V"- T * > V-^> W-fZ- A # \Wa' ' *" . f *t* • • • . 4 § ^. l 8l!? £*_ vg»' ^* *p jib /•.?3B?/ / \ •«!•• a* <:*&?/ 4? X wm : ^ '+*> A* £*r v s*a»L* ^ a? ♦!••• v- a>-^ *o a> V .•?•• *** ,0* t « l A> *o J> .•!•♦ ^ a>«^ <> *.. .0* t ' v '-*« ^6* A*" * "fU a"* • a>^ : * 4? % • ■% c°*^°o y\- sPr, ,0^ % ^11* *o, a> S o»V % ^ %> •-. J&tUoc 71. Tn^u^, Abraham Lincoln A SHORT STUDY OF A GREAT MAN AND HIS WORK. By ISAAC N. PHILLIPS SECOND EDITION. 1901: Bloomington, Illinois. Cf^* Et-5 7 Copyright, 1901, by Isaac N. Phillips. Gift Artie 1 FEB 2 6 1925 "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." — Lincoln'' s Speech at Cooper Institute, Neiv York. ABRAHAM LINCOLN. WHEN Abraham Lincoln, after having - been named for President, was questioned by a campaign biographer as to his early life, he very pathetically said the whole story might be told in a single line of Gray's Elegy: "The short and simple annals of the poor." All the world now knows that the man who spoke thus modestly of himself was born in the State of Kentucky on the 12th day of February, 1809. His cradle, if he ever had one, stood upon the dirt floor of a rude log hut; above it was a clap-board roof; about it was that kind of supersti- tion which an isolated people, full of rude elemental force, always manifest, and that kind of poverty which, in a new and wild country, casts no shadow of degradation, for it is not the absence of goods but the invidious and blighting contrast of condi- tions which constitutes real poverty. This boy, too, was surrounded by people profoundly ignorant of the world and of the ways of men, and almost as profoundly ignorant of all bookish learning. It is certain that the humblest child in the country might now, within the limits of a single year, obtain a far better schooling - than was accessible to Lincoln dur- ing" all the years of his minority. His surroundings from birth to manhood remained practically un- changed, and although his roving father made in that time something more than the number of re- moves which Poor Richard deemed equal to one fire, there is no evidence that in the first twenty-one years of his life Abraham Lincoln met with any personal example or fell under any social influence which would ordinarily be expected to quicken his mind, arouse his hope or inspire his ambition. This rise of one of the greatest statesmen of his- tory from an environment apparently so luckless naturally awakens intense interest and even enthu- siasm. But the phenomenon is less wonderful than it seems. Had Lincoln arisen from out the slums of a great city, or even from the social opulence and pampered ease of a palace at Newport, to the intel- lectual and moral plane where the assassin's bullet found him, the case would be more truly wonderful than it is. Though of obscure parentage, Abraham Lincoln was no mongrel. In spite of the industrious muck-rakes <>f shameless so railed biographers, it is now known that, both through his lather and his mother, this boy received rich strains of honest Eng- lish blood,— blood which had been strengthened and sweetened on its course through the veins of genera- tions of sturdy American pioneers. He lived with 6 nature and learned of her. He toiled, but his toil was never hopeless and degrading. His feet were upon the earth, but the stars, shining in perennial beauty, were ever above him to inspire contempla- tion. He heard the song of the thrush and the carol of the lark. He watched the sun in its course. He knew the dim paths of the forest, and his soul was awed by the power of the storm. Out of the heart of nature's solitudes he drew the primal elements of high success, namely, a good heart, a clear head and a strong body; and these factors, under the stimulat- ing influence of free institutions, at length wrought in the rude backwoodsman a wonderful, personal transfiguration, the successive stages of which my plan does not permit me to trace. At the day of his death Lincoln's reputation had already filled the world, and the intense popular affection for his mem- ory, which still constantly grows although its sub- ject has been for more than a third of a century in his tomb, may be regarded as the sure sign of one of those transcendant fames such as popular favor confers scarcely once in a century. As a politician Abraham Lincoln was in breadth and sincerity the superior, and in shrewdness and success the full equal, of Thomas Jefferson; yet he was much more than a politician. No man of his age wrote better English than he; yet it is not as a rhetorician that Americans revere him. His keen- ness of humor and aptness of anecdote were never surpassed by any public man; yet history sternly refuses to regard Abraham Lincoln as a jester. He was a patriot high and true; but in his day many others were also patriots, giving even life to the cause. He was a statesman of prodigious breadth and grasp, fearless, imperturbable, self-reliant, and when he judged principle to be at stake, absolutely immovable; 3^et even the high term "statesman" does not express quite the full measure of Lincoln or of Lincoln's fame. To all these elements he united a personality the most striking, the most singular and the most original which is met with in history, and beneath it all lay the unfathomable mystery of a human soul. In the depths of that rugged and pathetic face were the signs of a spirit that in its highest moments communed with itself and walked alone. In the language of Wordsworth, "His soul was like a star, and dwelt apart." Public life has its illusions and fame has its counterfeits. The relative importance of contem- porary historic characters, like the relative height and size of adjacent mountains, is not fully known until thf whole group is seen from a distance. The vain and noisy little man of each period "struts and frets his hour upon the stage" with such a deal of pomposity and show that he appears to his undis- criminating contemporaries quite as important as 8 the real makers of history. Like the mother frog in the fable, he tries with breath alone to puff him- self up to a colossal stature, and not unfrequently, like the frog, collapses in the process. True greatness is the consecration of either great talents or great character to the service of mankind. When we read the story of a truly great life we learn of high purposes pursued by effective methods; we learn of a lofty devotion to truth, of supreme faith in the right, of heroic self-sacrifice; in short, we learn of a supreme struggle of genius in the service of mankind. Then, too, a great cause is necessary to a great public career. Mere feats of intellectual agility send no man's name to the Pantheon. There may, for aught I know, be "mute, inglorious Miltons" in this world, but being mute they are not of much consequence. During several years Lincoln filled the public eye. He had a cause, and directly in pro- portion to the greatness of that cause his career was great. That cause measures Lincoln's public career, but it does not completely measure Lincoln. After the voluminous biographies have all been read; after the garrulous "old settler," who never so much as suspected the greatness of the man in his lifetime, has related his apochryphal "recollections" and told his mythical anecdotes, always exaggerating his own familiar relations with Lincoln, we feel there is a Lincoln still unrevealed who is now rapidly fading away. But his work is known and lives, and that we shall now briefly study. It is necessary that in an appreciative study of Lincoln we take a comprehensive view of his work. We must note that which had preceded him as well as that which immediately surrounded him. I must ask you to bear with me, therefore, while I go back a little to find the historic background of our picture. There was in the last century a "Critical Period" of American history, which Mr. Fiske places be- tween the surrender of Cornwallis and the adoption of the Federal constitution. This period was '•criti- cal" for the reason that in that time it was pain fully uncertain wether a permanent union could ever be formed of the American States. The upheaval of the revolution had unsettled the conservative force of the American mind, and more follies than would have re-filled Pandora's box a hundred times had broken out in all the American colonies, — follies which in their consequences threatened to become even worse than '"taxation without representation." Revolutions are not well adapted to the training of statesmen. A very good revolutionary patriot may be only a destruetionist, and destructionists are al- ways plenty and cheap. The hand that wrote the Declaration of Independence was not the hand to frame the Federa I constitution. Samuel Adams knew far better how to knock down King( l-eorge than how 10 to set up George Washing-ton, first President of a great nation. Patrick Henry could shout in a tempest of eloquence, "Give me liberty or give me death!" but he was scarcely less eloquent in resisting the formation of the Federal Union; while James Mon- roe, the reputed author of the "Monroe Doctrine," was very sure the adoption of the Federal consti- tution would endanger, if not entirely destroy, the people's liberties. In this critical period two conflicting theories of government contended for mastery in the American colonies. One side, led by Washington, Hamilton, Franklin, Madison, Jay, Marshall, and their co- workers, realized the supreme importance of a strong central authority — a firm union of the States under one stable government. With the true national in- stinct they appealed earnestly to the patriotism and good sense of their fellow-citizens. By bitter experi- ence they knew the evils of a many-headed confed- eracy of weak and discordant States, which, if not fused together, they believed would waste all their energies in jealous bickerings with each other, pre- senting to the nations of the world no broad frontage of sovereignty and power. They knew a weak gov- ernment would produce confusion at home and breed