Abraham Lincoln 
 
 By Edward A. Sumner 
 
 THE TANDY-THOMAS COMPANY 
 
 PUBLISHEBS NEW YORK 
 
CORNELL 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 GIFT OF 
 
 S?tinsky Lincoln Collectioit 
 
Cornell University 
 Library 
 
 The original of this bool< is in 
 the Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924032767695 
 
ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
Abeaham Lincoln 
 
 An Address 
 
 DELIVERED BEFORE THE MEN'S LEAGUE 
 
 OF THE BROADWAY TABERNACLE 
 
 CHURCH OF NEW YORK 
 
 FEB. 10th 1902 
 
 BY 
 
 EDWARD A. SUMNER 
 
 OF THE 
 
 NEW YORK BAR 
 
 NEW YORK 
 THE TANDY-THOMAS COMPANY 
 
 1910 
 
"I have always tried to pluck" up a 
 thistle and plant a flower, wherever 
 I thought a flower would grow." 
 
 ■' — Lincoln. 
 
ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 As THE visitor leans upon the gallery balus- 
 trade of the National Library at Wash- 
 ington, that monument of beauty, that 
 gift to their coimtry of the best that is in Ameri- 
 can architecture and genius and art, he finds im- 
 printed upon its walls words befitting the chaste 
 splendor of their surroundings. And first across 
 from his eye is this "Hither repairing other stars 
 in their golden urns draw light." 
 
 A sentiment we may happily make our own 
 whenever we come together once in the year upon 
 the time named in our laws, and setting aside 
 the care and the rush and the turmoil and the dis- 
 traction of the life of the nation and of this, its 
 teeming metropolis, may again draw hope and 
 faith and inspiration and pride and light into the 
 golden urns of our citizenship from that great 
 star of the nation's dark and troublesome and 
 Homeric days, ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 
 
 If some measure of this be taken to ourselves 
 in the brief time of this evening; if any heart 
 
 
 
6 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 in this audience be strengthened in his personal 
 life, in his struggle for right citizenship and in a 
 splendid and abiding belief in the working out of 
 a destiny for this land of ours, for ourselves and 
 our children after us, a destiny whose greatness it 
 has never yet been vouchsafed mortal eye to fore- 
 see, then your speaker will count the whole ob- 
 ject of this address accomplished. 
 
 The story of this life is a thrice told tale, but 
 it is one where age cannot wither or custom stale 
 its infinite variety. This is the more true if the 
 first impressions are the vivid ones of the dawn 
 of boyhood. Which happened to be my ovm good 
 fortune. It was fully forty years ago. The Sep- 
 tember stars had begun to twinkle that night upon 
 the then western frontier town on the Wisconsin 
 banks of the rolling Mississippi. The evening 
 breezes, fragrant and cool from upland bluff and 
 prairie stretch were wafting in with that soft and 
 velvet touch so characteristic of those early days 
 of the plateaus of the new Northwest. Soon they 
 bore the sound of fife and drum and then the tread 
 of marching feet. Along the street swung a line 
 of a hundred men, the flag at their head, and each 
 bore his torch and wore the glazed cap and cape. 
 There was a halt at my father's gate. He joined 
 them. And they swung away into the darkness, 
 singing in mighty unison to their rhythmic tread 
 one of the great songs of the north land: 
 
ABRAHAM LINCOLN 7 
 
 "John Brown's body lies a mouldering in the 
 grave. 
 But his soul goes marching on." 
 
 And each shook aloft his torch as men know- 
 ing they were about to look upon the throes of the 
 young Republic, for life or for death. 
 
 These were the Lincoln Wide Awakes. And 
 the campaign was for the first election to the 
 Presidency of the tall rail splitter of Illinois. 
 
 No truer word was ever believed or uttered 
 than that the Lord of Hosts, who holds in his 
 hands the nations of men, had from the first 
 chosen and trained and ordained this man to lead 
 this people through the terror and the struggle 
 and the blood and the cries and the tears, with 
 the smoke of a great cloud by day and an exceed- 
 ing pillar of fire by night, yea, through the very 
 valley of the Shadow of Death itself, of four years 
 of Civil War. 
 
