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THE CAREER AND CHARACTER OF 
 
 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 JOSEPH H. CHOATE. 
 
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 C, M. & St. P. Ry. Series No. 22. 
 
THE CAREER AND CHARACTER 
 
 OF 
 
 ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 
 
 AN ADDRESS 
 
 Delivered by Joseph K. Choate, Ambassador to Great Britain, 
 
 at the Philosophical Institution of Edinburgh, 
 
 November 13, 1900. 
 
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 ; 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." 
 
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THE CAREER AND CHARACTER 
 OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 
 
 "When you asked me to deliver the inaugural address on 
 this occasion, I recognized that I owed this compliment to the 
 fact that I was the official representative of America — and in 
 selecting a subject I ventured to think that I might interest you 
 for an hour in a brief study in popular government, as illustrated 
 by the life of the most American of all Americans. I, therefore, 
 offer no apology for asking your attention to Abraham Lincoln 
 — to his unique character and the parts he bore in two important 
 achievements of modern history — the preservation of the integ- 
 rity of the American Union and the emancipation of the colored 
 race. 
 
 " During his brief term of power he was probably the object 
 of more abuse, vilification and ridicule than any other man in 
 the world, but when he fell by the hand of an assassin, at the 
 very moment of his stupendous victory, all the nations of the 
 earth vied with one another in paying homage to his character, 
 and the thirty-five years that have since elapsed have established 
 his place in history as one of the great benefactors, not of his 
 own country alone, but of the human race. 
 
 "One of many noble utterances upon the occasion of his 
 death was that in which Punch made its magnanimous recanta- 
 tion of the spirit with which it had pursued him : 
 
 Beside this corpse that bears for winding, sheet 
 The Stars and Stripes he lived to rear anew, 
 
 Between the mourners at his head and feet, 
 Say, scurrile jester, is there room for you? 
 
Yes, he had lived to shame me from my sneer, 
 To lame my pencil, and confute my pen — 
 
 To make me own this hind — of Princes peer, 
 This railsplitter — a true-born king of men. 
 
 " Fiction can furnish no match for the romance of his life, 
 and biography will be searched in vain for such startling vicis- 
 situdes of fortune, so great power and glory won out of such 
 humble beginnings and adverse circumstances. 
 
 ''Doubtless, you are all familiar with the salient points of 
 his extraordinary career. In the zenith of his fame he was the 
 wise, patient, courageous, successful ruler of men, exercising 
 more power than any monarch of his time, not for himself but 
 for the good of the people who had placed it in his hands. 
 Commander in chief of a vast military power, which waged 
 with ultimate success the greatest war of the century ; the tri- 
 umphant champion of popular government, the deliverer of 
 4,000,000 of his fellow-men from bondage; honored by man- 
 kind as statesman, President, and liberator. 
 
 " Let us glance now at the first half of the brief life of which 
 this was the glorious and happy consummation. Nothing could 
 be more squalid and miserable than the home in which Abraham 
 Lincoln was born — a one-room cabin without floor or window, 
 in what was then the wilderness of Kentucky, in the heart of 
 that frontier life which swiftly moved westward from the Alle- 
 ghanies to the Mississippi, always in advance of schools and 
 churches, of books and money, of railroads and newspapers, of 
 all things which are generally regarded as the comforts and even 
 necessaries of life. His father, ignorant, needy, and thriftless,, 
 together for himself and his family, was ever seeking, without 
 success, to better his unhappy condition by moving on from 
 one such scene of dreary desolation to another. The rude 
 society which surrounded them was not much better. The 
 struggle for existence was hard, and absorbed all their energies. 
 They were fighting the forest, the wild beast, and the retreating 
 savage. From the time when he could hardly handle tools until 
 he attained his majority, Lincoln's life was that of a simple farm 
 laborer, poorly clad, housed, and fed, at work either on his 
 
father's wretched farm or hired out to the neighboring farmers. 
 But in spite, or, perhaps, by means of this rude environ- 
 ment, he grew to be a stalwart giant, reaching six feet four at 
 nineteen, and fabulous stories are told of his feats of strength. 
 With the growth of this mighty frame began that strange educa- 
 tion which in his ripening years was to qualify him for the great 
 destiny that awaited him, and the development of those mental 
 faculties and moral endowments which, by the time he reached 
 middle life, were to make him the sagacious, patient, and tri- 
 umphant leader of a great Nation in the crisis of its fate. His 
 whole schooling, obtained during such odd times as could be 
 spared from grinding labor, did not amount in all to as much as 
 one year, and the quality of the teaching was of the lowest pos- 
 sible grade, including only the elements of reading, writing and 
 ciphering. But out of these simple elements, when rightly used 
 by the right man, education is achieved ; and Lincoln knew 
 how to use them. As so often happens, he seemed to take 
 warning from his father's unfortunate example. Untiring indus- 
 try, an insatiable thirst for knowledge, and an ever-growing 
 desire to rise above his surroundings, were early manifestations 
 of his character. 
 
 " Books were almost unknown in that community, but the 
 Bible was in every house, and somehow or other ' The Pilgrim's 
 Progress,' '^sop's Fables,' a history of the United States, and 
 a life of Washington fell into his hands. He trudged on foot 
 many miles through the wilderness to borrow an English gram- 
 mar, and is said to have devoured greedily the contents of the 
 statutes of Indiana that fell in his way. These few volumes he 
 read and re-read— and his power of assimilation* was great. To 
 be shut in with a few books, and to master them thoroughly, 
 sometimes does more for the development of the mind and 
 character than freedom to range at large in a cursory and- indis- 
 criminate way through wide domains of literature. This youth's 
 mind, at any rate, was thoroughly saturated with Biblical knowl- 
 edge and Biblical language, which, in after life, he used with 
 great readiness and effect. But it was the constant use of the 
 little knowledge which he had, that developed and exercised his 
 
mental powers. After the hard day's work was done, while 
 others slept, he toiled on, always reading or writing. From an 
 early age he did his own thinking, and made up his own mind 
 — invaluable traits in the future President. Paper was such a 
 scarce commodity that, by the evening firelight, he would write 
 and cipher on the back of a wooden shovel, and then shave it 
 off to make room for more. By and by, as he approached man- 
 hood, he began speaking in the rude gatherings of the neighbor- 
 hood, and so laid the foundation of that art of persuading his 
 fellow-men, which was one rich result of his education, and one 
 great secret of his subsequent success. 
 
