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 AUG t I3it 
 
The Greatness of Abraham Lincoln 
 
 By 
 Rev. William E. Barton, D.D., LL.D. 
 
 Author of "The Soul of Abraham Lincoln," "The Paternity of 
 Abraham Lincoln," etc. 
 
 MEN whom the world counts great have been conveniently 
 grouped into three classes — those who are born great, 
 those who attain to greatness, and those who have great- 
 ness thrust upon them. The first two groups may in reality be 
 one — those who, born with inherent qualities of greatness, attain 
 to its realization and recognition by their own innate power and 
 its fortunate adaptation to opportunity. When a truly great man 
 becomes the advocate of a great cause and meets a great situa- 
 tion adequately, worthily and triumphantly, the patient ages rise 
 from their somnolence and rejoice. 
 
 The men who have greatness thrust upon them live not long 
 in the rarified atmosphere to which they are suddenly elevated. 
 They must die soon or they outlive their fame. Some of them, 
 fortunately caught, by death in the brief hour of their publicity, 
 are suddenly enrolled among the notable men of their generation ; 
 but even so, they lengthen but little the period in which they are 
 accounted notable. Die they soon or die they late, their fame 
 fades, and they pass in due time to their own place in oblivion. 
 But they who, being great, match their quality against the chal- 
 lenging front of opportunity, achieve a distinction which grows 
 toward immortality. Like a snow-capped mountain, hidden at 
 close view by its own foot-hills and emerging to seem at first only 
 a possibly higher elevation in the range, they tower higher as the 
 years recede, dwarfing all lesser hills of their contemporaries, until 
 they stand as if in solitary grandeur; and while the plain is yet 
 dark, they greet with radiant crest the dawn of succeeding gen- 
 erations. Of these men, greatest of all men of his generation, 
 was Abraham Lincoln. 
 
 3 
 
We measure the stature of Lincoln by the shadow which he 
 casts over succeeding generations. It is nothing less than colossal. 
 But while his figure bulks vast, his personality grows dim in out- 
 line as seen through the mists of the years. The memory of the 
 men who knew him is not yet obliterated, but the halo about 
 him refracts the light of calm judgment; and a clear vision of 
 his qualities is lost in indiscriminate eulogy. Those who knew 
 him constitute now a small and diminishing group, and these for 
 the most part have added to the dim outline of their actual 
 experiences of Lincoln the color of later reflection or tradition. 
 Abraham Lincoln is already in good part a mythical character. 
 To him are attributed many utterances which have no certain 
 place in his authentic speeches or writings. Concerning him 
 are current past any hope of eradication incidents which prob- 
 ably never occurred. Poetry and song and dramatic art and 
 the myth-making tendency of the human mind are all at work, 
 and have been active for a half century. He must have been 
 a great man who could inspire such inventions; but can we 
 discover the hiding of his power? Can we find at this late date 
 the real Abraham Lincoln? And when we find him, will he still 
 seem to us a truly great man? 
 
 I. The Greatness of His Stature 
 
 Lincoln was a tall man. In any company his height alone made 
 him conspicuous. This feature he accentuated by the long black 
 coat and tall stiff hat which he habitually wore. He recognized 
 the value of his own physical stature. He liked to measure him- 
 self, back to back, against other tall men, and was pleased if 
 by a fraction of an inch he over-topped them. Some notable men 
 who called upon him on matters of importance were surprised to 
 have him open the conversation by an invitation to measure 
 height with the President ; but that method at least prepared the 
 way for a conversation face to face. 
 
 Of Lincoln's stature, Herndon says: "In his eleventh year he 
 began that marvelous and rapid growth for which he was so 
 noted in the Pigeon Creek settlement. ' ' He quotes from a manu- 
 script letter from David Turnham: 
 
 "As he shot up, he seemed to change in appearance and action. 
 Although quick-witted and ready with an answer, he began to 
 exhibit deep thoughtfulness, and was so often lost in studied 
 reflection we could not help noticing the strange turn in his 
 actions. He disclosed rare timidity and sensitiveness, especially 
 
 4 
 
in the presence of men and women, and, although cheerful enough 
 in the presence of the boys, he did not appear to seek our com 
 pany as earnestly as before." 
 
 Herndon comments on this letter: 
 
 "It was only the development of every boy. Nature was a 
 little abrupt in the case of Abraham Lincoln.. She tossed him 
 from the nimbleness of boyhood to the gravity of manhood in a 
 single night." (Herndon 's Lincoln, i, p. 25.) 
 
 Before he finished his brief schooling in Indiana, Lincoln had 
 attained his full height. Herndon says: 
 
 ' ' He was now over six feet high, and was growing at a tre- 
 mendous rate, for he added two inches more before the close of 
 his seventeenth year, thus reaching the limit of his stature. He 
 weighed in the region of a hundred and sixty pounds, was wiry, 
 vigorous and strong. His feet and hands were large; arms and 
 legs long and in striking contrast with his slender trunk and 
 small head." 
 