 As his fellow citizens gathered about him in 
 this never to be forgotten struggle for the Presi- 
 dency, they found a man chosen to command, tall 
 above his fellows even as Saul of ancient and 
 kingly days, awkward at the first in appearance, 
 but gifted with a judgment unerring, a power 
 of argument and logic supreme, a very simplicity 
 and pathos itself of eloquence; with the tender 
 heart of a woman and the lion heart of a man. 
 
8 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 and fitted for the fiery ordeal before him as none 
 could have been save by the life of toil and pri- 
 vation and hardship and poverty and rigor that 
 had been his. Glance briefly at the moulding of 
 it and note the perfect tempering of the instru- 
 ment through the fires it passed, for the work it 
 had to do in the hands of a great people. 
 
 The first test of this nature of ours is by deep 
 privation and sorrow; and so it was with him. 
 
 The family had moved in the year 1818 from 
 the wilderness of the present State of Kentucky 
 to the wilderness of the present State of Indiana. 
 Trial and poverty and a hand to hand fight with 
 nature for a foothold was its daily lot. 
 
 Then sickness came and for weeks the mother, 
 the loving and tender and caring for mother, 
 whose sweet and womanly presence in that far off 
 cabin of the forest had been the whole light of 
 this boy's life, lay wasting with mortal sickness. 
 And one night death came and she answered the 
 call. In a rough box he helped to hew they low- 
 ered her worn form into the arms of mother earth. 
 And ashes had returned to ashes and dust to dust 
 and the spirit had gone to the Maker who gave it. 
 There was a little burial service, with a few far- 
 gathered frontier friends about. Simple words 
 of hope and of life immortal were spoken by the 
 travel stained and circuit riding man of God. 
 While at the grave stood the stricken father and 
 
ABRAHAM LINCOLN 9 
 
 these three little ones. Left alone. Youngest and 
 smallest of them all, Abraham peered around the 
 rough wooden headstone, looking at him who 
 spoke and prayed, through eyes tear-stained and 
 filled for the first time with the great and un- 
 speakable mystery of death, and from which was 
 never thereafter to leave that look of mysticism 
 and sorrow which marked the face of ABRA- 
 HAM LINCOLN like the face of an Isaiah, 
 great prophet of his people in days of old. 
 
 And so Lincoln grew into older boyhood and 
 young manhood in the forest home close to the 
 very heart of nature herself. And there the thirst 
 for knowledge came full upon him. The stronger 
 and the deeper that there were no wells of the 
 printed books from which he might drink. In his 
 father's cabin were but three of these. The Bible, 
 iEsop's Fables and Pilgrim's Progress. And so 
 it came to pass that this boy who was a master 
 in woodcraft, who knew the ways of the bird and 
 of the beast, who had learned the lessons of the 
 woodland and the forest and the stream and the 
 hill, of the moss upon the tree and of the latter 
 and the early rains, of the promise of the bow 
 in the cloud, of the harvest and seed time and of 
 all the sweet teachings of nature, found first of 
 the books of men three of their rarest classics and 
 in one of them the very voices of God. Fortu- 
 nate indeed was that boy and fortunate the nation 
 
10 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 over whose strange and wonderful destiny he was 
 in later years to be called to preside. 
 
 Young Lincoln read and reread these books 
 until he knew two of them by heart and until all 
 had become wrought into the very fibre of his 
 nature. They formed his beliefs and became his 
 literary taste. These never forsook him. Out of 
 the Fables came that fondness for and aptness in 
 story and illustration which so characterized his 
 whole career. Out of Pilgrim's Progress and the 
 Bible came that masterful, that simple, that clear 
 cut and exquisite Anglo-Saxon diction and style 
 which was to rank him as one of the first of the 
 orators of the world and which reached its acme 
 and perfect flower in that speech upon the battle- 
 field of Gettysburg. One of the few that was not 
 born to ever die. 
 
