, but at least a life time.

One of Lincoln’s creditors, who was like Shylock, demanded his exact dues the exact time they were due. He sued Lincoln and got judgment, so that the surveyor’s tools, and everything by which he made his living were seized and put up for sale by auction.

Lincoln’s friends gathered at the sale without saying anything about what they would or would not do. The demand was for one hundred and twenty dollars. Very few could spare any such sum. But the things, horse, saddle, surveying instruments, etc., were all bought in by James Short, a farmer living on Sand Ridge, just north of New Salem. Then this farmer turned them all over to Lincoln. That benevolent farmer did not know what he was doing for his country when he did that, but it was a great deed.

A few years later James Short moved out to California. For some reason he had lost most of his property and had become a poor man. When Lincoln became president he heard of the distress “Uncle Jimmy” was in and one day the old man received [Pg 71] a letter from Washington. Opening it, he found an appointment from Lincoln as commissioner to the Indians.

II. MAKING A LIVING AND LEARNING THE MEANING OF LIFE

Lincoln belonged to the Whig political party, but he was appointed postmaster by the Democratic administration in 1833. That there was not much mail may be inferred from the fact that it would cost twenty-five cents, in those scarce times, to send a letter or the ordinary magazine of today from any distance around of four hundred miles. His kindliness of spirit is well illustrated in the fact that he delivered most of the mail himself, knowing how precious it was to the person addressed.

As postmaster, Lincoln had to make an accounting to the government for its share of money received, and this was to be receipted for by the postoffice agent. There was much chance for graft, and especially so in this case, as the agent to settle the business did not appear. It was not till Lincoln became a practicing lawyer in Springfield that the agent [Pg 72] called upon him to close up his accounts as postmaster at New Salem.

The postoffice inspector produced a claim for seventeen dollars. Lincoln paused a moment as if perplexed to remember just what it was. A friend, seeing this, thought it was because Lincoln did not have the money, and so offered to lend him that amount. Without answering, Lincoln went to his trunk and brought out a package containing the exact amount, put away all that time, awaiting the business call of the postoffice agent.

As he turned over the money and received the receipt, he said, “I never use any man’s money but my own.”

It is interesting to note that both Washington and Lincoln became surveyors just before the opening of their great careers. It can be reasonably said that, by analogy, and even by contrast, they were also great surveyors for the rights of mankind.

Sangamon County was settling up so rapidly that John Calhoun, the official surveyor, could not do the required work. He had heard of Lincoln as being capable of doing almost anything required, so he sent for him to come and take the position of deputy surveyor.

Lincoln, so far, had studied human beings and law. He knew nothing about mathematics, much [Pg 73] less about surveying, probably not more than he knew about military tactics when he was elected captain. But he knew he could learn what any one else had learned. He bought a book on surveying and stayed with it almost day and night. He borrowed wherever he could hear of a book on surveying. In six weeks he had mastered the subject so that the many surveys he afterward made were never disputed and were always found to be correct.

It is said that he was too poor at first to buy a surveyor’s chain and so used a grapevine. But even a grapevine in the hands of Lincoln told the truth about measurements, and the town of Petersburg, Illinois, is proud of having been surveyed and laid out by Lincoln.

III. OUT OF THE WILDERNESS PATHS INTO THE GREAT HIGHWAY

The Great Teacher in his “Sermon on the Mount,” said, “Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled.” If that destitute boy had not hungered and thirsted after right knowledge, the whole history of America, after his time, would have been different. But what boy would [Pg 74] read, or what other boy ever did read such a book as the “Revised Statutes of Indiana?” To be sure, not the boy who is most interested in getting merely the most pleasure out of life, but the one who has a great desire to be useful and worthwhile in the world.

The next book that deeply impressed his career and probably had most to do with developing him to influence profoundly the history of our country was that beginning of every lawyer’s life, “Blackstone’s Commentaries.”

This is the way Lincoln tells it himself: “One day a man, who was migrating to the West, drove up in front of my store with a wagon which contained his family and household plunder. He asked me if I would buy an old barrel, for which he had no room in his wagon, which he said contained nothing of value. I did not want it, but, to oblige him, I bought it, and paid him, I think, a half-dollar. Without further examination I put it away in the store, and forgot all about it. Some time after, in overhauling things, I came upon the barrel, and, emptying it upon the floor to see what it contained, I found at the bottom of the rubbish a complete edition of Blackstone’s Commentaries. I began reading those famous works and the more I read the more intensely interested I became. Never in my whole life was my mind so thoroughly absorbed.”

First Inauguration of Lincoln as President.

[Pg 75]

It was that interest which made the man and the great historical character of Lincoln. One lives according to his interest in life, and the meaning realized in him as humanity.

In 1834 Lincoln again tried for the legislature, and this time was elected. This gave him his long desired opportunity to study law. He borrowed books and read them incessantly until he mastered them. He never studied law with any one, as was the custom in those days. He did not require a teacher to lay out or explain his mental tasks.

To a young man who asked him, twenty years later, how to become a successful lawyer, he said, “Get books. Read and study them carefully. Work, work, work is the main thing.”

IV. LINCOLN’S FIRST LAW CASES

One of the first important law cases of Lincoln in its claims sounds remarkably like the unsolved problems of today, and shows how rights have to be developed year by year, how the public mind has to be built up from idea to idea like an individual mind.

A public-spirited attempt was made to build a [Pg 76] bridge across the upper Mississippi. The boatmen declared it to be an invasion of human rights, as they had vested interests at stake in the business they had built up, ferrying people across the river. They declared that a man was an enemy of the people who would try to destroy business. But Lincoln won the case against them in favor of building the bridge for the larger interest of the people.

In another significant case he set a legal precedent. A negro girl had been sold in the free territory of Illinois. A note had been given for her but the maker of the note could not pay it when it became due and was sued for it.

Lincoln defended the maker of the note on the ground that the note was invalid because a human being could not be bought and sold in Illinois. The case was carried to the Supreme Court, where it was decided that Lincoln’s view of the case was correct law.

Another experience has still greater significance as to the professional character of Lincoln. He was engaged as counsel in a reaper patent case. It was to be tried at Cincinnati. The opposing counsel was an eminent lawyer from the East. Lincoln’s friends were eager for him to win this case, as it would give him great renown and prestige.

His client had four hundred thousand dollars at [Pg 77] stake, an enormous sum at that time, and the capitalist became frightened at the great talent arrayed against Lincoln. He called in the services of a correspondingly great Eastern lawyer, Edwin M. Stanton. This eminent man was shocked at the sight of his colleague, Lincoln. He took entire control of the case and not only ignored Lincoln, but openly insulted him. Lincoln, through an open door in the hotel, heard Stanton scornfully exclaim to the client who had employed Lincoln, “Where did that long-armed creature come from and what can he expect to do in this case?”

At another time Stanton spoke of Lincoln as “a long, lank creature from Illinois, wearing a dirty linen duster for a coat, on the back of which the perspiration had splotched wide stains that resembled a map of the continent.”

Lincoln, completely discouraged and thrown out of any possible council with a man thus against him, quit the case and sorrowfully returned to Illinois.

And yet, only a few years later, in the great crisis of approaching disunion, Lincoln became President of the United States and he made Stanton his Secretary of War. Very soon Stanton learned to prize “the long-armed creature” as one of the noblest and greatest men in the world. No one of Lincoln’s colleagues ever questioned his superior leadership as [Pg 78] the supreme chief in a struggle profoundly affecting all civilization and human government.

When we consider how Lincoln worked his way up, through such destitution of knowledge and means, in twenty-five years, from a five-dollar suit before a justice of the peace to a five-thousand-dollar fee before the Supreme Court of the United States, we know that such progress does not come about by accident nor political fortunes, but by sheer interest and work.

V. THE MAN WHO COULD NOT LIVE FOR SELF ALONE

Henry Cabot Lodge says, “Lincoln could have said with absolute truth, as Seneca’s Pilot says, in Montaigne’s paraphrase, ‘Oh, Neptune, thou mayest save me if thou wilt; thou mayest sink me if thou wilt; but whatever may befall I shall hold my tiller true.’”

The moral process of his life, in which the recorded incidents are only way-marks, is the only worthwhile interest for the American youth or for the newcomer to our shores.

Lincoln’s life-creed may be taken from a statement he has made of his personal duty. “I am not bound to win,” he said, “but I am bound to be true. [Pg 79] I am not bound to succeed, but I am bound to live up to the light I have. I must stand with anybody that stands right. I must stand with him while he is right, and I must part with him when he is wrong.”

That this does not mean infallible individual judgment executed at any cost as imperial individual will may be inferred from the beginning of the statement, but it does mean the infallible integrity of honest conscience and character.

Lincoln had a conscience that was like harmony in music, and he could not uphold a wrong thing any more than he could intentionally use a wrong figure and hope to solve correctly his problem.

As an illustrating incident, one of his clients wanted to bring suit against a widow with six children for six hundred dollars.

“Yes,” said Lincoln, “there is no reasonable doubt that I can win this case for you; I can set the whole neighborhood at loggerheads; I can greatly distress a widow and her six fatherless children, and thereby gain six hundred dollars for you which I can see belongs to them with about as much right as to you, but I’ll give you a little advice for nothing. Try some other way to get six hundred dollars.”

Like the rich man who went away so disturbed from the advice of Christ, this man went away sorrowing.

[Pg 80]

In another instance Lincoln started in with a case believing his client innocent, then he reached the belief that the man was guilty. Turning to his associates in the case, he said, “Sweet, this man is guilty. You defend him. I can’t.” The large fee in the case was forfeited, but his self-respect, that nobility which carried him through many great dark hours, was saved.

Once, when out with his lawyer-companions, he climbed a tree, searching for a bird’s nest, out of which two fledgelings had fallen. His companions made sport of him for giving so much time and work to such worthless things, but he exclaimed with such genuine feeling as to silence them, “I could not have gone to sleep in peace if I had not restored those little birds to their mother.”

Lincoln liked to argue, and, to pass the time in a certain stage-coach ride, he was arguing that every act, no matter how kind, was always prompted by a selfish motive. About this time the stage passed a ditch in which a pig was stuck fast in the mud. Lincoln asked the driver to stop. He then jumped out and rescued the pig.

The passenger with whom Lincoln had been arguing thought that he now had proof for his own side of the case.

“Now look here,” he said as Lincoln climbed back [Pg 81] into the stage, “you can’t say that was a selfish act.”

“Yes, I can,” replied Lincoln. “It was extremely selfish. If I had left that little fellow sticking in the mud, it would have made me uncomfortable till I forgot it. That’s why I had to help him out.”

General Littlefield says that one day a client came in with a very profitable case for Lincoln. He told Lincoln his story. Lincoln listened a little while and his look went up to the ceiling in a very abstract way. Presently, he swung his chair around and said, “Well, you have a pretty good case in technical law, but a pretty bad one in equity and justice. You’ll have to get some other fellow to win this case for you. I couldn’t do it. If I was talking to the jury in favor of your case, I’d all the time be thinking, ‘Lincoln, you’re a liar,’ and I believe I’d forget myself and say it out loud.”

Coleridge in his “Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner” might well have had Lincoln in mind when he wrote,

That was Lincoln’s religion, to love his fellow-men and his country. In the turmoil of wrongs infesting the confusions that were bewildering all minds at the close of the Civil War, all now know that both North and South lost the noblest and most valued friend, the ablest and wisest restorer, anywhere to be found in all the vast regions of pain.

[Pg 83]

CHAPTER VI

I. HELPFULNESS AND KINDNESS OF A WORTH-WHILE CHARACTER

It would take a whole book to tell the stories of kindness and sympathy told by those who were neighbors and friends of Lincoln. All who knew him agree in saying how much he loved children and how considerate he was for the comfort of others.

While living in the Rutledge tavern he often took upon himself all kinds of discomforts to accommodate travellers. The Great Book says, “He who loses his life for my sake shall find it.” Lincoln seemed most of the time to forget that he had any life of his own in trying to do good to others. Many times he served ungrateful people, and many persons mistreated him who mistook his kindness for servility, but that didn’t change Lincoln. He kept right on doing good to others, until at last he lost his life, in the full meaning of that phrase, but we may be sure that somewhere else he has found it.

If a traveller became stuck in the mud, literally or [Pg 84] figuratively, Lincoln always seemed to be the first to see his need. If widows and orphans were suffering, he was the first to know it and relieve their wants.