 He quotes Katy Roby, afterward Mrs. Allen Gentry, a school- 
 mate: 
 
 "His skin was shrivelled and yellow. His shoes, when he had 
 any, were low. He wore buckskin breeches, linsey-woolsey shirt, 
 and a cap made of the skin of a squirrel or a coon. His breeches 
 were baggy, and lacked by several inches meeting the tops of 
 his shoes, thereby exposing his shin-bone, sharp, blue and nar- 
 row." (Herndon 's Lincoln, i, 37-38.) 
 
 Lincoln's sudden attainment of manhood stature, and its cor- 
 responding mental effect, were marked at the time and commented 
 upon afterward. It was almost the last thing he ever did sud- 
 denly. He grew so fast that he reached the stature of manhood 
 tired. We shall not go far wrong if we accept without attempt 
 to qualify it the frank affirmation of his neighbors and employers 
 that he was lazy. He inherited little energy either from Thomas 
 Lincoln or the Hanks family — and what he inherited he used up 
 in his rapid growth. Thereafter he moved and thought slowly. 
 
 Herndon 's description of Lincoln's personal appearance in 
 mature life is classic. Of few other men have we so clear and 
 discriminating a portrayal: 
 
 "Mr. Lincoln was six feet four inches high, and when he left 
 the city (of Springfield) for Washington was fifty-one years old, 
 having good health and no gray hairs, or few, if any, on his head. 
 He was thin, wiry, sinewy, raw-boned; thin through the breast 
 to the back, and narrow across the shoulders; standing, he leaned 
 
 5 
 
forward — was what may be called stoop-shouldered, inclined to 
 the consumptive build. His usual weight was one hundred and 
 eighty pounds. His organization — rather his structure and func- 
 tions — worked slowly. His blood had to run a long distance from 
 his heart to the extremities of his frame, and his nerve force had 
 to travel through dry ground a long distance before the muscles 
 were obedient to his will. His structure was loose and leathery; 
 his body was shrunk and shrivelled; he had dark skin, dark hair, 
 and looked woe-struck. The whole man, body and mind, worked 
 slowly, as if it needed oiling. Physically he was a very power- 
 ful man, lifting with ease four hundred pounds, and in one case 
 six hundred pounds. His mind was like his body, and worked 
 slowly and strongly. Hence there was very little bodily or mental 
 wear and tear in him. This peculiarity gave him a great advan- 
 tage over other men in public life. No man in America — 
 scarcely a man in the world — could have stood what Lincoln did 
 in Washington and survived more than one term of the Presidency. 
 
 "When he walked, he moved cautiously but firmly; his long 
 arms and giant hands hung down by his side. He walked with 
 even tread, the inner sides of his feet being parallel. He put his 
 whole foot down on the ground at once, not landing on his heel; 
 he likewise lifted his foot all at once, not rising from the toe, 
 and hence he had no spring to his walk. His walk was undulatory 
 — catching and pocketing tire, weariness and pain, all up and 
 down his person, and thus keeping them from locating. The first 
 impression of a stranger, or a man who did not observe closely, 
 was that his walk implied shrewdness or cunning — that he was 
 a 'tricky man,' but in reality, it was the walk of caution and 
 firmness. 
 
 "In sitting down on a common chair he was no taller than 
 ordinary men. His legs and arms were abnormally, unnaturally 
 long, and in undue proportion to the remainder of his body. It 
 was only when he stood up that he loomed above other men. 
 
 "Mr. Lincoln's head was long, and tall from the base of the 
 brain and from the eyebrows. His head ran backwards, his 
 forehead rising as it ran back at a low angle, like Clay's, and 
 unlike Webster's, which was almost perpendicular. The size of 
 his hat, measured at the hatter's block, was seven and one-eighth, 
 his head being, from ear to ear, six and one-half inches, and 
 from the front to the back of the brain, eight inches. Thus 
 measured it was not below the medium size. His forehead was 
 narrow but high; his hair dark, almost black, and lay floating 
 
 6 
 
when his fingers or the wind left it, piled up at random. His 
 cheek bones were high, sharp and prominent; his jaws were long 
 and up-curved; his nose was long, blunt, and a little awry toward 
 the right eye; his chin was sharp and up-curved; his eyebrows 
 cropped out like a large rock in the brow of a hill; his long, 
 sallow face was wrinkled and dry, with a hair here and there on 
 the surface; his cheeks were leathery; his ears were large and 
 ran out almost at right angles from his head, caused partly by 
 heavy hats and partly by nature; his lower lip was thick, hang- 
 ing, and under-curved, while his chin reached for the lip up- 
 curved; his neck was neat and trim, his head being well balanced 
 on it; there was the loose mole on the right cheek, and Adam's 
 apple on his throat. 
 
 "Thus stood, walked, acted and looked Abraham Lincoln. He 
 was not a pretty man by any means, nor was he an ugly one; 
 he was a homely man, careless of his looks, plain-looking and 
 plain-acting. He had no pomp, display or dignity, so-called. He 
 appeared simple in his carriage and bearing. He was a sad- 
 looking man; his melancholy dripped from him as he walked." 
 (Herndon's Lincoln, iii, pp. 585-588.) 
 
 We possess a very large body of material that enables us to 
 judge of the personal appearance of Lincoln. He emerged into 
 prominence as the daguerreotype Avas coming into common use. 
 Many photographers desired to make pictures of him, and Lincoln 
 was not averse to having his picture taken. More than a hundred 
 authentic and original photographs exist, showing his appearance 
 from early in his career in Springfield to a few days before his 
 death. 
 