 ''Accustomed as we are in these days of steam and tele- 
 graphs to have every intelligent boy survey the whole world each 
 morning before breakfast, and inform himself as to what is go- 
 ing on in every nation, it is hardly possible to conceive how be- 
 nighted and isolated was the condition of the community at 
 Pigeon Creek, in Indiana, of which the family of Lincoln's 
 father formed a part, or how eagerly an ambitious and high- 
 spirited boy such as he must have yearned to escape. The first 
 glimpse that he ever got of any world beyond the narrow con- 
 fines of his home was" in 1828, at the age of nineteen, when a 
 neighbor employed him to accompany his son down the river to 
 New Orleans to dispose of a flatboat of produce, a commission 
 which he discharged with great success. 
 
 "Shortly after his return from this first excursion into the 
 outer world, his father, tired of failure in Indiana, packed his 
 family and all his worldly goods into a single wagon drawn by 
 two yoke of oxen, and after a fourteen days' tramp through the 
 wilderness, pitched his camp once more in Illinois. Here Abra- 
 ham, having come of age and being now his own master, ren- 
 dered the last service of his minority by plowing the fifteen acre 
 lot and splitting from the tall walnut trees of the primeval forest 
 enough rails to surround the little clearing with a fence. Such 
 was the meagre outfit of this corning leader of men, at the age 
 when the future British Prime Minister or statesman emerges 
 from the university as a double first or senior wrangler, with 
 every advantage that high training with broad culture and asso- 
 
ciation with the wisest and the best of men and women can 
 give, and enters upon some form of public service on the road 
 to usefulness and honor, the university course being only the 
 first stage of the public training. So Lincoln, at twenty-one, 
 had just begun his preparation for the public life to which he 
 soon began to aspire. For some years he must continue to earn 
 his daily bread by the sweat of his brow, having absolutely no 
 means, no home, no friend to consult. More farm work as a 
 hired hand, a clerkship in a village store, the running of a mill, 
 another trip to New Orleans on a flatboat of his own contriving, 
 a pilot's berth on the river, these were the means by which he 
 subsisted until, in the summer of 1832, when he was twenty- 
 three years of age, an event occurred which gave him public 
 recognition. 
 
 "The Black Hawk war broke out, and the Governor of Illi- 
 nois, calling for volunteers to repel the band of savages whose 
 leader bore that name, Lincoln enlisted and was elected captain 
 of his comrades, among whom he had already established his 
 supremacy by signal feats of strength and more than one suc- 
 cessful single combat. During the brief hostilities he was en- 
 gaged in no battle and won no military glory, but his local 
 leadership was established. The same year he offered himself 
 as a candidate for the Legislature of Illinois, but failed at the 
 polls. Yet his vast popularity with those who knew him was 
 manifest. The district consisted of several counties, but the 
 unanimous vote of the people of his own county was for Lincoln. 
 Another unsuccessful attempt at storekecping was followed by 
 better luck at surveying, until his horse and instruments were 
 levied upon under execution for the debts of his business venture. 
 
 "I have thus gone into detail in sketching his early years, 
 because upon these strange foundations the structure of his great 
 fame and service was built. In the place of a school and uni- 
 versity training fortune substituted these trials, hardships and 
 struggles as a preparation for the great work which he had to do. 
 It turned out to be exactly what the emergency required. Ten 
 vears instead at the uublic school and the university certainly 
 ^ever coma nave fitted tnis man for the unique work which was 
 
8 
 
 to be thrown upon him. Some other Moses would have had to 
 lead us to our Jordan, to the sight of our promised land of 
 liberty. 
 
 "At the age of twenty-five he became a member of the Leg- 
 islature of Illinois, and so continued for eight years, and, in the 
 meantime, qualified himself by reading such law books as he 
 could borrow at random — for he was too poor to buy any — to 
 be called to the bar. For his second quarter of a century — 
 during which a single term in Congress introduced him into the 
 arena of national questions — he gave himself up to law and pol- 
 itics. In spite of his soaring ambition, his two years in Con- 
 gress gave him no premonition of the great destiny that awaited 
 him, and at its close, in 1849, we find him an unsuccessful appli- 
 cant to the President for appointment as Commissioner of the 
 General Land Office, a purely administrative bureau, a fortunate 
 escape for himself and his country. Year by year his knowledge 
 and power, his experience and reputation extended, and his men- 
 tal faculties seemed to grow by what they fed on. His power 
 of persuasion, which had always been marked, was developed to 
 an extraordinary degree, now that he became engaged in con- 
 genial questions and subjects. Little by little he rose to prom- 
 inence at the bar, and became the most effective public speaker 
 in the west. Not that he possessed any of the graces of the 
 orator, but his logic was invincible, and his clearness and force 
 of statement impressed upon his hearers the convictions of his 
 honest mind, while his broad sympathies and sparkling and 
 genial humor made him a universal favorite as far and as fast as 
 his acquaintance extended. 
 
 "These twenty years that elapsed from the time of his estab- 
 lishment as a lawyer and legislator in Springfield, the new capi- 
 tal of Illinois, furnished a fitting theater for the development 
 and display of his great faculties, and with his new and enlarged 
 opportunities he obviously grew in mental stature in this second 
 period of his career, as if to compensate for the absolute lack of 
 advantages under which he had suffered in youth. As his powers 
 enlarged, his reputation extended, for he was always before the 
 people, felt a warm sympathy with all that concerned them, took 
 
a zealous part in the discussion of every public question, and 
 made his personal influence ever more widely and deeply felt. 
 
 "My professional brethren will naturally ask me, how could 
 this rough backwoodsman, whose youth had been spent in the 
 forest or on the farm and flatboat, without culture and training, 
 education or study, by the random reading, on the wing, of a 
 few miscellaneous law books, become a learned and accom- 
 plished lawyer? Well, he never did. He never would have 
 earned his salt as a writer for The Signet \ nor have won a place 
 as advocate in the Court of Session, where the technique of the 
 profession has reached its highest perfection, and centuries of 
 learning and precedent are involved in the equipment of a law- 
 yer. Dr. Holmes, when asked by an anxious young mother, 
 < When should the education of a child begin ? ' replied, ' Madam, 
 at least two centuries before it is born/ and so I am sure it is 
 with the Scots lawyer. 
 
 "But not so in Illinois in 1840. Between 1830 and 1880 its 
 population increased twentyfold, and when Lincoln began prac- 
 ticing law in Springfield, in 1837, life in Illinois was very crude 
 and simple, and so were the courts and the administration of 
 justice. Books and libraries were scarce. But the people loved 
 justice, upheld the law, and followed the courts, and soon found 
 their favorites among the advocates. The fundamental princi- 
 ples of the common law, as set forth by Blackstone and Chitty, 
 were not so difficult to acquire, and brains, common sense, force 
 of character, tenacity of purpose, ready wit and power of speech 
 did the rest, and supplied all the deficiencies of learning. 
 