contempt abroad, and, worse than all, would con- stantly invite foreign alliance and intervention, to the final destruction of that independence which had 11 been purchased with so much treasure and blood. The old Federalists garnered and preserved the fruits of the American revolution. They believed that so long" as a government is of the people and by the people it will not cease to be also /or the people. The outcry of that day against "consolidated gov- ernment," with which ambitious demagogues were frightening the ignorant, did not alarm the old Fed- eralists, who were the true friends of the people and the real republicans of their day. Such was the character of the party which bore us through the critical period of our early history, leaving us as a legacy the Federal Union, which Lincoln, with the help of the Union army, saved. Opposed to the Federalists, however, was another party of political philosophers, who, in their dread of centralization, opposed the adoption of the Fed- eral constitution. In the days of war they had been good destroyers, but they were not equally good as builders. The wrongs they had suffered under King George not unnaturally led them to distrust all forms of government, hence centralization meant to them only a renewal of despotism. They thought the people's only safeguard lay in the weakness of the central government That was an age in which the infection of "red republicanism" was abroad in tin- world. Rousseau bad dreamed Intoxicating and contagious dreams. Voltaire had philosophized and 12 sneered. The mad re-action against power long- abused had come, and in France already the chasm was opening - to engulf the monstrosities of ages. Alexander Hamilton's wise saying that "the vigor of government is essential to the security of liberty," was then, as a consequence, far less appreciated than it is to-day. In 1788, however, the country was prostrate and the tottering old Confederation was powerless to give relief. Riot, repudiation and anarchy were in the very air. As a choice of evils the people at last, with many misgivings, accepted of the Union. But it was power grudgingly given, and repented by many of the rampant revolutionists of that day almost as quickly as bestowed. The heresy of 1787, that the best government is the weakest government, and that whatever govern- ment we have should be distrusted by the people and hampered as much as possible in its action in order to insure the liberty of the individual, sur- vived in the form of "State sovereignty" to produce infinite mischief during full three-quarters of a century of our subsequent history. Attempts were made, after the constitution was adopted, to prac- tically nullify it by what was called "strict construc- tion." The theory was held that each State of the Union had the right to judge for itself what powers were conferred by the constitution upon the national 13 government. Such was,|in effect, the doctrine of the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, and it was a doctrine sincerely advocated in that day by many men who were really attached to the cause of civil liberty but who seemed not to know the means by which, alone, liberty can be insured.* Later, the motives of the foes of nationality changed. The slavery question rose, and strict con- struction and State rights, at first largely specula- tive political doctrines, became the pretext for the slave power's frantic effort to fortify and intrench slavery. Accordingly, in 1861 the old slavocracy of the South, after long threats, resolved to trample down the government of George Washington and the grand old Federalists and upon its ruins to erect a slave confederacy. And then it was that the Union army, called into being by Abraham Lincoln and acting under his sagacious policy, met and slew to- gether the dragons, slavery and State sovereignty. *Thomas Jefferson lived and died in the belief that each State of the Union was a sovereign nation, and that these several nations had, by adopting the constitution, formed a compact, — a sort of treaty, — which each of the States had a rijrht to construe for itself, there being no common judicial power over them. On April 8, 1*26, — less than three months before he died, — Jefferson wrote a Utter, being the Last but four of those preserved in his work-, in which letter be -aid: "I think with you. also, that the constitution of the United state- i- a compact of Independent nation-, bud j eel to the rules acknowledged in similar cases, as well that of amend- ment provided within itself, as, Ln case of abuse, the justly dreaded but unavoidable ultimo ratio gentium." Jefferson's Works, (Putnam's) vol. 10, p. 385. it In the fierce arbitrament of war and through the terrific adjudication of force and blood the Federal constitution at length received its final and authori- tative construction. I thus recapitulate facts well known merely to show that in the constitutional development of the nation Abraham Lincoln stands in line of direct