 What the meagre home could not give him in 
 books the boy walked miles to borrow from kindly 
 neighbors, who were reckoned those days literally 
 by miles. Thus he had from neighbor Crawford 
 and brought home in the bosom of his himting 
 shirt and read a Life of Washington, by Weems. 
 That evening the crude and homemade taUow dip 
 burned down and out. The boy tucked the 
 precious book into the log wall beside him. With 
 the morning light he reached for it. The night's 
 storm had blistered and soaked its every page. 
 But only to bring straight to the fore the boy's 
 
ABRAHAM LINCOLN 11 
 
 honor and determination, great qualities in which 
 this boy was father to the man. For three days 
 he bound himself to that neighbor a bondsman at 
 the pulling of cornstalks, until he paid for and 
 owned the half ruined, but still eagerly studied 
 volume. No story of Lincoln is new. But wher- 
 ever his life is recounted this one should be told 
 as a memorial of him. ■ 
 
 To such books, read anyhow and anywhere so 
 only he could read, read between blow of axe and 
 swing of maul at day, and by back log fire into the 
 far night, were added Cooper's Leather Stocking 
 Tales and the priceless gems of Burns and the 
 Bard of Avon. The former, in the judgment of 
 Lincoln's mature years, only little less great than 
 the matchless genius of the latter. No wonder at 
 this estimate. For the Scotch poet knew the 
 human heart as few ever did and the American 
 martyr sounded all the depths of its pathos, its 
 suffering and its sorrow close to the people he 
 loved and led through those years of terror and 
 death. 
 
 And now there came a turn in the tide of this 
 boy's life, strange, unlooked for, uncounted on, 
 that bore him to the sight and the hearing of a 
 new thing; a thing that seared his high soul for- 
 ever toward it ; that lifted him up as the leader of 
 his Nation against it; that overthrew it; that 
 made him the Emancipator; that martyred him; 
 
12 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 that gave him high place among the Immortals 
 forever. 
 
 Storekeeper Gentry must send a cargo of prod- 
 uce to New Orleans by flat boat; that lumbering, 
 scow-like, deckless ark of primitive river days, 
 borne with the downward current and out to the 
 rolling drift of the mighty Mississippi. The boy 
 knew nothing of navigation. He knew nothing of 
 the lower Mississippi. But he did know honor to 
 the core. And Gentry would send none other. 
 With one companion the voyage was successfully 
 made. And at its end ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 filled with the toil and poverty, but splendid free- 
 dom of his own life, had been brought face to face 
 with human slavery, and the hopeless bondage of 
 others. 
 
 The years took him now into yotmg manhood's 
 estate; the family had again set their faces to 
 the West, and moved from the forests of Indiana 
 to the broad prairies of Illinois. Here the hard 
 and bitter struggle went on. Here the character 
 was builded, chiseled in stone rough to look upon, 
 but destined to stand fast upon the everlasting 
 rock of justice and righteousness against the fury 
 of all the storms of earth upon it. 
 
 There was a country store and Lincoln kept it; 
 law books and he mastered them, and joined the 
 circuit riders of the Bar; men destined to fame in 
 the Republic, SJohn Calhoun, Edward D. Baker, 
 
ABRAHAM LINCOLN 18 
 
 Lyman Trumbull, John J. Hardin, John A. 
 Logan, McClernard and Stephen A. Douglass; 
 he became a soldier of the Black Hawk War; in 
 1832 was defeated for the Legislature; in 1834- 
 was elected; and again in 1837; both times as a 
 Whig. In this last Session, when to do it was a 
 bold and dangerous thing, he, with magnificent 
 courage, dealt his first blow in that cause with 
 which his destiny had been so strangely linked. 
 Here it is : 
 
 March 3, 1837. 
 
 "Resolutions upon the subject of domestic slav- 
 ery having passed both branches of the General 
 Assembly at its present session, the tmdersigned 
 hereby protest against the passage of the same. 
 
 "They believe that the institution of slavery is 
 foimded on both injustice and bad policy, but that 
 the promulgation of abolition doctrines tends 
 rather to increase than abate its evils. 
 
 "They believe that the Congress of the United 
 States has no power, under the Constitution, to 
 interfere with the institution of slavery in the dif- 
 ferent States. 
 
 "They believe that the Congress of the United 
 States has the power, under the Constitution, to 
 abolish slavery in the District of Columbia, but 
 that the power ought not to be exercised, unless 
 at the request of the people of the District. 
 
14 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 "The difference between these opinions and 
 those contained in the above resolutions is their 
 reason for entering this protest. 
 (Signed) 
 
 "DAN STONE, 
 "A. LINCOLN, 
 "Representatives from the County of Sangamcai." 
 