Deeds of kindness often look like “bread cast upon the waters,” but we are assured that such is not lost, for it “shall return after many days.”

The effective way in which Lincoln sometimes turned upon those who “run him down” by sarcastic references to his poverty or looks is illustrated by his reply to George Forquer. Lincoln was to make his first speech in the Court House at Springfield, and he was to be answered by Forquer, a rather aristocratic citizen of the town who had been a Whig, but who had recently turned over to the Democrats and received the appointment to an important office. Incidentally, he had also put up a lightning rod to protect his rather showy house, and this fact was quite well known, because it was the first lightning rod to be put upon a house in that county.

Forquer rose to speak as Lincoln sat down, and his smile of derision seemed to show that he expected to demolish with ridicule the backwoodsman from New Salem.

Turning to Lincoln, he said, “The young man must be taken down, and I am truly sorry that the task devolves upon me.”

[Pg 85]

He was a witty and sarcastic speaker. He did not try to argue but ridiculed Lincoln in the most offensive way. Lincoln’s friends feared for this onslaught, not knowing what Lincoln could say. But Lincoln said it so effectively in a few words, as he always seemed able to do, that his opponent lost and never recovered.

In closing a very short reply, Lincoln said, pointing his long, accusing finger at Forquer in a scathing rebuke:

“Live long or die young, I would rather die now than, like this gentleman, change my politics, and with the change receive an office with a salary of three thousand dollars a year, and then feel obliged to erect a lightning rod over my house to protect a guilty conscience from the fear of an angry God.”

II. THE LOVE OF FREEDOM AND TRUTH

Lincoln’s fairness for all men, even when they were his opponents and the enemies of his cause, may be seen in his defense of Colonel Baker.

There was a bitter political campaign in progress, and Colonel Baker was making a speech to a rough [Pg 86] crowd in the courthouse. This building had been built to be a storehouse and directly over the speaker was a loft with a stairway near the speaker’s stand. Lincoln was sitting on the platform above as a more convenient place to hear the speaker than from the crowded floor below.

The speaker began to say things that annoyed the crowd. Suddenly the yell was raised to take him off the stand and put him out. The crowd surged forward when Lincoln’s long legs were seen to swing over the edge of the opening at the head of the stairs as if he had no time to use the steps. He alighted on his feet by the speaker’s side.

“Gentlemen,” cried Lincoln as he raised his hand to stop the oncoming rioters, “let us not disgrace the age and country in which we live. This is a land where the freedom of speech is guaranteed. Mr. Baker has a right to speak, and ought to be permitted to do so. I am here to protect him, and no man shall take him from this stand if I can prevent it.”

The sudden appearance of this champion of human rights dropping down from above so unexpectedly, his perfect calmness and fairness and the well-known fact that he was no idle boaster, quieted the outbreak, and Colonel Baker finished his address in peace.

[Pg 87]

Joshua Speed tells how Lincoln rode into Springfield on a borrowed horse to attend his first session of the legislature with all his earthly possessions packed into his saddle bags. Lincoln came into the store owned by Speed and asked the price of a bedstead with its equipment of bedding. The price was named, Lincoln said that was no doubt cheap enough but that he could not buy it unless the storekeeper could wait for part of the pay until the money was earned.

Speed was greatly impressed with the earnest young man. He offered to share with him the room which he used over the store. He pointed to the stairway leading up to the room.

Lincoln went up the stairs and in a moment appeared at the stairway with beaming face.

“Well, Speed,” he said, “I am moved.”

Thus he made friends of all persons at once and they were not fairweather friends, but lifetime friends.

The homely old copybook text so familiar to our grandmothers, “Beauty is as beauty does,” applies well to the appearance of Lincoln, and to the first impressions received by those who saw him. Paraphrasing the poet, “none knew him but to love him, none knew him but to praise.” He was like one transformed in the animation and zeal of expressing [Pg 88] his profound sentiments of freedom, humanity and truth.

One who knew Lincoln well says, “He was one of the homeliest men ever seen when walking around, but while he was making a speech he was one of the handsomest men I have ever known.”

III. THE WIT-MAKERS AND THEIR WIT

Lincoln’s quick wit never contained any sting and he lost no friends by it. On one occasion several of his friends got into an argument about the proper proportions of the body. They could agree on their theories in all respects excepting the relative length of the legs. Lincoln listened gravely to their arguments, and, as usual, some one asked him his opinion.

“It is of course one of the most important of problems, and doubtless was a source of great anxiety to the maker of man. But, after all is said and done, it is my opinion that man’s lower limbs, in order to combine harmony and service, should be at least long enough to reach from his body to the ground.”

At another time a very unhandsome man stopped Lincoln and peered offensively into his face.

[Pg 89]

“What seems to be the matter, my friend,” inquired Lincoln.

“Well,” replied the stranger, “I have always considered it my duty if ever I came across a man uglier than myself to shoot him on the spot.”

Lincoln took his hand in friendly agreement.

“Stranger, if this is really true, shoot me. If I thought I was uglier than you, I’d want to die.”

Senator Voorhees of Indiana said that he once heard Lincoln defeat a windy little pettifogging lawyer by telling a story. After showing how the fellow’s arguments were only empty words, he said, “He can’t help it. When his oratory begins it exhausts all his force of mind. The moment he begins to talk his mental operations cease. I never knew of but one thing that was similar to my friend in that respect. Back in the days when I was a keel boatman I became acquainted with a puffy little steamboat, which used to bustle and wheeze its way up and down the Sangamon River. It had a fivefoot boiler and a seven-foot whistle, so that every time it whistled that boat stopped.”

Even in business Lincoln could not refrain from expressing himself in a humorous way. A New York firm wrote him to know the financial reliability of one of their customers. He replied:

[Pg 90]

“I am well acquainted with your customer and know his circumstances. First, he has a wife and baby: these ought to be worth not less than $50,000 to any man. Secondly, he has an office in which there is a table worth $1.50, and three chairs at, say, $1.00.

“Last of all, there is in one corner a large rathole, which will bear looking into.

“Respectfully,

“ A. Lincoln .”

All the great contemporaries who heard Lincoln tell stories agree that he never told one merely for the sake of the story or to raise a laugh, but always to carry some useful point or impress an idea. The aptness and wit of his stories often were more convincing than any argument or logic. We may be assured that any other kind of a Lincoln story is spurious, and none of his.

He had a case where two men had got into a fight. It was proven that Lincoln’s man had merely defended himself against the other’s attack. But the other attorney insisted that Lincoln’s man could have defended himself less violently.

Lincoln closed out the argument and won his case with a story.

“That reminds me,” said Lincoln, “of the man who was attacked by a farmer’s dog. He defended [Pg 91] himself so violently with a pitchfork that he killed the dog.

“‘What made you kill my dog?’ demanded the angry farmer.

“‘Because he tried to bite me,’ replied the victim.

“‘Well, why didn’t you go at him with the other end of the pitchfork?’ persisted the farmer.

“‘Well, I would,’ replied the man, ‘if he had come at me with the other end of the dog.’”

IV. TURBULENT TIMES AND SOCIAL STORMS

One of the most singular, as well as undignified, experiences of Lincoln is closely involved in the most important measures of his life. This refers to the duel which he never fought with a man who was a stormy disturber for many years in many exalted yet unbecoming affairs.

In 1840 Lincoln became engaged to Miss Mary Todd of Lexington, Kentucky, who was visiting her sister, Mrs. Ninian Edwards of Springfield. She came of a noted and rather aristocratic family of Kentucky. That two persons, so unlike in ancestry, in social experience, and in education, should be attracted to each other has seemed to be mystery [Pg 92] enough to breed much speculation, a great number of curious stories, and much ungracious comment.

Lincoln was aware of these differences as much as any one, and this, if there were no other cause, would account for his seeming uncertainties, his hesitation and the delays in his courting affairs which have been the source of so much elaboration and explanation.

Lincoln had much social self-depreciation and he had a poetical fancy idealizing his own sensitiveness toward women. It may well be concluded that his judgment was helplessly unsettled from the impossibility of any foresight in a matter of such vital life-importance. The endless gossip that swarmed about Lincoln’s love affairs may well be dismissed as worthless in the presence of the facts.

Lincoln married Mary Todd November 4, 1842. During the summer before, in commercial and political affairs, there had arisen the greatest dissatisfaction with the money-interests and currency of the state. The current money had depreciated to half its value. Though the people had to use that kind of money in all their transactions, the state officers required their salaries to be paid in gold.

The auditor of the State was a young Irishman named James Shields. He was exceedingly vain, pompous and of violent temper. Therefore, he was [Pg 93] a shining mark for the wit of those opposed to the present management of the state.

In the “Sangamo Journal” there appeared an article of witty satire, ridiculing Shields and the financial methods of his political associates. It was signed, “Rebecca from Lost Townships.”

Shields became furious and demanded to fight the man responsible for it. The significance of this is rather in the peculiar popularity and yet unpopularity of such a man as Shields. His reckless adventures, his incessant boasting, and his whirlwind career of turmoil all loaded him with praise and ridicule for many a year.

Shields went into the Mexican War and came out with his own brand of glory. But it won popularity enough to make him Senator of the United States. As an indication of his amazing character, he wrote a preposterous letter to the man he defeated, declaring, that if Judge Breese had not been defeated, Shields would have killed him.

It can be imagined what the fury of such a man must have been against the “Rebecca” letters.

The next week another “Rebecca” letter appeared which was this time unmistakably written by some mischief-loving woman. She offered to settle the quarrel by marrying the aggrieved gentleman. This was too much for Shields and he stormed the [Pg 94] newspaper office to know whom he should hold responsible for the “Rebecca letters.”

V. THE FRONTIER “FIRE-EATER”

The public taste and the public requirements of its individuals change, as all know, from generation to generation. The development of Lincoln’s life can be appreciated only as the community in which he lived is understood. The public custom is necessary to explain Lincoln’s part in this peculiar episode.

The truth in this clownish affair was that Lincoln had written the first letter, and two young ladies, one of them Mary Todd, were the authors of the second letter. Mary Todd was at that time estranged from Lincoln, and probably did not know that he was the writer of the first “Rebecca Letter.”

Shields sent his friend, General Whiteside, with a fiery demand to the editor of the paper to know the authors of the “Rebecca letters.” The editor at once consulted Lincoln, who told the editor to tell General Whitesides that Lincoln held himself responsible for the “Rebecca letters.”

Nothing suited Shields better. He began at once [Pg 95] to make public the most insulting letters to Lincoln and to issue the most fiery challenges to a duel.

Though duelling was at that time forbidden by law, yet so strong was public opinion that the one who refused to fight a duel was branded as a coward and would not only lose his usefulness with the public, but his opponent would thus gain corresponding prestige.

Lincoln so far conceded to this demand as to accept the challenge, but on such terms as to make the battle ridiculous rather than heroic. He had the right to choose the weapons and the conditions, so he chose “cavalry broadswords of the largest size,” and the fight was to be “across a board platform six feet wide.”

Lincoln felt keenly the stupidity of the whole affair, but it would be degrading to his political standing to refuse. Fortunately, Lincoln had a friend in Doctor Merryman, who was not only a witty writer, but he loved a fight, and he used his wit with a fervor that overwhelmed even such men as Shields and Whitesides in the final roundup.

However, the duel progressed so far that the parties thereto went to Alton and crossed over to Missouri for the fight. But friends arrived and persuaded Shields to withdraw the challenge. The next week Shields wrote a bombastic article in the “Sangamo [Pg 96] Journal” crowning himself as a hero and Lincoln as a coward. Then Dr. Merryman came to the rescue. The next week the “Sangamo Journal” had another version of the now ridiculous duel. It showed up the Shields’ side as so utterly absurd that the humor and tragic aspect of the affair among such prominent people became the sensation of the day. General Whitesides challenged Doctor Merryman and Merryman responded, with the declaration that his selection would be rifles at close range in the nearby fields. This would not do, because duelists could not hold office in Illinois and Whitesides was fund commissioner. His boasts proved that he was not afraid to lose his life but he did not want to give up his fat office.

The same thing happened to Shields. He challenged Mr. Butler, one of Lincoln’s close friends. Butler accepted at once, choosing “to fight next morning at sunrise in Bob Allen’s meadow, one hundred yards’ distance with rifles.”

Shields declined.