suc- cession from those great constructive statesmen who formed and set in operation the government of the United States. He finished their great work. In the highest sense he was himself a constructive states- man. He was a conservative; a savior — not a de- stroyer. He stands pre-eminently for law and order, for the conservation of popular institutions, for hu- man rights secured and enforced by a supreme, mu- nicipal law. Back of Lincoln we see, among many others, Washington, Madison, Franklin, Gouverneur Morris, John Jay, and that other colossus of Ameri- can statesmanship, Alexander Hamilton. But between these men and Lincoln were many others conspicuous for great services rendered to the same great cause. John Marshall, of Virginia, statesman and judge, who for thirty-four years, as head of the Federal judiciary, read "between the lines" of the constitution and found there the "im- plied powers" by the exercise of which Lincoln was at length able to save the Union; Andrew Jackson, who laid low beneath the mandate of his imperious 15 will the first outbreak against national sovereignty, arousing" by his appeal to the people of South Caro- lina a national enthusiasm which had not yet spent itself when Lincoln delivered his first inaugural; Henry Clay, the greatest of parliamentary leaders, who applied his rare powers to the healing expedi- ent of compromise, thus relieving the strain until the cement of the Union had time to set; Daniel Webster, the invincible defender of the constitution, who in debate combined the strength of Goliath and the skill of David, overwhelming the enemies of the Union with torrents of logic and eloquence; Thomas H. Benton, the sturdy and truculent old patriot, him- self representing a slave State, whose every heart- throb was true to the nation he served, — all these great nationalists, and many others equally devoted though perhaps less conspicuous, had consecrated themselves to the maintenance of the union of the States. But to Abraham Lincoln among them all it was given to act and suffer in the fierce heat and light of terrific and final conflict. Prom the cross of national redemption whereon lie agonized was at length borne away forever the great sin of disunion, which like a malignant spirit had so long rent our fair land. I hit Lincoln's statesmanship embraced more than a mere constitutional doctrine. The destruction of the Onion as a political end, without an ulterior ob- it; ject, would in 1861 have been sheer madness, how- ever doubtful the policy of its original formation might have seemed to some of the colonists. In 1860 the nation had demonstrated its right to live, and but for the slave interest the doctrine of State sov- ereignty would have died with the generation that wrote and adopted the Virginia and Kentucky Reso- lutions. It was because the Union had proved less subservient to the slave interest than was desired, that the South, by a convenient application of this decaying political doctrine, sought to disrupt the Union and set up a distinctive slave confederacy. The constitutional question and the slavery question were thus thrown together into the crucible of war. The republicans in 1860 had no purpose to abol- ish slavery, nor was it the then avowed principles of that party which slaveholders feared. Far more ominous than the platform of any political party was the moral sentiment of the civilized world which the South saw everywhere rising against her favor- ite institution. The fact that Uncle Tom's Cabin found millions of eager readers, both in Europe and America, was to southern statesmen far more dis- quieting than any party declaration. Adverse public opinion — that universal solvent of modern democ- racy — threatened to dissolve the very rock upon which the industrial and social institutions of the South had been built. The high falsetto which a 17 few abolitionists were singing would have excited only contempt in the South but for the contagion which, in spite of all northern assurances, was known to be in that cr}'. The South knew abolition fire was falling - upon tinder, not only all over the North but all over the world; and, morals aside, there was real wisdom in the plan of forming" a new govern- ment of which slavery should be the corner stone. An institution like slavery must be the corner stone or nothing. Lincoln was not less opposed to slavery on moral grounds than any man in the nation, but when he de- clared he had no constitutional power, and therefore no purpose, to interfere with slaver}' in the southern States he was perfectly conscientious. When the war came on Lincoln ceased to speak of slavery and spoke only of the Union. He always seized upon the largest fact, lie knew, if the old abolitionists did not, that national preservation was the real stake in that contest. As chief executive he rightly disclaimed jurisdiction over slavery in time of peace, but 1 thinlc he m-ver doubted his right, as com- mander in chief of the army and navy, to save the Union by any means fitting and necessary to accom- plish that end even to the destruction of slavery by an executive proclamation. The idea seemed to grow upon 1 1 i tn through the early months of L862, and by midsummer of that year his course was determined. 