WHY WE LOVE LINCOLN

 From “The Life of Abraham Lincoln.” Copyright 1900, The McClure Co.

  Lincoln early in 1861. This is supposed to be the first, or one
    of the first, portraits made of Lincoln after he began to wear
    a beard
]

  WHY WE LOVE
  LINCOLN

  BY
  JAMES CREELMAN

  Author of “On the Great Highway”

  “As, in spite of some rudeness, republicanism is the sole hope
  of a sick world, so Lincoln, with all his foibles, is the greatest
  character since Christ.”--_John Hay._

  NEW YORK
  THE OUTING PUBLISHING COMPANY
  MCMIX

  Copyright, 1909, by
  THE OUTING PUBLISHING CO.

  Copyright, 1908, by
  THE PEARSON PUBLISHING CO.

  _All Rights Reserved._

  To
  MY SON
  ASHMERE
  AND TO ALL AMERICAN BOYS
  YOUNG OR OLD
  I ADDRESS THIS LITTLE VOLUME

_Acknowledgements are due to the excellent books on Lincoln by Herndon
and Weik, Hay and Nicolay, Ida Tarbell, Mr. Lamon, Mr. Stoddard, and
others._

ILLUSTRATIONS

  Lincoln early in 1861                                   _Frontispiece_

                                                                  FACING
                                                                   PAGE

  The Kentucky log cabin in which Lincoln was born                    12

  Lincoln debating with Douglas in 1858                               24

  The Globe Tavern, Springfield, where Lincoln lived                  36

  Lincoln in 1857                                                     48

  Senator Stephen A. Douglas, Lincoln’s great rival                   60

  Abraham Lincoln (in about 1860)                                     72

  A rare photograph of Lincoln in 1860                                84

  Carpenter’s picture of Lincoln’s cabinet                            98

  Fac-simile of Lincoln’s Letter of Acceptance                       102

  Mrs. Abraham Lincoln                                               108

  St. Gauden’s statue, Lincoln Park, Chicago                         120

  Head of Lincoln, by Gutzon Borglum                                 132

  Life mask of Lincoln while President                               142

  Autograph Copy of Lincoln’s speech at Gettysburg                   148

  Lincoln statue, E. Capitol and Thirteenth Street, Washington       154

  One of the last photographs of Lincoln                             166

WHY WE LOVE LINCOLN

While our great battleship fleet thundered peace and friendship to the
world, as it moved from sea to sea, stinging pens and voices in one
country after another answered that America had suddenly passed from
blustering youth to cynical old age, and that the harmless effrontery
of our nationality in the past was not to be confounded with the
cold-brained, organized, money-worshipping greed of the new generation
of Americans.

Meanwhile, in all parts of the American continent, preparations were
being made to celebrate the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of
Abraham Lincoln, the humblest, simplest and plainest of our national
leaders, whose name no American can utter without emotion.

We think of Washington with pride, of Jefferson and Madison with
intellectual reverence, and of Jackson and Grant with grateful
consciousness of their strength.

But the memory of Lincoln, even now, so many years after his piteous
death, stirs the tenderest love of the nation, thrills it with a sense
of intimate relationship to his greatness and awakens a personal
affection in the average American’s breast--not a mere political
enthusiasm, but a peculiarly heartfelt sentiment that has no parallel
in human history.

If it be true that the nation has at once become old, that it has grown
sinister and corrupt, that it cringes before material success, stands
in awe of multi-millionaires and prostrates itself before money, why is
it that we love Lincoln?

If in the pride of wealth and strength we have forgotten our early
republican ideals of simple justice and manhood, how is it that the
movement to commemorate the birth of this lowly, clumsy backwoodsman
and frontier lawyer turned President--a movement begun in the rich
cities of New York and Chicago--instantly spread to the remotest
villages, and all that seemed ugly and haggard, with all that seemed
brave and fair and true, swarmed together, heart-naked, to make that
twelfth day of February an unforgetable event?

Arches and statues; flower-strewn streets with endless processions;
moving ceremonies in thousands of schools and colleges; multitudes
kneeling in churches; other multitudes listening to orators; warships
and fortresses roaring out salutes.

Yet these were the mere externals of Lincoln Day. The average American
does not shout when he hears Lincoln’s name. Even the political
demagogue, the stock gambler, the captain of industry, aye, the
sorriest scarecrow of a yellow journalist, is likely to grow silent and
reverential when that word is spoken.

With all our national levity, we do not jest about Lincoln. With all
our political divisions, every party to-day reveres his memory and
claims his spirit. It is sober truth to say that he struck the noblest,
highest, holiest note in the inmost native soul of the American people.
There is nothing so arrogant or sodden and sordid in that new paganism
which has set its altars in Wall Street but will in some sense uncover
and kneel at the sound of his name.

Our fleet, in its voyage around the world, found no record of such a
man in any of the lands of its visitations. Each nation, each epoch,
each race, has its hero. But there is none like Lincoln. Alexander,
Caesar, Napoleon, Cromwell--how cold their glory seems to his, how
immeasurably smaller their place in the affections of mankind?

And, while America was getting ready to honor Lincoln, none might
pretend to understand his people who had not first discovered what it
is in his character and in ours that, even in this day of restless
commercialism, makes us love him above comparison in the story of the
world’s great men--love him for his poverty, for his simplicity, for
his humanity, for his fidelity, for his justice, for his plainness, for
his life and for his death.

By sheer force of character, conscience-inspired, Abraham Lincoln rose
from abject depths of squalid environment to become the most august
figure in American history, and perhaps the most significant and
lovable personality in the annals of mankind.

In his amazing emergence to greatness from poverty and ignorance is
to be found a supreme demonstration and justification of American
institutions.

It was the common people who recognized the nobility and majesty in
this singular man. He understood that always, and, even in his days
of power, when great battles were fought at a nod of his head, and a
whisk of his pen set a whole race free, it kept him humble.

Perhaps the profoundly tender love which the American people have for
his memory is to be explained by the fact that in the secret recesses
where every man communes with the highest, bravest and most unselfish
elements of his own nature, the average American is an Abraham Lincoln
to himself.

The power to recognize is not so far removed from the power to be
recognized, and it is thrillingly significant, after all these dreary
years of babble about the omnipotence of money, that the same people
who raised Lincoln from penniless obscurity to his place of power and
martyrdom, still cherish his name and example with a depth of devotion
that increases with each year of national growth, confusing and
confounding the learned foreign critics of the Republic, who miss the
finest thing in American civilization when they fail to learn why we
love Lincoln.

II

If Daniel Boone, the mighty hunter and Indian fighter, had not roused
the imagination of Virginians and Carolinians by his wonderful and
romantic deeds in the exploration of the Kentucky wilderness, the
grandfather of Abraham Lincoln would not have left Rockingham County,
Virginia, and “entered” seventeen hundred acres of land in Kentucky,
where he was presently slain on his forest farm by a savage in the
presence of his three sons.

The youngest of these sons, Thomas Lincoln, was the father of the
future President of the United States.

In spite of an educated, well-to-do American ancestry of pure English
Quaker stock--one was a member of the Boston Tea Party; another was a
revolutionary minuteman, served in the Continental Congress and was
Attorney General of the United States under Jefferson--this frontier
boy, who was only six years old when his father was murdered before
his eyes, grew up without education, to be a wandering work boy, who
gradually picked up odd jobs of carpentering.

He became a powerfully built, square-set young man, somewhat indolent
and improvident, who occasionally showed his temper and courage by
knocking down a frontier rowdy.

The rough young carpenter in 1806 married Nancy Hanks, a niece of
Joseph Hanks, in whose shop he worked at his trade. Nancy, who was the
mother of Abraham Lincoln, was the daughter of a supposedly illiterate
and superstitious family, but she was comely, intelligent, knew how to
read and write and taught her husband to scrawl his name.

The great Lincoln always believed that he got his intellectual powers
from his mother.

For a time this pair, who were to bring forth the savior of America,
dwelt in a log hut, fourteen feet square, at Elizabethtown, Kentucky,
where they were married. Then a daughter was born. A year later the
carpenter bought a small farm on the Big South Fork of Nolin Creek, in
Hardin County.

Here, on wretched soil overgrown with stunted brush, Thomas Lincoln
and Nancy Hanks lived with their infant daughter in a rude log cabin,
enduring profound poverty.

It was in this mere wooden hutch, which had an earth floor, one door
and one window, that Abraham Lincoln was born on February 12th, 1809.

What American, however poor, ignorant, unlettered or discouraged, can
look upon the rude timbers of the home which sheltered the birth of
the greatest man of the Western Hemisphere without a thrill of hope
and a new realization of the opportunities that are co-eternal with
conscience, courage and persistence?

What man of any race or country can stand before that cabin and be a
coward?

Moses, the waif; Peter, the fisherman; Mahomet, the shepherd; Columbus,
the sailor boy--each age has its separate message of the humanity of
God and the divinity of man.

The gray-eyed boy Lincoln played alone in the forest near Knob Creek,
where his father had secured a better farm. It was a solitary and
cheerless life for a child. Sometimes he sat among the shavings of
his father’s carpenter shanty--a silent, lean little boy, with long,
black hair and grave, deep-set eyes, dressed in deerskin breeches and
moccasins, without toys and almost without companions.

[Illustration: The Kentucky log cabin in which Lincoln was born on
February 12th, 1809]

For a few months he attended log-cabin schools with his sister Sarah,
but he learned little more than his letters. It is amazing to think
that this man, whose Gettysburg address is accepted as one of the
noblest classics of English literature, did not have much more than
six months of schooling in his whole life.

In 1816 Thomas Lincoln decided to move from Kentucky to Indiana. He
built a raft, loaded it with a kit of carpenter’s tools and four
hundred gallons of whiskey, and, depending on his rifle for food,
floated down into the Ohio River in search of a new home. Having
picked out a place in the Indiana forest, he walked home and, with a
borrowed wagon and two horses, he took his wife and children into the
wilderness, actually cutting a way through the woods for them.

Near Little Pigeon Creek the carpenter and his wife, assisted by young
Abraham, now seven years old, built a shed of logs and poles, partly
open to the weather, and here the family lived for a year. Meanwhile
a patch of land was cleared, corn was planted, and as soon as a
log-cabin, without windows, could be built, the Lincolns moved into it.

The forest swarmed with game and the carpenter’s rifle kept his family
supplied with venison and deer hides for clothing. They relied on the
rifle and the corn patch for life. Little Lincoln “climbed at night to
his bed of leaves in the loft by a ladder of wooden pins driven into
the logs.”

Not only were the means of life hard to get, but it was a malarial
country, and in 1818 the small group of pioneers who came to dwell at
Pigeon Creek near the Lincolns were attacked by a pestilence known as
the milk-sickness.

In October the mother of Abraham Lincoln died. Her husband sawed a
coffin out of the forest trees and buried her in a little clearing.
Several months later a wandering frontier clergyman preached a sermon
over her lonely, snow-covered grave.

No wonder the countenance of the great Emancipator moved all who
beheld it by its deep melancholy. He knew what sorrow was forty-five
years before he paced his office in the White House all night, with
white face and bowed head, sorrowing over the bloody defeat of
Chancellorsville, wondering whether he was to be the last President of
the United States, and praying for the victory that came at Gettysburg.

All that year the sensitive boy grieved for the mother who had gone
out of his life; but in time his father went back to Elizabethtown,
Kentucky, where he married the widow of the town jailer, and presently
a four-horse wagon creaked up to the door of the Lincoln cabin in the
Indiana forest, with the bride, her son and two daughters, and a load
of comfortable household goods, including a feather bed and a walnut
bureau, valued at fifty dollars.

Sarah Bush Lincoln, the stepmother of Abraham Lincoln, was a woman of
thrift and energy, tall, straight, fair, and a kind-hearted motherly
Christian. The American people owe a debt to this noble matron who did
so much to influence and develop the character of the boy who was yet
to save the nation from destruction.

She was good to the Lincoln orphans whose mother lay out in the wild
forest grave. She gave them warm clothes. She threw away the mat of
corn husks and leaves on which they slept and replaced it with a soft
feather tick. She loved little Abe, and the lonely boy returned her
kindness and affection. In a primitive cabin, set in the midst of a
savage country, she created that noblest and best result of a good
woman’s heart and brain, a happy home.

Oh, pale woman of the twentieth century, sighing for a mission in the
great world’s affairs! Perhaps there may be a suggestion for you in the
simple story of what Sarah Bush did for Abraham Lincoln and, through
him, for the ages. Did not the two malaria-racked and care-driven
mothers who lived in the rough-hewn Lincoln cabin do more to influence
the political institutions of mankind than all the speeches and votes
of women since voting was first invented?

Even at the age of ten years the frontier lad was a hard worker. When
he was not wielding the axe in the forest, he was driving the horses,
threshing, ploughing, assisting his father as a carpenter. He also
“hired out” to the neighbors as ploughboy, hostler, water-carrier,
baby-minder or doer of odd chores, at twenty-five cents a day. He
suddenly began to grow tall, and there was no stronger youth in the
community than the lank, loose-limbed boy in deerskins, linsey-woolsey,
and coonskin cap, who could make an axe bite so deep into a tree.