It was a burlesque and a comedy farce, and so it ingloriously ended.

But Shields had no less singular luck than he had singular friends. He was commissioned Brigadier-General in the Mexican War while still holding a state office and before he had ever seen a day’s service. [Pg 97] At Cerro-gordo he was wounded and that wound was doubtless what made him United States Senator from Illinois. After serving one term in constant commotion with his associates, he removed to Minnesota and from there was returned to the Senate of the United States.

In the War of the Rebellion Lincoln appointed him Brigadier-General and he was again wounded in battle when his troops defeated Stonewall Jackson.

He moved into Missouri and from there was sent for the third time to the United States Senate. A few years later he became the subject of one of the bitterest and most disgraceful controversies in Congress over the question of voting him money and a pension.

VI. HONOR TO WHOM HONOR IS DUE

Lincoln always seemed to be far more proud of his fist fight with Jack Armstrong of the Clary gang than of his near-duel with Shields and his political ring. He had many an occasion to refer to the Clary boys, but never to the Shields crowd.

[Pg 98]

It was not Lincoln’s disposition to have personal quarrels.

Only one other is known. He got into a verbal encounter with a man named Anderson at Lawrenceville. Anderson wrote him a harsh note demanding satisfaction.

Lincoln replied, “Your note of yesterday is received. In the difficulty between us of which you speak you say you think I was the aggressor. I do not think I was. You say my words ‘imported insult.’ I meant them as a fair set-off to your own statements, and not otherwise; and in that light alone I now wish you to understand them. You ask for my ‘present feelings on the subject.’ I entertain no unkind feeling toward you, and none of any sort upon the subject, except a sincere regret that I permitted myself to get into such altercation.”

Mr. Anderson was “satisfied” and henceforth counted himself as one of Lincoln’s friends.

Another example shows Lincoln’s idea of quarrels. It ought to be impressed upon every boy’s mind, as the belief of this great leader of men.

In the midst of the war a young officer had been court-martialed for a quarrel with one of his associates, and Lincoln had to give him an official reprimand. It was as follows:

“The advice of a father to his son, ‘Beware of entrance to a quarrel, but, being in, bear it that the opposed may beware of thee!’ is good, but not the best. Quarrel not at all. No man resolved to make the most of himself can spare time for personal contention. Still less can he afford to take all the consequences, including the vitiating of his temper, and the loss of self-control. Yield larger things to which you can show no more than equal right; and yield lesser ones, though clearly your own. Better give your path to a dog than to be bitten by him in contesting for the right. Even killing the dog would not cure the bite.”

Lincoln and His Cabinet at the First Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation.

But the Shields’ quarrel and its skyrocket burlesque had another effect probably of priceless consequence to Lincoln. There was a certain whole-souled, self-effacing championship in it of the two girls who had written the last “Rebecca letter.” Mary Todd appreciated it, and she had to express her appreciation to the man whom she knew loved her, but who feared that he could not make her happy. Merely to be made happy is not all that a real woman of true womanhood is concerned with in her choice of a husband. Doubtless, she saw in him qualities to love rather than form or manners. She had abundance of time to consider all things and we may well believe that she was wise and good in her choice. Considering their differences, it is [Pg 99]
[Pg 100] really a great testimony and tribute to her that so little could ever be found for cruel gossip about incompatibility and unhappiness in the Lincoln household.

Mary Todd ignored the coldness that Lincoln’s sensitiveness had brought between them, in the mutual adjustment of courtship, and she thanked him for keeping her out of the Shields’ gossip and controversy. The coldness disappeared and never returned. They were married, and we must believe that humanity owes her a priceless debt, that she was one of the three great souls who made the immortal man, that together in glory are three great names, Nancy Hanks Lincoln, Sarah Bush Lincoln and Mary Todd Lincoln.

[Pg 101]

CHAPTER VII

I. SIMPLICITY AND SYMPATHY ESSENTIAL TO GENUINE CHARACTER

Greatness of mind, valued as worth while in historical characters, has always been characterized by simplicity and sympathy, especially as interested in children and in those without means for the needs of life. Lincoln said pityingly of the poor that the Lord surely loved them because he had made so many.

That Lincoln understood children and could talk to them is shown in his visit to Five Points Mission, then the most miserable spot in all the poverty-stricken sections of New York City. No one knows why he went there, alone and unannounced. Perhaps, knowing what was the lowest possible poverty in the frontier forests, he wanted to see what it was in the midst of the greatest wealth in America.

The manager of the Mission, seeing a stranger, in the rear of the house, who had been such an earnest listener to their exercises, asked him if he would like to speak a few words to the children.

[Pg 102]

We can hardly imagine his feelings as he arose to speak to those suffering little ones, so like his own hard childhood and yet subject to such different causes and conditions.

Feeling that he had used up his time, after speaking a few minutes, he stopped but they urged him to go on. Several times he ended his talk, but every time they cried out so persistently for him to go on that he spoke to them long over time.

No one knew who he was, but so impressive had been what he said that one of the teachers caught him at the door, begging to know his name. He replied simply, “Abraham Lincoln of Illinois.”

Adversity only made Lincoln stronger. In the midst of defeat he was at his best. In the midst of great moral success, in the profound trials of his country, his heart was mild and gentle as a child, and his eyes misty with supreme dreams of beauty and peace to lessen the suffering of humanity.

Once when Lincoln was speaking for Fremont, a brazen voice in the audience roared out above his own, “Is it true, Mr. Lincoln, that you came into the state barefoot and driving a yoke of oxen?”

The interruption had come in the midst of his strongest argument and was intended to throw him off of his subject.

His reply came back with a bound that it was true [Pg 103] and he believed he could prove it by at least a dozen men in the audience more respectable than the speaker. Then he seemed inspired by the question into a vision of this country as the home of the free and the land of opportunity.

In a great burst of eloquence, that carried the people with him, he showed how oppression had injured the oppressor as much as the oppressed, even as slavery had injured the master as it did the slave.

“We will speak for freedom and against slavery,” he said, “as long as the Constitution of our country guarantees free speech, until everywhere on this wide land the sun shall shine, and the rain shall fall, and the wind shall blow upon no man who goes forth to unrequited toil.”

This was before he had spoken in New York, where his speech at the Cooper Institute awoke the people of the Eastern States to realize that an intellectual political giant had at last come out of the West.

II. NEARING THE HEIGHTS OF A PUBLIC CAREER

Lincoln’s long struggle to know and to be worth while culminated at last in a political career. The good opinion of associates grew into the favorable [Pg 104] friendship of his neighbors and that confidence widened to the community, then to the political district and so on.

In this age when thousands of dollars, and, in some instances, many hundred thousands of dollars used for campaign expenses is a common occurrence, it is interesting to read how Lincoln managed such things. He was elected four times to the Illinois legislature. One time the Whigs made up two hundred dollars to pay his campaign expenses. After the election he returned one hundred and ninety-nine dollars and twenty-five cents, to be given back to the subscribers, in which he explained, “I did not need the money. I made the canvass on my own horse; my entertainment, being at the house of friends, cost me nothing; and my only outlay was seventy-five cents for a barrel of cider, which some farm hands insisted I should treat them to.”

The history of Lincoln’s political battles belongs to those who would comment on his part in public affairs. We are interested here in a moral consideration of what built him up to a life used in the preservation of his nation, the intimate personal interests of his wonderful story, and how he stands as an ideal character of American manhood.

It is therefore sufficient for us to pass over the great political struggles that proved him to be the [Pg 105] “Giant of the West,” and begin with him on the way to the White House.

Lincoln was not exactly as the prophet without honor in his own country, for he was beloved wherever he was known, but his neighbors were struck with surprise when he was nominated to be President of the United States.

One fine old gentleman, recently settled in Springfield from England, who had brought his old country ideas of propriety with him, was covered with astonishment.

“What!” he exclaimed, “Abe Lincoln nominated for President of the United States! A man that buys a ten-cent beefsteak for his breakfast, and carries it home himself! How is it possible!”

Lincoln’s vision of himself, expressed during a debate with Douglas, was not much more hopeful. Ponder over these words in which Lincoln with mingled humor, pathos and insight contrasted his own appearance with that of his adversary in the famous debates:

“There is still another disadvantage under which we labor.... It arises out of the relative positions of the two persons who stand before the State as candidates for the Senate. Senator Douglas is of world-wide renown. All the anxious politicians of his party ... have been looking upon him as certainly, [Pg 106] at no distant day, to be the President of the United States. They have seen in his round, jolly, fruitful face, post offices, land offices, marshalships and Cabinet appointments, chargeships and foreign missions, bursting and sprouting out in wonderful exuberance, ready to be laid hold of by their greedy hands. On the contrary, nobody has ever expected me to be President. In my poor lean, lank face nobody has ever seen that any cabbages were sprouting out. These are disadvantages all, taken together, that the Republicans labor under. We have to fight this battle upon principle and upon principle alone.”

But the people were in earnest. It was realized by all that the fundamental interests of American progress were in the midst of a great crisis. They needed a reliable man and Lincoln was that man.

Campaign songs are usually very flat reading after the campaign is over, but they were then the carriers of the enthusiasm for a great cause.

The song sung in the state nominating-convention at Springfield, Illinois, had for its first verse and chorus the following lines:

III. SOME CHARACTERISTICS OF MOMENTOUS TIMES

Reference to a few of his speeches, made before his election to the presidency, will give a clear idea of his political Americanism, to which was entrusted the definition and the destiny of the greatest democracy in the world.

The Illinois legislature of 1854, by the union of Whigs and Know-Nothings, indorsed him for senator and sent a committee to notify him. The Know-Nothings were especially strong on the slogan of “America for Americans,” and wanted to shut out immigration.

[Pg 108]

In the reply to the delegation or committee of notification, he said, “Who are the native Americans? Do they not wear the breech-clout and carry a tomahawk! Gentlemen, your principle is wrong. It is not American. For instance, I had an Irishman named Patrick working my garden. One morning I went out to see how Pat was getting along.

“‘Mr. Lincoln,’ he said, ‘what d’ye think of these Know-Nothing fellers?’ I explained their ideas and asked him if he had been born in America.”

“‘Faith, to be sure,’ Pat replied, ‘I wanted to be, very much, but me mother wouldn’t let me. It’s no fault of mine.’”

Lincoln and Pat thus together believed that every baby, born anywhere on earth, is a good American until its mind is moulded into some man-made shape.

Referring to the thirteen original colonies and what they stood for, he said, “These communities by their representatives in old Independence Hall said to the world of men: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’ This was their lofty and wise and noble understanding of the justice of the Creator to his creatures. In their enlightened belief nothing stamped with the Divine image and [Pg 109] likeness was sent into the world to be trodden on and degraded and imbruted by its fellows. They grasped not only the race of men then living, but they reached forward and seized upon the farthest posterity. They created a beacon to guide their children and their children’s children, and the countless myriads who should inhabit the earth in other ages.”

Among the many familiar quotations from these great speeches that made him known to the nation may be mentioned a few that should never be forgotten.

“Let none falter who believes he is right.”

“Let us have faith that right makes might.”

“Freedom is the last, best hope of earth.”

“Disenthrall ourselves, then we shall save ourselves.”

“Come what will, I’ll keep my faith with friend and foe.”

“For those who like that sort of thing, that is the sort of thing they like.”

“I do not think much of a man who is not wiser today than he was yesterday.”

“No man is good enough to govern another without the other’s consent.”

[Pg 110]

“Would you undertake to disprove a proposition in Euclid by calling Euclid a liar!”

“Familiarize yourself with the chains of bondage and you prepare your own limbs to wear them.”

In pioneer days it was very common for individuals to conclude any personal controversy by resort to the settlement of “fist and skull,” and, on the far frontier of the Wild West, the convincing evidence that brought peace was often the quickest and most skillful use of the gun.

We are now in that pioneer day and wild-west age of nations whose “fist and skull” arguments and wild-west “gun-play” must end. This is what Lincoln thought of it in the midst of the Civil War. It was written to the Springfield convention.

“Peace does not appear so distant as it did. I hope it will come soon and come to stay; and so come as to be worth the keeping in all future time. It will then have been proved that among freemen there can be no successful appeal from the ballot to the bullet, and that they who take such an appeal are sure to lose their case and pay the cost.”