18 Starting" out only to preserve the Union, Lincoln, by force of circumstances and through the inexora- ble logic of events, became the liberator of a race. He was the most modest of men, and distinctly dis- claimed any personal credit for emancipation. He wrote in April, 1864: "I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have con- trolled me." This was honest and it was true, for in the stress of war, events, under a popular gov- ernment, must to a large extent control everybody. Further discussing in the same letter the credit for emancipation he reverently said, "God alone can claim it." Exactly one month before the preliminary proc- lamation was issued Lincoln had written to Horace Greeley these ever-memorable words: "If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time save slavery, I do not agree with them. If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time de- stroy slavery, I do not agree with them. My para- mount object is to save the Union, and not either to save or destroy slavery." It argues nothing against Lincoln's sincerity that when he wrote these words the draft of the great proclamation was lying in his desk awaiting only a Union victory to precede its issuance, in order that it might not seem to be a mere desperate expedient. Indeed, the student of 19 Lincoln's writing's cannot fail to see that at least as early as March, 1862, — fully five months before he wrote this letter to Greeley, — Lincoln had come to the conclusion that the war must in the end be given a turn that would destroy slavery, — not merely to gratify his personal wish in the matter, much as he hated slavery, but because of the inexorable logic of events.* Lincoln was not an idealist. He was not one of those moral egotists who are wont to set their own scruples of conscience above statutes. By nature a conservative, he would not resort to revolutionary measures under gaiise of law. He was the highest example of a constitutional ruler. When the hour came that emancipation might fairly be judged a military necessity, and when the public opinion of the loyal States was ready to accept it as such, then, and not before, Lincoln meant to strike slavery down. The time at length came, and Lincoln struck the blow which has resounded many times round the word; and thus what seems one of the most radical measures of American history in fact came from the most conservative and cautious mind which ever ruled in our councils. Believing firmly the time would soon come when emancipation must be proclaimed. Lincoln had long i>. en earnestly,— almost pathetically,— urging the *"I aver that, to this day, I have done no official ad in mere deference to mj abstrarf judgment and Feeling on slavery." {Lincoln to .1 0. Hodges, April ;, /■ 20 border States to themselves adopt gradual emanci- pation and take compensation for their slaves. He procured the passage of an act by Congress under which they could have done this, and in a proclama- tion upon the subject, issued May 19, 1862, he elo- quently said: "To the people of these (border) States I now earnestly appeal. I do not argue, — I beseech you to make the argument for yourselves. You can not, if you would, be blind to the signs of the times. * * * This proposal makes common cause for a com- mon object. * * * It acts not the Pharisee. * * * So much good has not been done by one effort in all past time as in the providence of God it is now your high privilege to do. May the vast future not have to lament that you have neglected it." Again, to the Senators and Representatives of the border States he in July, 1862, addressed a letter, in which, among other things, he told them the war would soon de- stroy slavery in their States "by mere friction and abrasion." He told them much of the value of slave property was already gone and urged them to favor compensated emancipation, and then, with that terseness and force of which he was so great a mas- ter, he added: "How much better for you as seller and the nation as buyer to sell out and buy out that without which the war never could have been, than to sink both the thing to be sold and the price of it in cutting one another's throats." 