 "The lawsuits of those days were extremely simple, and the 
 principles of natural justice were mainly relied on to dispose- of 
 them at the bar and on the bench, without resort to technical 
 learning. Railroads, corporations absorbing the chief business 
 of the community, combined and inherited wealth, with all the 
 subtle and intricate questions they breed, had not yet come in 
 — and so the professional agents and the equipment which they 
 require were not needed. But there were many highly educated 
 and powerful men at the bar of Illinois, even in those early days, 
 whom the spirit of enterprise had carried there in search of fame 
 
10 
 
 and fortune. It was by constant contact and conflict with these 
 that Lincoln acquired professional strength and skill. Every 
 community and every age creates its own bar, entirely adequate 
 for its present uses and necessities. So in Illinois, as the popu- 
 lation and wealth of the state kept on doubling and quadru- 
 pling, its bar represented a growing abundance of learning and 
 science and technical skill. The early practitioners grew with 
 its growth and mastered the requisite knowledge. Chicago soon 
 grew to be one of the largest and richest and certainly the most 
 intensely active city on the continent, and if any of my profes- 
 sional friends here had gone there in Lincoln's later years to try 
 or argue a cause, or transact other business, with any idea that 
 Edinburgh or London had a monopoly of legal learning, science, 
 or subtlety, they would certainly have found their mistake. 
 
 "In those early days in the West, every lawyer, especially 
 every court lawyer, was necessarily a politician, constantly en- 
 gaged in the public discussion of the many questions evolved 
 from the rapid development of town, county, state, and federal 
 affairs. Then and there, in this regard, public discussion sup- 
 plied the place which the universal activity of the press has 
 since monopolized, and the public speaker who, by clearness, 
 force, earnestness, and wit, could make himself felt on the ques- 
 tions of the day would readily come to the front. In the 
 absence of that immense variety of popular entertainments 
 which now feed the public taste and appetite, the people found 
 their chief amusement in frequenting the courts and public and 
 political assemblies. In either place he who impressed, enter- 
 tained, and amused them most was the hero of the hour. They 
 did not discriminate very carefully between the eloquence of the 
 forum and the eloquence of the hustings. Human nature ruled 
 in both alike, and he who was the most effective speaker in a 
 political harangue was often retained as most likely to win in a 
 cause to be tried or argued. 
 
 "And I have no doubt in this way many retainers came to 
 Lincoln. Fees, money in any form, had no charms for him ; in 
 his eager pursuit of fame he could not afford to make money. 
 He was ambitious to distinguish himself by some great service 
 
11 
 
 to mankind, and this ambition for fame and real public service 
 left no room for avarice in his composition. However much 
 he earned, he seemed to have ended every year hardly richer 
 than he began it, and yet as the years passed fees came to him 
 freely. One of $5,000 is recorded — a very large professional 
 fee at that time, even in any part of America, the paradise of 
 lawyers. I lay great stress on Lincoln's career as a lawyer — 
 much more than his biographers do — because in America a state 
 of things exists wholly different from that which prevails in 
 Great Britain. The profession of the law always has been, and 
 is to this day, the principal avenue to public life, and I am sure 
 that his training and experience in the courts had much to do 
 with the development of those forces of intellect and character 
 which he soon displayed on a broader arena. 
 
 " It was in political controversy, of course, that he acquired 
 his wide reputation, and made his deep and lasting impression 
 upon the people of what had now become the powerful state of 
 Illinois, and upon the people of the great West, to whom the 
 political power and control of the United States were already 
 surely and swiftly passing from the older Eastern States. It 
 was this reputation and this impression and the familiar knowl- 
 edge of his character which had come to them from his local 
 leadership, that happily inspired the people of the West to pre- 
 sent him as their candidate, and to press him upon the Repub- 
 lican Convention of 18G0, as the fit and necessary leader in the 
 struggle for life which was before the Nation. 
 
 '•'That struggle, as you all know, arose out of the terrible 
 question of slavery — and I must trust to your general knowl- 
 edge of the history of that question to make intelligible the 
 attitude and leadership of Lincoln as the champion of the hosts 
 cf freedom in the final contest. Negro slavery had been firmly 
 established in the Southern States from an early period of their 
 history. In 1619, the year before the Mayflower landed our 
 Pilgrim Fathers upon Plymouth Rock, a Dutch ship had dis- 
 charged a cargo of African slaves at Jamestown, in Virginia. 
 All through the Colonial period their importation had continued. 
 A few had found their way into the Northern States, but in none 
 
12 
 
 of them in sufficient numbers to constitute danger or to afford 
 a basis for political power. At the time of the adoption of the 
 Federal Constitution there is no doubt that the principal mem- 
 bers of the convention not only condemned slavery as a moral, 
 social, and political evil, but believed that by the suppression 
 of the slave trade it was in the course of gradual extinction in 
 the South, as it certainly was in the North. Washington, in his 
 will, provided for the emancipation of his own slaves, and said 
 to Jefferson that it ' was among his first wishes to see some plan 
 adopted by which slavery in this country might be abolished. ' 
 Jefferson said, referring to the institution: ' I tremble for my 
 country when I think that God is just ; that His justice cannot 
 sleep forever ' — and Franklin, Adams, Hamilton, and Patrick 
 Henry were all utterly opposed to it. But it was made the sub- 
 ject of a fatal compromise in the Federal Constitution, whereby 
 its existence was recognized in the States as a basis of repre- 
 sentation ; the prohibition of the importation of slaves was 
 postponed for twenty years, and the return of fugitive slaves 
 provided for. But no imminent danger was apprehended from 
 it till, by the invention of the cotton gin in 1792, cotton culture 
 by slave labor became at once the leading industry of the South 
 and gave a new impetus to the importation of slaves ; so that in 
 1808, when the Constitutional prohibition took effect, their 
 numbers had vastly increased. From that time forward slavery 
 became the basis of a great political power, and the Southern 
 States, under all circumstances and at every opportunity, car- 
 ried on a brave and unrelenting struggle for its maintenance and 
 extension. 
 
 "The conscience of the North was slow to rise against it, 
 though bitter controversies from time to time took place. The 
 Southern leaders threatened disunion if their demands were not 
 complied with. To save the Union, compromise after compro- 
 mise was made, but each one in the end was broken. The Mis- 
 souri Compromise, made in 1820 upon the occasion of the 
 admission of Missouri into the Union as a slave state whereby, 
 in consideration of such admission, slavery was forever excluded 
 from the Northwest Territory — was ruthlessly repealed in 1854 
 
IS 
 
 by a Congress elected in the interests of the slave power, the 
 intent being to force slavery into that vast territory which had 
 so long been dedicated to freedom. This challenge at last 
 aroused the slumbering conscience and passion of the North, 
 and led to the formation of the Republican party for the avowed 
 purpose of preventing, by Constitutional methods, the further 
 extension of slavery. 
 