His stepmother sent him to school again for several months. In 1826,
too, he walked nine miles a day to attend a log-house school. He had
new companions at home now, a stepbrother, two stepsisters, and his
cousins, John and Dennis Hanks.

As young Lincoln grew taller his skill and strength as a woodchopper
and rail-splitter, and his willingness to do any kind of work, however
drudging or menial--in spite of a natural meditative indolence--made
him widely known. His kindly, helpful disposition and simple honesty
gave him a distinct popularity, and he was much sought after as a
companion, notwithstanding his ungainly figure and rough ways.

But it was his extraordinary thirst for knowledge, his efforts to raise
himself out of the depths of ignorance, that showed the inner power
struggling against adverse surroundings.

He grew to a height of six feet and four inches by the time he was
seventeen years old. His legs and arms were long, his hands and feet
big, and his skin was dry and yellow. His face was gaunt, and his
melancholy gray eyes were sunk in cavernous sockets above his prominent
cheek bones. A girl schoolmate has described him: “His shoes, when he
had any, were low. He wore buckskin breeches, linsey-woolsey shirt, and
a cap made of the skin of a squirrel or coon. His breeches were baggy
and lacked by several inches meeting the tops of his shoes, thereby
exposing his shin-bone, sharp, blue and narrow.”

This is the real Abraham Lincoln, who read, and read, and read; whose
constant spells of brooding abstraction, eyes fixed, dreaming face,
gave him a reputation for laziness among some of his shallow fellows;
who would crouch down in the forest or sit on a fence-rail for hours
to study a book; who would lie on his stomach at night in front of the
fireplace and, having no paper or slate, would write and cipher with
charcoal on the wooden shovel, on boards and the hewn sides of logs,
shaving them clean when he wanted to write again.

Here is his cousin’s picture of him at the age of fourteen:

“When Abe and I returned to the house from work he would go to the
cupboard, snatch a piece of corn bread, sit down, take a book, cock his
legs up as high as his head, and read. We grubbed, plowed, mowed and
worked together barefooted in the field. Whenever Abe had a chance in
the field while at work, or at the house, he would stop and read.”

His principal books were an arithmetic, the Bible, “Æsop’s Fables,”
“Robinson Crusoe,” Weems’ “Life of Washington,” “The Pilgrim’s
Progress,” and a history of the United States. He became the best
speller and penman in his neighborhood. Yet there was a vein of waggery
in him which occasionally found a vent in such written verse as this:

    _Abraham Lincoln,
    His hand and pen,
    He will be good,
    But God knows when._

All this has been told of him many times and in many ways; yet the
nation he saved loves to dwell on the picture of the tall, tanned,
awkward woodchopper and farm drudge; gawky, angular, iron-muscled, with
bare feet or moccasins, deerhide breeches and coonskin cap, battling
out in the forest against his own ignorance and, by sheer force of will
power, conquering knowledge and commanding destiny.

Not a whimper against fate, not a word against youths more successful
than himself, no complaint of the hard work and coarse food--simply the
strivings of a soul not yet conscious of its own greatness, but already
superior to its squalid environments.

It is probable that there is not a youth in all America to-day, however
poor, ignorant, and forlorn, that has not a better chance to rise in
life than Abraham Lincoln had when he started to climb the ladder of
light by courage and persistent application.

He attended spelling matches, log-rollings and horse races. He wrote
vulgar and sometimes silly verse. He outraged the farmers who employed
him by delivering comic addresses and buffoonery in the form of
sermons from tree-stumps, to the snickering field hands. Sometimes he
thrashed a bully. His strength was tremendous. No man in the country
could withstand him. It is said that he once lifted half a ton. Yet
his temper was cool, his heart gentle and generous, and back of his
singsongy, rollicking, spraddling youth, with its swinging axe-blows,
forest-prowlings, and coarse humor, there was a gravity, dignity,
sanity, fairness, generosity and deep, straightout eloquence that made
him a power in that small community.

Think of a young man of six feet and four inches in coonskin and
deerhide, who could sink an axe deeper into a tree than any pioneer in
that heroic region, and who yet had perseverance enough in his cabin
home to read “The Revised Statutes of Indiana” until he could almost
repeat them by heart!

He became a leader and could gather an audience by merely mounting a
stump and waving his hands. Nor was that all. He frequently stopped
brawls and acted as umpire between disputants. Another side of his
nature was displayed when he found the neighborhood drunkard freezing
by the roadside, carried him in his arms to the tavern and worked over
him for hours.

When Lincoln’s sister Sarah married Aaron Grigsby in 1826, the
seventeen-year-old giant composed a song and sang it at the wedding.
Here are the concluding verses:

    _The woman was not taken
    From Adam’s feet we see,
    So he must not abuse her,
    The meaning seems to be._

    _The woman was not taken
    From Adam’s head we know,
    To show she must not rule him--
    ’Tis evidently so._

    _The woman she was taken
    From under Adam’s arm,
    So she must be protected
    From injuries and harm._

Yet that dry volume of “The Revised Statutes of Indiana,” through
which the woodchopper worked so bravely, contained the Declaration of
Independence, the Constitution of the United States and the Ordinance
of 1787, and he bound them on his heart like a seal and wore them till
the hour of his cruel death.

As time went on Lincoln developed into a popular story-teller and
oracle at Jones’ grocery store in the nearby village of Gentryville.
His oratory grew at the expense of his farm-work. He went to all the
trials in the local courts, and trudged fifteen miles to Booneville for
the sake of hearing a lawsuit tried. Between times he wrote an essay on
the American Government and another on temperance. He made speeches,
he gossiped, he argued public questions, he cracked jokes, he made
everybody his friend--sometimes he worked. Already he was an American
politician, although he did not know it.

                                             Taken from an old print

Lincoln debating with Douglas in 1858]

It is hard to realize that, even later in his career, and with all
his mighty strength and courage, the man who preserved “government of
the people, for the people, and by the people” to the world could earn
only thirty-seven cents a day, and that he had “to split four hundred
rails for every yard of brown jeans dyed with white walnut bark that
would be necessary to make him a pair of trousers.”

When he was President of the United States he told Secretary Seward
the story of how he had once taken two men and their trunks to a river
steamer in a flatboat built by his own hands, and got a dollar for it.

“In these days it seems like a trifle to me,” he added, “but it was a
most important incident in my life. I could scarcely credit that I, the
poor boy, had earned a dollar in less than a day; that by honest work I
had earned a dollar.”

In 1828 Mr. Gentry, of Gentryville, loaded a flatboat with produce, put
his son in charge of it and hired Lincoln for eight dollars a month
and board to work the bow oars and take it to New Orleans. Near Baton
Rouge the young men tied the boat up at night and were asleep in a
cabin when they were awakened to find a gang of negroes attempting to
plunder the cargo. With a club Lincoln knocked several of the marauders
into the river and chased the rest for some distance, returning bloody
but victorious. The boat was then hurriedly cut loose, and they floated
on all night.

That voyage was Lincoln’s first brief glimpse of the great world. Till
then he had never seen a large city. In New Orleans he was yet to see
human beings bought and sold, and hear the groans that were afterwards
answered by the thunders of the Civil War.

IV

Two years later the milk-sickness which had robbed Lincoln of his
mother again visited the Pigeon Creek settlers, and his father decided
to move to Illinois, where rich lands were to be had cheap. Dennis
Hanks and Levi Hall accompanied the Lincoln family.

The tall young woodchopper had just passed his twenty-first birthday,
and it was he, in buckskin breeches and coonskin cap, who goaded on the
oxen hitched to the clumsy wagon that creaked and lurched through the
March mud and partly frozen streams on that terrible two weeks’ journey
into the Sangamon country of Illinois.

He said good-bye to the old log-cabin. It was rude and mean, but, after
all, it was his home. He shook hands with his friends in Gentryville.
He took a last look at the unmarked grave of his mother. His boyhood
was over.

Before setting out for his new home, Lincoln spent all his money,
more than thirty dollars, in buying petty merchandise, knives, forks,
needles, pins, buttons, thread and other things that might appeal to
housewives. And on the voyage to Illinois the future President of the
United States peddled his little wares so successfully that he doubled
his money. Thus Abraham Lincoln entered the State which saw him rise to
greatness--woodchopper, ox-driver, peddler, pioneer.

Even in that rough, heroic pilgrimage, the tender heart of the man
showed itself again and again. One loves to remember Lincoln as Mr.
Herndon, his law-partner, has described him, pulling off his shoes and
stockings and wading a stream through broken ice to save a pet dog left
whining on the other side.

“I could not bear to abandon even a dog,” he explained.

Presently the emigrants settled on a bluff overlooking the Sangamon
River, five miles from Decatur, in Macon County. All promptly set to
work. A clearing was made, trees felled, and a cabin built. Abraham and
his cousin, John Hanks, ploughed fifteen acres of sod and split rails
enough to fence the space in.

Some of the rails split by Lincoln at that time were thirty years later
carried into the convention which nominated him for President.

Having reached his majority and seen his father and family safely
housed, Lincoln started out to shift for himself. Among other things,
he split three thousand rails for a Major Warnick, walking three miles
a day to his work.

Then came the winter of “the deep snow,” a season so terrible that John
Hay has thus described its effects:

“Geese and chickens were caught by the feet and wings and frozen to the
wet ground. A drove of a thousand hogs, which were being driven to St.
Louis, rushed together for warmth, and became piled in a great heap.
Those inside smothered and those outside froze, and the ghastly pyramid
remained there on the prairie for weeks; the drovers barely escaped
with their lives. Men killed their horses, disemboweled them, and crept
into the cavities of their bodies to escape the murderous wind.”

Lincoln left his father’s house empty-handed, save for his axe, and
he had to face that blizzard winter as best he could. No man or woman
ever heard him complain. In all his after years he looked back upon the
struggles of his early career without a word of self-pity. Those were
iron days, but they were not without romance, and life was honest and
strengthening.

It is doubtful, after all, whether Lincoln’s son, who became rich,
dined with kings and queens, and came to be president of the
hundred-million-dollar Pullman Company, ever in his comfortable and
successful career once felt half the sense of life in its deepest,
grandest moods that thrilled his gaunt father facing that fearful
winter.

Let the discouraged American, whose heart grows faint in the presence
of “bad luck,” think of that rude frontiersman, to whom hardship
brought only strength and renewed courage. In spite of everything,
the sources of a man’s success are within him, and none can stay him
but himself. Lincoln knew famine, and cold, and wandering. But he did
not pity himself. Axe in hand, he confronted his fate in that smitten
country with as great a soul as when he faced the armed Confederacy and
saw his country riven and bleeding.

In the spring of 1831 Denton Offut hired Lincoln to go with him on a
boat, with a load of stock and provisions, to New Orleans, and, after
many adventures, in which his strength and ingenuity saved boat
and cargo several times, he again found himself at the mouth of the
Mississippi.

Here he first saw the hideous side of slavery. His law-partner thus
refers to one of the scenes he witnessed:

“A vigorous and comely mulatto girl was being sold. She underwent a
thorough examination at the hands of the bidders; they pinched her
flesh and made her trot up and down the room like a horse.... Bidding
his companions follow him, he said, ‘By God, boys, let’s get away from
this. If ever I get a chance to hit that thing I’ll hit it hard.’”

The grandest and bloodiest page of modern history is a record of how
Lincoln fulfilled that promise.

That very summer he went to the village of New Salem, on the Sangamon
River--a village that has long since vanished--and became clerk in a
log-house general store opened by Offut, who was a restless commercial
adventurer. Lincoln and an assistant slept in the store.

Here the tall clerk became famous for his stories and homely wit. His
immense stature, his strength, his humor and his penetrating logic
attracted attention at once. He talked in quaint, waggish parables, but
he never failed to reach the heart or brain.

Offut’s store grew to be the common meeting place of the frontiersmen,
and long-legged, droll, kindly Lincoln developed his natural genius for
story-telling and argument.

But Offut bragged of his clerk’s strength. That angered the rough,
rollicking youths of a nearby settlement known as Clary’s Grove,
who picked out Jack Armstrong, their leader and a veritable giant,
to “throw” Lincoln. At first Lincoln declined the challenge on the
ground that he did not like “wooling and pulling.” But, although his
inheritance of Quaker blood inclined him to avoid violence, he was
finally taunted into the struggle. In the presence of all New Salem
and Clary’s Grove he partly stripped his two hundred and fourteen
pounds of muscle-ribbed body and conquered the bully of Sangamon County.

After that exhibition of strength and pluck, Lincoln was the hero of
the community. Braggarts became silent in his presence. A ruffian swore
one day in the store before a woman. Lincoln bade him stop, but he
continued his abuse. “Well, if you must be whipped,” said the clerk, “I
suppose I might as well whip you as any man.” And he did it. That was
Lincoln.

His honesty became a proverb. It is said that, having overcharged a
customer six cents, he walked three miles in the dark, after the store
was closed, to give back the money. By mistake he sold four ounces of
tea for a half-pound, and the next day trudged to the customer’s cabin
with the rest of the tea.

Just when Lincoln became a conscious politician no man can say. His
endless anecdotes and jokes, his winning honesty and good nature, his
readiness to accept or stop a fight, his willingness to do a good turn
for man, woman or child, and his open scorn for meanness, cruelty
or deceit, were the simple overflowings of his natural character.
He was coarse in his speech and manners. But behind the joking and
buffoonery, the primitive man in him was true, gentle, chivalrous. His
tender-heartedness was real. His kindliness was not merely the result
of a desire to catch friends.