21 It seems incredible, in the light of events, that such appeals to the good sense and the true inter- ests of the border States could have fallen upon deaf ears, and the fact that Lincoln's border-State policy was scoffed alike by those it sought to benefit and by those northern idealists, like Horace Greele3 T and Wendell Phillips, who were always ready to burn other people upon the pyre of their immolating good- ness, only serves to illustrate the deep intrenchment of slavery in the popular interest and prejudice. If Lincoln could in the spring of 1862 have wrested from all future sympathy with the rebellion those slave States which remained in the Union, by in- ducing them to voluntarily adopt emancipation, by that very act the great game would have been won. Had the one State of Kentucky heeded Lincoln's appeal and voluntarily abolished slaver} 7 , it would have been a moral blow more decisive than many mil- itary victories, and would have shaken the Southern Confederacy to its very foundations. Lincoln had always realized that to check the spread of slavery was a long step towards its aboli- tion. In 1858 he wisely said the country must ulti- mately become "all one thing or all the other." The wise men of the south clearly saw this was true, and acted upon it. Had slavery been admitted to all our new territories freely from the first it would soon have become national, and Robert Toombs might 22 have fulfilled his threat to call the roil of his slaves at the foot of Bunker Hill monument. On the other hand, had slavery been strictly confined to the area it occupied prior to 1820, emancipation would prob- ably have come long- before this time, even had there been no war. In proclaiming- freedom Lincoln is commonly thoug-ht to have reached the summit of his moral grandeur. The act was certainly great in itself and equally great in the manner of its accomplishment. It was natural, however, that admirers of the great anti-slavery agitators should dispute Lincoln's title to the historic credit for emancipation. Many thought Lincoln's proclamation lost its moral gran d eur in the fact that it was issued under the force of military necessity, and thus became a mere incident in the preservation of the Union. I must, however, dissent from this view, and insist that Abraham Lincoln's abolitionism did not lose its ethical qual- ity in its respect for established law and in its well tempered expediency. Any fool could shout and say slavery must be abolished, but it took a states- man to find a way to abolish it. The noble old abolitionists blew the reckless clarion blast which alarmed the northern conscience and precipitated the conflict. The flashlight of their audacious and consuming eloquence fell upon slavery and revealed 23 its enormity. But the man who marshaled and led the material and moral forces which finally crushed the rebellion and destroyed slaver}' had need to be something more than a reckless agitator. Prominent in our war period, upon the northern side, were many idealists, among whom some of the old "higher law" abolitionists were the purest types. An idealist (to depart somewhat from the lexicons) is one who counts his chickens before the eggs have been laid. He is lacking in a sense of the propor- tion and relation of things, and takes himself so seriously that he loses the power of seeing himself as others see him. In the last analysis he lacks humor. In the rapturous contemplation of the end he forgets all about means. The northern idealists thought if Lincoln would only sound a great blast upon a ram's horn all the walls of the Jericho of rebellion would fall flat. Acknowledging no re- sponsibility, these men could talk much nonsense without having to account for the folly of their speech. Lincoln, however, was President, and as such he felt gravely responsible to the country for his every act and word. He did not 11 y through the air with the theorists, but walked slowly and pain- fully upon the ground, — and rough, indeed, was his footing. He walked among the "plain people" and communed with them day by day, and as tie walked h • took note of all the rocks and chasms and quag"- 24 mires which lay in his pathway, — little matters, for which the mere theorists felt only contempt. The old abolitionists had so long combated a ma- jority upon the slavery issue that they could not appreciate the wisdom of a President who waited for a majority before acting - . To Wendell Phillips, the agitator, delivering a philippic against slavery, the approval of a majority was not necessary. His temperament was such that the violent opposition of numbers acted upon him as a stimulant. But to Lincoln the President, formulating and enforcing practical measures of government for a sovereign people, the moral support of public opinion was an absolute necessity. Those who, almost before Lincoln's right hand was lowered, insisted that he should abandon the constitution he had sworn to support and resort to that vague delusion called the "higher law," without any then apparent mili- tary necessity, had little appreciation of the man or the occasion. In the days of war most of these men went their own wild, unreasoning way, and heaped obloquy upon the man who was completing their work in the only possible way it could then have been completed. The distinct issue on which Lincoln won the presidency was the prevention of the spread of slavery, — not its abolition, — and on that issue he received less than one-half of the popular vote, ex- 25 eluding- from the caleulation the votes of the States that afterwards seceded. However great may be the