 "In its first campaign, in 1856, though it failed to elect its 
 candidates, it received a surprising vote and carried many of the 
 States. No one could any longer doubt that the North had 
 made up its mind that no threats of disunion should deter it 
 from pressing its cherished purpose and performing its long neg- 
 lected duty. From the outset Lincoln was one of the most active 
 and effective leaders and speakers of the new party, and the 
 great debates between Douglas and Lincoln, in 1858, as the re- 
 spective champions of the extension and restriction of slavery, 
 attracted the attention of the whole country. Lincoln's power- 
 ful arguments carried conviction everywhere. His moral nature 
 was thoroughly aroused— his conscience was stirred to the quick. 
 Unless slavery was wrong, nothing was wrong. Was each man, 
 of whatever color, entitled to the fruits of his own labor, or 
 could one man live in idle luxury by the sweat of another's brow, 
 whose skin was darker? He was an implicit believer in that 
 principle of the Declaration of Independence, that all men are 
 vested with certain unalienable rights— the equal rights to life, 
 liberty and the pursuit of happiness. On this doctrine he staked 
 his case and carried it. We have time only for one or two sen- 
 tences in which he struck the keynote of the contest : 
 
 " 'The real issue in this country is the eternal struggle be- 
 tween those two principles— right and wrong— throughout the 
 world. They are the two principles that have stood face to 
 face from the beginning of time, and will ever continue to strug- 
 gle. The one is the common right of humanity, and the other 
 the divine right of kings. It is the same principle in whatever 
 shape it develops itself. It is the same spirit that says, "You 
 work and toil and earn bread, and I'll eat it." 
 
 " He foresaw with unerring vision that the conflict was inev- 
 
14 
 
 itable and irrepressible — that one or the other, the right or the 
 wrong, freedom or slavery, must ultimately prevail, and wholly 
 prevail, throughout the country, and this was the principle that 
 carried the war, once begun, to a finish. 
 
 " One statement of his is immortal : 
 
 "Under the operation of the policy of compromise, the 
 slavery agitation has not only not ceased, but has constantly 
 augmented. In my opinion, it will not cease until a crisis shall 
 have been reached and passed. 'A house divided against itself 
 cannot stand.' I believe this Government cannot endure per- 
 manently, half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to 
 be dissolved. I do not expect the house to fall, but I do expect 
 it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all 
 the other — either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further 
 spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the 
 belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction, or its advo- 
 cates will push it forward till it shall become alike lawful in all 
 the States, old as well as new, North as well as South. 
 
 "During the entire decade from 1850 to 18G0, the agitation 
 of the slavery question was at the boiling point, and events 
 which have become historical continually indicated the near 
 approach of the overwhelming storm. No sooner had the 
 Compromise acts of 1850 resulted in a temporary peace, which 
 everybody said must be final and perpetual, than new outbreaks 
 came. The forcible carrying away of fugitive slaves by Federal 
 troops from Boston agitated that ancient stronghold of freedom 
 to its foundations. The publication of ' Uncle Tom's Cabin/ 
 which truly exposed the frightful possibilities of the slave sys- 
 tem ; the reckless attempts by force and fraud to establish it in 
 Kansas against the will of the vast majority of the settlers ; the 
 beating of Sumner in the Senate chamber for words spoken in 
 debate ; the Dred Scott decision in the Supreme Court, which 
 made the Nation realize that the slave power had at last reached 
 the fountain of Federal justice; and, finally, the execution of 
 John Brown for his wild raid into Virginia to invite the slaves 
 to rally to the standard of freedom which he unfurled ; all these 
 events tended to illustrate and confirm Lincoln's contention that 
 
15 
 
 the Nation could not permanently continue half slave and half 
 free, but must become all one thing or all the other. When John 
 Brown lay under sentence of death, he declared that now he 
 was sure that slavery must be wiped out in blood ; but neither 
 he nor his executioners dreamed that within four years a million 
 soldiers would be marching across the country for its final extir- 
 pation to the music of the war song of the great conflict: 
 
 ' John Brown's body lies a'moldering in the grave, 
 But his soul is marching on.' 
 
 "And now, at the age of fifty-one, this child of the wilderness, 
 this farm laborer, railsplitter, flatboatman ; this surveyor, law- 
 yer, orator, statesman, and patriot, found himself elected by 
 the great party which was pledged to prevent at all hazards the 
 future extension of slavery, as the Chief Magistrate of the Re- 
 public, bound to carry out that purpose, to be the leader and 
 ruler of the Nation in its most trying hour. 
 
 "Those who believe that there is a living Providence that 
 overrules and conducts the affairs of nations, find in the eleva- 
 tion of this plain man to this extraordinary fortune and to this 
 great duty which he so fitly discharged a signal vindication of 
 their faith. Perhaps to this philosophical institution the judg- 
 ment of our philosopher Emerson will commend itself as a just 
 estimate of Lincoln's historical place : 
 
 " 'His occupying the chair of state was a triumph of the 
 good sense of mankind and of the public conscience. He grew 
 according to the need ; his mind mastered the problem of the 
 day, and as the problem grew, so did his comprehension of it. 
 In the war there was no place for holiday magistrate nor fair- 
 weather sailor. The new pilot was hurried to the helm in a tor- 
 nado. In four years — four years of battle days — his endurance, 
 his fertility of resource, his magnanimity, were sorely tried and 
 never found wJfcting. There, by his courage, his justice, his 
 even temper, his fertile counsel, his humanity, he stood a heroic 
 figure in the center of a heroic epoch. He is the true history 
 of the American people in his time, the true representative of 
 this continent— father of his country, the pulse of twenty mil- 
 
16 
 
 lions throbbing in his heart, the thought of their mind articu- 
 lated in his tongue.' 
 
 " He was born great, as distinguished from those who achieve 
 greatness or have it thrust upon them, and his inherent capacity, 
 mental, moral, and physical, having been recognized by the 
 educated intelligence of a free people, they happily chose him 
 for their ruler in a day of deadly peril. 
 
 "It is now forty years since I first saw and heard Abraham 
 Lincoln, but the impression which he left on my mind is inef- 
 faceable. After his great successes in the West he came to New 
 York to make a political address. He appeared in every sense 
 of the word like one of the plain people among whom he loved 
 to be counted. At first sight there was nothing impressive or im- 
 posing about him — except that his great stature singled him out 
 from the crowd ; his clothes hung awkwardly on his giant frame, 
 his face was of a dark pallor, without the slightest tinge of color; 
 his seamed and rugged features bore the furrows of hardship 
 and struggle ; his deep-set eyes looked sad and anxious ; his 
 countenance in repose gave little evidence of that brain power 
 which had raised him from the lowest to the highest station 
 among his countrymen. As he talked to me before the meeting 
 he seemed ill at ease, with that sort of apprehension which a 
 young man might feel before presenting himself to a new and 
 strange audience whose critical disposition he dreaded. 
 