He once illustrated himself by quoting an old man at an Indiana church
meeting: “When I do good I feel good, when I do bad I feel bad, and
that’s my religion.”

But in New Salem it soon became evident that Lincoln was not satisfied
to remain a clerk in a general store, and that the strivings of
leadership were in him. He borrowed books. He asked Menton Graham, the
schoolmaster, for advice. He read, read, read. He walked many miles
at night to speak in debating clubs. He trudged twelve miles to get
Kirkham’s Grammar, and often asked his assistant in the store to keep
watch with the book while he said the lesson. It was a common thing
to find him stretched out on the counter, head on a roll of calicos,
grammar in hand. His desire to master language became a passion. The
whole village “took notice.” Even the cooper would keep a fire of
shavings going at night that Lincoln might read.

The young frontiersman of six-feet-four, who could outlift, outwrestle
and outrun any man in Sagamon County, rising from an almost hopeless
abyss of ignorance and poverty, was, by his own resolute efforts,
acquiring the power that made him the hero of civilization and the
savior of a race.

          From “Abraham Lincoln.” Copyright, 1892, D. Appleton & Co.

The Globe Tavern, Springfield, where Lincoln lived]

How many of the almost seventeen million children who receive free
education in the public schools in the United States, and who assemble
once a year to repeat the imperishable sayings of Lincoln, realize
how he had to strain and struggle for the knowledge which is offered
daily to them as a gift?

No wonder that Lincoln became popular in New Salem, and that when
the little Black Hawk Indian war broke out he was elected captain of
the company which marched forth from the village in April, 1831, in
buckskin breeches and coon caps, with rifles, powder horns and blankets.

It was in that picturesque campaign that Lincoln, coming with his
company to a fence gate and not remembering the military word of
command necessary to get his company in order through such a narrow
space, instantly showed his ingenuity by shouting, “This company is
dismissed for two minutes, when it will fall in again on the other side
of the gate.”

A poor, old half-starved Indian crept into Lincoln’s camp for shelter.
The excited soldiers insisted on killing him. But Lincoln stood between
them and the frightened fugitive. At the risk of his own life he saved
the Indian. The soul of chivalry was in him.

He had no chance to fight, and he was compelled to wear a wooden
sword for two weeks because his company got drunk--he who afterwards
commanded Grant, Sherman and Sheridan--yet he returned to his village
a hero without having shed blood, for the world honors courage and
patience even in those who fail to reach the firing line.

V

After the war of 1812, which was fought while Lincoln was in his
rude Kentucky cradle, the continental spirit of the American people
gradually rose to a high pitch, which was intensified in 1823, when
the Monroe Doctrine was born and the Holy Alliance--not to say all
Europe--was warned against armed interference with even the humblest
republic of the Western Hemisphere.

A new sense of power inspired swaggering, bragging American politics.
So the Greeks bragged when Alexander overthrew Persia; so Christendom
bragged when Charles Martel smashed the Saracens and made possible
the Empire of Charlemagne; so the British bragged after Trafalgar and
Waterloo; so the Puritans bragged when Cromwell struck off the head of
King Charles.

The boastful spirit of America was encouraged by spread-eagle statesmen
in blue coats, brass buttons and buff waistcoats, who spoke as though
history began at Bunker Hill. Andrew Jackson, whose frontiersmen had
thrashed the trained British regiments at New Orleans, had succeeded
John Quincy Adams, the polished Harvard professor, in the White House.
It was a time of grand talk. The People--with a capital P--puffed out
their unterrified bosoms and made faces at the miserable rulers of
Europe. It was brave and honest, this strutting, defiant democracy, but
it took Charles Dickens some years later to show us the ridiculous side
of it, even though he went too far.

“Do you suppose I am such a d--d fool as to think myself fit for
President of the United States? No, sir!” was Jackson’s estimate of
himself in 1823. Yet there was the rough old hero in Washington’s chair
at last.

Hayne had talked in the United States Senate of nullifying the nation’s
laws in South Carolina, and Webster had thundered back his majestic
defence of the indivisible Union. Then South Carolina had attempted
nullification and threatened secession, to be promptly answered by
President Jackson with an effective promise of cold steel and powder,
and a gruff hint of the hangman’s noose.

Beyond the Allegheny Mountains were the new Western States, with
unpaved towns, frantic land booms, tall talk, and hero-hearted men
in coonskin caps pushing out with axes and rifles into the unsettled
national territories.

In the midst of this half-organized civilization Abraham Lincoln
listened to the slowly swelling voices of conflict that came to him in
his Illinois village from the Eastern and Southern States.

The great scattered West longed for means of transportation. Railroads,
canals, steamboats! They meant wealth and power to the pioneers and
the shrieking speculators. The Whigs under Henry Clay promised to raise
such a national revenue through a high protective tariff that a mighty
surplus of money could be divided among the States to carry on internal
improvements.

Lincoln was a Whig. He was for a high tariff and internal improvements.
Had he not personally piloted a steamboat from Cincinnati between
the crooked and overgrown banks of the Sangamon River, and had not
the imagination of that country taken fire as the vessel reached
Springfield? Railroads, canals, steamboats! And no recognition yet of
the issue of disunion that was to shake the continent and drench it
with blood.

After the return from the Black Hawk war Lincoln offered himself as a
candidate for the Legislature. His handbill, addressed to the voters,
dealt mainly with river navigation, railroads and usury.

“I was born and have ever remained in the most humble walks of life,”
he wrote. “I have no wealthy or popular relatives or friends to
recommend me.”

Lincoln knew that public. He made his first speech in “a mixed jeans
coat, claw-hammer style, short in the sleeves and bob-tail; flax and
tow-linen pantaloons, and a straw hat.” First, he jumped from the
platform, caught a fighting rowdy by the neck and trousers, hurled him
twelve feet away, remounted the platform, threw down his hat, and made
his historic entrance into American politics in these words:

“Fellow citizens: I presume you all know who I am. I am humble Abraham
Lincoln. I have been solicited by many friends to become a candidate
for the Legislature. My politics are short and sweet, like the old
woman’s dance. I am in favor of a national bank. I am in favor of the
internal improvement system and a high protective tariff. These are my
sentiments and political principles. If elected I shall be thankful;
if not, it will be all the same.”

There is the Lincoln we love--simple, genuine, direct! He seemed to
feel to the day of his death that the public was not some distant
abstraction, to be approached fearfully and crawlingly; but men like
himself, with the same feelings and aspirations. It was because Lincoln
hated shams and sneaks, and had the root of kindly honor in his nature,
and because he saw, at the very bottom, all men more or less the same,
that he reached the average American heart as no one has reached it
before or since. He was humble enough--and humility is an inevitable
result of moral and spiritual intelligence--to believe that the honesty
he felt in himself stirred an equal honesty in others about him.

He was defeated in the election, but that was the only time the people
rejected him.

Failure did not sour Lincoln. He took odd jobs about the
village--Offutt’s had “petered out”--and for a time he considered the
blacksmith’s trade. But presently he became a partner in a general
store with an idle fellow named Berry, giving his note in payment of
his share. He and his partner bought out still another unsuccessful
store, paying for it with their notes. The end of it all was that
their business failed and Lincoln had to shoulder a debt that made him
stagger for many years.

He was not a good merchant. His fondness for study made him neglect
his store. Having secured copies of Blackstone and Chitty he spent his
days and nights studying law. He would go to the great oak just outside
of the door, lie on his back with his feet against the tree, and lose
himself in Blackstone for hours.

The store was a failure, and Lincoln went back to rail splitting and
farm work. But his law books were always with him. No hardship, no
disappointment, could persuade him to give up his pursuit of knowledge.

In 1833 he became postmaster of New Salem, often carrying the scanty
mail about in his hat and reading the newspapers before he delivered
them.

Meanwhile John Calhoun, the Surveyor of Sangamon County, wanted
an assistant, and he appointed the tall, story-telling, likeable
postmaster to the place. Lincoln knew nothing of surveying, but in six
weeks he got enough out of books to fit him for the work. His survey
maps are still models of accuracy and intelligence.

Once more he was a candidate for the Legislature, in 1834. This time he
was elected. He had to borrow money to buy clothes in which to make his
legislative appearance.

VI

And now came the first great romance of Lincoln’s life. He fell in love
with pretty, auburn-haired Anne Rutledge, daughter of the owner of the
tavern in which he lived. His passion seemed hopeless, for the slender
maid of seventeen was pledged to a young man from New York. Yet Lincoln
loved and waited and hoped. His studies had worn him to emaciation. His
ill-fitting clothes hung loose on his ungainly figure. His face was
thin and his eyes sunken. He was poor, and a mere clodhopper. Still he
loved sweet little Anne Rutledge, even though all the village knew she
was another’s, and that love burned in him always.

When her lover went away, promising to return, Lincoln was her watchful
knight, serving and hoping. But the New Yorker did not come back. Anne
Rutledge grew pale with waiting. It was evident that she was deserted.
All New Salem knew it.

Then Lincoln offered her his heart and she consented, asking only time
enough to write to her lost lover. No answer to the letter came. Week
after week passed. And then Lincoln was accepted. But, alas, the strain
had been too great, and the abandoned young beauty grew mortally ill.
On her deathbed she called for Lincoln continually, and when he came
they left him alone with her for farewell. Afterwards he went to her
grave and wept like a child. “My heart lies buried there,” he said.

[Illustration: Lincoln in 1857]

Poor, honest, ugly Lincoln! That tragedy saddened his life, and years
afterwards he could not refer to Anne Rutledge without tears. So
terrible was the effect of her death upon him that for a time his
friends feared for his reason. He would wander in the woods a victim to
despair. To a companion who urged him to forget his loss he groaned,
“I cannot; the thought of the snow and rain on her grave fills me with
indescribable grief.” Finally, he was taken to a friend’s house and
there watched and comforted through days of deep torment, bordering on
madness, till he could bear to go out again among men.

Lincoln went to the Legislature at Vandalia in a coarse suit of jeans,
but most of the Illinois lawmakers wore jeans and coonskin caps. It
cannot be honestly said that he was a brilliant or important lawmaker,
although his great height, immense strength, quaint, sharp wit and
never-failing stories made him a popular figure at the State capital.

His mind was too much occupied with the study of the law. He had
resumed an acquaintance, formed during the Black Hawk war, with Major
John T. Stuart, who encouraged him to become a lawyer, and loaned him
books. Curiously enough he seemed to desire no teacher, but followed
his course of studies alone. Self-reliance was his strongest trait,
self-reliance and endless work.

Those who attempt to account for Lincoln’s remarkable rise in life are
apt to overlook the terrific mental grind to which he subjected himself
for so many years; and, as we value most that which we get through
stress and sacrifice and pain, so the things which Lincoln dug out of
his books were never forgotten.

Perhaps, in these easy days, when education is pressed upon all,
there is a lesson to be found in the story of this man who laid firm
foundations for his after life of greatness by taking upon himself the
whole responsibility for searching after sound knowledge and principles.

Lincoln became Major Stuart’s law-partner, and for many years he
alternated between petty lawsuits and his more profitable work as a
surveyor. His sincerity, shrewd humor, fairness and hearty hand-shaking
qualities drew friends to him wherever he went. His long, almost
ludicrous figure, with its trousers short of the shoetops by several
inches; his stooping shoulders and shriveled, sunken, melancholy face,
were not associated with the distinction, romance and tragic dignity
which history has given to all that belongs to him. But his very
spraddling awkwardness, the picturesque vernacular in which he told his
countryside parables, coarse and satirical though they sometimes were;
the humble spirit in which the lawyer-surveyor-politician would do odd
jobs or chores to help a neighbor or earn a dollar, gave him added
political strength with a frontier people who loved plain men.

He does not understand Lincoln who thinks of him as a guileless,
innocent frontiersman, raised by accident from a log-cabin to direct
a mighty war and shape the policy of a nation. He was a sagacious,
observant, natural politician, ambitious but honest. His law-partner,
Mr. Herndon, has made that plain. Horace White, who knew Lincoln in
his days of political campaigning, has written of him:

“He was as ambitious of earthly honors as any man of his time.
Furthermore, he was an adept at log-rolling or any political game that
did not involve falsity.... Nobody knew better how to turn things to
advantage politically, and nobody was readier to take such advantage,
provided it did not involve dishonorable means. He could not cheat the
people out of their votes any more than out of their money. The Abraham
Lincoln that some people have pictured to themselves, sitting in his
dingy law office, working over his cases till the voice of duty roused
him, never existed. If this had been his type he never would have been
called at all.”

It helps one to realize the man who afterwards roused the soul of the
Republic to resist the degradation of slavery and the shock of war to
read what he wrote from Washington to Mr. Herndon in 1848:

“Now, as to the young men, you must not wait to be brought forward by
the older men. For instance, do you suppose that I should ever have
got into notice if I had waited to be hunted up and pushed forward by
older men? You young men get together and form a Rough and Ready club,
and have regular meetings and speeches. Take in everybody that you can
get.... As you go along, gather up the shrewd, wild boys about town,
whether just of age or just a little under. Let every one play the part
he can play best--some speak, some sing, and all halloo.”