 We have also oil portraits in considerable number. Soon after 
 Lincoln's election artists flocked to Springfield. They set up 
 their easels in the vacant legislative hall of the old Capitol and 
 Lincoln was accustomed to sit for perhaps an hour each morning 
 as they worked, reading his mail as he posed for them. Most, 
 if not all, of these portraits are preserved. Some of them have 
 merit and all of them have historic interest. 
 
 Of portraits after he became President, we have one in some 
 respects the most notable of all, and surrounded most by re- 
 markable associations, that of Prank B. Carpenter. The likeness 
 is preserved in the detail portrait and in the notable painting of 
 the Signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, and the events 
 which accompanied it are recorded in Carpenter's book, "Six 
 Months in the White House." 
 
 7 
 
We are peculiarly fortunate in possessing the life-mask of Lin- 
 coln, as well as the casts of his hands — the former made in Chicago 
 by Leonard Volk, a Chicago sculptor in the spring before his 
 nomination for the Presidency, the latter made in Springfield, 
 by the same artist, within a week after Lincoln's nomination. 
 Volk was not a gTeat sculptor, and he valued these casts for the 
 sake of a statue which he made and which possessed no great 
 merit. But he was a remarkably good workman in plastic material, 
 and the casts were well made, and they preserve to all coming 
 time not simply the bony structure of hands and head, but the 
 living lineaments of Abraham Lincoln. To this undoubtedly 
 accurate record of his features and his hands must every sculptor 
 and artist refer. 
 
 Down to the time of his election to the Presidency, Mr. Lincoln 
 wore no beard. A letter received from a little girl, Grace Bedell, 
 suggested the wearing of a beard, and Lincoln accepted the sug- 
 gestion. This decision has caused widespread regret, for the 
 beard added little that was decorative, and did not conceal the 
 lower lip, which was Lincoln's least attractive feature, but hid 
 the well-modeled chin and a jaw that was at once kind and firm. 
 To say that Lincoln was tall, gaunt and awkward does not ac- 
 curately describe him. There was in his ungainliness a certain 
 symmetry. He said of himself that for a clumsy fellow he was 
 rather sure-footed. On election night in 1864, when the White 
 House was almost deserted because so many Washington residents 
 had gone home to vote, he told his secretaries and a little group 
 who were rejoicing with him over the election returns, how on a 
 dark night after his defeat by Douglas he had slipped on a 
 muddy path but caught himself before he went down, and how he 
 went on with a kind of gleeful application of the incident to his 
 defeat—' ' It 's a slip, but not a fall ! ' ' 
 
 To call Lincoln graceful would be untrue, but there was a 
 certain co-ordination of his ungainlinesses which made for an ap- 
 proach to grace. Especially was this true when he grew animated 
 in discourse. His features lit up ; his eyes glowed ; he forgot 
 what he was doing with his great hands; he towered aloft and 
 moved forward in his argument with a power of personality that 
 caused men to forget that he was otherwise than graceful. 
 
 Hon. Joseph H. Choate, when a young man, heard Lincoln in 
 his Cooper Union address. Years afterward he wrote out his 
 impressions of the evening: 
 
 "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 imposing about him; his clothes hung 
 awkwardly on his giant form; his face was of a dark pallor 
 without the slightest tinge of color; his seamed and rugged fea- 
 tures bore the furrows of hardship and struggle; his deep-set 
 eyes looked sad and anxious; his countenance in repose gave 
 little evidence of the brilliant power which raised him from fhe 
 lowest to the highest station among his countrymen; as he talked 
 to me before the meeting he seemed ill at ease." 
 
 He was ill at ease, and painfully aware of his clothes, but he 
 did not continue thus to be embarrassed. Mr. Choate continued 
 his description: 
 
 "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. * * * It was marvelous to see how this untutored 
 man, by mere self -discipline and the chastening of his own spirit, 
 had outgrown all meretricious acts and found his way to the 
 grandeur and strength of absolute simplicity. ' ' 
 
 Lincoln 's voice was not deep and strong as seemed to befit a 
 tall man. It was high and thin — almost grotesquely so. In his 
 debates with Douglas, the feature which almost every surviving 
 listener seems to have preserved is the contrast between the two 
 men as to stature and sound. Douglas was a little man with a 
 big voice — Lincoln a big man with a little voice. But Douglas 
 abused his deep, rich baritone, and his voice wore out, and toward 
 the end of the campaign could not be heard by a large portion of 
 his audience; but Lincoln's thin, high voice carried well, and after 
 he lost his self -consciousness was sufficiently flexible to be effective 
 and persuasive. 
 
 People misjudged Lincoln who set him down as a clown or a 
 simple rustic. A second and more careful look at him showed 
 elements of dignity and nobility. Lincoln was great and capable 
 of looking great. His portrait as we have become familiar with 
 it is the portrait of a great man. Of him we could almost say, 
 as the Duke of Wellington said after he had seen Webster: "Sir, 
 no man could be as great as Daniel Webster looked!" 
 