It is interesting here, as he came up out of the darkness into the dawn of his supreme humanity, to know what the greatest men of his times thought of him, when that great day of human service closed [Pg 111] down over him, in the martyrdom of assassination. It is not eulogy, but an estimate of values in a personality, and as appreciation of righteousness exalting a man into an ideal of his age.

Lord Beaconsfield, addressing the House of Commons, said, “In the life of Lincoln there is something so homely and so innocent that it takes the subject, as it were, out of the pomp of history, and out of the ceremonial of diplomacy. It touches the heart of nations, and appeals to the domestic sentiments of mankind.”

John Stuart Mill, one of the most distinguished philosophers of the last century, speaks in his writings of Lincoln as “The great citizen who afforded so noble an example of the qualities befitting the first magistrate of a free people, and who, in the most trying circumstances, won the admiration of all who appreciate uprightness and love freedom.”

D’Aubigne, the historian of the Reformation, wrote,

“While not venturing to compare him to the great sacrifice of Golgotha, which gave liberty to the captive, is it not just to recall the word of the apostle John (I John 3:16): ‘Hereby perceive we the love of God, because he laid down his life for us: and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren.’ Among the legacies which Lincoln leaves to us, we [Pg 112] shall all regard as the most precious his spirit of equity, of moderation, and of peace, according to which he will still preside, if I may so speak, over the destinies of your great nation.”

IV. THE BEGINNINGS OF GREAT TRAGEDY

As we all now know, there was never a more fearless man than Abraham Lincoln, but so bitter and so threatening were his enemies that it was believed by his friends that the Presidency should not be endangered by taking any chances as to his assassination on the way to Washington, for his inauguration. Open boasts were widely made that he would never be inaugurated. Assassination was especially threatened if he should pass through Baltimore, and it was thought best by the managers of his transportation that it should not be known when he passed through Baltimore.

Evidence was uncovered that a band of sworn assassins, headed by a man calling himself Orsini, was to throw the train from the track somewhere between Philadelphia and Baltimore, and then do their monstrous deed. If this failed, they were to mingle with the crowds about the carriage and at the first [Pg 113] chance assassinate him, by discharging pistols at him and then throwing hand grenades. In the confusion they expected to make their escape to a vessel awaiting them in the harbor.

The plot was defeated by the managers of the journey sending Lincoln back to Philadelphia from Harrisburg, while all who might be watching him as spies for the plotters thought him to be asleep in a Harrisburg hotel. At Philadelphia he was placed on board a night train for Washington, where he arrived safely the next morning.

It was here at Baltimore, where there was such opposition to the preservation of the Union, that a delegation was some time later sent to Lincoln, demanding that no more troops pass through Maryland. Lincoln replied that the troops had to go to their destination, and, since they could neither go under nor over Maryland, they would have to go through it. Another delegation demanded that all hostilities should cease, and the controversy be left in the hands of Congress, otherwise seventy-five thousand men would oppose any more troops going through Maryland.

President Lincoln assured them that hostilities would not cease until the rebellion was ended, and that he supposed they had room on the soil of Maryland to bury seventy-five thousand men.

[Pg 114]

This unequivocal language ended such conferences and deputations.

These stupendous difficulties crowding upon Lincoln in the opening of the war, the opposition of powerful men, and the chaos into which the country had been thrown by the slavery agitation are subjects for political history, and were the trying out of the great soul which seemed to have been built up for that purpose from every experience in the living of men.

General Scott had charge of the inaugural ceremonies and the baffled conspirators, scattered by the police, left their hideous work to be done for a no less monstrous purpose four years later.

V. THE LIFE STRUGGLE OF A MAN TRANSLATED INTO THE LIFE STRUGGLE OF A NATION

Lincoln, in his speeches before the beginning of the war, cleared the public mind as to the fundamental issues and made it plain that the first sublime task was to save the Union. In a vague manner all men knew that the establishment of a national slave-labor absolutism in the South meant the development of an aristocratic slave-made oligarchy that would cause perpetual war, or, otherwise, bring about [Pg 115] the slave-holding mastery of America. Perhaps no clearer illustration of his mission, as he saw it, is in evidence than may be taken from one of the many characteristic incidents. While en route to Washington for his first inauguration the train conveying Mr. Lincoln came to a temporary stop at Dunkirk, N. Y., and an old farmer in the crowd surrounding the train shouted:

“Mr. Lincoln, what are you going to do when you get to Washington?”

Reaching for one of the little flags that decorated the train, he held it aloft and said:

“By the help of Almighty God and the assistance of the loyal people of this country I am going to uphold and defend the Stars and Stripes.”

The preservation of the Union, regardless of all the turmoil and clamor on other issues, was the one clear-sighted object of Lincoln. It is quite true that up to the beginning of the war there was little sentiment in the North for the abolition of slavery. It was the beginning of war that crystalized resentment against slave-holding power, because it was thus capable of destroying the union in the furtherance of its own dominion. But never was a nation more divided into mutually injurious confusions. It is always so in democracies where every one thinks, talks and acts. Authority was regarded as tyrannical [Pg 116] and Lincoln soon became widely berated as a despot. But his patience and devotion never swerved. He had already experienced the life-long lessons of holding true. The situation is well represented in the way General McClellan treated Lincoln. He began to show contempt for his commander-in-chief by causing Lincoln to wait outside like any other caller, and once he went to bed ignoring Lincoln’s call.

General McClellan seemed to believe himself so much greater than Lincoln that he more and more publicly ignored the President. When the mistreatment became notorious, Lincoln replied, “I will hold McClellan’s horse if he will only bring success.”

“On to Richmond,” was the cry of the nation, but McClellan remained preparing in what was bitterly called “masterly inactivity.”

Lincoln said one day sadly, “McClellan is a great engineer, but his special talent is for a stationary engine.”

One of the popular songs of the time, reflecting the bitterness of the seemingly interminable delay, has for its first and last stanzas the following:

Washington’s struggle and patience against adversities and confusions, through his long career as leader in the making of the Union, was doubtless an ever present example and consolation to Lincoln in the no less stupendous task of preserving the Union.

Laboulaye, the French Statesman says, “History shows us the victory of force and stratagem much more than of justice, moderation and honesty. It is too often only the apotheosis of triumphant selfishness. There are noble and great exceptions; happy those who can increase the number, and thus bequeath a noble and beneficent example to posterity. Mr. Lincoln is among these. He would willingly have repeated, after Franklin, that ‘falsehood and artifice are the practice of fools, who have not wit enough to be honest.’ All his private and all his political life was inspired and directed by his profound faith in the omnipotence of virtue.”

[Pg 118]

VI. SOME HUMAN INTERESTS MAKING LIGHTER THE BURDENS OF THE TROUBLED WAY

Great minds always see a ridiculous aspect in the midst of every human crisis, even as Franklin did in the signing of the Declaration of Independence when he said, “We must all hang together or we will all hang separately.”

The President on a certain occasion was feeling very ill and he sent for the doctor, who came and told him that he had a very mild form of smallpox.

“Is it contagious?” he asked.

“Yes, very contagious,” replied the doctor.

A visitor was present who was very anxious to be appointed to a certain office. On hearing what the doctor said, the visitor hastily arose.

“Don’t be in a hurry, sir,” said Lincoln, as if very well intentioned toward him.

“Thank you, sir, I’ll call again,” said the retreating office seeker, as he vanished through the door.

“Some people,” said Lincoln, laughing at the hurried exit of his friend, “do not take kindly to my Emancipation Proclamation, but now I am happy to believe I have something that everybody can take.”

Once, when Charles Sumner called upon him, he found Lincoln blacking his boots.

[Pg 119]

“Why, Mr. President,” he exclaimed, “do you black your own boots?”

With a vigorous rub of the brush, the President replied,

“Whose boots did you think I blacked?”

The way Lincoln answered unjustified people is illustrated in his response to a delegation asking the appointment of a certain man to be commissioner to the Sandwich Islands. After praising his qualifications for the place, they urged the plea of his bad health.

The President said, “Gentlemen, I am sorry to say that there are eight other applicants for that place, and they are all sicker than your man.”

Lincoln, in the great receptions, often heard flattering remarks that had been made short so as to be delivered quickly. But his apt replies were always equal to the remark. On one occasion, as the handshakers came by, an elderly gentleman from Buffalo said, “Up our way we believe in God and Abraham Lincoln.” To which the President replied as he took the next hand, “My friend, you are more than half right.”

Somewhat similar is a noble reply of Lincoln to some over-zealous religious friends which has become justly famous. A clergyman, heading a delegation with one of the many immature and injudicious [Pg 120] appeals, said sadly, “I hope, Mr. Lincoln, that the Lord is on our side.”

“I am not at all troubled about that,” was the instant reply, “for I know that the Lord is always on the side of right. But it is my constant anxiety and prayer that this nation and I should be on the Lord’s side.”

[Pg 121]

CHAPTER VIII

I. THE MAN AND THE CONFIDENCE OF THE PEOPLE

Abraham Lincoln, as President of the United States and Commander-in-Chief of its army and navy, never seemed to know that he was any more bound to look out for the good opinion of the world than at any time before. To him there was no such thing as presidential attitude or pose. He did not see that he had any part to act out more than he had always had. Life might be a stage, as Shakespeare had described it, and Lincoln had played many parts, but it was always as a man.

“Nothing was more marked in Lincoln’s personal demeanor,” says one of his intimate friends, “than his utter unconsciousness of his position. He never seemed aware that his place or his business was essentially different from that in which he had always been engaged. All duties were alike to him. All called equally upon him for the best service of his mind and heart, and all were alike performed with a conscientious, single-hearted devotion.”

[Pg 122]

Mr. Herndon, Lincoln’s law partner, says, “The great predominating elements of Mr. Lincoln’s peculiar character were: First, his great capacity and power of reason; second, his excellent understanding; third, an exalted idea of the sense of right and equity; and, fourth, his intense veneration of what was true and good.”

Thackery expresses a vision of character that might well be used to describe the motive-interest of Lincoln, and every other youth who desires to be worth while:

In that great address which he gave on the occasion of his being sworn in the first time as President of the United States, toward the close, he said, “Why should there not be a patient confidence in the ultimate justice of the people? Is there any better or equal hope in the world? In our present [Pg 123] differences is either party without faith in being right? If the Almighty ruler of nations, with his eternal truth and justice, be on your side of the North, or on yours of the South, that truth and that justice will surely prevail, by the judgment of this great tribunal of the American people.”

Lincoln Monument—Springfield, Illinois.

At the last of his inaugural address he said, referring to the people of the South, “In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The government will not assail you. You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors. You have no oath registered in Heaven to destroy the government; while I have the most solemn one to ‘preserve, protect and defend’ it.”

It was in 1840, when he set this standard that made him worthy of being called the savior of his nation. In a great political address at that time, he said, “Let it be my proud plume not that I was the last to desert (my country), but that I never deserted her.”

The result is a united and powerful America facing the centuries of human posterity as a working place for the enlargement of freedom accomplished as rapidly as is possible through the perfection of character and civilization.

[Pg 124]

II. TYPICAL INCIDENTS FROM AMONG MOMENTOUS SCENES

Lincoln’s many forms of kindness are exemplified in such a continuous series of acts, during his period of almost unlimited political power, that only a few typical instances need to be described.

One day a woman got past the doorkeeper and thrust herself into his presence. Her husband was captured and condemned to be shot. He was one of the hated Mosby guerillas. She had come to beg for his pardon. She weepingly poured out the story of his kindness, his love for his family and that they could hardly live without him. She said that she was a Northern woman, that she would take him to their home, and, on his parole and her promise, he should never again do harm to his country. She had papers also setting forth these facts. Lincoln examined them and decided to parole the husband in her care.

At hearing this, the woman sobbed with joy as if her heart would burst with gratitude.

“My dear woman,” said Lincoln, listening to her hysterical sobs, “if I had known it would make you feel so bad as this, I would never have pardoned him.”

[Pg 125]

“You do not understand me,” she cried, fearful that he might reverse his decision.

“Yes, I do,” he replied, “but if you do not go away at once I shall soon be crying with you.”

The Judge Advocate General was one day reviewing death sentences with Lincoln when they came to one where a young soldier was to be shot for “cowardice in the face of the enemy.” He had hid behind a stump during battle.

Lincoln drew out the paper and said, “This one I’ll have to put with my bunch of leg cases.”

“‘Leg cases,’” said Judge Holt; “what do you mean by ‘leg cases?’”