And in 1836 we catch sight of Lincoln, again a candidate for the
Legislature, leaping forward, with flashing eyes to answer a taunt
of a Mr. Forquer, who had a lightning rod on his new house, and had
just left the Whig party for a place in the Land Office: “I desire to
live, and I desire place and distinction; but I would rather die now
than, like the gentleman, live to see the day that I would change my
politics for an office worth three thousand dollars a year, and then
feel compelled to erect a lightning rod to protect a guilty conscience
from an offended God.”

Yes, Lincoln was a politician who could seize your attention by the
very witchery of his grotesque personality, twist his opponent into
helplessness by the stinging shrewdness of a humorous story, make you
laugh or cry alternately, reach down into your humanity by some frank
confession of his poverty and rough beginnings, and then suddenly stir
the highest instincts of your nature by a sublime moral appeal.

It is true that in his second term in the Legislature he voted for
all manner of extravagant and preposterous schemes of “internal
improvements.” But that was a day of inflated hope, and Illinois was
delirious with land gambling. Lincoln, like the other politicians of
the State, was swept along by the current of popular enthusiasm. He
swaggered, dreamed, bragged and voted with the rest. The voters wanted
railways, canals and river improvements. So the Legislature authorized
thirteen hundred miles of railways, a canal between the Illinois River
and Lake Michigan, and endless improvements of rivers and streams;
and to carry out this staggering programme of improvements in a poor,
half-settled frontier State, a loan of twelve million dollars was voted.

Not only did Lincoln in his early life vote for this audacious and
spendthrift scheme, in response to a harebrained popular demand, but
he advocated woman suffrage; proposed a usury rate, with the naive
suggestion that “in cases of extreme necessity there could always be
found means to cheat the law”; wrote foolish love letters to blue-eyed
Mary Owens, offering to keep his supposed marriage engagement to her,
but advising her for her own sake not to hold him to it; and developed
into a more or less ranting, downright country politician, ready to
make a stump speech, tell a story, shake hands with a crowd or thrash a
ruffian on the slightest provocation.

And when the capital of Illinois was changed to Springfield, he rode
into that town on a borrowed horse, with “two saddlebags, containing
two or three law books and a few pieces of clothing,” and, not
having seventeen dollars with which to buy a bed and furnishings,
accepted a free room over the store of his friend, Mr. Speed, dropped
his saddlebags on the floor and smilingly said, “Well, Speed, I’m
moved.” That was his entrance into the town which saw his rise to the
Presidency.

Around the fireplace in Speed’s store Lincoln used to sit with Douglas,
Baker, Calhoun, Browning, Lamborn and other rising politicians and
orators of the West. Here every question under heaven was debated,
stories were told, jokes cracked, poems recited; and it would take the
pen of a Balzac to describe the scenes of merriment, or serious, sharp
contest, that happened before those blazing logs, with an attentive
ring of friends listening to the never-ceasing flow of wit and wisdom.

Again and again Lincoln was elected to the Illinois Legislature, always
as a Whig. Yet he remained humble in spirit. In answer to the taunt
that the Whigs were aristocrats, he made a speech showing that he
understood how the political sympathies of the West were to be won:

“I was a poor boy, hired on a flatboat at eight dollars a month, and
had only one pair of breeches to my back, and they were buckskin. Now,
if you know the nature of buckskin when wet, and dried by the sun, it
will shrink; and my breeches kept shrinking until they left several
inches of my legs bare between the tops of my socks and the lower part
of my breeches; and whilst I was growing taller, they were becoming
shorter, and so much tighter that they left a blue streak around my
legs that can be seen to this day. If you call this aristocracy I plead
guilty to the charge.”

He could outwrestle, outrun and out-talk any man in his section. He
was recognized as the most skillful and hard-headed politician in his
State. His courage and shrewdness in ordinary affairs were notable, and
his honesty and earnestness, sweetened by a sure sense of humor, lent
distinction and dignity to a ridiculous figure and sometimes theatrical
manner of address.

Yet there was a strange, gloomy self-distrust in Lincoln which showed
itself in his love affairs; an imaginative melancholy that wrung his
heart and tortured his mind with baseless, shadowy misgivings. He
engaged himself to marry Mary Todd and, doubting his own love, broke
the engagement. It has been even charged that he deserted her when she
was attired for the wedding. Lincoln described his parting to Mr. Speed:

“When I told Mary I did not love her,” he said, “she burst into tears
and almost springing from her chair and wringing her hands as if in
agony, said something about the deceiver being himself deceived. To
tell you the truth, Speed, it was too much for me. I found the tears
trickling down my own cheeks. I caught her in my arms and kissed her.”

So great was Lincoln’s agony and depression after this that he was
watched by his friends lest he might commit suicide. “I am now the most
miserable man living,” he wrote to Major Stuart. “If what I feel were
distributed to the whole human family, there would not be one cheerful
face on earth. Whether I shall ever be better, I cannot tell; I awfully
forbode I shall not.”

The shadow of threatened insanity passed, and within two years Mary
Todd became his wife. It was a singular jest of fate that he should
have won her away from Stephen A. Douglas, who was yet to be his rival
in the great anti-slavery struggle that was ended only by millions of
armed men.

Poor heart-torn, shrewd, foolish, humble, sublime Lincoln!

[Illustration: Senator Stephen A. Douglas, Lincoln’s great rival]

Then there was the duel with James Shields. That hot-headed Irishman
had challenged Lincoln to fight because the tall politician had written
certain anonymous letters for the _Springfield Journal_. Lincoln
accepted and named “cavalry broadswords of the largest size.” The
duelists went to the place appointed by the river, and sat on logs on
opposite sides of the field. Here is a description of the scene by an
onlooker, from Miss Tarbell’s “Life of Abraham Lincoln”:

“I watched Lincoln closely while he set on his log awaiting the signal
to fight. His face was grave and serious. I could discern nothing
suggestive of ‘old Abe,’ as we knew him. I never knew him to go so
long without making a joke, and I began to believe he was getting
frightened. But presently he reached over and picked up one of the
swords, which he drew from its scabbard. Then he felt along the edge
of the weapon with his thumb, like a barber feels of the edge of his
razor, raised himself to his full height, stretched out his long arms
and clipped a twig from above his head with the sword. There wasn’t
another man of us who could have reached anywhere near that twig, and
the absurdity of that long-reaching fellow fighting with cavalry sabres
with Shields, who could walk under his arm, came pretty near making me
howl with laughter. After Lincoln had cut off the twig he returned the
sword to the scabbard.”

Before the combat could begin, friends arrived in a canoe, Shields was
induced to make a concession, and presently Lincoln and his opponent
returned to town fast friends.

VII

We love Lincoln because his life plucks every harp-string in true
democracy. Lincoln is the answer to Socialism. He represents
individualism, justifying opportunity. Self-government stands
vindicated in his name. The thought of him is at once an inspiration
and challenge to the poorest and most ignorant boy or man in America.

But we love him most of all because he saved the nation which
Washington began, and, in the bloody act of salvation, brought human
slavery to an end in the great Republic.

In following Lincoln through his picturesque and gaunt youth and
through his service in the Illinois Legislature and in Congress to the
point where the inner and outer influences of his life, his soul and
its environments, merged into one supreme idea--the preservation of
the Union--we must not forget the things that preceded the final test
of his life.

Up to Lincoln’s time it had not been determined whether the
fathers of the Republic had really produced a nation, or merely a
contract or treaty between independent and sovereign States. The
system of separated, incoordinate and aloof colonies--a shrewd and
stubborn British device for keeping their American subjects weak by
disunion--grew into the system of States which formed the Republic.

When the Constitution of the United States was framed, ten of the
thirteen States had prohibited the importation of slaves. Georgia and
the two Carolinas still permitted the slave trade with Africa. In order
not to leave these three States out of the Union, the Constitution
permitted the importation of slaves until 1808. But the conscious
horror of that concession is to be recognized in the care with which
the word slavery is avoided. To satisfy all the slave-owning States,
whose consent was necessary to the adoption of the Constitution,
slavery itself, within those States, was recognized and sanctioned by a
clause providing that five slaves should equal three free persons as a
basis of representation in the national House of Representatives.

So that, whether we like the remembrance or not, it is a fact that the
founders of the nation actually did sanction slavery, although there
was some righteous talk in the Constitutional Convention over the
reluctant compromise.

While this convention, in Philadelphia, was legalizing slavery,
the Continental Congress, in New York, passed an ordinance for the
government of the “territory of the United States northwest of the
river Ohio,” providing that slavery should be forever prohibited in
that territory.

In 1820 the ocean slave-trade was declared to be piracy, punishable by
death.

In that same year Congress, under pressure from the slave owners,
adopted the Missouri Compromise, by which Missouri was admitted to the
Union as a slave State, with the proviso that slavery should be always
forbidden in any other part of the territory north of 36° 30´ north
latitude.

New England raged against slavery. Her abolitionists cried out against
it night and day. To the assertion of the South that slaves were
valuable property, legally acquired and legally held, they answered
that slavery was a deep damnation in the sight of God, an unspeakably
cruel crime, intolerable among civilized men. They helped slaves to
escape from their masters, and did everything in their power to make a
farce of the laws under which such fugitives might be returned.

A great gulf opened between the free States and the slave States, a
gulf flaming with passion and menace. Could the nation hold together?

There were tremendous scenes in the Senate in 1850, when a compromise
was reached. California was to be admitted a free State, slavery was
to be abolished in the District of Columbia, and there was to be an
effective Fugitive Slave Law. These were the principal points.

Henry Clay, in his seventy-third year, spoke for two days in favor of
compromise and peace, picturing the frightful war that must result from
a failure to agree. John C. Calhoun, pale, haggard and dying, rose from
his sick bed, staggered into the Senate on the arms of friends and,
being too weak to speak, sat there while his plea for the rights of the
South was read. Then he went back to his bed to die a few days later,
groaning, “The South! The poor South! God knows what will become of
her.” Daniel Webster, too, raised his voice for compromise in one of
his noblest orations. William H. Seward and Salmon P. Chase bitterly
opposed any compromise on the basis of the Fugitive Slave Law. So
fierce did the debate become that Senator Benton drew a pistol on
Senator Foote.

Yet in the end, the compromise was adopted and the Fugitive Slave Law
was passed.

Then, in 1854, Stephen A. Douglas, United States Senator from Illinois,
introduced a bill providing a government for the immense country now
included in Kansas, Nebraska, the Dakotas, Montana and portions of
Wyoming and Colorado--a country larger than all the existing free
States. All this region was in the area from which slavery was forever
prohibited by the Missouri Compromise. Yet Douglas’ bill provided that
whenever any part of the territory should be admitted to the Union the
question of slavery or free-soil should be decided by its inhabitants.
This was the famous “squatter sovereignty” idea, a virtual repeal of
the Missouri Compromise.

After a desperate fight in Congress, Douglas carried his bill. It
was a startling step and a direct bid for the Democratic nomination
for the Presidency. By this act Douglas made himself one of the most
conspicuous men in the country.

Hell seemed to break loose after President Pierce signed this bill. It
became impossible to enforce the Fugitive Slave Law. The anti-slavery
agitation in the North broke out with indescribable fury. “Uncle Tom’s
Cabin” was published. The abolitionists were almost insane with anger
and indignation. Douglas was denounced as a scoundrel who had sold
himself to the slaveholders for the sake of his Presidential ambitions.

Lincoln was a well-supported candidate for the United States Senate
in 1854, but he gave up his chance and threw his strength to Lyman
Trumbull, a weaker candidate, rather than risk the election of a
pro-slavery Senator.

Miss Tarbell gives this picture of Lincoln by his friend, Judge Dickey:

“After a while we went upstairs to bed. There were two beds in our
room, and I remember that Lincoln sat up in his nightshirt on the edge
of the bed arguing the point with me. At last we went to sleep. Early
in the morning I woke up, and there was Lincoln half sitting up in bed.
‘Dickey,’ he said, ‘I tell you this nation cannot exist half slave and
half free.’ ‘Oh, Lincoln,’ said I, ‘go to sleep.’”

The Territories of Kansas and Nebraska became the center of interest,
for whether they would be slave States or free States must depend
upon the vote of their inhabitants, and that was a simple question of
emigration.

Bands of colonists were sent to Kansas by both the slavery and
anti-slavery forces. The work of colonizing the State was organized on
a large scale by both sides. The pro-slavery men from Missouri crossed
into Kansas in 1854 and elected a pro-slavery delegate to Congress. In
1855 about five thousand Missourians, armed with pistols and bowie
knives, invaded Kansas and carried the elections for the Territorial
Legislature. This Legislature enacted the Missouri slavery laws and,
in addition, provided the death penalty for inciting slaves to leave
their masters or revolt. The Free Soil Kansans thereupon elected a
Constitutional Convention, and organized a State government, with a
constitution prohibiting slavery.

Thus there were two governments in Kansas, one pro-slavery, the other
anti-slavery. Blood began to flow as the hostile governments collided.