 "It was a great audience, including all the noted men — all 
 the learned and cultured — of his party in New York ; editors, 
 clergymen, statesmen, lawyers, merchants, critics. They were 
 all very curious to hear him. His fame as a powerful speaker 
 had preceded him, and exaggerated rumor of his wit had reached 
 the East. When Mr. Bryant presented him on the high plat- 
 form of the Cooper Institute a vast sea of eager, upturned faces 
 greeted him, full of intense curiosity to see what this rude child 
 of the people was like. He was equal to the occasion. When 
 he spoke he was transformed ; his eye kindled, his voice rang, 
 his face shone and seemed to light up the whole assembly. For 
 an hour and a half he held his audience in the hollow of his 
 hand. His style of speech and manner of delivery were severely 
 
17 
 
 simple. What Lowell called 'the grand simplicities of the 
 Bible,' with which he was so familiar, were reflected in his dis- 
 course. With no attempt at ornament or rhetoric, without 
 parade or pretense, he spoke straight to the point. If any came 
 expecting the turgid eloquence or the ribaldry of the frontier 
 they must have been startled at the earnest and sincere purity 
 of his utterances. It was marvelous to see how this untutored 
 man, by mere self-discipline and the chastening of his own 
 spirit, had outgrown all meretricious arts, and found his way to 
 the grandeur and strength of absolute simplicity. 
 
 " He spoke upon the theme which he had mastered so thor- 
 oughly. He demonstrated by copious historical proofs and 
 masterly logic that the fathers who created the Constitution in 
 order to form a more perfect union, to establish justice, and to 
 secure the blessings of liberty to themselves and their posterity, 
 intended to empower the Federal Government to exclude slavery 
 from the Territories. In the kindliest spirit, he protested 
 against the avowed threat of the Southern States to destroy the 
 Union if, in order to secure freedom in those vast regions, out 
 of which future States were to be carved, a Republican Presi- 
 dent were elected. He closed with an appeal to his audience, 
 spoken with all the fire of his aroused and kindling conscience, 
 with a full outpouring of his love of justice and liberty, to main- 
 tain their political purpose on that lofty and unassailable issue 
 of right and wrong which alone could justify it, and not to be 
 intimidated from their high resolve and sacred duty by any 
 threats of destruction to the Government or of ruin to them- 
 selves. He concluded with this telling sentence, which drove 
 the whole argument home to all our hearts : 
 
 '"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.' 
 
 " That night the great hall, and the next day the whole city,. 
 
 rang with delighted applause and congratulations, and he who 
 
 had come as a stranger departed with the laurels of a great 
 
 triumph. 
 
 "Alas ! in five years from that exulting night, I saw him 
 again, for the last time, in the same city, borne in his coffin 
 
18 
 
 through its draped streets. With tears and lamentations a heart- 
 broken people accompanied him from Washington, the scene of 
 his martyrdom, to his last resting place in the young city of the 
 West, where he had worked his way to fame. 
 
 "Never was a new ruler in a more desperate plight than 
 Lincoln when he entered office on the 4th of March, 1861, four 
 months after his election, and took his oath to support the Con- 
 stitution and the Union. The intervening time had been busily 
 employed by the Southern States in carrying out their threat of 
 disunion in the event of his election. As soon as that fact was 
 ascertained, seven of them had seceded and had seized upon 
 the forts, arsenals, navy yards, and other public property of the 
 United States within their boundaries, and were making every 
 preparation for war. In the meantime, the retiring President, 
 who had been elected by the slave power, and who thought the 
 seceding States could not lawfully be coerced, had done abso- 
 lutely nothing. Lincoln found himself, by Constitution, com- 
 mander in. chief of the army and navy of the United States, 
 but with only a remnant of either at hand. Each was to be 
 created on a great scale out of the unknown resources of a 
 Nation untried in war. 
 
 "In his mild and conciliatory inaugural address, while ap- 
 pealing to the seceding States to return to their allegiance, he 
 avowed his purpose to keep the solemn oath he had taken that 
 day, to see that the laws of the Union were faithfully executed, 
 and to use the troops to recover the forts, navy yards, and other 
 property belonging to the Government. It is probable, how- 
 ever, that neither side actually realized that war was inevitable 
 and that the other was determined to fight, until the assault on 
 Fort Sumter presented the South as the aggressor, and roused 
 the North to use every possible resource to maintain the Gov- 
 ernment and the imperiled Union, and to vindicate the supremacy 
 of the flag over every inch of the territory of the United States. 
 The fact that Lincoln's first proclamation called for only 75, 000 
 troops, to serve for three months, shows how inadequate was 
 even his idea of what the future had in store. But from that 
 moment, Lincoln and his loyal supporters never faltered in their 
 
19 
 
 purpose. f hey knew they could win, that it was their duty to 
 win, and that for America the whole hope of the future depended 
 upon their winning, for now by the acts of the seceding States 
 the issue of the election — to secure or prevent the extension of 
 slavery — stood transformed into a struggle to preserve or destroy 
 the Union. 
 
 "We cannot follow this contest. You know its gigantic 
 proportions ; that it lasted four years instead of three months ; 
 that in its progress instead of 75,000 men, more than 2,000,000 
 were enrolled on the side of the Government alone ; that the 
 aggregate cost and loss to the Nation approximated to $5,000,- 
 000,000, and that no less than 300,000 brave and precious lives 
 were sacrificed on each side. History has recorded how Lin- 
 coln bore himself during those four frightful years ; that he was 
 the real President, the responsible and actual head of the Gov- 
 ernment through it all ; that he listened to ail advice, heard ail 
 parties, and then, always realizing his responsibility to God and 
 the Nation, decided every great executive question for himself. 
 His absolute honesty had become proverbial long before he was 
 President. ' Honest Abe Lincoln ' was the name by which he 
 had been known for years. His every act attested it. 
 
 "In all the grandeur of the vast power that he wielded, he 
 never ceased to be one of the 'plain people,' as he always 
 called them, never lost or impaired his perfect sympathy with 
 them, was always in perfect touch with them and open to their 
 appeals ; and here lay the very secret of his personality and of 
 his power, for the people in turn gave him their absolute confi- 
 dence. His courage, his fortitude, his patience, his hopeful- 
 ness, were sorely tried but never exhausted. 
 
 " He was true as steel to his generals, but had frequent occa- 
 sion to change them as he found them inadequate. This serious 
 and painful duty rested wholly on him, and was, perhaps, his 
 most important function as commander in chief.; but when at 
 last he recognized in General Grant the master of the situation, 
 the man who could and would bring the war to a triumphant 
 end, he gave it all over to him and upheld him with all his 
 might. Amid all tl 3 pressure and distress that the burdens of 
 
20 
 
 office brought upon him, his unfailing sense of humor saved him 
 — probably made it possible for him to live under the burden. 
 He had always been the great story teller of the West, and he 
 used and cultivated this faculty to relieve the weight of the load 
 he bore. 
 