 For this he became known as the Sangamon 
 Chief; banqueted there and given these toasts 
 which have survived from those distant days : 
 
 "Abraham Lincoln: he has fulfilled the expec- 
 tations of his friends and disappointed the hopes 
 of his enemies." 
 
 "A. Lincoln: one of nature's noblemen." 
 
 These, now, were the days when discussion and 
 event were hurrying on all over the land to the 
 night which should flame the sky with Civil War 
 and fill the Republic with the tread of the feet of 
 armed men. What metal was in the soul must 
 ring false or true. 
 
 During the Legislature of 1839 came a great 
 debate. In the one camp was Douglass. In the 
 other was Lincoln. To the latter was flung the 
 taunt that his cause was hopeless and his numbers 
 few. The flint struck deep and out flashed one of 
 
ABRAHAM LINCOLN 16 
 
 those living sparks filled with the fire of the heart 
 of the man. Lincoln rose and said: 
 
 "Address that argument to cowards and 
 knaves. With the free and the brave it will affect 
 nothing. It may be true ; if it must, let it. Many 
 free countries have lost their liberty, and ours may 
 lose hers; but, if she shall, let it be my proudest 
 plume, not that I was the last to desert, but that 
 I never deserted her." 
 
 Here again spoke honor. Here again was the 
 lion-like courage. Here the words of the states- 
 man f arseeing, and of the man. Here once more 
 the strong, the pure, the simple and the beautiful 
 diction of the orator matchless. Here again the 
 ringing call of the silver trumpet challenging de- 
 fiance to the walls of the citadel of error and 
 wrong. 
 
 In the year 1840 occurred two incidents in 
 Lincdln's home town of Springfield, which were 
 of lasting effect upon his character and career. 
 With the happenings of these he stepped forever 
 from the local stage and into that national arena, 
 which was to mean for him fame everlasting. The 
 State Auditor of Illinois was James Shields, able, 
 impetuous, hot headed, a democrat and a political 
 opponent of the raU splitter. Lincoln wrote and 
 had printed in the Sangamon Journal, a letter 
 whose pretended author was a widow. Therein 
 she bewailed hard times and democratic rule. 
 
16 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 And therein directed keen and satirical allusions 
 to Shields. This politician who boasted with his 
 other qualities a very sensitive disposition, raged 
 through the town to discover the author. There- 
 upon another letter appeared from the widow of- 
 fering to assuage Mr. Shields by marrying him. 
 These productions were the talk of that section 
 of the State. Shields demanded of the editor the 
 name of the author. Lincoln sent word that he 
 was responsible. Shields promptly challenged to 
 a duel, the challenge was accepted and the tall 
 rail splitter chose as weapons, "Cavalry broad- 
 swords of the largest size." Needless to say the 
 duel never came off. Shields left uncontested 
 such a field with such an opponent with such a 
 weapon in hands and arms that had for years 
 swung the axe and the maul in the wilderness. 
 Lincoln explained to him that the letters were 
 intended as political, and not personal. And the 
 incident closed. But the man of a nation's life 
 had learned a lesson he never forgot. With char- 
 acteristic modesty and frankness he owned the 
 mistake. Of useless personal bickering and con- 
 tention and quarrel he afterwards said: 
 
 "Quarrel not at all. No man resolved to make 
 the most of himself can spare the time for per- 
 sonal contention. Still less can he afford to take 
 all the consequences, including the vitiating of his 
 temper and the loss of self control. Yield larger 
 
ABRAHAM LINCOLN lY 
 
 things to which you can show no more than equal 
 right; and yield lesser ones though clearly your 
 own. Better give your path to a dog than be bit- 
 ten by him in contesting for the right. Even 
 killing the dog would not cure the bite." 
 
 The other incident was his marriage to Miss 
 Todd, which took place on the 4th day of Novem- 
 ber, 1840, and- it gave to him a wife to whom he 
 was devoted from that day to the end of his 
 earthly journey. It is of interest to note here an 
 extract from one of his letters in which he says 
 that their living expenses were then "only four 
 dollars a week for board and lodging." 
 
 Here again shines the utter simplicity and hon- 
 esty of this man's life. Content with his help- 
 mate to begin where they could. Content that 
 their income should never be outlived no matter 
 how meagre, no matter how small, no matter 
 what sacrifice to keep within its limit. 
 