 They also reckoned without their host who attempted on short 
 acquaintance an undue familiarity with Lincoln. Familiar as he 
 was, there was about, him a certain dignity that protected him 
 from too free approach. 
 
 The man who now declares that he habitually addressed Lincoln 
 
 9 
 
by his first name, whether in full or with abbreviation, probably 
 draws upon his imagination rather than his memory. Lincoln 'a 
 neighbors did not address him as "Abraham" or "Abe." They 
 called him "Mr. Lincoln." 
 
 II. The Greatness of His Intellect 
 
 Abraham Lincoln possessed a great mind. Born in the midst of 
 penury and destitution, not only of educational advantages but 
 of incentive to study, he obtained by force of will and strength 
 of mental power a mind disciplined and of commanding ability. 
 
 He had a logical mind. He wanted, as he said, to be able to 
 bound his subject, North, South, East and West. He had a 
 fondness for mechanics which he transferred to his mental proc- 
 esses; he insisted on knowing the connections of truths, their 
 causes and effects. He would be content with nothing short of 
 truth. 
 
 Where he inherited this power and aptitude has given rise to 
 much discussion. He appears to have inherited from his father 
 a certain imperturbability and good nature; a slowness of mental 
 and physical movement, and an ability to discern a humorous 
 quality in men and events. From his mother, as he believed, 
 he inherited his power of analysis, his intellectual alertness, his 
 gift of logic. 
 
 In his earlier environment there was, as he said, "absolutely 
 nothing" to stimulate within him the love of learning; yet the 
 love of learning was strong within him. Much did he owe to 
 solitude and the power of reflection. 
 
 Yet his was a nature strongly social, and under that was in- 
 herent in him a great human love which could not have been 
 evoked except in association and competition with men. 
 
 Of his mental development in youth, Herndon wrote: 
 
 ' ' The intellectual fire burned slowly, but with a steady and 
 intense glow. Although denied the requisite training of the school- 
 room, he was none the less competent to cope with those who 
 had undergone that discipline. No one had a more retentive 
 memory. If he read or heard a good thing it never escaped 
 him. His powers of concentration were intense, and in the ability 
 to strip bare a proposition he was unexcelled. His thoughtful 
 and investigating mind dug down after ideas and never stopped 
 till bottom facts were reached. With such a mental equipment 
 the day was destined to come when the world would need the 
 services of his intellect and heart. That he was equal to the 
 great task when the demand came is but another striking proof 
 
 10 
 
of the grandeur of his character." (Herndon's Lincoln, i, p. 
 44— 1st ed.) 
 
 Of Lincoln's habits of study while at New Salem, Robert B. 
 Rutledge wrote to William II. Herndon a paper which Herndon 
 used in part and which the nephew of Robert Rutledge has fur- 
 nished me in full. He says: 
 
 "While clerking in the store or serving as postmaster lie would 
 apply himself as opportunity offered to his studies, if it was 
 but five minutes' time — would open his book which he always 
 kept at hand, study it, reciting to himself, then entertain the 
 company present or wait on a customer without apparent annoy- 
 ance from the interruption. I have frequently seen him reading 
 while walking along the streets. Occasionally he would become 
 absorbed with his book ; would stop and stand for a few moments, 
 then walk on, or pass from one house to another, or from one 
 squad or crowd of men to another. He was apparently seeking 
 amusement; and with his thoughtful face and ill-fitting clothes 
 was the last man we would have singled out for a student. 
 * * * He never appeared to be a hard student, and he seemed 
 to master his studies with little effort until he commenced the 
 study of the law. In that he was wholly engrossed, and began 
 for the first time to avoid the society of men, in order that he 
 might have more time for study. He was not what is usually 
 termed a quick-witted man, although he would usually arrive at 
 his conclusions very readily. He seemed invariably to reflect and 
 deliberate, and never acted from impulse so far as to force a 
 wrong conclusion on a subject of any moment." (Herndon's 
 Lincoln, i, 113.) 
 
 1 ' The weird and melancholy association of eloquence and poetry 
 had a strong fascination for Lincoln's mind," said Hon. Lawrence 
 Weldon, at a bar-meeting held in the U. S. Court in Springfield in 
 June, 1865. Tasteful composition, either of prose or poetry, which 
 faithfully contrasted the realities of eternity with the unstable 
 and fickle fortunes of time, made a strong impression on his 
 mind. In the indulgence of this taste it is related of him that 
 the poem "Immortality" he knew by rote and appreciated very 
 highly. He had a strange liking for the verses, and they bear 
 a just resemblance to his fortune." (Herndon, iii, p. 626.) 
 
 Horace Greeley, in one of his brutally frank letters to Lincoln, 
 told him plainly that he was not considered a really great man. 
 The nation counted him in 1860 a political accident. Of his Cab- 
 inet, Seward, Chase and Stanton all let him know at one time 
 or another that they considered him their inferior. But he was 
 
 11 
 
great enough to compel their respect, not by the fiat of his political 
 position above them, but by sheer force of an intellectual su- 
 periority which compelled even Seward to write to his wife: 
 
 "The President is the best of us." 
 