 "It enabled him to keep the wonderful record of never hav- 
 ing lost his temper, no matter what agony he had to bear. A 
 whole night might be spent in recounting the stories of his wit, 
 humor and harmless sarcasm. But I will recall only two of his 
 sayings, both about General Grant, who always found plenty of 
 enemies and critics to urge the President to oust him from his 
 command. One, I am sure, will interest all Scotchmen. The 
 critics repeated with malicious intent the gossip that Grant 
 drank. 'What does he drink?' asked Lincoln. 'Whisky,' 
 was, of course, the answer ; doubtless you can guess the brand. 
 ' Well,' said the President, < just find out what particular kind he 
 uses and I'll send a barrel to each of my other generals.' The 
 other must be as pleasing to the British as to the American ear. 
 When pressed again on other grounds to get rid of Grant, he 
 declared, ' I can't spare that man ; he fights/ 
 
 "He was tender-hearted to a fault, and never could resist 
 the appeals of wives and mothers of soldiers who had got into 
 trouble and were under sentence of death for their offenses. 
 His secretary of war and other officials complained that they 
 never could get deserters shot. As surely as the women of the 
 culprit's family could get at him, he always gave way. Cer- 
 tainly you will all appreciate his exquisite sympathy with the 
 suffering relatives of those who had fallen in battle. His heart 
 bled with theirs. Never was there a more gentle or tender utter- 
 ance than his letter to a mother who had given all her sons to 
 her country, written at a time when the angel of death had vis- 
 ited almost every household in the land, and was already hover- 
 ing over him. 'I have been shown,' he says, ' in the file of the 
 War Department a statement that you are the mother of five 
 sons who have died gloriously on the field of battle. I feel how 
 weak and fruitless must be any words of mine which should at- 
 tempt to beguile you from your grief for a loss so overwhelm- 
 
21 
 
 ing, but I cannot refrain from tendering you the consolation 
 which may be found in the thanks of the Republic they died to 
 save. I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish 
 of your bereavement and leave you only the cherished memory 
 of the loved and the lost, and the solemn pride that must be 
 yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of free- 
 dom. ' Hardly could your illustrious sovereign, from the depths 
 of her queenly and womanly heart, have spoken words more 
 touching and tender to soothe the stricken mothers of her own 
 soldiers. 
 
 "The Emancipation Proclamation, with which Mr. Lincoln 
 delighted the country and the world on the first of January, 
 1863, will doubtless secure for him a foremost place in history 
 among the philanthropists and benefactors of the race, as it res- 
 cued from hopeless and degrading slavery so many millions of 
 his fellow beings, described in the law and existing in fact as 
 1 chattels-personal, in the hands of their owners and possessors, 
 to all intents, constructions, and purposes whatsoever.' Rarely 
 does the happy fortune come to one man to render such a serv- 
 ice to his kind — to proclaim liberty throughout the land unto all 
 the inhabitants thereof. 
 
 "Ideas rule the world, and never was there a more signal 
 instance of this triumph of an idea than here. William Lloyd 
 Garrison, who thirty years before had begun his crusade for the 
 abolition of slavery, and had lived to see this glorious and un- 
 expected consummation of the apparently hopeless cause to 
 which he had devoted his life, well described the proclamation 
 as a ' great historic event, sublime in its magnitude, momentous 
 and beneficent in its far-reaching consequences, and eminently 
 just and right alike to the oppressor and the oppressed.' 
 
 " Lincoln had been always heart and soul opposed to slavery. 
 Tradition says that on the trip of the flatboat to New Orleans 
 he formed his first and last opinion of slavery at the sight of 
 negroes chained and scourged, and that then and there the iron 
 entered into his soul. No boy could grow to manhood in those 
 days as a poor white in Kentucky and Indiana, in close contact 
 with slavery or in its neighborhood, without a growing con- 
 
22 
 
 sciousness of its blighting effects on free labor, as well as of its 
 frightful injustice and cruelty. In the Legislature of Illinois, 
 where the public sentiment was all for upholding the institution 
 and violently against every movement for its abolition or restric- 
 tion, upon the passage of resolutions to that effect he had the 
 courage, with one companion, to put on record his protest, 
 'believing that the institution of slavery is founded both in 
 injustice and bad policy. ' No great demonstration of courage, 
 you will say; but that was at a time when Garrison, for his 
 abolition utterances, had been dragged by an angry mob through 
 the streets of Boston with a rope around his body, and in the 
 very year that Lovejoy, in the same State of Illinois, was slain 
 by rioters while defending his press, from which he had printed 
 anti-slavery appeals. 
 
 "In Congress he brought in a bill for gradual abolition in 
 the District of Columbia, with compensation to the owners — 
 for until they raised treasonable hands against the life of the 
 Nation he always maintained that the property of the slave- 
 holders, into which they had come by two centuries of descent, 
 without fault on their part, ought not to be taken away from 
 them without a just compensation. He used to say that, one 
 way or another, he had voted forty-two times for the Wilmot 
 Proviso, which Mr. Wilmot, of Pennsylvania, moved as an ad- 
 dition to every bill which affected United States territory — 
 ' that neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall ever exist 
 in any part of the said territory ' — and it is evident that his 
 condemnation of the system, on moral grounds as a crime 
 against the human race, and on political grounds as a cancer 
 that was sapping the vitals of the Nation, and must master its 
 whole being or be itself extirpated, grew steadily upon him, 
 until it culminated in his great speeches in the Illinois debate. 
 
 « By the mere election of Lincoln to the Presidency the fur- 
 ther extension of slavery into the Territories was rendered for- 
 ever impossible — vox populi, vox Dei. Revolutions never go 
 backward, and when founded on a great moral sentiment stirring 
 the heart of an indignant people, their edicts are irresistible and 
 final. Had the slave power acquiesced in that election, had the 
 
2o 
 
 Southern States remained under the Constitution and within the 
 Union, and relied upon their constitutional and legal rights, 
 their favorite institution, immoral as it was, blighting and fatal 
 as it was, might have endured for another century. The great 
 party that had elected him, unalterably determined against its 
 extension, was nevertheless pledged not to interfere with its 
 continuance in the States where it already existed. Of course, 
 when new regions were forever closed against it, from its very 
 nature it must have begun to shrink and to dwindle, and proba- 
 bly gradual and compensated emancipation, which appealed 
 very strongly to the new President's sense of justice and expedi- 
 ency, would in the progress of time, by a reversion to the ideas 
 of the founders of the Republic, have found a safe outlet for 
 both masters and slaves. But whom the gods wish to destroy 
 they first make mad, and when seven States, afterward increased 
 to eleven, openly seceded from the Union ; when they declared 
 and began war upon the Nation, and challenged its mighty 
 power to the desperate and protracted struggle for its life, and 
 for the maintenance of its authority as a Nation over its terri- 
 tory, they gave to Lincoln and to freedom the sublime oppor- 
 tunity of history. 
 