In 1856 Preston Brooks, a nephew of Senator Butler, of South Carolina,
stole up behind Senator Sumner, who had brilliantly defended the
Free Soilers of Kansas, and beat him on the head with a heavy cane
till he fell unconscious. The pro-slavery Kansans sacked the town of
Lawrence. John Brown and his abolitionist fanatics went from cabin to
cabin in Kansas, killing and mutilating pro-slavery men. Riots and
murders terrorized the State. It was war to the knife between slavery
and anti-slavery. And Douglas, in Washington, was pressing his bill
declaring that, as soon as Kansas had ninety-three thousand voters,
the pro-slavery Territorial Legislature should call a convention and
organize the State.

VIII

It was in 1856 that the conscience and courage of the North found a
voice in Abraham Lincoln. In his great soul the civilization of America
suddenly flowered.

In Congress Lincoln had vainly opposed the war with Mexico as
“unnecessary and unconstitutional,” and he had gone back to Springfield
to practice law with his new partner, William H. Herndon.

[Illustration: Abraham Lincoln. This photograph was made by Hesler, in
Chicago, about 1860]

The mighty sweep of events in the country had forced the Whigs and
Northern Democrats to form the Free Soil party, not to extinguish
slavery, but to prevent its spread from the slave States into the free
Territories, and Lincoln’s tongue had pleaded powerfully for freedom.
But Fremont, the Free Soil candidate for President, was defeated, and
the contending slaveowners and abolitionists continued to press the
cup of horror and hatred to the trembling lips of the nation. The South
threatened to withdraw from the Union.

Again and again Lincoln had expressed his opinion that slavery was
a crime against civilization. In the teeth of Senator Douglas, the
eloquent and all-powerful Democratic leader of Illinois, who was
arousing the West for slavery, he lashed and trampled upon the attempt
to make Kansas a slave State.

While trying to obtain the release of a free-born Illinois negro boy
held by the authorities of Louisiana, Lincoln appealed to the Governor
of Illinois, to whom he said, “By God, Governor, I’ll make the ground
in this country too hot for the foot of a slave, whether you have the
legal power to secure the release of this boy or not.”

Even then the man who felt in himself the stirrings of power great
enough to utter that threat was a grotesque figure among his
fellow-lawyers. Yet there was no shrewder advocate, no more effective
jury-pleader and no kindlier heart in Illinois. Mr. Herndon gives this
picture of him:

“His hat was brown, faded, and the nap usually worn or rubbed off.
He wore a short cloak and sometimes a shawl. His coat and vest hung
loosely on his gaunt frame, and his trousers were invariably too short.
On the circuit he carried in one hand a faded green umbrella, with ‘A
Lincoln’ in large white cotton or muslin letters sewed on the inside.
The knob was gone from the handle, and when closed a piece of cord was
usually tied around it in the middle to keep it from flying open. In
the other hand he carried a literal carpet bag, in which were stored
the few papers to be used in court, and underclothing enough to last
until his return to Springfield. He slept in a long, coarse yellow
flannel shirt, which reached half way between his knees and ankles.”

Lincoln was not a distinguished lawyer. Nor was he a financial success
in his profession. His partners complained that he neglected the
business side of things and was completely absorbed in the justice or
humanity involved in his cases. His heart would melt over the sorrows
of a client, and he would either accept a petty fee or altogether
neglect to collect anything. Mr. Lamon, his junior partner, has
testified that when he charged a fee of $250, Lincoln made him return
half the money to their client on the ground that “the service was not
worth the sum.” So extreme was his generosity and charity, so averse
was he to accepting anything but the most modest fees, that Judge David
Davis once rebuked him from the bench for impoverishing his brother
lawyers by such an example.

Not only that, but Lincoln many times in court showed his deep and
unfailing love of justice and fair play by refusing to take advantage
of the mere slips of his opponents. That generous honesty made him a
power with judges and juries.

It was when the Republican party was born in the convention at
Bloomington, Illinois, on May 29, 1856, that Lincoln displayed the
full grandeur of his character. His speech opposing the extension of
slavery to Kansas was so stirring, his presence so inspiring, that the
reporters forgot to take notes. His hearers were thrilled, swept out of
themselves. He seemed to grow taller as he spoke, his eyes flashed, his
face shone with passion, he seemed suddenly beautiful, for his soul was
in his eyes and on his lips as he declared that slavery was a violation
of eternal right.

“We have temporized with it from the necessities of our condition,” he
said, “but as sure as God reigns and school children read, that black,
foul lie can never be consecrated into God’s hallowed truth.”

_McClure’s Magazine_ in 1896 gave a report of this extraordinary
speech. Here is an extract:

“Do not mistake that the ballot is stronger than the bullet. Therefore,
let the legions of slavery use bullets; but let us wait patiently till
November and fire ballots at them in return.... We will be loyal to the
Constitution and to the ‘flag of our Union,’ and no matter what our
grievance--even though Kansas shall come in as a slave State; and no
matter what theirs--even if we shall restore the Compromise--we will
say to the Southern disunionists, ‘_We won’t go out of the Union and
you shan’t!_’”

We love Lincoln because on that day he spoke as one naked in the
presence of God. There was no lie in his mouth. Slavery must be kept
out of Kansas. Kansas must be free. Slavery was an unspeakable offence
in the nostrils of a free people. Yet, since the Constitution and the
Missouri Compromise permitted it in the slave States, a law-respecting
nation must permit it to remain there. But Kansas must be free. All
the soil as yet uncursed by slavery must be kept free.

And slave or free, the nation must be held together--that was the
central note of Lincoln’s great speech.

It is a common mistake to suppose that Lincoln was an advocate of
the abolition of slavery in the United States. Yet in 1854, while
denouncing slavery as a “monstrous injustice,” he said:

“When Southern people tell us they are no more responsible for the
origin of slavery than we, I acknowledge the fact. When it is said that
the institution exists and that it is very difficult to get rid of it
in any satisfactory way, I can understand and appreciate the saying. I
surely will not blame them for not doing what I should not know how to
do myself. If all earthly power were given me, I should not know what
to do as to the existing institution.”

There was a sincere man, brave enough and humble enough to make such
an admission in the teeth of the terrific abolitionist crusade. So,
too, he stood in 1856. The nation had given its word, right or wrong,
to the slaveholders, and the nation’s word must be kept. But Kansas
must be free.

No, tender and merciful as Lincoln was, he did not raise his voice for
negro emancipation. That thought came years afterwards, when, in the
agony of fratricidal strife, he proclaimed the freedom of the blacks as
a war measure.

However, when the Supreme Court of the United States in 1857 decided in
the Dred Scott case that a negro could not sue in the national courts,
and expressed the opinion that Congress could not prohibit slavery in
the territories, there was a fierce outcry in the free States, for five
of the Supreme Court justices were from slave States. It is impossible
to indicate the pitch of excitement in the country.

Senator Douglas, prompt, bold, masterful, faced his constituents in
Illinois and stigmatized opposition to the Supreme Court as simple
anarchy. Lincoln answered him at once. The people must not resist the
court, but it was well known that the court had often overruled its
own decisions and “it is not resistance, it is not factious, it is not
even disrespectful, to treat it as not having yet quite established a
settled doctrine for the country.”

Another strain was placed upon the nerves of the overwrought country.
By trickery the pro-slavery men of Kansas had brought about the
“Lecompton Constitution,” permitting slavery in the State. President
Buchanan pressed for the admission of Kansas into the Union with this
constitution.

So, in 1858, when Lincoln was nominated by the Republicans to succeed
Douglas in the Senate, and when he challenged Douglas to a joint
debate, the nation was in the throes of an agitation that transcended
all other passions in its history.

When the long-legged country lawyer, in loose-hung cloak, faded
hat and ill-fitting trousers--sunken-eyed, lantern-jawed and
stoop-shouldered--went forth to meet the great Senator before the
people, the whole country watched the struggle with intense interest.
For, ever since Andrew Jackson overthrew the Virginia oligarchy, the
West had grown stronger in the national councils, and it was even now
suspected that the balance of political power was passing from the
South to the North. And Lincoln, risen from the soil itself, was a
singularly bitter challenge to the aristocratic and haughty temper of
the slaveowners.

Who can describe that unforgetable and decisive debate in Illinois?

On the very day of his nomination Lincoln uttered the thought that was
pressed on and on until slavery and secession were trampled into dust
under the heels of the Union armies:

“A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this
government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not
expect the house to fall--but I do expect it will cease to be divided.
It will become all one thing or all the other.”

Gaunt, gray-eyed, crooked-mouthed Lincoln! In all history no man ever
flayed an opponent as he did Douglas.

“I tremble for my country when I remember that God is just,” he
exclaimed in one of his loftiest moments.

He pelted Douglas with logic, exposed the sham of his “squatter
sovereignty” doctrine, and pitilessly analyzed the predatory policy
of the slavery forces. He forced Douglas to defend and explain his
Kansas-Nebraska law, trapped him into confusing admissions and showed
that his popular sovereignty principle meant simply “that if one man
chooses to make a slave of another man, neither that other man, nor
anybody else, has a right to object.”

Against the awkward country lawyer with shriveled, melancholy
countenance and shrill voice, the polished, handsome and resourceful
Douglas contended in vain in the seven monster outdoor meetings of the
debates. The humanity of Lincoln, the fairness of his statements, the
moral height from which he spoke, the homely, cutting anecdotes, the
originality and imagination, the obvious simplicity and sincerity of
his arguments beat down Douglas’ lawyer-like pleas.

Douglas charged Lincoln with favoring the political and social equality
of the white and black races. Lincoln denied that he considered the
negro the equal of the white man. “But in the right to eat the bread
which his own hands earns,” he added, “he is my equal, and the equal of
Judge Douglas, and the equal of every living man.”

Nothing in the whole story of the American people approaches this
struggle between Lincoln and Douglas for dramatic setting and popular
enthusiasm; and nothing in Lincoln’s life proved more clearly that
with his feet set upon a moral issue he was matchless. He was filled
with the majesty of his cause.

“If slavery is right,” he said that winter in Cooper Institute,
New York, “all words, acts, laws and constitutions against it are
themselves wrong, and should be silenced and swept away. If it is
right, we cannot justly object to its nationality, its universality.
If it is wrong, they cannot justly insist upon its extension, its
enlargement. All they ask we could readily grant, if we thought slavery
right; all we ask they could as readily grant, if they thought it
wrong. Their thinking it right and our thinking it wrong is the precise
facts upon which depends the whole controversy.”

In the race for the Senatorship Douglas defeated Lincoln; but in that
defeat Lincoln won a great victory in the awakened conscience and
courage of the North.

[Illustration: An unpublished photograph of Lincoln in 1860, framed in
walnut rails split by him in his woodchopper days. Owned by Charles W.
McClellan of New York]

We who love him now can hardly understand how deep was the love and
how great the confidence that, a year later, raised the cabin-born,
uncouth country lawyer and politician to be President of the United
States.

We remember his strength and faith in the great war; we remember his
gentle patience, his justice and mercy, and his martyrdom; but do we
fully realize the effort he made to save his people from the ghastly
sacrifice made on the battlefields where the nation was reborn?

IX

How still Lincoln became after his nomination for President in 1860!
A note of acceptance, just twenty-three lines long, and then unbroken
silence till the end of the campaign.

He had thundered throughout the country against the Christless creed
of slavery until men forgot his crude manners, preposterous figure and
shrill, piping voice in admiration and reverence of his noble qualities.

Now the crooked mouth was set hard. He retired to his modest home in
Springfield, Illinois. Nor could threats or persuasions induce him to
address a word to the public during that terrific campaign which was
the prelude to the horrors of civil war.

In the upward reachings of Lincoln’s life there was a singular
mysticism that sometimes startles one who contemplates the imperishable
grandeur of his place in history.

He saw omens in dreams; experimented with the ghostly world of
spiritualism; half-surrendered to madness, when his personal affections
were attacked; predicted a violent death for himself; dreamed of
his own assassination, and discussed the matter seriously; and gave
evidence many times of a strange, aberrant emotional exaltation,
alternated with brooding sadness or hilarious, uncontrollable merriment.

But behind these mere eccentricities were sanity, conscience, strength
and far-seeing penetrativeness.

In the midst of his heroic debate on slavery with Douglas in 1858,
while the whole nation watched the exciting struggle, he showed his
statesmanlike appreciation of the situation when he said: “I am after
larger game; the battle of 1860 is worth a hundred of this.”

And when he was nominated in the roaring Chicago Convention, where the
foremost politicians of the East actually shed tears over the defeat
of William H. Seward, he let his party do the shouting, promising,
denouncing and hurrahing, while he--wiser, cooler, abler than
all--stood squarely on his record and his party’s platform, without
apology, explanation or mitigation.

To his mind the issue was simple. It could not be misunderstood.
Slavery was immoral. It must be confined to the slave States, where it
had a constitutional sanction, but uncompromisingly kept out of the
free territories.

Yet the country rang with threats that the slave States would break
up the Union if Lincoln was elected. He had declared that the nation
could not endure half slave and half free. That, they insisted, was a
declaration of war against the slave States.

Lincoln drew the short gray shawl about his stooped shoulders, and his
face grew more sorrowful. But he said nothing.

Not many months before he had written a letter to a Jefferson birthday
festival in Boston, in which he flung the name of Jefferson against
the Democrats as Douglas hurled the heart of Bruce into the ranks of
the heathen:

  “The Democracy of to-day holds the _liberty_ of one man to be
  absolutely nothing when in conflict with another man’s right of
  _property_.