 There are two opposing theories of the origin of great men. 
 One of them, derived from Buckle and his school, attempts to 
 account for all men, both individually and racially, by their 
 environment and the conditions of the times in which they live. 
 The other, of whose conviction Carlyle is the indignant spokesman, 
 explains not the man by his times, but his times by the man. 
 Emerson agreed with Carlyle, and went even farther. The Atlan- 
 tic Ocean is there because nothing smaller would answer the pur- 
 poses of Columbus; he needed a large world and a round world 
 and a wide ocean to express what was inherent in himself. The 
 world and all external conditions are to be explained by the 
 man, and not the man by his world. 
 
 Something of this latter theory must be held as to genius. It 
 has its own laws. It produces its own exponents in manner and 
 form which cannot be predicted. It is impossible to explain 
 Robert Burns without Scotland, but Scotland alone does not 
 explain Burns. Scotland has been on the map for a long time, 
 and still there is but one Bobert Burns. Henry Ward Beecher 
 stood at the foot of his class in Amherst College. Since his day 
 many men in Amherst College have stood at the foot of the 
 class, and it is not known that that environment has produced 
 any more Beeehers. Socrates was the product of the life and 
 spirit of Athens, but Athens has long since given up the expecta- 
 tion of producing men of Socratic mind by the wholesale. 
 
 No great man can be understood entirely apart from his en- 
 vironment, and if he could, it would be unfair both to him and 
 to his environment thus to interpret him; but that which enables 
 a man to dominate and rise above his environment is in the man 
 himself. 
 
 Lincoln would have been a great man in almost any environ- 
 ment. Gray is not the only man who has had occasion to 
 moralize concerning the "mute inglorious Miltons" or the Crom- 
 wells guiltless of their country 's blood and of anything else good 
 or bad enough to be mentioned. A few of them might have 
 won fame and fortune in more favorable environment, but most 
 of them in any other place would have continued mute and in- 
 glorious. 
 
 In statecraft, as in certain other of the nobler vocations, there 
 are few absolute standards by which to measure greatness or 
 
 12 
 
success. A civil engineer erects a bridge; it stands or falls, and 
 With it stands or falls his success in his profession. A manu- 
 facturer establishes a business; it pays a profit or sustains a loss, 
 and the balance-sheet shows it at the end of each year. A lawyer 
 either wins his case or loses it, and he knows which as soon as 
 the jury is polled, or the court reads its decision. The soldier 
 either wins his battle or is defeated, and no end of official lying 
 will permanently conceal the truth. But the teacher, the editor, 
 the preacher and the statesman, however soon or keenly they may 
 be made aware of failures in their respective fields, have not the 
 same swift and sure credentials of success. The teacher must live 
 long to see his pupils come to fame, and when they do so, he 
 may have to divide his share of the glory with other influences 
 which deserve it less. The editor may die before he knows that 
 an editorial of his, pasted into a farm-house scrap-book, in- 
 fluenced for power or righteousness a life. The preacher must 
 measure his success by evidences far more intangible than the 
 size either of his congregation or his salary. 
 
 The politician also must wait long for lasting evidence of his 
 greatness. He cannot measure it by the election returns, nor 
 by the number of his re-elections. His success in the political 
 arena is seldom undisputed, and he must courageously wait long 
 before the results of the policies in which he is able to carry 
 out his purposes bear their full and legitimate fruit and his wis- 
 dom is conceded and assured. Few men in politics live to see the 
 result of this testing. A statesman has been defined as a dead 
 politician; he is more than that — he is a politician whose work, 
 viewed in the retrospect, attains a common acceptance of justifica- 
 tion as wise, righteous, constructive and permanent. 
 
 Lincoln died while the judgment concerning his work was still 
 in the balance, tilted indeed in his favor by the successful ter- 
 mination of the war, but with a final and favorable decision to be 
 rendered not by his contemporaries alone, but also by posterity; 
 not by America only, but by the world. 
 
 A sure test of Lincoln's intellectual processes is afforded by his 
 literary style. The free use of words is no assurance of the 
 ability to think. But Lincoln's clear, clean-cut, accurate and 
 transparent use of English is the indubitable evidence of a mind 
 working with precision, with conviction and with authority. Only 
 a mind strong and clear and logical and well-disciplined could have 
 expressed itself as Lincoln's did in pure, accurate and forceful 
 language. 
 
 There is legitimate ground for honest difference of opinion 
 
 13 
 
whether Abraham Lincoln at the time of his election was a suf- 
 ficiently great man to have been elected President, or whether, 
 having in him the inarticulate elements of greatness, he was 
 educated up to his responsibilities. Henry Adams, seeing him 
 on the night of his first inaugural ball, painfully conscious of 
 his white gloves and showing little evidence that he was conscious 
 of anything else, may have had some justification for his opinion 
 that Lincoln had not as yet the requisite training for his task. 
 But surely he was not justified in his further inference that no 
 training that could come to him would ever be sufficient. 
 
 Lincoln declared that he did not claim to have controlled 
 events, but that he had been controlled by them. He spoke in 
 part truly, but that was not the whole truth. In a very large 
 sense he did control events, and his control was that of a man 
 who trusted his own intellectual judgments and was capable of 
 compelling other men to accept them and in the main to ap- 
 prove them. 
 