wonder of it in the light of events, the fact is that a large majority of the whole American people stood, in 1861, against Mr. Lincoln's moderate per- sonal views on the slavery question. Out of twenty- three christian ministers residing in Springfield, Illi- nois, in 1860, twenty were opposed to the election of Mr. Lincoln. A quarrel between two factions of the democratic party as to the particular degree of legal encouragement slaver}^ should receive in its strug- gle for territory and supremacy had resulted in Lin- coln's election. No wonder he refused to at once launch an emancipation policy when even his own moderate principle of slavery restriction could scarcely be sustained. Lincoln was acquainted, perhaps better than any other public man. with that prejudice which in those days often led even good Union men, in the western States, to declare they would not support an "aboli- tion war." He knew many good friends of the Union believed that emancipation would be followed by a horrible war of races or by a still more horrible ama I - g.nnation of whites and blacks. To such he held out 1 1 is zea lous i>ut imprad [cable scheme of coloniz- ing the negroes in South America or Airica, It was exactly because Lincoln's early associations had SO thoroughly familiarized him with the prejudice 26 which used to fairly shudder at sound of the then current phrase "nigger equality," — nay, because he even partook in a degree of that prejudice himself, — that he proved the fittest man to stand at the helm. He thrust forward the Union issue because he knew there were far more men in the north for the Union than for emancipation. The boast, early made, that a united south would be hurled against a divided north, was, upon the slavery question, fully real- ized. Lincoln's party was distinctly pledged not to disturb slavery in the States where it existed, and the pro-slavery Unionist was as vehement in urging the sanctity of this promise as the eastern radical was in declaring that treason had put slavery be- yond constitutional protection. When the emanci- pation proclamation was at length issued it was bitterly assailed as a subversion of the constitu- tion, and yet it is remarkable that none of his critics ever stated the legal case against emancipation so strongly or so well as Lincoln once stated it himself. To O. H. Browning, who scolded him for revoking Fremont's emancipation proclamation, he on Sep- tember 22, 1861. wrote: "If the General needs them [the slaves] he can seize them and use them, but when the need is past it is not for him to fix their permanent future condition. That must be settled according to the laws made by law-makers, and not by military proclamations. The proclamation on 27 the point in question is simply dictatorship. It as- sumes that the General may do anything he pleases: confiscate the lands and free the slaves of loyal peo- ple as well as of disloyal ones. And going - the whole figure, I have no doubt, would be more popular with some thoughtless people than that which has been done. But I cannot assume this reckless position nor allow others to assume it on my responsibility. You speak of it as being the only means of saving the government. On the contrary, it is, itself, a sur- render of the government. Can it be pretended that it is any longer the government of the United States — any government of constitution and laws — where- in a general or President may make permanent rules of property by proclamation? * * * What I ob- ject to is, that I, as President, shall expressly or impliedly seize and exercise the permanant legisla tive functions of the government." This whole letter to Browning is most interesting in ;i study of the development of the emancipation policy, and should be compared with his proclama- tion annulling the emancipation edict of Gen. Hun- ter, eight months later, May L9, L862. In the Latter In- says: "Whether it be competent for me, as com- mander-in-chief of the army and navy, to declare the slaves of any State or States free, and whether at any time, in any rase, it shall have become a neces- sity indispensable to the maintenance of the gov 28 ernment to exercise such supposed power, are ques- tions which, under my responsibility, I reserve to myself and which I cannot feel justified in leaving' to the decision of commanders in the field." Here was a distinct advance upon the position announced in the Browning- letter. He had found the true basis for his emancipation policy, and only awaited the de- velopment of public opinion and the march of events. Lincoln had the sense to keep his eye upon great facts and to reckon with large causes. He was sa- gacious enough to perceive that the supreme issue of the struggle was national preservation, and that this issue embraced the slavery question and all others. Greeley's silly advice to let the southern States "go in peace," and Wendell Phillips' still more picturesque folly that we would "build a bridge of gold and pay their toll over it," could meet no favor