  Republicans, on the contrary, are for both the man and the dollar;
  but in cases of conflict, the man _before_ the dollar.

  I remember being once amused much at seeing two partially
  intoxicated men engage in a fight with their great coats on, which
  fight, after a long and rather harmless contest, ended in each
  having fought himself out of his own coat and into that of the
  other. If the two leading parties of this day are really identical
  with the two in the days of Jefferson and Adams, they have
  performed the same feat as the two drunken men....

  The principles of Jefferson are the definitions and axioms of free
  society, and yet they are denied and evaded, with no small show
  of success. One dashingly calls them ‘glittering generalities.’
  Another bluntly calls them ‘self-evident lies.’ And others
  insidiously argue that they apply to ‘superior races.’...

  This is a world of compensation; and he who would be no slave
  must consent to have no slave. Those who deny freedom to others
  deserve it not for themselves, and, under a just God, cannot long
  retain it. All honor to Jefferson--to the man who, in the concrete
  pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single
  people, had the coolness, forecast, and the capacity to introduce
  into a merely revolutionary document an abstract truth, applicable
  to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there that to-day and
  in all coming days it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to
  the very harbingers of reappearing tyranny and oppression.

                                        Your obedient servant,
                                                        A. LINCOLN.”

After that no man might claim that he had not bared his soul.

Editors, political leaders, personal friends, vainly attempted during
the Presidential campaign to draw from him some public expression of
opinion, some hint of what was going on in his mind while the national
horizon flamed with passion and threats of war were openly made by the
slaveholders.

But he knew that it would not pay to say a word that might complicate
a question so clear. The American people were sound at heart. If the
issue could be confined to the question of whether slavery was morally
right or wrong, the common people could be depended upon to vote
against spreading it to the free territories.

Lincoln’s confidence in the plain people grew with years. In spite
of his shrewd experience in politics he was free from cynicism.
There was a childlike simplicity in his character, a central purity
and earnestness, that enabled him to see under the broadcloth and
ruffles of the East the same elemental humanity he had known under the
deerhide, jeans and coonskins of the West.

Up to the hour of his death he gave no evidence of class consciousness.
The rich citizen was no better and no worse than the poor citizen.
The college professor was no better and no worse than the field
hand. At the bottom of each was the original man, with almost divine
possibilities of justice, love and compassion in him.

It was this supreme faith in the better natures of men, and their
ability to reach sound conclusions on simple moral issues, that
persuaded Lincoln to remain mute throughout the struggle.

How many political leaders are there in the United States to-day who
disclose their minds and hearts so unreservedly to the people that they
could dare to stand for office with closed lips, relying solely on
their record and on the general public intelligence?

Even in his career as a lawyer Lincoln made fun of himself. His
small fees were the jest of his companions. It is probable that he
did not earn an average of more than three thousand dollars a year,
notwithstanding his eloquence and logic. When he went to the White
House, all his possessions, including his residence, were worth only
about seven thousand dollars.

So he laughed at and made light of his personal appearance. The change
from deerhide breeches and coonskin cap to black cloth and a high silk
hat simply emphasized the clumsy enormity of his figure. His skin was
yellow and his face seamed and puckered. The gray eyes looked out of
hollow sockets. The high cheek-bones protruded sharply above sunken
cheeks. The mouth was awry and the neck long, lean and scraggy. His
immensely long arms swung loosely from stooped shoulders, his trousers
were always “hitched up too high,” and his ill-kept hat was set at a
grotesque tilt from his lugubrious countenance. His great height, the
lank, swinging slouchiness of his immense frame, his somber, saggy
clothing and sorrowful expression, added to unconventional manners,
made him a target for his political opponents.

“Old ape,” “ignorant baboon”--these were the favorite flings of the
Southern Democrats. He was pictured as a raw, coarse, brutal and
reckless “nigger lover,” filled with hatred of the slave States, eager
to rob them of their legitimate property, a half-horse-half-alligator,
unfit to enter a polite house or associate with gentlemen, and almost
insane with the murderous fanaticism of the New England abolitionists.

If Lincoln felt the sting of this cruel satire he gave no sign of it.
So humble was his nature that, after his election, he grew a beard at
the suggestion of a little girl, who wrote to say that it might make
him look better. He wrote this during the Presidential campaign:

  “If any personal description of me is thought desirable, it may
  be said, I am, in height, six feet, four inches, nearly; lean in
  flesh, weighing on an average, one hundred and eighty pounds; dark
  complexion, with coarse black hair and gray eyes--No other marks or
  brands recollected. A. LINCOLN.”

He was silent in the face of pitiless abuse and carricature, yet he
sent many confidential letters, advising, encouraging, admonishing
the Republican leaders. While his supporters carried fence-rails in
processions and shouted hosannahs, he quietly directed matters from his
home.

And, although he would sometimes laugh with a pure humor that bubbled
up unconsciously from his blameless nature, as the strain of the
political campaign increased, the tragic sadness of his countenance
deepened, for his keen eyes began to see the awful significance of the
eminence to which he was to be lifted.

A year ago the rebellion of John Brown at Harper’s Ferry had
dramatically revealed the irreconcilable temperaments of North and
South. While Virginia enthusiastically hanged the man who tried to
create an armed negro revolution, the North tolled her bells, lowered
her flags to half-mast and glorified him as a holy martyr.

X

A month before the first vote for President was cast, Governor Gist, of
South Carolina, addressed a secret circular to the other slave State
governors saying, that if Lincoln were elected, which seemed almost
certain, South Carolina would secede from the Union. The whole South
was urged to join in this dismemberment of the republic.

The answers of the governors, even before the election had occurred,
showed that it was not the intention of the slave States to submit to
the rule of the majority, and that, already, armed resistance to the
national authority was acceptable as the alternative to “the yoke of a
black Republican President.”

If any secret voice of this germinating treason reached Lincoln at
Springfield he kept it to himself.

But when his victory was assured by a majority that made the combined
vote of his opponents seem insignificant, his continued silence in the
midst of general rejoicing and boasting showed that he understood the
gravity of the situation.

South Carolina withdrew from the Union, seizing custom houses, post
offices, arsenals and forts.

                                                 Smith
  Stanton   Chase   President Lincoln   Welles   Seward   Blair   Bates

Carpenter’s picture, painted under the personal supervision of Lincoln,
represents the moment when the President told his cabinet that he would
issue the Proclamation of Emancipation in fulfilment of a personal vow
to God.]

President Buchanan, old, weak and cowardly, promised to use no
force against the rebels, but to leave everything to Congress. His
Secretary of War, Mr. Floyd, of Virginia, was a traitor, secretly
helping the slave States to arm against the general government. His
Secretary of the Treasury, Mr. Cobb, of Georgia, also conspired with
the disunionists, and finally resigned to take part in the rebellion.
His Secretary of the Interior, Mr. Thompson, of Mississippi, actually
acted as a rebel commissioner to spread the doctrine of secession while
he was still in the Cabinet. The Assistant Secretary of State, Mr.
Trescott, was another member of the great plot.

Within two months, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana
and Texas had followed South Carolina out of the Union. Forts,
arsenals, post offices and custom houses were captured, the Stars and
Stripes lowered, and the rebel flag hoisted.

Before Lincoln could be inaugurated, the seceded States had organized a
Confederate government, with Jefferson Davis for President.

With treason in his Cabinet, and armed rebellion openly preached in
Congress, the bewildered, rabbit-hearted Buchanan did nothing to defend
the national sovereignty. He was no traitor--simply a poltroon, without
character, convictions or courage enough to assert the plain powers of
his office, and willing to shelter his cringing soul and dishonored
responsibilities behind a paramount authority which he pretended to
find in Congress.

Imagine Lincoln, sitting in far-away Springfield, helpless to act,
while Buchanan permitted a foreign government to be set up within the
United States, and promised to use no force against the rebels lest war
might follow.

Think of the newly-chosen leader of the American people compelled to
silence and impotence while the President refused to send relief to
loyal Major Anderson and his handful of soldiers besieged in Fort
Sumter by rebels whose arms had been furnished by the government they
sought to destroy!

The lines in Lincoln’s face deepened. His eyes grew more sorrowful.
The stooping shoulders stooped still lower. There was that in his look
sometimes that compelled mingled awe and pity.

For Lincoln loved his country with the love that a father has for his
child, and the pent-up agony that showed in his lean visage as he
watched the attempt to break up the great republic might not yet find
utterance.

It was useless for him to repeat that he did not hate the South; that
he did not favor the political and social equality of negroes and
whites; that he was not an abolitionist; that, although he considered
slavery wrong and would oppose its extension to Kansas and all other
free soil of the United States, he would do nothing to interfere with
it in the States where it had Constitutional rights.

Yet he waited patiently and silently, believing that he could persuade
the South that he was not an enemy, and in that time of slow anguish
his soul turned to God for help.

The careless, foot-free, waggish woodchopper of New Salem had scoffed
at religion, and written a bitter attack on the Bible, which a wiser
friend had snatched from his hands and burned. The President-elect with
the cares of a mighty nation in its death throes descending upon his
shoulders, stretched his hands child-like to a power greater even than
the “omnipotent and sovereign people.”

[Illustration: Fac-simile of Lincoln’s letter of acceptance]

Mr. Herndon, his law partner, has given us an unforgetable picture of
Lincoln a day before his departure for the White House:

“He crossed to the opposite side of the room and threw himself down on
the old office sofa, which, after many years of service, had been moved
against the wall for support. He lay for some moments, his face towards
the ceiling, without either of us speaking. Presently he inquired,
‘Billy’--he always called me by that name--‘how long have we been
together?’ ‘Over sixteen years,’ I answered. ‘We’ve never had a cross
word in all that time, have we?’... He gathered a bundle of papers
and books he wished to take with him, and started to go; but, before
leaving, he made the strange request that the sign-board which swung
on its rusty hinges at the foot of the stairway should remain. ‘Let it
hang there,’ he said, with a significant lowering of the voice. ‘Give
our clients to understand that the election of a President makes no
change in the firm of Lincoln & Herndon. If I live, I am coming back
some time, and then we’ll go right on practising law as if nothing
had happened.’ He lingered for a moment, as if to take a last look at
the old quarters, and then he passed through the door into the narrow
hallway.”

On the day Lincoln left Springfield to take the oath of office at
Washington he stood in a cold rain on the rear end of the train that
was to take him away, and addressed a bareheaded crowd. His face worked
with emotion. His lips trembled and his voice shook. His eyes sought
the faces of his old neighbors with a new sadness.

“To-day I leave you,” he said, bending his tall, ugly figure, as if
in benediction. “I go to assume a task more difficult than that which
devolved upon Washington. Unless the great God who assisted him shall
be with me and aid me, I must fail.”

Strong men in the crowd wept.

“But if the same omniscient mind and almighty arm that directed and
protected him shall guide and support me, I shall not fail--I shall
succeed.”

The long arms and bony hands were extended. The crooked mouth quivered,
the gray eyes were moist, and the tall figure seemed to grow taller.

“Let us all pray that the God of our fathers may not forsake us now.”

With that prayer on his lips Lincoln went on his way to Washington
through many a cheering multitude that uncovered as the train passed.

He made speeches at Indianapolis, Columbus, Steubenville, Pittsburg,
Cleveland, Buffalo, Albany and New York. He begged the American
people to be patient. No blood would be shed unless the government
was compelled to act in self-defense. There would be no “coercion”
or “invasion” of the South, but the United States would retake its
own forts and other property and collect duties on importations. In
Cincinnati Lincoln spoke to the South, which was reviling him and
defying the national authority, in terms that prove how eager he was to
avert armed conflict:

“We mean to leave you alone, and in no way interfere with your
institutions; to abide by all and every compromise of the Constitution;
and, in a word, coming back to the original proposition, to treat you,
so far as degenerate men--if we have degenerated--may, according to the
examples of those noble fathers, Washington, Jefferson and Madison.
We mean to remember that you are as good as we are; that there is no
difference between us other than the difference of circumstances. We
mean to recognize and bear in mind always that you have as good hearts
in your bosoms as other people, or as we claim to have, and to treat
you accordingly.”

It took a great soul in a man of Lincoln’s heroic origin, direct
methods, intense patriotism and deep hatred of slavery to speak in such
terms to rebellion.

The time came when he hurled a million armed men against the insurgent
South, when with a stroke of his pen he set free four millions of
slaves, representing a property value of about two and a half billion
dollars; and when, with fire and sword and the expenditure of hundreds
of thousands of lives and billions on billions of treasure, he proved
to the world that democratic institutions were strong enough to resist
the mightiest shocks of civil war.

But as he moved on to the scene of his great ordeal in Washington,
there was nothing but temperate reason, kindness and peace on his lips.

It must not be forgotten that the tall, gawky, sad-faced lawyer in
ill-fitting funereal black, was no limp-limbed product of sedentary
sentimentalism, but a man with muscles of steel, who had thrashed and
cowed the most dreaded desperadoes of the frontier, a self-made son
of the wilderness, who had battled against floods, famines and wild
beasts; and who had in him the stout heart and steady will of the
cabin-born and forest-bred. Lincoln was incapable of fear, save the
fear of folly or injustice. He was not afraid even of ridicule, that
poisoned weapon before which so many strong men tremble.