 Lincoln possessed a mind capable of indefinite growth. Essen- 
 tially one with the people among whom he was born and with 
 whom he spent the years of his boyhood and youth, he early dis- 
 played a capacity for development that carried him beyond the 
 horizon and above the level of the life of his associates. This 
 he accomplished without at any point breaking his associations 
 with them. His root remained in the soil of his associations, but 
 he grew until the terminal end of his ideal was far above his 
 associations. 
 
 He learned by his disappointments. Peter the Great is said 
 to have accepted his early defeats in battle with a kind of glee. 
 ' ' They are teaching me how to fight, " he is reported to have said. 
 Lincoln fulfilled in his own career the old Latin proverb that it 
 is lawful to learn from the enemy. He was educated by his defeats. 
 After he suffered humiliation at the hands of Stanton in the reaper 
 case, he returned from Cincinnati to Illinois "to study law." 
 He was already one of the foremost men at the Illinois bar, but 
 he had learned something from a cruel disappointment, and he 
 did not fail to make use of what he had learned. He returned 
 from his one term in Congress and mastered Euclid. He dis- 
 ciplined himself through his disappointments. 
 
 Also, he grew through his successes. They increased his self- 
 confidence, without spoiling him with vanity. 
 
 Thus disciplined by both failure and success, Lincoln grew 
 mentally, and he was growing to the very end of his life. His 
 mind was a growing, a retentive, a noble, a truly great mind. 
 
 14 
 
III. The Greatness in the Breadth of His Sympathies 
 
 We cannot understand Lincoln without an appreciation of the 
 range and power of his sympathies. 
 
 It is related of him that when he began to compose essays for 
 use in the backwoods school of Indiana, one of the first, and 
 perhaps the very first, of his attempts at literature was one on 
 cruelty to animals. In it he especially protested against the 
 practice of putting hot coals on the back of a turtle, as boys 
 sometimes did, in order to make the turtle thrust out its head. 
 His crossing the cold stream to carry over a dog that had been 
 left behind and was afraid of the chilly water; his dismounting 
 to pull out a pig that was mired deep in the mud, are kindred 
 evidences of his sympathies. He once in his youth shot and 
 killed a wild turkey, and never thereafter killed any larger game. 
 He was not a hunter; his father appears never to have been a 
 hunter. He seems not to have cared to take life needlessly. It 
 does not appear to have troubled him as a young man to have 
 assisted the farmers at their work of hog-killing, but this neces- 
 sary work for the providing of food appears to have had a dif- 
 ferent place in his thought and feeling from that of taking life 
 for sport. 
 
 Lincoln's sympathy sometimes caused him to be imposed upon. 
 It was hard for him to resist an appeal on behalf of youth, old 
 age or womanhood. A woman dressed in widow's garb made an 
 immediate appeal to his sympathies, and there is good reason to 
 believe that some of the sable millinery worn by those who came 
 to him was borrowed for the occasion. 
 
 Abraham Lincoln was great as an orator. Without this element 
 of greatness he could never have risen to fame. He was great in 
 the high quality of his public leadership. The political leader 
 has no such swift and sure test of success as has the military 
 leader or the captain of industry. His success is something far 
 less tangible, as is the success of all moral leadership. Every 
 great leader of men must have one of two qualities. He must 
 either have vision to enable him to see farther and clearer than 
 other men, or he must have the ability to discern the mind of 
 the people and adapt himself to their moods, wills and changing 
 purposes. Few, very few, are the leaders who possess both these 
 qualities, and almost none hold them in an equal balance. But 
 Abraham Lincoln possessed them both, and that to a marked 
 degree. 
 
 15 
 
Generals fumed and Stanton swore because of his readiness to 
 pardon common soldiers sentenced to die for infraction of neces- 
 sary military rules. 
 
 But it would be a mistake to assume that Lincoln's sympathies 
 were balanced by no consideration of firmness and stern reso- 
 lution. Lincoln permitted the military prisons to be filled with 
 men and women under suspicion of treason, and saw to it that 
 those prisons were in charge of very stern men. He permitted the 
 writ of habeas corpus to be suspended in order that where it was 
 necessary very relentless judgment might be measured out against 
 people who were lengthening the war or rendering its result less 
 certain — some of them eminent and respectable people. 
 
 Many of the stories told of his gentleness are mythical. But 
 Lincoln did issue pardons, many of them, and in the judgment 
 of officers of the army, more than he ought, for the release of 
 common soldiers charged with offenses which it seemed to him 
 might be condoned. He did not see, he said, that it would do 
 those men any good to shoot them. But he had no such mercy 
 on "the wily agitator" or the respectable copperhead who dis- 
 couraged enlistments or gave comfort to the enemy. His tender- 
 ness of heart possessed a counterbalancing quality of stern justice 
 — a kind of relentlessness the more terrible because he was so kind. 
 