 "In his first inaugural address, when as yet not a drop of 
 precious blood had been shed, while he held out to them the 
 olive branch in the one hand, in the other he presented the 
 guarantees of the Constitution, and after reciting the emphatic 
 resolution of the convention that nominated him, that the 
 maintenance inviolate of the < rights of the States, and especially 
 the right of each State to order and control its own domestic 
 institutions according to its own judgment exclusively, is essen- 
 tial to that balance of power on which the perfection and endur- 
 ance of our political fabric depend/ he reiterated this sentiment 
 and declared with no mental reservation, for < all the protection 
 which, consistently with the Constitution and the laws can be 
 given to all the States when lawfully demanded for whatever 
 cause — as cheerfully to one section as to another.' 
 
 "When, however, these magnanimous overtures for peace 
 and reunion were rejected, when the seceding States defied the 
 
24 
 
 Constitution and every clause and principle of it, when they 
 persisted in staying out of the Union from which they had 
 seceded, and proceeded to carve out of its territory a new and 
 hostile empire based on slavery, when they flew at the throat of 
 the Nation and plunged it into the bloodiest war of the nine- 
 teenth century, the tables were turned and the belief gradually 
 came to the mind of the President that if the rebellion was not 
 soon subdued by force of arms, if the war must be fought out 
 to the bitter end, then to reach that end the salvation of the 
 Nation itself might require the destruction of slavery wherever 
 it existed ; that if the war was to continue on one side for dis- 
 union, for no other purpose than to preserve slavery, it must 
 continue on the other side for the Union, to destroy slavery. 
 
 "As he said, l events control me; I cannot control events/ 
 and as the dreadful war progressed and became more deadly 
 and dangerous, the unalterable conviction was forced upon him 
 that, in order that the frightful sacrifice of life and treasure on 
 both sides might not be all in vain, it had become his duty as 
 commander in chief of the army, as a necessary war measure, 
 to strike a blow at the rebellion which, all others failing, would 
 inevitably lead to its annihilation, by annihilating the very 
 thing for which it was contending. His own words are the 
 best: 
 
 11 'I understand that my oath to preserve the Constitution 
 to the best of my ability imposed upon me the duty of preserv- 
 ing by every indispensable means that Government, that Nation, 
 of which that Constitution was the organic law. Was it possi- 
 ble to lose the Nation and yet preserve the Constitution? By 
 general law, life and limb must be protected; yet often a limb 
 must be amputated to save a life, but a life is never wisely 
 given to save a limb. I felt that measures otherwise unconsti- 
 tutional might become lawful by becoming . indispensable to the 
 preservation of the Constitution through the preservation of the 
 Nation. Right or wrong, I assumed this ground, and now avow 
 it. I could not feel that, to the best of my ability, I had ever 
 tried to preserve the Constitution if, to save slavery or any 
 
25 
 
 minor matter, I should permit the wreck of Government, coun- 
 try and Constitution all together. 
 
 " And so, at last, when in his judgment, the indispensable 
 necessity had come, he struck the fatal blow, and signed the 
 proclamation which has made his name immortal. By it, the 
 President, as commander in chief in time of actual armed 
 rebellion, and as a fit and necessary war measure for suppress- 
 ing the rebellion, proclaimed all persons held as slaves in the 
 States and parts of States then in rebellion to be thenceforward 
 free, and declared that the Executive, with the army and navy, 
 would recognize and maintain their freedom. 
 
 " In the other great steps of the Government, which led to 
 the triumphant prosecution of the war, he necessarily shared the 
 responsibility and the credit with the great statesmen who stayed 
 up his hands in his cabinet — with Seward, Chase, Stanton and 
 the rest, and with his generals and admirals, his soldiers and 
 sailors — but this great act was absolutely his own. The concep- 
 tion and execution were exclusively his. He laid it before his 
 cabinet as a measure on which his mind was made up and could 
 not be changed, asking them only for suggestions as to details. 
 He chose the time and the circumstances under which the eman- 
 cipation should be proclaimed and when it should take effect. 
 
 "It came not an hour too soon; but public opinion in the 
 North would not have sustained it earlier. In the first eighteen 
 months of the war its ravages had extended from the Atlantic 
 to beyond the Mississippi. Many victories in the West had 
 been balanced and paralyzed by inaction and disasters in Vir- 
 ginia, only partially redeemed by the bloody and indecisive bat- 
 tle of Antietam ; a reaction had set in from the general enthu- 
 siasm which had swept the Northern States after the assault 
 upon Fort Sumter. It could not truly be said that they had lost 
 heart, but faction was raising its head. Heard through the land 
 like the blast of a bugle, the proclamation rallied the patriotism 
 of the country to fresh sacrifices and renewed ardor. It was a 
 step that could not be revoked. It relieved the conscience of 
 the Nation from an incubus that had oppressed it from its birth. 
 The United States was rescued from the false predicament in 
 
which it had been from the beginning, and the great popular 
 heart leaped with new enthusiasm for ' Liberty and union, 
 henceforth and forever, one and inseparable.' It brought not 
 only moral but material support to the cause of the Govern- 
 ment, for within two years 120,000 colored troops were enlisted 
 in the military service and following the National flag, supported 
 by all the loyalty of the North and led by its choicest spirits. 
 One mother said, when her son was offered the command of the 
 first colored regiment, < If he accepts it, I shall be as proud as 
 if I had heard that he was shot.' He was shot, heading a gal- 
 lant charge of his regiment. The Confederates replied to a re- 
 quest of his friends for his body that they 'had buried him under 
 a layer of his niggers'; but that mother has lived to enjoy 
 thirty-six years of his glory, and Boston has erected its noblest 
 monument to his memory. 
 
 "The effect of the proclamation upon the actual progress of 
 the war was not immediate, but wherever the Federal armies 
 advanced they carried freedom with them, and when the sum- 
 mer came around, the new spirit and force which had animated 
 the heart of the Government and people were manifest. In the 
 first week of July the decisive battle of Gettysburg turned the 
 tide of war, and the fall of Vicksburg made the great river free 
 from its source to the Gulf. 
 