 And now the .Republic was to begin to know 
 what manner of man this was. The next period 
 of Lincoln's life was crowded to the brim. In the 
 victorious Harrison Log Cabin and Hard Cider 
 campaign of 1840 he took the National stump for 
 his party. 
 
 The Thirtieth Congress saw him representing 
 his old Sangamon district already made famous 
 by Douglass and Baker. His one speech there 
 reviewing the Mexican War and attacking the 
 
la ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 administration of Polk was by common consent a 
 masterpiece. High praise indeed. For in that 
 Congress in the Senate were Douglass and Davis 
 and Benton and Calhoun and Dix and Cass and 
 Webster; and in the house were Robert C. Win- 
 throp, that knight errant with flashing blade 
 from the old Conmionwealth of Massachusetts, 
 Andrew Johnson and John G. Palfrey and Caleb 
 B. Smith and ex-President John Quincy Adams, 
 while from the south had come Robert Toombs 
 and Howell Cobb and Alexander H. Stevens. 
 Mark the tribute of Stevens to this then unknown 
 one of the West : 
 
 "He always attracted and riveted the attention 
 of the House when he spoke. His manner of 
 speech, as well as thought, was original. He had 
 no model. He was a man of strong convictions 
 and what Carlisle would have called an earnest 
 man. He abounded in aneddote. He illustrated 
 everything he was talking about vidth an anec- 
 dote, always exceedingly apt and pointed; and 
 socially he always kept his company in a roar of 
 laughter." 
 
 Close upon this came "The Old Rough and 
 Ready" campaign resulting in the election of 
 General Taylor and remarkable for its showing 
 of how political parties were disintegrating and 
 new lines slowly but surely forming for the great 
 struggle that was in the air. With the Whigs 
 
ABRAHAM LINCOLN 19 
 
 were joined the Barn Burners, the Native Ameri- 
 cans, Tyler's men, office-seeking Loco Focos, 
 and, as Lincoln so characteristically put it, "all 
 the odds and ends and the Lord knows what." 
 
 Meantime in Buffalo was born that party 
 whose battle cry Was "Free SoU, Free Labor and 
 Free Speech;" they nominated Martin Van 
 Buren and the Democracy nominated Lewis 
 Cass. William H. Seward in supporting Taylor 
 said, "Freedom and Slavery are two antagonistic 
 elements of society in America." 
 
 Lincoln said, "I am a northern man, or rather a 
 western Free State man, with a constituency I 
 believe to be, and with personal feeling I know to 
 be against the extension of Slavery." And so the 
 storm gathered and discussion and many tongued 
 rumor foreran. And Texas and Kansas and Ne- 
 braska were dealt with. And the line was drawn. 
 East and West it ran. And across it and back 
 and across again went the man whose color was 
 black; whose status was now slave and now free 
 and whom then the Supreme Court of the United 
 States named and defined as human chattel. 
 
 On the 8th day of May, 1854, was finally 
 passed through Congress the bill of Stephen A. 
 Douglass, Senator from IlUnois, organizing the 
 two territories of Kansas and Nebraska and leav- 
 ing the question of Slavery to their settlers. 
 There was a boom of artillery on Capitol HUl in 
 
20 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 Washington. And a burst of answering flame 
 from the whole North. Hence arose the "Squat- 
 ter Sovereignty" cry of Douglass and his sup- 
 porters. And the answering shout of defiance of 
 "Popular Sovereignty" of all who opposed. Into 
 the debatable territory rushed settlers from the 
 North and South with arms in their hands. And 
 here the first blood of the struggle was shed. 
 Douglass came home to Illinois astounded at the 
 burst of wrath that was upon him. In Chicago 
 where he first essayed he was not permitted to 
 speak, but in Springfield in October came the 
 great State Fair. And there he declared he 
 would speak and would be heard. And there 
 Lincoln was chosen to reply. Never was the 
 Senator from Illinois more subtle, more crafty, 
 more filled with guile of poKtical expedient than 
 on that historic day and in that historic speech. 
 And never was such craft and such guile so an- 
 swered, so revealed, so stripped of every shred 
 of the garment of its hypocrisy, so crushed by the 
 power of logic, so overwhelmed by tremendous 
 array of fact and argument, so stimg to its death 
 by the merciless steel of truth and so rent and 
 torn and dismembered by the aroused lion that 
 was upon it, as in the masterful speech of Abra- 
 ham Lincoln in answer. In one trenchant, cut- 
 ting and terrible sentence that was never there- 
 
ABRAHAM LINCOLN 21 
 
 after to go out from the memory of men, he de- 
 stroyed the speech of Douglass. 
 