As the nation prepared to honor the hundredth anniversary of his birth,
well might it remember him, newly separated from his provincial and
rude, but heroic West, advancing between the haggard passions of a
divided country with firm, brotherly hands held out to the whole people.

In Philadelphia he was told by Allan Pinkerton, the detective, that
there was a conspiracy to murder him when he reached Baltimore. Unless
he agreed to make the rest of the journey secretly he could not reach
Washington alive. He was urged not to expose himself again in public,
but to go right on to his destination at once.

With this knowledge of his peril, he assisted in the raising of a new
flag over Independence Hall that day, and delivered a noble address,
in which he recalled the sentiment in the Declaration of Independence
“which gave promise that in due time the weights should be lifted from
the shoulders of all men, and that all should have an equal chance.”

“Now, my friends,” he cried, his shrill voice ringing to the outer edge
of the excited multitude, “can this country be saved on that basis? If
it can, I will consider myself one of the happiest men in the world if
I can help to save it.... But if this country cannot be saved without
giving up that principle, I was about to say that I would rather be
assassinated on this spot.... I have said nothing but what I am willing
to live by, and, if it be the pleasure of Almighty God, to die by.”

[Illustration: Mrs. Abraham Lincoln]

With assassins waiting in Baltimore to save the cause of slavery and
disunion by striking down the President-elect, Lincoln, by a secret
change of plan, managed to reach Washington in safety.

XI

All the way from Springfield Lincoln carried a small handbag containing
the manuscript of his inaugural address, upon which it was believed
that the issue of peace or war would depend. The whole country waited
anxiously to hear what the rail-splitter had to say, now that he had
command of the army, navy and treasury.

Would he dare to send troops to the rescue of Major Anderson and his
men, besieged in Charleston harbor by rebellious South Carolina?

Would he relieve the loyal garrisons hemmed in by insurgent Florida?

To use force meant instant civil war. To refrain from using force meant
the destruction of the Union.

Only three months before, Mr. Holt, Buchanan’s loyal Postmaster
General, had written to one of Lincoln’s partners:

“I doubt not, from the temper of the public mind, that the Southern
States will be allowed to withdraw peacefully; but when the work of
dismemberment begins, we shall break up the fragments from month to
month, with the nonchalance with which we break the bread upon our
breakfast table.... We shall soon grow up a race of chieftains who will
rival the political bandits of South America and Mexico, who will carve
out to us our miserable heritage with their bloody swords. The masses
of the people dream not of these things. They suppose the Republic
can be destroyed to-day, and that peace will smile over its ruins
to-morrow.”

Away out in his Illinois home Lincoln had written these words in his
inaugural address:

“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_ shall have the most solemn one to ‘preserve,
protect and defend it.’”

This was the spirit in which he made that journey from the West,
knowing that the question of war or peace hung as upon a hair trigger.
Backwoodsman and provincial though he might be, he knew the underlying
American character well enough to hope, in his own heart, in spite of
the secession of so many States, what was bluntly said to Jefferson
Davis and his Cabinet: “Unless you sprinkle blood in the face of the
people of Alabama, they will be back in the old Union in less than ten
days.”

But when Lincoln went through the guarded streets of Washington to the
bayonet-girt Capitol, to have the pro-slavery Chief Justice administer
the oath of office, the speech he carried in his pocket had been
greatly altered. He had even been persuaded by Mr. Seward, his new
Secretary of State, to modify this brave sentence:

“All the power at my disposal will be used to reclaim the public
property and places which have fallen; to hold, occupy and possess
these, and all other property and places belonging to the government.”

They thought he might be murdered before he could take the oath. There
was artillery in the streets and ominous swarms of soldiers. Even on
the roofs sharpshooters were to be seen.

Grizzled old General Scott had sent this word from his sick bed to
the President-elect: “I’ll plant cannon at both ends of Pennsylvania
Avenue, and if any of them show their heads or raise a finger I’ll blow
them to hell.”

Yet when Lincoln’s long body reared itself before the hushed crowd, and
when he laid aside his new ebony, gold-headed cane, set his iron-bound
spectacles on his nose and removed his hat--there was Douglas, his
old rival for Mary Todd’s hand, his competitor for the Senate and the
Presidency, his antagonist in the struggle against slavery; but a new
Douglas, loyal to the Union, who was content to reach out his hand in
the presence of that high-strung multitude and hold Lincoln’s hat.

President Buchanan was there, withered, bent, slow, insignificant,
in flowing white cravat and swallowtail coat. Beside him towered
the homely rail-splitter--also in an unaccustomed and distressing
swallowtail coat and wearing a stubby new beard, grown to please a
little girl--who dared at last to give the national authority a voice
and to say that “No State, upon its own mere motion, can lawfully get
out of the Union,” that “resolves and ordinances to that effect are
legally void,” and that “I shall take care, as the Constitution itself
expressly enjoins upon me, that the laws of the Union be faithfully
executed in all the States.”

How hard it is for us now to realize the appalling strain of
responsibilities that could persuade a valiant frontiersman like
Lincoln--knowing that Fort Sumter was already besieged; that the
Florida forts were threatened and that an organized Confederate
government, with drilled troops, was actually in possession of many
States--to say so softly to the armed and defiant South:

“I trust that this will not be regarded as a menace, but only as the
declared purpose of the Union that it will constitutionally maintain
and defend itself.”

Just before he closed his speech Lincoln looked up from his manuscript,
and his gray eyes--those eyes that could be so tender as to make his
gaunt face beautiful--sought the silent, listening crowd. There were
dark circles under his eyes. His whole bearing was that of a man in
pain. Then he raised his splendid head and made that last sublime
appeal against war:

“I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not
be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our
bonds of affection. The mystic 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 surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

As Lincoln kissed the open Bible in the hands of Chief Justice
Taney--who wrote the Dred Scott opinion supporting slavery--the thunder
of artillery announced his vow to defend the Union.

XII

Those who in peaceful times like these wonder why so strong and
direct a man as Lincoln should have been so eager to conciliate the
haughty and rebellious Confederacy, to assure the rebels that there
would be no “coercion” or “invasion,” and to appeal to their historic
national consciousness, rather than to tell them in so many words that
they would be scourged into obedience, must consider that he at last
realized the Southern misunderstanding of his purpose and temperament
which caused the Governor of Florida to write to the Governor of South
Carolina:

“If there is sufficient manliness at the South to strike for our
rights, honor and safety, in God’s name let it be done before the
inauguration of Lincoln.”

Not only that, but Mr. Seward, the great Republican leader of the East,
now Secretary of State, and one of the deadliest foes of slavery,
within three weeks wrote this advice:

“_Change the question before the public from one upon slavery, or about
slavery_, for a question upon _union or disunion._”

No man knew or loved Lincoln better than Leonard Sweet, who made this
deliberate analysis of him:

“In dealing with men he was a trimmer, and such a trimmer the world has
never seen. Halifax, who was great in his day as a trimmer, would blush
by the side of Lincoln; _yet Lincoln never trimmed in principles_, it
was only in his conduct with men.”

Besides, Lincoln was incapable of mere hatred. All through the Civil
War he showed that his love for the whole American people was tidal.
It was his belief in the goodness of human nature and the justice of
the Union cause that made him grieve like a defied and deserted father
over the erring Southern insurgents, and to hope, with an intensity
that drew prayer from his lips, that the ties of race, continental
pride and common national memory would reunite the nation without the
sacrifice and seal of bloodshed.

It was not for love of the negro that he waged war upon slavery, but
for the sake of justice and humanity, and to save the nation from
increasing degradation and demoralization. True, he had challenged the
South when he said, “a house divided against itself cannot stand. I
believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half
free.” But he had also said:

“There is a physical difference between the white and black races which
I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms
of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live,
while they do remain together, there must be the position of superior
and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the
superior position assigned to the white race.”

Lincoln’s private letters and conversations, from his nomination to his
election, prove that there was one point only on which he would permit
no compromise--slavery must not be extended to the free territories.

[Illustration: St. Gaudens statue, Lincoln Park, Chicago]

But as President his one supreme duty was to save the Union, to prevent
the destruction of the nation. He was yet to write amid the roar of a
conflict in which half a million lives were lost, that agonized but
unflinching letter to Horace Greeley:

“I would save the Union. I would save it the shortest way under the
Constitution. The sooner the national authority can be restored, the
nearer the Union will be ‘the Union as it was.’ If there be those who
would not save the Union unless they could at the same time destroy
slavery, I do not agree with them. My paramount object in this struggle
is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy
slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would
do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do
it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone,
I would also do that. What I do about slavery and the colored race, I
do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I
forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union.”

Those who did not recognize the greatness of Lincoln under his simple
manners and kindly, humble disposition, assumed that he would be
dominated by Mr. Seward, his scholarly and distinguished Secretary of
State. The homespun, picturesque orator of Illinois was all very well
to catch votes. But Mr. Seward would be the real President.

Mrs. Lincoln heard the talk and mentioned it to her husband.

“I may not rule myself, but certainly Seward shall not,” said Lincoln.
“The only ruler I have is my conscience--following God in it--and
these men will have to learn that yet.”

John Hay, his secretary and bosom friend, who called Lincoln “the
greatest character since Christ,” wrote to Mr. Herndon: “It is absurd
to call him a modest man. No great man was ever modest. It was his
intellectual arrogance and unconscious assumption of superiority that
men like Chase and Sumner could never forgive.”

Still, even though he stood rocklike where his mind and conscience told
him that he was right, a humbler, simpler, more unaffected man never
walked the earth; and there are libraries of books teeming with tales
of his tenderness to women, his love of little children, his compassion
for the unfortunate.

The first sign of the strong, sure Lincoln in the White House came when
the new President on the day after his inauguration received a dispatch
from Major Anderson declaring that he was short of provisions, that
Fort Sumter must be abandoned to the Confederacy in a few weeks,
and that it would take at least twenty thousand soldiers to relieve
Charleston harbor from the Confederate siege. The whole Federal army
numbered only sixteen thousand men.

Washington was filled with clamorous office-seekers who crowded the
White House. The President was distracted. Even his carriage was
stopped by a greedy applicant, and he was compelled to cry, “I won’t
open shop in the street.”

With the secret news from Fort Sumter stirring his soul--for no one
knew better that immediate war depended on his action--Lincoln told
stories, cracked jokes and dealt with the thronging politicians in his
old shrewd, homely way. None of the place-hunters was permitted to
suspect the impending tragedy that made him bow his head when he was
alone.

Meanwhile he ordered General Scott to report what could be done; but
the old hero advised him that the abandonment of Sumter was “almost
inevitable.” He had also ordered troops to be sent to relieve Fort
Pickens, in Florida, which was also menaced. General Scott reported
that both Pickens and Sumter should be evacuated.

Instantly the President ordered the Navy Department to prepare plans
for a relief expedition for Fort Sumter. That night he gave a great
state dinner. His humorous stories and quaint sallies of wit kept his
guests in high spirits. His lean face was convulsed with laughter, his
eyes sparkled and his thin, high voice whipped up the merriment.

But as the night waned and the laughter died down, he called the
members of his Cabinet aside and, with haggard face and a voice of deep
emotion, he told them the news from General Scott.

That night Lincoln did not close his eyes. The next day, against the
advice of five of his Cabinet, including Mr. Seward, all of whom
advised the abandonment of Fort Sumter, he ordered the preparation of
a naval expedition to relieve Major Anderson. Additional troops and
supplies were ordered into the beleaguered Fort Pickens in Florida.

The Confederate commissioners might seek conferences with Secretary
Seward in vain. The expedition to rescue Sumter sailed with orders to
deliver food to the garrison and, if opposed, to force its way in.
Lincoln’s hand had signed the order that precipitated the Civil War.

Although the President had notified Governor Pickens, of South
Carolina, that the relief expedition simply contemplated the peaceful
delivery of provisions to a garrison threatened by starvation, the
Confederates immediately demanded the surrender of Sumter, with
a pledge from Major Anderson that he should make no preparations
to injure the fort after withdrawing. This demand was refused by
Anderson, who added, “if I can only be permitted to leave on the pledge
you mention, I shall never, so help me God, leave this fort alive.”

Again and again Anderson was called upon to surrender Sumter. The
Confederates were determined to have the place before Lincoln’s
supplies arrived. Each time the brave Union officer replied that he
would maintain his country’s flag where it flew.

Then came the crash which shook the continent and thrilled the
civilized world.

At daybreak on April 12, 1861, in the presence of a great multitude of
civilian spectators in Charleston harbor, the rebel batteries opened
fire on Fort Sumter and the Union. For two days the fort withstood the
terrific bombardment, and then, with all food gone, his quarters set
on fire by red hot cannon balls, and his ammunition almost exhausted,
Major Anderson lowered the stars and stripes to native-born Americans
and hoisted the white flag.

That was on Saturday. On Sunday Lincoln wrote a proclamation calling
for seventy-five thousand volunteers to defend the Union.

The same night Douglas called at the White House--Douglas, the
Democratic, thundering Douglas, the champion of slavery; Douglas, the
antagonist of Lincoln in almost every crisis of his career; Douglas,
who in the Senate only a few weeks ago had cried, “War is disunion.
War is final, eternal separation”--and Lincoln clasped hands with the
brilliant rival from whom he had won his wife and the Presidency, now
come to pledge his life to the defence of the Union.