 " On foreign nations the influence of the proclamation and 
 of these new victories was of great importance. In those days, 
 when there was no cable, it was not easy for foreign observers 
 to appreciate what was really going on ; they could not see 
 clearly the true state of affairs, as in the last years of the ninr 
 teenth century we have been able, by our new electric vision, 
 to watch every event at the antipodes and observe its effect. 
 The rebel emissaries, sent over to solicit intervention, spared no 
 pains to impress upon the minds of public and private men and 
 upon the press their own views of the character of the contest. 
 The prospects of the Confederacy were always better abroad 
 than at home. The stock markets of the world gambled upon 
 its chances, and its bonds at one time were in high favor. 
 
 "Such ideas as these were seriously held — that the North 
 
27 
 
 was fighting for empire and the South for independence ; that 
 the Southern States, instead of being the grossest oligarchies, 
 essentially despotisms, founded on the right of one man to ap- 
 propriate the fruit of other men's toil and to exclude them from 
 equal rights, were real republics, feebler to be sure than their 
 Northern rivals, but representing the same idea of freedom, and 
 that the mighty strength of the Nation was being put forth to 
 crush them ; that Jefferson Davis and the Southern leaders had 
 created a nation ; that the republican experiment had failed, 
 and the Union had ceased to exist. But the crowning argu- 
 ment to foreign minds was that it was an utter impossibility for 
 the Government to win in the contest; that the success of the 
 Southern States, so far as separation was concerned, was as cer- 
 tain as any event yet future and contingent could be ; that the 
 subjugation of the South by the North, even if it could be 
 accomplished, would prove a calamity to the United States and 
 the world, and especially calamitous to the negro race ; and 
 that such a victory would necessarily leave the people of the 
 South for many generations cherishing deadly hostility against 
 the Government and the North, and plotting always to recover 
 their independence. 
 
 "When Lincoln issued his proclamation, he knew that all 
 these ideas were founded in error; that the National resources 
 were inexhaustible ; that the Government could and would win, 
 and that if slavery were once disposed of, the only cause of 
 difference being out of the way, the North and South would 
 come together again and, by-and-by, be as good friends as ever. 
 In many quarters abroad the proclamation was welcomed with 
 enthusiasm by the friends of America ; but I think the demon- 
 strations that brought more gladness to Lincoln's heart than any 
 other were the meetings held in the manufacturing centers by 
 the very operatives upon whom the war bore the hardest, ex- 
 pressing the most enthusiastic sympathy with the proclamation, 
 while they bore with heroic fortitude the grievous privations 
 which the war entailed upon them. Mr. Lincoln's expectation 
 when he announced to the world that all slaves in all States 
 then in rebellion were set free, must have been that the avowee] 
 
28 
 
 position of his Government that the continuance of the war 
 now meant the annihilation of slavery would make intervention 
 impossible for any foreign nation whose people were lovers of 
 liberty — and so the result proved. 
 
 " The growth and development of Lincoln's mental power 
 and moral force, of his intense and magnetic personality, after 
 the vast responsibilities of Government were thrown upon him 
 at the age of fifty-two, furnish a rare and striking illustration of 
 the marvelous capacity and adaptability of the human intellect 
 — of the sound mind in the sound body. He came to the dis- 
 charge of the great duties of the Presidency with absolutely no 
 experience in the administration of Government or of the vastly 
 varied and complicated questions of foreign and domestic policy 
 which immediately arose and continued to press upon him dur- 
 ing the rest of his life ; but he mastered each as it came, appar- 
 ently with the facility of a trained and experienced ruler. As 
 Clarendon said of Cromwell : ' His parts seemed to be raised 
 by the demands of great station. ' His life through it ail was 
 one of intense labor, anxiety, and distress, without one hour of 
 peaceful repose from first to last. But he rose to every occa- 
 sion. He led public opinion, but did not march so far in ad- 
 vance of it as to fail of its effective support in every great 
 emergency. He knew the heart and thought of the people, as 
 no man not in constant and absolute sympathy with them could 
 have known it, and so, holding their confidence, he triumphed 
 through and with them. 
 
 "Not only was there this steady growth of intellect, but the 
 infinite delicacy of his nature and its capacity for refinement 
 developed also, as exhibited in the purity and perfection of his 
 language and style of speech. The rough backwoodsman, who 
 had never seen the inside of a university, became in the end, 
 by self-training and the exercise of his own powers of mind, 
 heart, and soul, a master of style — and some of his utterances 
 will rank with the best, the most perfectly adapted to the occa- 
 sion which produced them. 
 
 "Have you time to listen to his two minutes' speech at 
 
29 
 
 Gettysburg, at the dedication of the Soldiers' Cemetery ? His *■•* 
 whole soul was in it : 
 
 " ' Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth 
 on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedi- 
 cated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now 
 we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, 
 or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. 
 We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come 
 to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting place for 
 those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It 
 is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But in 
 a larger sense we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we 
 cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, 
 who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor 
 power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long 
 remember, what we say here, but it can never forget what they 
 did here. It is for us, the living, rather, to be dedicated here 
 to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus 
 far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated 
 to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored 
 dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they 
 gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly 
 resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this 
 Nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and that 
 government of the people, by the people, and for the people 
 shall not perish from the earth.' 
 
 "He lived to see his work indorsed by an overwhelming 
 majority of his countrymen. In his second inaugural address, 
 pronounced just forty days before his death, there is a single 
 passage which well displays his indomitable will, and at the 
 same time his deep religious feeling, his sublime charity to the 
 enemies of his country, and his broad and catholic humanity : 
 
 " < If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those 
 offenses which in the providence of God must needs come, but 
 which, having continued through the appointed time, He now 
 wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South 
 this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offense 
 
30 
 
 came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine 
 attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to 
 Him ? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this 
 mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet if God 
 wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bonds- 
 men's 250 years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every 
 drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid with another 
 drawn by the sword as was said 3,000 years ago, so still it must 
 be said : " The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous 
 altogether." 
 
 " ' With malice toward none, with charity for all ; with firm- 
 ness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive 
 on to finish the work we are in ; to bind up the Nation's wounds ; 
 to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his 
 widow and his orphan — to do all which may achieve and cherish 
 a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.' 
 
 "His prayer was answered. The forty days of life that re- 
 mained to him were crowded with great historic events. He 
 lived to see his Proclamation of Emancipation embodied in an 
 amendment of the Constitution adopted by Congress, and sub- 
 mitted to the States for ratification. The mighty scourge of war 
 did speedily pass away, for it was given him to witness the surren- 
 der of the rebel army and the fall of their capital, and the starry 
 flag that he loved waving in triumph over the National soil. When 
 he died by the madman's hand in the supreme hour of vic- 
 tory the vanquished lost their best friend, and the human race 
 one of its noblest examples, and all the friends of freedom and 
 justice, in whose cause he lived and died, joined hands as 
 mourners at his grave." 
 
*Se 
 
 F. Hall Printing Company, Chicago 
 
LB S '12