 "I admit that the emigrant to Kansas and Ne- 
 braska is competent to govern himself; but I 
 deny his right to govern any other person with- 
 out that person's consent." 
 
 But one thing could come from such a speech 
 and such an answer in such a country and in such 
 an era of its history. And that came quickly. In 
 Bloomington, Illinois, May 29th, 1856, was or- 
 ganized a party in that State, whose corner stone 
 Lincoln was appealed to for and which took the 
 one he gave, when he said : 
 
 "Let us in building our new party make our 
 corner stone the Declaration of Independence; 
 let us buUd on this rock and the gates of Hell 
 shall not prevail against us." 
 
 They called its name Republican, and dedi- 
 cated it for freedom. Its first Presidential nomi- 
 nee, Freemont, the Pathfinder, was defeated. 
 Then came the canvass for the United States 
 Senatorship of Illinois. And those wonderful 
 debates between Lincoln and Douglass, which for 
 surpassing power and masterful logic and pathos 
 and the education of a whole people in those po- 
 litical principles which are founded deep in the 
 immutable and everlasting laws of the righteous- 
 ness of God, have never been equalled since the 
 world began. The times were ripe, the men were 
 
22 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 ready, and the eyes of the world were beginning 
 to turn toward that stage whereon the great 
 drama was to be played. Nothing was lacking 
 to make the occasion great and in nothing did it 
 lack of greatness. If Lincoln's career had ended 
 with the Senatorial election in that State, which 
 defeated him, none the less would he have come 
 out of these debates with a fame not soon to 
 vanish from the minds of men. But it was not 
 so ordained. Fate bore on until he was known as 
 a candidate for the nomination by the Republican 
 party for the Presidency of the United States. 
 Early in 1860 Lincoln was invited to speak in 
 New York at Cooper Union. His friends dread- 
 ed the test. How would the back- woodsman fare 
 with an eastern audience of culture, of thought, 
 of brains, and of the best that the civilization of 
 that day could afford? But out of it came Lin- 
 coln splendidly triumphant. Disdaining, as 
 usual, any of the tricks of oratory, in a speech 
 simple, yet scholarly and skillfully formed, with 
 fresh and vigorous illustration drawn direct from 
 that Nature with which for so many years he had 
 communed, he appealed direct to the human heart 
 of the East and found the same quick and ready 
 response as from the human heart of the West. 
 In one of the strongholds itself of the refinement 
 of the seaboard he had won a famous victory. 
 And this was the way he closed that speech: 
 
ABRAHAM LINCOLN, 23 
 
 "Neither let us be slandered from our duty by 
 false accusations against us, nor frightened from 
 it by menaces of destruction to the government. 
 Let us have faith that right makes might, and in 
 that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty 
 as we understand it." 
 
 Once more the lifting of the trumpet against 
 the walls of wrong. Once more the clear and 
 ringing blast of defiance. Once more the cour- 
 age. And, now, too, we have the outward mani- 
 festation of the characteristic of the man so 
 wonderful among all the things that went to his 
 make up; that far seeing^ that mystic, that 
 prophetic vision which from this period of his 
 career to the very end so filled his every thought 
 and every speech and every utterance. Until his 
 countrymen came to look upon him with a rever- 
 ence due the prophet and seer. And here too was 
 another of the master springs of his character. 
 Faith in God, faith in humanity, faith in the right 
 that having done all, stands. 
 
 And so it came that on that June day by the 
 free rolling waters of Michigan this man was 
 bidden by his party to stand for the Presidency 
 of the Union. 
 
 There amid the booming of batteries of can- 
 non the son of Thomas Lincoln, the back-woods- 
 man, "stepped out upon the mighty stage on 
 
24 [ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 which was to be enacted one of the most tremen- 
 dous tragedies the world has ever seen." 
 
 Down in Springfield town he quietly had the 
 news and then went to his home saying: "there 
 is a little woman on Eighth street who would like 
 to hear about this." 
 