On Monday morning Lincoln’s proclamation and Douglas’s noble and
magnanimous declaration that he would support Lincoln in saving the
nation were read by the American people.

To the exultant shout that went up from the armed slave States, there
came an answering cry of rage and indignation from the free States.
The whole country trembled with the war spirit. War! war! war! Every
city, town and village in the North answered Lincoln’s call for troops
to crush the rebellion. Farms and factories poured out their men.
Streets were gay with bunting and noisy with marching feet. Industry
was abandoned in the instant and tremendous preparation for the
conflict.

Yet Lincoln’s call for seventy-five thousand men was to grow into
a call for a half million men and a half billion dollars, and the
struggle between the sixteen free States and the seven rebellious slave
States, with the border States hesitating between, was to change into a
four years’ death-grapple between all the States of the South and all
the States of the North, a conflict without parallel in its horror and
costliness.

Mr. Stoddard, one of Lincoln’s private secretaries, thus described
Lincoln in the White House at the beginning of the war:

“A remarkably tall and forward-bending form is coming through the
further folding doors, leaving them carelessly open behind him. He is
walking slowly, heavily, like a man in a dream. His strongly marked
features have a drawn look, there are dark circles under his deep-set
eyes, and these seem to be gazing at something far away, or into the
future.”

That countenance of unutterable sadness, fixed gray eyes that seemed to
see something in the vacant air; thin, stooped shoulders, bowed head,
hands clasped behind the back, slow, halting step and general air of
weariness and melancholy abstraction, was known only to those who saw
Lincoln when he wrestled alone with the agony of his burdens.

The greedy crowd that pressed for office, the impatient fanatics who
thrust their advice upon him, the haughty statesmen who condescended
to meddle with his powers, the tricksters and traders, saw only the
simple, resolute, vulgar, kindly Lincoln, full of the old allure
of anecdote and jest, patient, keen and ready in a flash to avoid
an immature decision or soften a refusal by a witty epigram or an
illuminating joke.

It is an astonishing evidence of Lincoln’s complex character that he
could laugh and play like a careless boy, and patiently putter over the
small details of office-giving, while the iron of his character was
annealing in the furnace of war.

No more sensitive or imaginative man than Lincoln ever lived. His
amazing sense of humor stayed him in his trial. It was sometimes
Titanic.

“Has anything gone wrong at the front?” asked a friend, seeing him
downcast.

“No,” replied the President with a weary smile. “It isn’t the war; it’s
the post office at Brownsville, Missouri.”

The deadly, ceaseless, shameless crowding and intriguing of
place-hunters--notwithstanding the shock of war that threatened the
nation itself--made a profound impression on Lincoln.

“This human struggle and scramble for office, for a way to live without
work, will finally test the strength of our institutions,” he said to
Mr. Herndon.

That has been the idea of every tormented President of the United
States, from Washington to Roosevelt.

“He is an old criminal lawyer,” wrote one of his secretaries,
“practiced in observing the ways of rascals, accustomed to reading them
and circumventing them, but he does not commonly tell any man precisely
what he thinks of him.”

Even so able a man as Secretary Seward did not at first recognize the
force, genius and dignity that lay behind the rough, whimsical exterior
of Lincoln, and gave himself the airs of a superior; but presently even
Seward said: “He is the best of us all.”

While the country was ringing with the sounds of marching men after
the fall of Fort Sumter, it was reported that a great force of
Confederates was moving against Washington. There were only four or
five thousand troops in the capital. A Massachusetts regiment on the
way to Washington had been attacked by a mob. The Seventh Regiment of
New York was expected, but the Marylanders had torn up the tracks and
it did not come. The city was in danger of famine. The Confederate
attack was hourly expected. The capital was cut off.

Lincoln’s anguish was unconcealed. Walking up and down his office, with
a look of pain on his face, he gave vent to his dread.

“I begin to believe that there is no North. The Seventh Regiment is a
myth.”

Again he paced the floor for half an hour.

“Why don’t they come? Why don’t they come?” he groaned.

                                   Photograph by Davis and Eikemeyer

This powerful and poetic head of Lincoln, by Gutzon Borglum, which
deeply impressed the emancipator’s living son, has been presented to
Congress by Eugene Meyer, Jr., of New York]

Presently the New Yorkers, who had rebuilt the tracks and bridges from
Annapolis on, marched into Washington, and within a week Lincoln had
seventeen thousand soldiers in the city.

It was this terror of losing Washington that persuaded Lincoln to
withdraw McDowell’s forty thousand men from McClellan when his army was
within sight of Richmond.

XIII

Lincoln’s tenderness of heart was one of his striking traits. The story
of his life is full of touching incidents showing his pity for all
living things in distress. As a boy he protected frogs and turtles from
torture; as a frontiersman he returned young birds to their nests, and
once rode back on his tracks over the prairie and dismounted to help
a pig stuck in the mud; as President his habit of pardoning soldiers
condemned to death excited the wrath of his generals. His heart melted
at the sight of tears. It was hard for him to withstand a tale of woe.
The shedding of blood stirred horror and grief in him.

This extreme sensitiveness would have been an element of almost fatal
weakness in the man upon whom events had so suddenly thrust the command
of a great war, particularly a war between his own countrymen, but for
the fact that reason and devotion to justice were the anchors of his
nature.

He could not be moved on a clear question of principle by either
friendship, enmity or compassion.

He appointed Edwin M. Stanton as Secretary of War, in place of the
discredited Simon Cameron, in spite of the fact that Stanton had
treated him contemptuously in a law case on which they were engaged
together, and had described him 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.”

He raised George B. McClellan to command the army, notwithstanding the
circumstance that McClellan, as vice-president of the Illinois Central
Railway, had once deeply wounded him by declining to pay his lawyer’s
bill; and that, in 1858, while the Illinois Central refused Lincoln the
most common courtesy, McClellan was accompanying his rival, Douglas,
in a private car and special train.

It was not chivalry, but patriotism, that inspired Lincoln to put
these two Democrats in control of the armed forces of the nation.
His own feelings were nothing; the fate of the Union was everything.
Stanton had been an honest and masterful member of Buchanan’s Cabinet.
McClellan had made a glorious answer to the Bull Run defeat by driving
the Confederate troops out of West Virginia.

The life of the nation was more important than party lines. Besides,
Stanton and McClellan had the confidence of the Democrats, and it was
essential, not only that the whole North should be held together, but
that the loyal Democrats in the wavering border States should feel that
there was no sectional or party prejudice in the government.

Stanton tried to bully Lincoln and called him “the original gorilla,”
and McClellan treated him with disdainful indifference. Neither could
exhaust his patience. He mastered his lion-headed Secretary of War by
gentle persistence. He endured McClellan’s months of inactivity after
the Army of the Potomac had grown into a fighting force of nearly a
hundred and seventy thousand magnificently trained men, and when the
government was being openly sneered at for its hesitation to give
battle.

Great-hearted, patient Lincoln! He even consented to sit
uncomplainingly in the waiting room of McClellan’s residence while the
arrogant young general talked to others.

“I will hold McClellan’s stirrup if he will only bring success,” he
said.

But, in the end, he wrote the orders which forced McClellan’s
army against Richmond; and when Frémont, in the West, ignored the
President’s orders to fight, Lincoln promptly removed him from command.

To the newly assembled Congress he said:

“This is essentially a people’s contest. On the side of the Union it
is a struggle for maintaining in the world that form and substance of
government whose leading object is to elevate the condition of men--to
lift artificial weights from all shoulders.... It is now for them [the
people] to demonstrate to the world that those who can fairly carry an
election can also suppress a rebellion; that ballots are the rightful
and peaceful successors of bullets; and that when ballots have fairly
and constitutionally decided, there can be no successful appeal back
to bullets; that there can be no successful appeal except to ballots
themselves at succeeding elections.”

To one of the many committees that went to the White House to complain
that the war was not being pressed rapidly enough, he suggested a
question and answer that were repeated all over the country.

He was tired, pale, almost worn out. The ceaseless grind of work, the
frightful and increasing responsibilities imposed by the war, the
cruel jibes of critics all over the country, had deepened the furrows
in his brow and wasted his homely face. Every mail brought threats of
assassination. The far-away, rapt look in his eyes, the pitiful droop
of his strong mouth, the pathetic sloping of his tall, black-clad
figure, gave evidence of the strain upon him.

“Gentlemen,” he said, with a smile that lit up his wonderful face,
“suppose all the property you were worth was in gold, and you had put
it in the hands of Blondin [the famous tight-rope walker] to carry
across the Niagara River on a rope. Would you shake the cable, or keep
shouting at him, ‘Blondin, stand up a little straighter--Blondin,
stoop a little more--go a little faster--lean a little more to the
north--lean a little more to the south’? No, you would hold your
breath, as well as your tongue, and keep your hands off until he was
safe over. The Government’s carrying an enormous weight. Untold
treasures are in their hands. They are doing the best they can. Don’t
badger them. Keep silence, and we will get you safe across.”

Lincoln did not fight battles himself, but he searched patiently for
generals who could, and then he trusted them, and kept the public off
their backs. As he said to General Grant, “If a man can’t skin, he must
hold a leg while somebody else does.”

Imagine Lincoln, in his black frock coat and high hat, stealing out
of the White House in the morning to kneel in the grass on the Mall
and practice at a sheet of note paper with newly-invented rifles till
the indignant sentries dash up shouting, to see the long figure unfold
itself upward and recognize in the disturber the President of the
United States!

Imagine him playing with his children on the White House lawn, “his
coat-tails standing out straight and his black hair tousled this way
and that” as he dashes about, chased by his shrieking playmates!

Imagine him again and again asking little girls to kiss him, snatching
them to his thin breast, fondling them with tears in his eyes!

Imagine him watching through weary nights by his son’s deathbed,
standing stricken beside the little coffin, and then, for the first
time, turning to the Bible for consolation!

Imagine him entertaining his log-cabin cousin, Dennis Hanks, in the
White House, and, when that simple soul disapproves of Secretary
Stanton’s arrogance and urges him to “kick the frisky little Yankee
out,” patiently answering, “It would be difficult to find another man
to fill his place”!

Imagine him sitting in his nightshirt on the edge of young John Hay’s
bed, night after night, reading doggerel verses from the newspapers,
cracking jokes or reciting from Shakespeare!

Imagine him signing a pardon for a young soldier sentenced to be shot
and hearing the sobs of that mother waiting outside, “Thank God! Thank
Lincoln! Pardoned! Oh, my boy! my boy!”

Imagine him facing the gray-haired father of another doomed soldier and
saying, “If your son lives until I order him shot, he will live longer
than ever Methuselah did”!

Imagine him sitting at the table day after day, his face cold,
abstracted, his gray eyes “seeing something in the air” and hardly
touching his food!

[Illustration: Life mask of Lincoln while President. Observe the wasted
features, the kindly, humorous mouth, and the reverential indications
of the high top head]

Imagine him on the night after the bloody loss of
Chancellorsville--seventeen thousand killed, wounded and missing! Mr.
Stoddard, sitting in the deserted White House, underneath Lincoln’s
room, has helped our imagination:

“But that sound, the slow, heavy, regular tread of the President’s
feet, pacing up and down in his room and thinking of Chancellorsville!
A man’s tread may well be heavy when there is such a load upon his
shoulders as Lincoln is carrying.... He can hear, in his heart, the
thunder of the Union and Confederate guns, and the shrieks and groans
that rise on the lost battlefield.... Ten o’clock--and now and then
there have been momentary breaks, as if he paused in turning at the
wall; but no pause has lasted longer than for a few heart-beats....
Eleven o’clock--and it is as if a more silent kind of silence had been
obtained, for the tread can be heard more distinctly, and a sort of
thrill comes with it now and then.... There has been no sound from
the President’s room for a number of minutes, and he may be resting
in his chair or writing. No; there it comes again, that mournfully
monotonous tread, with its turnings at the wall.... Two o’clock comes,
without another break in the steady tramp of Lincoln’s lonely vigil.
Three o’clock arrives, and your task is done, and you pass out almost
stealthily ... and the last sound in your ears is the muffled beat of
that footfall.

Before eight o’clock of the morning you are once more at the White
House ... look in at the President’s room.... He is still there, and
there is nothing to indicate that he has been out of it.... There
upon the table, beside his cup of coffee, lies the draft of his fresh
instructions to General Hooker, bidding him to push forward without any
reference to Chancellorsville.”

These are but fragmentary glimpses of the savior of the Union in his
many-sided life during the war. But they help us to understand him in
that tragic stretch of time when he plodded wearily between the White
House and the telegraph room in the War Department to learn, day by
day, what his generals at the front had to say.

It would be but vain repetition to picture him in silent, white-faced
anguish, or in equally silent transports of joy and thanksgiving, all
through the fighting days of Shiloh, Stone River, Fredericksburg,
Antietam, Gettysburg, Vicksburg, Chickamauga, the Wilderness,
Spottsylvania and Petersburg, when Americans reddened American soil
with the blood of Americans, and the ordinary dress of women and
children throughout the country turned to black.