 Lincoln approached the question of slavery under the impulse 
 of a threefold predisposition. First, he had something of the 
 feeling of race superiority which belonged to a man of southern 
 birth, reared in an environment essentially southern in birth and 
 tradition. In the second place, he had a mighty and compelling 
 sense of justice. For the same reason that he would not willingly 
 be a slave, he would not be a master. In the third he had a 
 compelling sympathy. This quality is expressed in his letter to 
 Joshua F. Speed under date of August 24, 1855. Speed was an 
 old friend, and in regard to slavery a southerner. Lincoln had 
 re-entered politics, still believing himself a Whig and being very 
 much mistaken about it, for he was no longer a Whig. He wrote : 
 
 ' ' I acknowledge your rights and my obligations under the Con- 
 stitution in regard to your slaves. I confess I hate to see the poor 
 creatures hunted down and carried back to their stripes and 
 unrequited toil; but I bite my lips and keep quiet. In 1841 you 
 and I had together a tedious low-water trip on a steamboat from 
 Louisville to St. Louis. You may remember that from Louisville to 
 the mouth of the Ohio there were aboard ten or a dozen slaves, 
 shackled together with irons. The sight was a constant torment 
 to me, and I see something like it every time I touch the Ohio 
 
 16 
 
or the slave border. Tt is not fair for you to assume that I 
 have no interest in a thing that h;is and continually exercises the 
 power to make me miserable. ' ' 
 
 He was talking of his own right, as a non-slaveholder living 
 in a free state, to an interest in slavery such as might lead him 
 to an active opposition. The root of his personal interest, as 
 here set forth, was in the power of slavery to make him miserable 
 in its strong appeal to his personal sympathy. 
 
 Great in his sympathies, Lincoln was greater in his patience. 
 He was patient with generals who lost battles which they ought 
 to have won, and who shirked when they ought to have been 
 fighting. He was patient with Mead, though sorely tried because 
 he did not follow Lee after Gettysburg; patient with Burnside 
 and Hooker and Pope. He was patient with his Cabinet officers 
 when they did not agree with him. He was patient with the 
 nation, even when he thought it had repudiated him and was about 
 to throw him and his policies overboard. 
 
 Abraham Lincoln was a man of the noblest type of magnanimity. 
 
 He knew that Seward believed himself to be a much greater 
 man than Lincoln, but he made Seward his prime minister. He 
 refused to let Seward resign; he ignored Seward's haughty 
 demeanor. He respected Seward, took counsel of Seward, prof- 
 ited by the assistance of Seward, and found in him an invaluable 
 counsellor and a loyal friend. 
 
 Lincoln was tried almost beyond endurance by Chase. Biog- 
 raphers have denounced Chase as a selfish plotter. Charnwood 
 calls him a sneak, and John Drinkwater had him in mind when 
 he created for the Cabinet of Lincoln his character of Burnet 
 Hook. Chase was not an intentionally dishonorable man. He 
 believed that he ought to have been President in 1860. He had 
 fought and suffered for the freedom of the slave long before 
 Lincoln had defined his opinions upon that subject. Chase be- 
 lieved that one term of Lincoln was as much as the country 
 could endure, and he deliberately used his own position in the 
 Cabinet and his relation as father-in-law of Governor Sprague, 
 and the charm and ambition of his daughter, Kate Chase Sprague, 
 to make himself President, if he could, in 1864. Lincoln knew his 
 schemes and disapproved them, but "hoped the country would 
 never have a worse President than Chase would make." He 
 held Chase in the Cabinet, not indeed to the end of his adminis- 
 tration, but until his notable work as Secretary of the Treasury 
 had. been so far and so well done that the country could spare 
 him by accepting one of his many resignations. But when old Chief 
 
 17 
 
Justice Taney died, Lincoln appointed as his successor on the 
 Supreme Bench of the United States the very man who had so 
 long and so often irritated him — Salmon P. Chase. 
 
 Everyone knows the story of Lincoln's monumental patience 
 with McClellan and the magnanimity with which he endured the 
 timidity, the irresolution, the conceit and the hostility of that 
 general. We need not here review it, but we must recall, though 
 the story is familiar, his relations to Stanton. Stanton had snubbed 
 him cruelly in the reaper case, and Lincoln was hurt to the heart. 
 Stanton was a Democrat and had been a Cabinet officer under 
 Buchanan. Stanton held Lincoln in contempt and Lincoln knew 
 it. But Stanton had organizing power, and an inflexible will, 
 and a sulphurous vocabulary, and a passionate loyalty. Lincoln 
 made him his Secretary of War, and no man in the nation could 
 have filled better that trying position. Stanton was rude to Lin- 
 coln, but Lincoln won not only his support but his enduring affec- 
 tion. In the terrible days of the war's greatest peril and un- 
 certainty, he was always to be relied upon. When Lincoln was 
 shot, hie fortitude and control of a situation that paralyzed the 
 nation made him for a few hours the de facto head of the Gov- 
 ernment. With the Vice-President helpless and the Secretary of 
 State weltering in his own blood and apparently dying, Stanton 
 quietly and with determination sat by the bedside of the Presi- 
 dent, dictated the best account which has ever been written of 
 the assassination, issued orders, held a steady hand on the affairs 
 of the nation, and stood like a mighty rock in a stricken land. 
 And when the man whom he had grown to honor and to love 
 breathed his last, he uttered those undying words: "Now he 
 belongs to the ages." 
 