 Much of the time of this address has been de- 
 voted to the days that builded the character of 
 Lincoln, because in these days it has seemed to 
 your speaker were the well springs themselves 
 from which we might this evening draw those 
 many urns of inspiration. 
 
 The dreadful years that were now upon this 
 man and which were to bow that tall, ungainly 
 form; and seam that sorrowing face with those 
 far away and pitying eyes, with the woe and 
 terror and death struggle of a nation, were years 
 indeed of his rich fruition. And yet it was but 
 the ripening and full shaping of that which was 
 already upon the branch when his first presiden- 
 tial term began. Nor is there any need to dwell 
 long before an American audience upon the ex- 
 ceeding bitterness of those dark and bloody and 
 dreadful times. The central figure of it all had 
 said good-bye forever to his friends in the Illinois 
 town that had known so much of his poverty and 
 his distress. They should never see him alive 
 again. Nor ever again indeed, his face or form, 
 until shrouded there in the nation's woe and ready 
 
ABRAHAM LINCOLN 25 
 
 for the sepulchre. On the steps at the Capitol in 
 Washington he made to his countrymen and to 
 the world that exquisite, that pathetic, that heart 
 stirring plea for the Union of the land he loved. 
 And again he wrote his own superb character in 
 these words, to die no more: 
 
 "I am loth to close. We are not enemies, but 
 friends. We must not be enemies. Though pas- 
 sion 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," 
 
 The first inaugural address was ended. Lin- 
 coln turned to the man standing by his side, who 
 had held his hat through that magnificent plea 
 and his eyes met the eyes and his hand grasped 
 the hand of Stephen A. Douglass, the little giant 
 of Illinois. At last at one with his great poUtical 
 rival, this man, himself little less wonderful than 
 Lincoln, turned his face to the West and 
 preached with all his fire and fervor and splendid 
 magnetism the gospel of the Union that must and 
 should be preserved. It was the last up-blaze of 
 a brilliant torch, for, in June the summons came 
 and Douglass went to his long sleep. 
 
 And what faced that other there at Washing- 
 
26 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 ton? The Treasury looted. The Navy scattered. 
 The army small and disorganized. Officers in 
 both branches of thp service violating their oaths 
 and swearing allegiance to the South; States in 
 secession and more going. Senators and Repre- 
 sentatives abandoning the Capitol and hurrying 
 to the forming of a new government which should 
 tear stars from the flag and take out from among 
 its stripes. The South united and some of the 
 North divided. Washington defenceless and 
 threatened. Then came the shot at Sumter. The 
 flames of it burst across the sky and the hounds 
 of war were slipped at last from their leash. 
 
 Out there in far Wisconsin men who had 
 borne the Wide Awake torch that night took the 
 musket of the Iron brigade with their war eagle. 
 Old Abe, and faced to the front ; and with them 
 sprang from every village and city and hamlet a 
 host of armed men to see that the Union of 
 Webster and the fathers be kept forever one and 
 indissoluble. And Lincoln sent the call. And 
 how the leaders rose! In Indiana, Morton; in 
 Ohio, Dennison; in Pennsylvania, Curtin; in 
 New York, Morgan; in Connecticut, Bucking- 
 ham; in Massachusetts, Andrews; through all the 
 north land men set their faces toward their leader 
 with another and a new song. "We are coming 
 Father Abraham, 300,000 strong." 
 
 Dreadful as an army with banners they 
 
ABRAHAM LINCOLN 27 
 
 streamed to him and for four such years as the 
 world had never looked upon their lives went out 
 in prison pen, in Southern swamp, and on far 
 away battlefield, till the whole land became a 
 sepulchre of brave men. Down there in the 
 peninsular with McClellan, up here on the banks 
 of the Potomac at Antietam; now along the death 
 strewn sides of Fredericksburg; now in the West 
 at Shiloh and Vicksburg; out there with the 
 hearts of oak of Farragut in the Bay of Mobile 
 or passing the hell of Forts Jackson and St. 
 Philip; now with Thomas, the magnificent, at 
 Nashville; or with Rosencranz at dreadful Chick- 
 amauga, until when it seemed the Nation could 
 bear no more came the death grapple over the 
 slopes and hills of Gettysburg; the plunge with 
 Grant into the burning fires and tangle of the 
 Wilderness; the desperate throttle began at the 
 bloody angle of Spottsylvania; Sheridan scourg- 
 ing the Shenandoah, a very god of war; Sherman 
 loosed from all the world and swinging down 
 from Atlanta to the sea; and then Cold Harbor 
 and Petersburg and the last stand of the tattered 
 ranks of gray, those fighters of the lost cause, 
 whose splendid courage has always challenged 
 the admiration of the army of the blue ; and then 
 Appomattox and the famous appletree. And 
 what of Lincoln? What of that man upon whom 
 all this had been laid? Ah, the infinite sorrow and 
 