“Do you see that bunch of papers in yonder pigeon-hole?” he replied. “Well, they are cases marked ‘Cowardice in the face of the enemy.’ I call them, for short, my leg cases. I’ll put it up to you for judgment: if Almighty God gives a boy a cowardly pair of legs, how can he help their running away with him.”

One of the instances, which was far from being either desertion or “Cowardice in the face of the enemy,” came unexpectedly before him. A little woman of poverty-stricken clothing and pinched features, after several days trying, at last succeeded in getting through the press of people waiting to see Lincoln, and told him that her only son was about [Pg 126] to be shot for desertion. His regiment had come by near their home, and, being refused leave of absence, he had gone without permission to see her. He had returned to his regiment but had been arrested, tried and ordered shot, and there was only one more day. She did not know where he was now confined.

Lincoln examined the papers verifying her statements. He hastily arose from his chair, seized the woman by the hand, and, leaving the offices without a word, hastened over to the Secretary of War.

Stanton, weary with Lincoln’s constant interference against what the War Secretary believed to be necessary discipline, begged Lincoln to leave that matter to him.

But Lincoln insisted. He gave directions that immediate messages be sent to every army headquarters till the boy be found and the execution stayed for his further orders.

It was in a similar instance where mercy had been given to a New England mother that she came out from the interview silent, as if wrapped in thought.

Some friend interrupted her to know what had so impressed her.

“I have always been told,” she said, “that Lincoln is one of the ugliest of men. I now know that to be a lie. He is one of the handsomest men I ever saw.”

In another case, when Lincoln had relieved the distress [Pg 127] of an old man for his only son, the orders were that the soldier should not be executed until further orders from Lincoln.

“But that is not pardon, is it?” said the fearing petitioner.

“Well, it’s just as good,” replied Lincoln. “He will be older than Methuselah before I order his execution. Killing a man doesn’t make him any better or wipe out the act.”

III. EXPERIENCES DEMANDING MERCY AND NOT SACRIFICE

The kindness so exemplified throughout his life never failed on the side of mercy, as shown in many an incident of the war.

In one case a woman, whose son had run away from home at the age of seventeen and joined the Confederacy, sought to have him released from Fort McHenry, where he was in the hospital, a wounded prisoner.

She applied to Stanton, Secretary of War. He refused to listen to her, saying, “I have no time to waste on you. If you have raised up a son to rebel [Pg 128] against the best Government under the sun, you and he must take the consequences.”

She attempted to plead with him, but he very peremptorily ordered her to go, saying that he could do nothing for her.

Friends asked her to go to see Lincoln, but, sharing in the Southern prejudice or misunderstanding of the President, she refused in despair, believing him to be more fierce than Stanton. But she was at last persuaded to try.

With fear and trembling she came into his presence, and in the greatest joy any woman can have she came away.

“When I was permitted to go in to see him,” she said, in describing the scene, “he was alone. He immediately arose, with the most reassuring respect, and, pointing to a chair by his side, said, ‘Take this seat, Madam, and tell me what I can do for you.’”

She handed him, without speaking, a letter telling the truth about her son. He read it thoughtfully.

“Do you believe he will honor his parole if I permit him to go with you,” he said, with great kindness in his voice.

“I am ready, Mr. President,” she replied, “to peril my personal liberty that he will keep his parole.”

“You shall have your boy, my dear Madam,” he said. “To take him from the ranks of rebellion and [Pg 129] give him to a loyal mother is the best investment that can be made by this government.”

He handed her an order to give to the commanding officer at Fort McHenry.

“May God grant,” he fervently added, “that your boy may prove a blessing to you and an honor to his country.”

Lincoln’s interest in the lowly and their sacrifices for the Union has become classic in his letter to a Boston mother. A copy of this letter hangs on the wall in Brasenose College, Oxford University, England, as a model of pure and exquisite diction, which has never been excelled.

“Dear Madam:

“I have been shown in the files of the War Department a statement of the Adjutant-General of Massachusetts that you are the mother of five sons who have died gloriously on the field of battle. I feel how weak and fruitless must be any word of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming. But I cannot refrain from tendering you the consolation that may be found in the thanks of the republic they died to save. I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the sol [Pg 130] emn pride that must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom.

“Yours sincerely and respectfully,

“A. Lincoln.”

IV. HUMANITY AND THE GREAT SCHOOL OF EXPERIENCE

Many people in estimating Lincoln’s scholarship do not sufficiently recognize how much an eager student of life can learn in such wide experience as his among men. To say that he was uneducated or that he was self-made are alike erroneous. He was truly entered in the school of experience in which he chose the wisest interest as his teacher, and from which he graduated as a martyred president, one of the wisest masters of humanity.

It can hardly be said that Lincoln arrived slowly at a leadership of men. He was only twenty-eight when he was regarded as one of the most influential men in his State. The nation was then in the midst of the religious belief that God intended slavery or he would not have made men black. Even at that early period Lincoln, with the boldness of a Martin Luther, declared that “the institution of slavery is [Pg 131] founded both on injustice and bad policy,” though the great reformation was not yet at hand.

It is said that “those in glass houses should not throw stones.” Society and government have yet so many sins and wrongs to answer for that the people of slavery days can hardly be blamed for not seeing as we see now. Mankind seems to be only well started on the way to civilization. Now and then we are given a great far-seeing man and the vision of righteousness is made a little clearer. We see a little farther through him into the promised land of a better world.

To any one looking down upon the stormy United States of that period it could be seen that probably no one ever entered the presidency, and more probably never would, who seemed so destitute of influential associates and political supporters. It was Lincoln alone and his faith in the unseen faithful of his ancient Israel. He knew the people. He knew they understood what the great crisis in their country’s history meant for their ideals of America. They wanted a leader from among themselves, because they no longer trusted the politicians in high places.

In 1862 John James Piatt wrote:

[Pg 132]

This seems to show that the patriotic men of the literary East were not yet sure of him. In fact, it was not yet sure that there was any man anywhere who could remain sane and true through the rampant treason and raging strife.

A year later Frank Moore wrote:

If the Americans who tried to destroy Washington could now appear among us and see what we and the world think of him, they would hardly attempt to justify what they said and did to ruin him. Many lived to realize their error in defaming Lincoln and to appreciate their pitiful malignity in spreading the gossip and slander about him. And yet a few strove on to save some of their reputation for intelligence or personal honor and honesty, until [Pg 133] research and cumulative evidence established the unassailable truth of his standing and character as one of the noblest and greatest of Americans.

The lesson of personal justice and integrity is learned slowly where freedom has long seemed to mean political license to distort and defame party opponents. But election slanders die out as the people emerge from party possession and mastery. After the election is over, still increasing numbers become conscious that most of the evils told of the opposition have either been lies or the distorted halftruths that are more misleading to the honest-intentioned minds.

But, fortunately, one of Lincoln’s great sayings has been proven true even in the miscellaneous freedom of Americans. To an insignificant interruption on an insignificant occasion, one of those famous sayings popped up, as it were from the mass of thinking in Lincoln’s mind, “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.”

Lincoln’s great passion for friendship in the midst of his prophetic vision is shown in the last paragraph of his first inaugural address. He said, “I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, [Pg 134] it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched as they surely will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

V. SIMPLE INTERESTS THAT NEVER GROW OLD

Lincoln’s great sympathy for those who mourn is expressed in a letter of condolence to a friend whose father had just died.

“Dear Fanny:

“In this sad world of ours sorrow comes to all, and to the young it comes with bittered agony because it takes them unawares. The older have learned ever to expect it. You cannot now realize that you will ever feel happier. Is this not so? And yet, it is a mistake. You are sure to be happy again. To know this, which is certainly true, will make you some less miserable now. I have had experience enough to know what I say, and you need only to believe it to feel better at once. The memory of your dear father, instead of an agony, will be a sad, sweet [Pg 135] feeling in your heart of a purer and holier sort than you have known before.

“Your sincere friend,

A. Lincoln.”

His fatherly feeling toward childhood is shown in many stories of his younger son Tad.

Little Tad had all the impetuosity of energetic childhood. His father’s example of kindness once led him into conflict with the White House cook. Tad never saw a hungry-looking boy that he didn’t invite him in to have something to eat. This generosity was a light that could not be hid under a bushel. The number of hungry boys increased surprisingly. At last Peter, the cook, thought that Mrs. Lincoln must be told. He accordingly refused entrance to a hungry bunch that Tad brought in. Tad was very angry that his benevolence and his authority should be thus disputed. He flew upstairs to see his mother, but she was nowhere to be found. At this crisis he saw his father coming up the yard with Secretary Seward. They were discussing some important affairs of state, but that was insignificant in comparison with Tad’s grievance. He ran out to carry his complaint to the head of the nation.

“Father,” he cried, running up to the Executive in Chief of the United States, “Peter won’t let me [Pg 136] feed these hungry boys. Two of them are boys of soldiers. Isn’t it our kitchen? I’m going to discharge Peter. He doesn’t obey orders.”

Secretary Seward was very much amused.

The President turned to him as if much perplexed.

“Seward,” he said, “advise with me. This case requires great diplomacy.”

Mr. Seward patted Tad on the head and said, “My boy, be careful that you don’t run the government into debt.”

Then Lincoln took his little boy’s hand in his, saying, “Tell Peter that you really have to obey the Bible which tells you to feed the hungry, and that he ought to be a better Christian.”

Tad went to Peter with the astonishing news that his father didn’t believe the White House cook was a Christian.

The religious problem of “feeding the hungry” won quickly over the economic problem of White House expenses. Childhood was not defeated in its sympathies, and, like every other moral question, it was solved in the spirit of social democracy.

Secretary Seward writes of this that in less than an hour they passed back through the yard on their way to a Cabinet meeting and about a dozen small boys were sitting on the kitchen steps having a state dinner at the expense of the government.

[Pg 137]

VI. SOME INCIDENTS FROM THE GREAT YEARS

Little incidents of appreciative consideration marked all of Lincoln’s way.

One afternoon in Chicago, while many noted visitors were gathered about him, a little boy entered the room, and, seeing Lincoln, took off his cap, whirled it over his head and shouted, “Hurrah for Lincoln!”

Mr. Lincoln gently made his way through the crowd, picked the little boy up in his arms, held him out at arm’s length, studied him a moment seriously, and then shouted, in like enthusiasm, as he set the boy down, “Hurrah for you!”

Honorable W. D. Kell tells an incident that occurred in asking Lincoln to do something for Willie Bladen.

This boy had served a year on the gunboat Ottawa and had gone through two important battles. Willie lived in the district of Congressman Kell and he asked Kell to help him get a place in the Naval School. The testimony of the gunners on the Ottawa was that Willie had carried powder to them in the midst of the hottest engagements with all the coolness and bravery of any of the sailors, and Congressman Kell’s sympathy was thoroughly enlisted for the boy’s ambition.

[Pg 138]

Lincoln was much interested in the case and at once wrote to the Secretary of the Navy to appoint Willie Bladen to the school, if there was yet a place for him.

The appointment was made and the boy was ordered to report in July. But Congressman Kell found, on going back home, that Willie would not be fourteen till September, and no one could be accepted in the Naval School under fourteen.

Willie was terribly distressed.

“Never mind,” said Mr. Kell, “I’ll take you to see the President about this and I am sure he will manage it some way.”

A few days later, Congressman Kell, holding Willie Bladen by the hand, walked in to where Lincoln sat, and introduced the boy.

Willie made a profound bow.

“Why, bless me,” responded Lincoln, “is this the boy who did so gallantly in those two great battles! I feel that I should bow to him.”

And, with that, Lincoln arose and made a bow to the little hero.

The President then made out papers directing that the boy be allowed until September to report, then putting his hand on the boy’s head, he said, “Now, my boy, go home and play for the next two months. They may be the last holidays you will ever get.”

[Pg 139]

Lincoln’s knowledge of the Bible is shown by many an incident.

In one of the darkest hours of the war a mass convention was called of Union men to protest against the President’s “imbecile policy in the conduct of the war.” It was also intended to start a boom for “Fremont the Pathfinder” to succeed Lincoln to the Presidency. Instead of a great mass convention of many thousands, only four hundred disgruntled politicians were present.