 IV. The Greatness in His Religious Nature 
 
 Lincoln 's religion was inherent in the qualities that made up his 
 manhood. It is true that he did not find himself at home in the 
 church with which his parents were affiliated, the Baptist Church. 
 It is also true that he did not unite with the Presbyterian Church 
 when his wife left the Episcopal Church and joined the Presbyte- 
 rian. But it is true that his religious convictions underwent a 
 change in 1850 when he came under the influence of Eev. James 
 Smith and read his book on the Evidences of Christianity. Three 
 unimpeachable witnesses testify that Lincoln declared that that 
 book had changed his religious thinking, and Lincoln knew that 
 Dr. Smith claimed to have brought to him evidences which re- 
 sulted in his change of view. Lincoln permitted Dr. Smith to 
 
 IS 
 
circulate this report, and confirmed it to his own brother-in-law, 
 Ninian W. Edwards, and when Dr. Smith gave up liis pastoral 
 work on account of age, Lincoln made him U. S. Consul to Dundee, 
 Scotland. If Smith lied, Lincoln not only condoned the lie !'iit 
 participated in it. But he did not lie. Lincoln for the first 
 time learned in logical form the evidences of Christianity and 
 was profoundly impressed. 
 
 But Lincoln's religion was not wholly or even chiefly a matter 
 of his opinions on doctrinal matters. It was a development, a 
 growth. 
 
 When Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation he told his 
 Cabinet he did not ask their opinion of the main questions, for 
 he had promised his God that he would do this thing. 
 
 Among all state papers and addresses there is none that breathes 
 a deeper religious spirit than his Second Inaugural. It is re- 
 ligious from beginning to end. It is not only the noblest and 
 greatest of his utterances — it is the high water mark of his own 
 religious convictions. 
 
 He believed in God. He knew and honored the Bible. He be- 
 lieved in prayer. He believed in God's guidance in the affairs 
 of men and nations. He believed in duty and immortality. Out 
 of his authentic utterances could be formulated a creed, and it 
 would not be an unworthy or unattractive creed. Abraham Lin- 
 coln was a Christian. 
 
 V. The Greatness in His Power to Influence His Own and 
 Succeeding Generations 
 
 Like most great men, Lincoln suffered in his own age a divided 
 judgment. The tests of greatness in politics are not immediate 
 and undisputable. Lincoln was denounced in his own day in 
 terms which I should not like to repeat, so bitter, cruel and 
 unjust were they. But he was able to hold men in working re- 
 lationships and to accomplish his purposes and perform his per- 
 manent tasks. In the best sense he was an opportunist. He 
 combined vision with practical sagacity. He was subtle and at 
 times stubborn. He was pliable and in time of need adamant. 
 He was a man of strong and contradictory qualities. 
 
 Lincoln was not a radical. He was a conservative. As an 
 advocate of anti-slavery his constant appeal was to the fathers 
 of the Eepublic, who, while recognizing the inevitability of 
 slavery, believed it a moral wrong and desired its extinction. 
 He Avas slow to leave the Whig Party. Even in IS.").! lie wrote 
 to Speed that he believed himself to be a Whig. But the Whig 
 
 19 
 
Party was already dead. Of its seven candidates, it had elected 
 only two, Harrison and Taylor, and both of thern had died early. 
 It drew to itself the ablest men in the nation, north and south, 
 but it did not succeed in defining its issues in terms that com- 
 pelled assent. 
 
 Lincoln was unmethodical and disorderly in his office and un- 
 systematic in his work of preparation for his cases. But he had 
 a singular ability to discriminate in his mental processes between 
 the essential and non-essential. 
 
 This process he carried over into his moral judgments. He 
 believed in a government dedicated to equality of rights before 
 the law. We are much more likely to think ourselves the equal 
 of Lincoln than to think humbler men our equals. Lincoln faced 
 honestly the full implications of his convictions. 
 
 Lincoln was an American. He epitomized in his life the whole 
 of American history. He was born in a log cabin. He became 
 President of the United States. He lived through backwoods life 
 in Kentucky, pioneer life in Indiana, small town life in New 
 Salem, the life of a State Capital in Springfield; and at Wash- 
 ington he shared and was a part of the life of the whole nation. 
 
 We never think of him as southern. We think of him as Amer- 
 ican. He belongs to Kentucky, to Indiana, to Illinois, but he 
 belongs to the whole United States of America. 
 
 But he does more than this. It is remarkable that side by side 
 with the growth of America 's own appreciation of him has ap- 
 peared a new sense of his world citizenship. England claims him 
 and so do all free nations. His biography has been published not 
 only in innumerable editions in the United States, but in England, 
 Prance, Spain, Germany, Holland, Bussia, Italy, Turkey, China, 
 Japan, Hawaii and South America. 
 
 He belongs to the world. 
 
 The noblest statue of him, that of St. Gaudens, stands in Chicago 
 and forever interprets to the world his features, stature and noble 
 appearance. But in Newark stands the statue of Gutzon Gorglum, 
 with Lincoln seated on a bench. There the working man may sit 
 beside him and eat out of his dinner pail, and little children 
 climb upon his knees. 
 
 But Great Britain demands a St. Gaudens, and a replica of 
 his noble Lincoln is erected near Westminster Hall and the Abbey. 
 And other European nations have and ever will have his monu- 
 ment. And they all know his name and know his character. 
 Abraham Lincoln is not only America's greatest American — he is 
 the first world citizen of modern times. 
 
 20 
 
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