28 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 patience and tenderness and pathos of him who 
 bore our griefs. No soldier boy of the Union, 
 wearied to his sleep on post that would not be 
 denied, but could look to Father Abraham, amid 
 all the anguish of those days and months and 
 years, and pray for the mercy that was sure to 
 come. 
 
 "We have had blood enough," he said, "the 
 land is fiUed with it; you shall not shoot one of 
 my boys." 
 
 And when the end of it all came, what, again, 
 of Lincoln? What of him upon whom the whole 
 world had looked for those years? Down there 
 in the smoking ruins of the rebel Capitol he 
 walked alone with his boy. And upon his skirts 
 pressed, and at his feet kneeled down the dusky 
 people he had freed. 
 
 And now what for him was there to be? Rest 
 and peace? Yea, rest and peace that passeth un- 
 derstanding. For scarce had he turned to his 
 countrymen with these immortal words upon his 
 lips of that second and last inaugural, "With 
 malice towards none and with charity towards 
 all," than the assassin's bullet did its work. And 
 Lincoln was dead. After service so valiant and 
 true on many a fierce and rugged field this great 
 brand Excalibur at last had come at nightfall to 
 the shores of that boundless and eternal sea. And 
 there strongly wheeled it was and thrown. 
 
ABRAHAM LINCOLN 29 
 
 "The great brand made lightnings in the splen- 
 dor of the moon, 
 And flashing round and round, and whirl'd in an 
 
 arch. 
 Shot like a streamer of the northern morn. 
 Seen where the moving isles of winter shock 
 By night, with noises of the northern sea; 
 So flashed and fell the brand Excalibur: 
 But ere he dipt the surface, rose an arm 
 Clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful. 
 And caught him by the hilt, and brandish'd him 
 Three times, and drew him under in the mere." 
 
 And so passed our Lincoln into the sure keep- 
 ing of those that die no more. 
 
 "He has gone," says Stanton, "he belongs now 
 to the great of all time." 
 
 Gone but ever with us. No longer of this 
 earth, but there among the stars of America's 
 noblest and best to shine with splendor and never 
 failing* light. 
 
 And if the eye of our citizenship grow dim let 
 it here renew its youth, kindled and undazzled at 
 the very sun itself of this man's career. 
 
 In no fitter words can the study of this Ameri- 
 can be ended to-night than in that Battle Hymn 
 of the Republic which was ever his favorite and 
 whose measures, stately, grand, beautiful, tender 
 
30 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 and prophetic are themselves so full of the life 
 he led and the death he died : 
 
 "Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of 
 the Lord, 
 
 He is trampling out the vintage where his grapes 
 of wrath are stored, 
 
 He hath loosed the fearful lightnings of his terri- 
 ble quick sword, 
 
 His truth is marching on. 
 
 I have seen him in the watch-fires of a hundred 
 
 circling camps. 
 They have builded him an altar by the evening 
 
 dews and damps, 
 I have read his righteous sentence by the dim and 
 
 flaring lamps, 
 His truth is marching on. 
 
 I have read a fiery gospel writ in burnished rows 
 
 of steel. 
 As ye deal with my contemners so with you my 
 
 grace shall deal. 
 Let the hero born of woman crush the serpent 
 
 with his heel. 
 Our God is marching on. 
 
 He hath sounded forth the trumpet that shall 
 never call retreat. 
 
ABRAHAM LINCOLN 31 
 
 He is sifting out the hearts of men before his 
 
 judgment seat, 
 Oh be swift my soul to answer him, be jubilant 
 
 my feet. 
 For God is marching on. 
 
 In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across 
 
 the sea, 
 With a glory in his bosom that transfigures you 
 
 and me, 
 As he died to make men holy, let us die to make 
 
 men free. 
 For God is marching on."