When this news was brought to Lincoln, he reached for the Bible that always lay on his desk, and, turning to the first book of Samuel, the twenty-second chapter, read aloud, “And every one that was in distress, and every one that was in debt, and every one that was discontented gathered themselves unto him; and he became a Captain over them: and there were with him about four hundred men.”

The old saying, originating from the Bible, “To have friends you must show yourself friendly,” was always true in Lincoln’s case. One of these friends once said of Lincoln that “he had nothing, only friends.” His enemies did not know him or they would not have been enemies.

[Pg 140]

CHAPTER IX

I. FALSEHOOD AIDS NO ONE’S TRUTH

James Oppenheim says:

War times and periods of great public agitation have always brought forth in every free country the most scurrilous and vicious denunciations and slanders of public men. Such vile vituperation of Washington, Lincoln and others in our stormy periods, if all printed would make many volumes that bear in numerous instances the logical appearance of authentic history. But when sifted down, each to its origin, it is always what some one, long since gone from the possibility of explanation, has said, or been supposed to say, who might have known or might have misunderstood.

[Pg 141]

Every young man, if not every boy, sooner or later hears, as if indisputable, the most vulgar stories about men whom the world has enrolled as their noblest benefactors. All the moral world then seems to go to pieces as these stories seem to be the truth. But it is a common evidence of the viciousness, the most degenerate and cowardly viciousness, that is thus seen to remain possible in the composition of common minds. Political perversions of the meaning and motives of public men are so common in election times that the only wonder is, the only reassurance is, how little the disease of slander prevails, and yet, alas, we may not see how much injury and despair it has caused and is causing in growing minds. Many delight in making respected people appear filthy. Somehow, it satisfies and excuses their own brains and degenerate character.

Many people vaguely know that an assertion may be wrong, they even more vaguely know what is the right thing, and, when some one appears to state clearly what is wrong, and to give a clear idea of what is right, and a clear vision of the right way, then he becomes the embodiment of the people and they follow him. It was thus that Lincoln was the superbly great man. In the days when Americanism was a mist and a fog in so many high places, Lincoln stood forth as the embodied patriotism and mind [Pg 142] of America. When men stormed around him with ideas as diverse as the wind, he was a soul high and clear as the unchanging sun. The storm-makers are gone, but Lincoln remains, unchanged, one of the beacon lights of mankind.

Lincoln’s favorite poem reflects the deep burden of his own soul. It is a long poem written by William Knox, who was a much valued friend of Sir Walter Scott.

Four of the stanzas are as follows:

II. FREEDOM TO MISREPRESENT IS NOT FREEDOM

One of the great perils of the American republic, which makes progress so slow and misery so rich in victims, is the perversions which opponents put upon the words of public men, and the distortions which are given to their meaning. It is not only brutal, but to misshape righteous ideas is treason to those who receive them, and it brands such malefactors as criminal minds. The traitor and the liar are abhorred, but somehow we have not yet classified the unspeakable vice that deforms minds by disfiguring ideas so that they make a man say what he never said and to represent what he never was. This malignant vice is not above the village gossip and the vile tongue of common slander, but it has been especially the method of gamblers in the most sacred social interests, and of demagogues trying to control the election of officers and legislators for our government.

Such perversions were placed on Lincoln’s meaning [Pg 144] throughout the South that his name was the most abhorred of all names, until the miseries of reconstruction, by contrast, so brought in comparisons that he became known as the one great soul who had not, through all the terrible struggle, ever uttered a single bitter word against them, and who was the one great friend who could have given them justice and peace.

Soon the typical view of the intelligent South was that “his untimely and tragic end was one of the severest catastrophes of the war,” and, to the South, his death was “the direst misfortune that ever darkened the calendar of its woes.”

Up to the time of his nomination and following him in many ways on to his death, the Eastern States took up the most trivial news items and used them for ridicule, as representing Lincoln to be the mere caricature of a man.

One of these minor incidents, showing this defaming method, is represented as follows in the newspaper headlines of New York and New England. The great news, in the midst of the fearful times, relating to this incident was usually introduced in these words, “Old Abe kisses a Pretty Girl.”

Here is the true story: A little girl named Grace Bedell lived at Westfield, New York. Her father was a republican, but her two brothers were democrats, [Pg 145] and, therefore, hearing much excited argument, she was greatly interested. Of course, she was a republican and she wanted to help her father. Seeing a portrait of Lincoln gave her an idea. If Lincoln only had whiskers like her father, he would look better, and so her brothers might not be so much against him. No sooner was this improvement thought of than she hastened to put it into an earnest letter to Mr. Lincoln, telling him of her idea.

She seemed to think that all great men, like her father, must have a little girl, so she said in closing, “If you have no time to answer my letter, will you allow your little girl to reply for you?”

Such a letter could not be ignored by the great-hearted man to whom it came. He replied,

“Springfield, Illinois, Oct. 19, 1860.

“My dear little Miss:

“Your very agreeable letter of the fifteenth is received. I regret the necessity of saying I have no daughter. I have three sons; one seventeen; one nine, and one seven years of age. They, with their mother, constitute my whole family. As to whiskers, having never worn any, do you think people would call it a piece of silly affectation if I should begin now?

“Your very sincere well-wisher,

A. Lincoln.”

[Pg 146]

It happened, when on the journey to Washington to be inaugurated, that the train stopped at Westfield. Suddenly, in speaking to the people, he remembered.

“I have a little correspondent at this place,” he said, “I would like to see her.”

Some one called out and asked if Grace Bedell was in the crowd that surged around the train. Far back in the crowd the way began to open and a beautiful little girl came forward, timid but happy, to speak to the President-elect, who was also happy to show her that he had taken her advice and begun to grow a beard. The little girl was lifted up to him. He took her in his arms and tenderly kissed her forehead in the midst of the enthusiastic approval of a cheering multitude.

But the story ran the rounds of the East as the uncouth conduct of a backwoods demagogue.

As Europe got its idea of the new President from the New York and New England papers, he was believed by foreign leaders to be the proof of degenerate democracy and the failure of popular government. Throughout the war there was lavished upon him an unceasing tirade of caricature and lampoon. But they had been deceived. The shock of his assassination seemed to tear off the veil that blinded their eyes, and since then all the scholarship of Europe [Pg 147] has analyzed his career as showing one of the great characters of the world. History finds that he was a prophet of ideal humanity, the farthest possible from despotic sovereignties. Dynastic states can never fight for a democratic government merely to preserve it, and democracies can never fight merely to preserve a party in power. It may very well be doubted that the North could have won the Civil War if there had not been involved the moral issues of human slavery. England would surely have intervened for the starving workers of their cottonmills, but the workers refused to have their cause supported by fastening slavery upon any part of the human race.

Lincoln Statue—Chicago, Illinois.

III. HOMELY WAYS TO EXPRESS TRUTH

The way Lincoln looked at the malicious denunciations of his conduct of the war, the vile stories told about him and the wicked perversions of the things he said was once characterized by him in the story of an incident that happened to two Irish emigrants who had come out into the wilderness fresh from the Emerald Isle.

They were tramping their way through the West [Pg 148] seeking for work. One evening they camped at the edge of a pond of water. Being tired, they were soon fast asleep. Suddenly they were awakened by a chorus of bellowing sounds the like of which they had never heard before. It was not comparable to anything they knew of man or beasts. Baum, gurgle and bellow it went here, there, and then seemingly everywhere. They grabbed their walking-stick shillelahs, ready to face the enemy, whether man, beast or devil. But nothing was to be seen. They crept forward, then boldly searched, strained their eyes in every direction and defied their enemy with many insulting challenges to show himself, but the scattering bellowing was all that could be found.

At last a happy thought struck one of them. “Jamie,” he cried to his companion, “I know what it is! It’s nothing but a noise.”

Lincoln took this attitude toward all minor things that could have absorbed his time for weightier questions.

When General Phelps captured Ship Island, near New Orleans, early in the war, he took upon himself the power of freeing all the slaves on the island. This looked like something very important to many people, who were surprised that Lincoln took no notice of it. At last he was taken to task for it, and he settled the whole question with a story.

[Pg 149]

There was once a man who was very meek but he had a very aggressive wife. He had the reputation of being badly henpecked. One day a friend saw the poor man’s wife switching him out of the house.

The first time the friend met the henpecked man, after that disgraceful episode, the friend said, “I have always stood up for you, as you well know, but now I am done with you. Any man who allows his wife to switch him out of the house deserves all he gets.”

The abused man patted his friend on the back and in a conciliating tone said, “Now don’t feel that way about it, it didn’t hurt me a bit, and you have no idea what a great amount of satisfaction it gives my dear wife.”

Lincoln saw things as symbols with moral meanings. On seeing a tree covered with a luxuriant vine, he said, “The vine is beautiful, but, like certain habits of men, it decorates the ruin it makes.”

Speaking of the difference in meaning between character and reputation, he said, “Character is like a tree and reputation is like its shadow. The shadow is what we think of it, but the real thing is the tree.”

Some influential people were urging him to declare the slaves free before conditions made such a thing practical. He pressed that point home to them with a question.

[Pg 150]

“How many legs,” he asked, “will a sheep have if you call the sheep’s tail a leg?”

They promptly answered five.

“You are wrong,” he replied, “for calling a sheep’s tail a leg won’t make it so.”

To importunate and impetuous persons Lincoln always had the right reply. Once a rather proud mother came before him with a rather haughty-looking son.

“Mr. President,” she said very conclusively, “you must give a Colonel’s commission to my son.”

He waited for her to explain why he must do so.

“Sir,” she exclaimed, “I have a right to demand it. My grandfather fought at Lexington; my uncle stood his ground at Blandensburg; my father fought at New Orleans; and my husband was killed at Monterey.”

“I guess, Madam,” Lincoln promptly replied, “that your family has done its share for its country. Let’s give others a chance.”

IV. THE GREAT TRAGEDY

Our story here has to do only with episodes that compose the personal interest of Lincoln and does [Pg 151] not take into consideration the usual public or political affairs that build up his historical character and national service. But the tragedy of his martyrdom has many important points of interest relating to the interpretation of his personal life. The Book of Fate opens only upon the past and we call it history, but it is the “light of experience” for social reason and the moral law.

On the evening of April 14, 1865, a happy party of distinguished friends were gathered for dinner with President Lincoln at the White House. Mrs. Lincoln, being the manager of social affairs, made up a theatre party to see Laura Keene play “Our American Cousin” at Ford’s Theatre. In the party were General Grant and his wife, and Governor Oglesby of Illinois. The box for the party having been procured in the morning, the manager of the theatre announced in the afternoon papers that the President and the Hero of Appomattox would be present at the farewell benefit performance of Miss Keene.

The house was filled, but the President came late, as Mr. and Mrs. Grant had decided to take the train that evening for the West, and Mrs. Lincoln had to rearrange the plans for her party, so as to include Major Rathburn and his stepsister, Miss Harris, daughter of Senator Harris of New York. The [Pg 152] President desired to give up going, but, on being told how disappointed the public would be, he yielded to the persuasion and went.

They arrived about the middle of the first act and were received with loud applause, the people standing as the band played “Hail to the Chief.”

One can hardly refrain from pausing, as this scene comes before the mind, to wonder if the log-cabin boy had beheld this scene in a prophetic dream how extravagant and impossible it would have seemed.

On reaching the box, the President took a large arm-chair in front, with Mrs. Lincoln by his side on the right.

After they were seated, the interrupted play was resumed.

It was about the middle of the third act, the time 10.20, when the audience was startled by a shot, and immediately the shout, “Sic semper tyrannis” (so ever to tyrants). Next came the piercing shriek of Mrs. Lincoln, then a well-known actor, John Wilkes Booth, was seen to swing out over the box and fall heavily upon the stage.

The horrified people arose with cries of alarm and all was confusion, so that witnesses from the audience could see no more, and they poured forth into the streets with the dreadful news that the President had been shot.

[Pg 153]

Booth had desired to make the assassination as spectacular and sensational as possible. He prepared himself, just before the terrible deed, with a heavy drink of whisky in the nearby saloon. Going into the theatre from the front, he passed along the wall to the passageway leading to the box. He took out a visiting card and went up to the President’s messenger, who was sitting just outside. Presenting the card, he passed through the door into the aisle back of the box, closing and barring the door after him. Slipping in just behind the President, he aimed the pistol at the back of his victim’s head and fired the shot.

Some testify that his first words were “Revenge for the South.”

As the assassin swung himself over to take the twelve-foot leap to the stage, Major Rathburn of the party tried to catch him, and so received a severe wound on the hand from a dagger. An American flag draped the front of the stage, and in this Booth’s spur caught, throwing him so as to fracture his left leg, and which actually resulted in being the cause of his capture. This flag has thus been called the “mute avenger of its Nation’s Chief.”

Excited crowds were nothing new in Washington, but witnesses declare they never saw such insane despair as that with which the people expressed their [Pg 154] grief. Shouting, frenzied men and women ran aimlessly here and there in a chaos of ungovernable disorder.

People could hardly believe that the hideous deed had been done by John Wilkes Booth, whose rising fame as a tragedian was only surpassed by his famous brother and father. But he had been recognized by Laura Keene, as with quick thought she grasped a glass of water and ran to the President’s box. She seemed to be almost the first to understand, and to reach the martyr’s side with help for him. She held his head in her lap while the doctors were examining the wound. Her silk dress stained with his blood is still kept with the sacred relics at his tomb in Springfield, Illinois.

The picture of that box party cannot be surpassed by anything ever set up in the romantic imagination. At the death-moment it contained five persons. One of them was the greatest man of his time, just emerging as victor in one of the most consequential struggles of all human history. The death blow was upon him from a type of man as utterly his opposite in everything making the form of man that anyone can conceive. He was of the most illustrious family of actors in his time, handsome, a fashionable beau, and a moral degenerate,—the most courted idler of the social show. For his deed he was destined in a few [Pg 155] weeks to die the death of a beaten dog in a filthy stable. But no less in direful tragedy was the fate of the betrothed lovers, Major Rathburn and his stepsister, Miss Harris, who were the guests in that ghastly social hour. A few months later the young man went insane, killed his sweetheart and died in a madhouse.

Lincoln was still alive but unconscious when responsible persons, in a few minutes, came into control. He was carried across the street to the nearest room where he could be made as comfortable as possible. The doctors had no hope that he would ever return to consciousness. The surgeons and the nearest official friends were all that were allowed to remain in the little room with him. The pale light of a single gas jet flickered down over him. Secretary Stanton stood against the wall writing telegrams that told how the battle was going, and giving orders needed to keep the peace of that dark hour. At seven-twenty-two the next morning Lincoln’s heart ceased to beat and one of the greatest characters of history had passed from life.

Mr. Stanton closed the martyr’s eyes, drew the sheet over his face, and said, “Now he belongs to the Ages.”

[Pg 156]

CHAPTER X

I. THE FRIEND OF HUMANITY

The nation was in mourning at the unspeakable tragedy. Friend and foe had just begun to learn how great was the difference between him and other men. Coming as it did at the close of the war, in the very dawn of peace, the assassination seemed so needless and cruel, even in the name of his bitterest foe.

Walt Whitman wrote one of the most stirring appreciations of the time.

William Cullen Bryant wrote the ode for the funeral services held in New York City. Two of the stanzas are as follows:

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote for the funeral services at Concord, Massachusetts, a poem of which the following is the last stanza:

II. THE TIME WHEN “THOSE WHO CAME TO SCOFF REMAINED TO PRAY”

Lincoln’s death was received throughout the South generally as the death of an enemy. Well do they know now that it could have been said of them then, “Father forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

The sorrow throughout the North was as in the midst of Egypt’s ancient woe. It was as if “There was not a house where there was not one dead.”

As was once said of a great martyr of liberty, slain three centuries before, so it could be said of Lincoln, “He went through life bearing the load of a people’s sorrows upon his shoulders with a smiling face. While he lived he was the guiding star of a whole brave nation, and when he died the little children cried in the streets.”

Periodicals that had ridiculed him from his first appearance in their view, and that had caused many [Pg 160] of their readers to believe him little better than a clown in the arena of affairs, or than a court fool before the nations, dropped their defaming caricatures of him, and gave him nearer justice.

One of the most belittling and besmirching periodicals of England against Lincoln was the “London Punch.” The war-president of the United States was, largely from this source of authority, the jest of all Europe.

But the issue following the assassination of Lincoln contained a great picture. It was symbolical of England laying a wreath of flowers upon Lincoln’s coffin. The picture was drawn by Tenniel and with it was a most penitent poem by Tom Taylor, who was author of the play, “Our American Cousin,” which Lincoln was attending when assassinated. Five of the expressive stanzas are as follows:

In 1879, at an unveiling in Boston of Freedman’s Memorial Statue, a duplicate of the original in Lincoln Square, Washington, a poem was read from Whittier, of which the last three stanzas are the most significant in their characterization. It beautifully expresses the faith that in righteousness is personal power, even as it also “exalteth a nation.”

III. SOME TYPICAL EXAMPLES GIVING VIEWS OF LINCOLN’S LIFE

Vachel Lindsay invokes the spirit of American patriotism when he says,

Herr Loewes in the Prussian Parliament said: “Mr. Lincoln performed his duties without pomp or ceremony, and relied on that dignity of the inner self alone, which is far above rank, orders and titles. He was a faithful servant, not less of his own country than of civilization, freedom and humanity.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes, writing of Lincoln’s death, said:

Samuel Francis Smith, author of the national hymn, “America,” in a long poetic tribute wrote:

Horace Fiske closed a poem inspired by the Saint Gaudens statue, as follows:

Theodore Roosevelt said, in an address on the character of Lincoln, “One of his most wonderful characteristics was the extraordinary way in which he could fight valiantly against what he deemed wrong, and yet preserve undiminished his love and respect for the brother from whom he differed.”

Woodrow Wilson said, “There was no point at which life touched him that he did not speak back to it instantly its meaning.”

Sir Spencer Walpole says in his history, “Of all men born to the Anglo-Saxon race in the nineteenth century, Abraham Lincoln deserves the highest place in history.”

[Pg 165]

IV. REMEMBRANCE AT THE END OF A HUNDRED YEARS

The centennial anniversary of Lincoln’s birth called forth expressions of appreciation from over all the world. His memory and his meaning had not grown dim in the interests of humanity. A few typical examples illustrate the love and reverence inspired by his great work in the human cause.

James Oppenheim, in his poem in praise of the Lincoln child, says,

James Whitcomb Riley, writing of Lincoln, the boy, says in the last stanza:

Ambassador Bryce of England, speaking at Lincoln’s tomb before a vast gathering at the centennial anniversary of Lincoln’s birth, said, “To us in England, Lincoln is one of the heroes of the race from whence we sprung. Great men are the noblest possession of a Nation, and are potent forces in the moulding of national character. Their influence lives after them, and, if they be good as well as great, they remain as beacons lighting the course of all who follow them. They set for succeeding generations the standards of public life. They stir the spirit and rouse the energy of the youth who seek to emulate their virtues in the service of their country.”

Vice-President Fairbanks in an address at Harrisburg on that occasion said, “His life was spent in conflict. In his youth, he struggled with nature. At the bar of justice he contended for the rights of his clients. In the wider field of politics, he fought with uncommon power to overthrow the wrong and enthrone the right. He fought not for the love of conquest, but for the love of truth. By nature he was a man of peace. He instinctively loved justice, right, and liberty. His conscience impelled him to uphold the right whenever it was denied his fellowman.”

S. E. Kiser ended a centennial poem with the following stanza:

[Pg 167]

Virginia Boyle, in her poem for the Philadelphia Brigade Association, said in two of her stanzas:

Edwin Markham concluded a centennial poem as follows:

[Pg 168]

CHAPTER XI
CONCLUDING REFLECTIONS

I. THE HARMONIZING CONTRAST OF MEN

American freedom and democratic humanity require American minds to be composed of free-made ideas, organized efficiently for the righteous promotion of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” if we are ever to be safe in the faith that “government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from the earth.”

The American order, however defective, even as it is composed of defective minds, is the only safety for a free humanity. The Western hemisphere is under the control of that democratic order, and America is large enough and powerful enough to stand alone, in clear vision and unadulterated theory, for the rights of man. America alone is clear-minded enough for the unprejudiced and unbiased championship of a free-minded world.

[Pg 169]

Washington and Lincoln reached the heights from which they saw together one vision of the Promised Land, “ordained from the foundations of the world” for the chosen order of human evolution. They wanted no “entangling alliances” with a foreign order, or a fragmentary system of human freedom. Americans have so far kept the peace with the uncompromised moral law of the “free and equal” rights of man. America is dedicated to the proposition that a compromised order of freedom and equality, either through treaty or war, shall never invade the Western Hemisphere.

American youth, and every newcomer entitled to home or refuge on American soil, must know the truth that makes men free. That truth is marvellously embodied in the lives of Washington and Lincoln. Their careers and patriotism have been contrasted and unified by many learned students of their meaning for America. The characterization of their lives, as significant for Americans, and needing much to be well understood, has been nobly done by Charles Sumner. The more important part of that impressive valuation is as follows:

“The work left undone by Washington was continued by Lincoln. Kindred in service, kindred in patriotism, each was naturally surrounded at death [Pg 170] by kindred homage. One sleeps in the East, the other sleeps in the West; and thus, in death, as in life, one is the complement of the other.

“Each was at the head of the republic during a period of surpassing trial; and each thought only of the public good, simply, purely, constantly, so that single-hearted devotion to country will always find a synonym in their names. Each was the national chief during a time of successful war. Each was the representative of his country at a great epoch of history.

“Unlike in origin, conversation, and character, they were unlike, also, in the ideas which they served, except so far as each was the servant of his country. The war conducted by Washington was unlike the war conducted by Lincoln,—as the peace which crowned the arms of the one was unlike the peace which began to smile upon the other. The two wars did not differ in the scale of operations, and in the tramp of mustered hosts, more than in the ideas involved. The first was for national independence; the second was to make the republic one and indivisible, on the indestructible foundations of liberty and equality. In the relation of cause and effect, the first was the natural precursor and herald of the second. By the sword of Washington independence was secured; but the unity of the republic and the principles of the Declaration were left exposed to question. From that day to this, through various chances, they have been questioned, and openly assailed,—until at last the republic was constrained to take up arms in their defence.

“Such are these two great wars in which these two chiefs bore such part. Washington fought for national independence and triumphed, making his country an example to mankind. Lincoln drew a reluctant sword to save those great ideas, essential to the life and character of the republic. * * *

“Rejoice as you point to this child of the people, who was lifted so high that republican institutions became manifest in him! * * * Above all, see to it that his constant vows are fulfilled, and that the promises of the fathers are maintained, so that no person in the upright form of man can be shut out from their protection. Then will the unity of the republic be fixed on a foundation that cannot fail, and other nations will enjoy its security. The cornerstone of national independence is already in its place, and on it is inscribed the name of George Washington. There is another stone which must have its place at the corner also. This is the Declaration of Independence, with all its promises fulfilled. On this stone we will gratefully inscribe the name of Abraham Lincoln.”

[Pg 171]
[Pg 172]

Emancipation Statue of Lincoln—Washington, D. C.

Carlyle says that “sincerity, a deep, great, genuine sincerity, is the first characteristic of all men in any way heroic. All great men have this as the primary material in them.” This is why the so-called “art for art’s sake” never can be great. It is sincerity for merely formal success, and not for the spirit of “life more abundantly.” Formal efficiency is achieved only in the complicated training of an extended education, but social efficiency of immeasurably greater value is the simplicity of knowledge. It is the source and explanation of all interests, and in that learning, Lincoln had no superior. He never achieved any good that he did not at once want to share it with others. As a boy he never learned anything good that he did not want to express it to others. In this process of receiving and giving is the fundamental means of building character and mind. In teaching others, he taught himself, and thus in losing his life he found it. In being able to tell his observations and interpretations to his comrades, he was training to be the schoolmaster of the world.

Lincoln’s earnest sincerity relating to himself, his associates, his community, his country, and for all mankind, may be illustrated in a few quotations:

“The man who will not investigate both sides of a question is dishonest.”

“After all, the one meaning of life is simply to be kind.”

[Pg 173]

“I have not done much, but this I have done—wherever I have found a thistle growing, I have tried to pluck it up, and in its place to plant a flower.”

“I have been too familiar with disappointment, to be very much chagrined by defeat.”

“Without the assistance of that Divine Being I cannot succeed, and with that assistance I cannot fail.”

“If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”

“A majority held in restraint by constitutional checks and limitations, and always changing easily with deliberate changes of popular opinions and sentiments, is the only true sovereign of a free people.”

“Twenty-five years ago I was a hired laborer. The hired laborer of yesterday may labor on his own account today, and hire others to labor for him to-morrow. Advancement and improvement in conditions is the order of things in a society of equals,—in a democracy.”

In a speech at Columbus, Ohio, September 16, 1859, he said, “I believe there is a genuine popular sovereignty. I think a definition of genuine popular sovereignty, in the abstract, would be about this: That each man shall do precisely as he pleases with himself, and with all those things which exclusively concern him. Applied to government this principle [Pg 174] would be, that a general government shall do all those things which pertain to it, and all the local governments shall do precisely as they please in respect to those matters which exclusively concern them. I understand that this government of the United States, under which we live, is based upon that principle; and I am misunderstood if it is supposed that I have any war to make upon that principle.”

But, there is a patriotic masterpiece of Lincoln’s thought, which, with the reinforcement of occasion and place, such as the field of Gettysburg was, contains all the unmeasurable and priceless meaning of Lincoln for American patriotism and the manhood of America. It is his address of dedication on the battlefield of Gettysburg. In effect on the human mind, it probably can never be surpassed as a message of political freedom for the rights of man.

II. A MASTERPIECE OF MEANING FOR AMERICA

The battle of Gettysburg is regarded by historians as one of the decisive battles of the world. It was fought July 2, 3 and 4, 1863. On the first anniversary, a great national meeting was held there to dedicate the ground as a government burial place for the soldiers who had died there.

[Pg 175]

Mr. Seward, Secretary of State, on the eve of the dedication, in the course of an address, said, “I thank my God for the hope that this is the last fratricidal war which will fall upon this country, vouchsafed us from heaven, as the richest, the broadest, the most beautiful and capable of a great destiny, that has ever been given to any part of the human race.”

At the opening of the ceremonies, before a vast concourse of people, from all the Northern states, convened on the open battlefield, Rev. T. H. Stockton said in the course of his dedicatory prayer, “In behalf of all humanity, whose ideal is divine, whose first memory is Thine image lost, and whose last hope is Thine image restored, and especially of our own nation, whose history has been so favored, whose position is so peerless, whose mission is so sublime, and whose future so attractive, we thank Thee for the unspeakable patience of Thy compassion, and the exceeding greatness of Thy loving kindness.... By this Altar of Sacrifice, on this Field of Deliverance, on this Mount of Salvation, within the fiery and bloody line of these ‘munitions of rocks,’ looking back to the dark days of fear and trembling, and to the rapture of relief that came after, we multiply our thanksgivings and confess our obligations.... Our enemies ... prepared to cast the chain of Slavery around the form of Freedom, binding life and death together forever.... But, behind these hills was [Pg 176] heard the feeble march of a smaller, but still pursuing host. Onward they hurried, day and night, for God and their country. Footsore, wayworn, hungry, thirsty, faint,—but not in heart,—they came to dare all, to bear all, and to do all that is possible to heroes.... Baffled, bruised, broken, their enemies recoiled, retired and disappeared.... But oh, the slain!... From the Coasts beneath the Eastern Star, from the shores of Northern lakes and rivers, from the flowers of Western prairies, and from the homes of the Midway and Border, they came here to die for us and for mankind.... As the trees are not dead, though their foliage is gone, so our heroes are not dead, though their forms have fallen.... The spirit of their example is here. And, so long as time lasts, the pilgrims of our own land, and from all lands, will thrill with its inspiration.”

Edward Everett, as the orator of the day, said in the course of his scholarly address, “As my eye ranges over the fields whose sod was so recently moistened by the blood of gallant and loyal men, I feel, as never before, how truly it was said of old, ‘it is sweet and becoming to die for one’s country.’ I feel, as never before, how justly from the dawn of history to the present time, men have paid the homage of their gratitude and admiration to the memory of those who nobly sacrificed their lives, that their fellowmen may live in safety and honor.... I do not [Pg 177] believe there is in all history, the record of a Civil War of such gigantic dimensions where so little has been done in the spirit of vindictiveness as in this war.... There is no bitterness in the hearts of the masses.... The bonds that unite us as one People,—a substantial community of origin, language, belief and law; common, national and political interests ... these bonds of union are of perennial force and energy, while the causes of alienation are imaginary, factitious and transient. The heart of the People, North and South, is for the Union.... The weary masses of the people are yearning to see the dear old flag floating over their capitols, and they sigh for the return of peace, prosperity and happiness, which they enjoyed under a government whose power was felt only in its blessings.... You feel, though the occasion is mournful, that it is good to be here! God bless the Union! It is dearer to us for the blood of brave men which has been shed in its defense.... ‘The whole earth,’ said Pericles, as he stood over the remains of his fellow citizens, who had fallen in the first year of the Peloponnesian War, ‘the whole earth is the sepulchre of illustrious men.’ All time, he might have added, is the millennium of their glory.”

The place and the occasion were supremely inspiring to patriotism, not only for the triumph of moral principle in one’s country, but for its meaning to all [Pg 178] humanity. The great battlefield spread out before the eyes of the vast concourse gathered there from all the states, and the spirit of the heroic scenes animated every mind.

Edward Everett, then regarded as the greatest orator in America, had delivered the dedicatory oration through a long strain of attention, during the weary and fatiguing hours. The President was then called on to close the dedication with whatever he might feel desirable to say. He did so in a few words, but these few words are cherished as among the greatest contributions to the meaning of civilization. To one of the decisive battles for freedom in the world, it gave a starry crown from “the voice of the people” as “the voice of God.”

The War Department appropriated five thousand dollars to cast this speech in bronze and set it up on the battlefield of Gettysburg. It is regarded as a masterpiece of dedication in the literature of the world.

“Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

“Now we are engaged in a great civil war testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a [Pg 179] great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

“But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.

“It is for us, the living, rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us: that from the same honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion; that we here highly resolve that these dead should not have died in vain; that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

[Pg 180]

III. THE MISSION OF AMERICA

The understanding person who becomes conscious of a meaning for his life, realizes a most important responsibility to work for the betterment of his mind and the material conditions that are to become as his future self. The moral person, who becomes conscious of a meaning for human life, works for this betterment as his contribution to the progress of posterity. This means that a moral individual coincides with a social humanity. Anything not thus harmonizing morally for the world as it is, in order to promote a world as it ought to be, is an enemy of both self and society.

Lincoln admonishes us to remember that “The struggle of today is not altogether for today,—it is for a vast future also.” We learned rapidly, when the true situation came into our view, that, as Professor Phelps voiced it long ago, “To save America we must save the world.” American patriotism is clearly world-patriotism, and it has become synonymous with humanity. This old truth was discovered by the Revolutionary Fathers, and it is the mission of America to make it the truth of the World.

The International Teachers’ Congress representing eighteen nations, which met at Liege in 1905, adopted five definite ideas of International Peace, [Pg 181] that should be promoted through all available ways, in all the schools of civilized nations. Briefly stated, those fundamental ideas were as follows:

1. The morality of individuals is the same for people and nations.

2. The ideal of brotherly love has no limit.

3. All life must be duly respected.

4. Human rights are the same for one and all.

5. Love of country coincides with love of humanity.

Such principles and such a definition of patriotism were upheld by the makers and preservers of America, at the greatest cost of treasure and life, and they are the life-interest of every one worthy of the name American. It moved Bishop J. P. Newman to say of Lincoln in his anniversary oration of 1894, “Lincoln’s mission was as large as his country, vast as humanity, enduring as time. No greater thought can ever enter the human mind than obedience to law and freedom for all.... Time has vindicated the character of his statesmanship, that to preserve the Union was to save this great nation for human liberty.”

American faith has at last come to the conditions when it can realize itself in fulfilling the moral work of the world. That vision came into full view during the Great European War.

[Pg 182]

President Wilson, in his address to Congress, April 2, 1917, said:

“We are at the beginning of an age in which it will be insisted that the same standards of conduct and of responsibility for wrong shall be observed among nations and their Governments that are observed among the individual citizens of civilized states.”

Congress acted upon this reaffirmation of the responsibility of Americans and the mission of America. Concerning the monstrous invasion of humanity and ruthless denial of international law, he said:

“Neutrality is no longer feasible or desirable where the peace of the world is involved and the freedom of its peoples and the menace to that peace and freedom lies in the existence of autocratic Governments backed by organized force which is controlled wholly by their will, not by the will of their people. We have seen the last of neutrality in such circumstances.”

The Way of Peace, as the morality of democracies, he clearly defined, so that even the worst prejudice could not becloud the issue with irrelevant or contradictory assertions.

“A steadfast concert for peace can never be maintained except by a partnership of democratic nations. No autocratic Government could be trusted to keep faith within it or observe its covenants. It must be a league of honor, a partnership of opinion. Intrigue would eat its vitals away; the plotters of inner [Pg 183] circles who could plan what they would and render account to no one would be a corruption seated at its very heart. Only free peoples can hold their purpose and their honor steady to a common end and prefer the interests of mankind to any narrow interest of their own.”

Washington was charged with the heroic task of making the thirteen colonies safe for “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness;” Lincoln’s patriotic mission was to unchain this Ideal for all America: and Wilson’s sublime conception was to make the world “safe for democracy,” that its peace might be planted on “the trusted foundations of liberty.”

A mind-union upon human meaning as an ideal is necessary for the patriotism of America. The right to life means that the making of right life has a right way. Those who deny the meaning of America divest themselves of all claims in reason upon the rights of life defined in American history. The American kingdom of right is perfecting itself as rapidly as minds can be mobilized for its sublime task. The war-message extending the definition of American freedom says:

“We have no selfish ends to serve. We desire no conquest, no dominion. We seek no indemnities for ourselves, no material compensation for the sacrifices we shall freely make. We are but one of the champions of the rights of mankind. We shall be satisfied [Pg 184] when those rights have been made as secure as the faith and the freedom of the nations can make them.”

And, finally, the duty of every American, worthy of America, enters the third epoch of American history, as did the patriot duty of Washington and Lincoln in their time. The message concludes in these measured terms:

“It is a fearful thing to lead this great, peaceful people into war—into the most terrible and disastrous of all wars, civilization itself seeming to be in the balance.

“But the right is more precious than peace, and we shall fight for the things which we have always carried nearest our hearts—for democracy, for the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their own Governments, for the rights and liberties of small nations, for a universal dominion of right by such a concert of free peoples as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world itself at last free.

“To such a task we can dedicate our lives and our fortunes, everything that we are and everything that we have, with the pride of those who know that the day has come when America is privileged to spend her blood and her might for the principles that gave her birth and happiness and the peace which she has treasured. God helping her, she can do no other.”

[Pg 185]

The world in its social evolution has come on through its immemorial struggle to the crisis in its history, where civilization, as liberty in moral law, can progress further only as the forces of humanity are organized “to make the world safe for democracy.” The final truth is that the world will be made safe for democracy when democracy is made safe for the individual. All political creeds, religious interests and moral ideals, must have this democracy in which to work, before they can become free to develop their own truth.

Autocratic egotism, whether framed in national or personal will, among many or few, must perish from the earth, with all its spoils and masteries, before there can be any possible “government of the people, for the people and by the people.” As “a house divided against itself cannot stand,” so, a civilization cannot stand whose humanity is divided into the three special interests known to us as individuals, the nation and an alien world.

The human task of conscience and reason, made clear in the progress of experience, finds the humanity of child, mother and man in all its relations and interests, or it has not found God or the meaning of the Universe.

Human peace and salvation are gained, not only through persuasion, education and regeneration, but also that the composing conditions of “peace on [Pg 186] earth” shall be made materially safe for “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

Physically, as well as spiritually, the faith that is “without works is dead.” The righteousness that allows its right to be defeated is not righteous, and the conscience that permits the crimes of inhumanity is no less unlawful before man and God. In such conditions, the prophet cried out, “Cursed be he that doeth the work of the Lord negligently, and cursed be he that keepeth back his sword from blood.”

The American democracy of Washington and Lincoln, with their hosts of devoted associates, means individual righteousness and responsibility making safe the free-born mind for a moral world. What is an American and why so is the patriotic and religious interest developed through ages of sacrifice and suffering. Only those who are willing “to give the last full measure of devotion” to that divine work are heirs to the humanity of Washington and Lincoln, and who are thus entitled to be named Americans, or are worthy to share the heritage of America.