in a mind so sane as Lincoln's. He knew if the gov- ernment proved strong enough to cope with the re- bellion it would, in the end, prove strong enough to deal with slavery and ultimately abolish it by peace- ful means. He said in his Peoria speech, in 1854: "Much as I hate slavery, I would consent to the ex- tension of it rather than see the Union dissolved, just as I would consent to any great evil to avoid a greater one." Prom this sentiment he never receded. Had the southern people acquiesced in Lincoln's election and in the supremacy of his doctrines they 29 would certainly have prolonged slavery, and in the end, perhaps, have insured a liberal compensation for their slaves. But ultimately either slavery or the Union had to go down. I have sometimes thought Lincoln, with pro- phetic eye, saw the destruction of slavery from the very beginning, but with a patience and self-control which find no parallel he waited the slow turning of the mills of the gods. He had the large sense to perceive that the Spirit of the Times would in the end abolish slavery, and that to force the issue would only insure the success of the Confederacy. He recognized a plan higher than human plans. He knew when he wrote the Greeley letter that the march of events had put it past human power to save slavery with the Union. He felt that a hand mightier than his own was writing the doom of slavery upon the fiery war-cloud, aud so believing, and so praying, too, he patiently accepted criticism, and even calumny,— first from the extreme aboli- tionists and afterwards from the pro-slavery Union- ists. He knew a premature expression, officially, Of his belief that the war was destined to destroy slavery would take from the Union army a hun- dred thousand bayonets and that this might turn the tide agrainsl "'<• Union. Bad the border slave ^..t,-. been repelled by the least rudeness of treat- " '' h " m the administration the Union would prob- ably never have been saved. Realizing - that public opinion was the only effective abolitionist, Lincoln stayed his pen and allowed the Union volunteers to write with their bayonets, in the blood of angry battles, the real proclamation of freedom. He knew well that a proclamation so written would never need to be recanted. In the spring of 1861 there were thousands of persons in the north who saw in Lincoln only a well- meaning", shrewd, but inexperienced person, whose redeeming trait they hoped, would prove to be docil- ity. Each of these persons felt sure Lincoln would need much sage advice, and expected to supply it, and even to largely control his administration. These self-appointed guardians were unprepared to receive a national savior from the Nazareth of the prairies. They at once began telling Lincoln what to do, and it has been aptly said he received worse advice, and more of it, than any statesman who ever lived. This will not seem wonderful when we re- member how utterly the sudden rending of the Union had dazed the American people. In the confusion of that awful crisis even wise men said and did silly things. William H. Seward, — certainly a wise states- man, — in the face of threatened civil war lost both heart and judgment and gave Lincoln some incredi- bly foolish advise. Chase marred his otherwise splendid record with querulous carpings against a 31 chief he did not in any degree understand and whose superior he felt he was. That Lincoln, inexperi- enced as he was, "kept his head" through the panic of timidit3 r , distrust and hysteria which marked the early months of his administration, gently but firmly resisting the bad advice which came to him from so many high sources, is one of the strongest proofs of the firm texture of his mind. To keep on good terms with advisers of assumed superiority and at the same time not take their advice requires great shrewdness and tact, and no statesman ever knew better how to do this than Lincoln. He was too great to stand for a moment upon mere pride of opinion. He was always ready to hear advice, but his ultimate monitor was within. He said: "It is my dut}' to hear all, but at last I must, within my sphere, judge what to do and what to forbear." This self-reliance, in practice, gave mortal offense to many prominent republicans, who could never bring themselves to admit that the basis of it was real superioritj 7 , and not arrogance. Lincoln was ruling a democracy, and to rule a real democracy involves problems never thought of by such rulers as Caesar, Cromwell and Napoleon. He had a great military problem, and this was com- plicated with a still more perplexing political prob- lem, to say nothing of the other problems that were presented by our foreign relations. An early blow at slavery, it was thought, would assist us with Uu- 32 eign countries, but Lincoln knew such a move would set our domestic politics awry. His first wise thought was to keep the peace among the adherents of the Union, and this desire furnishes the key to his whole policy. He recognized no line of political cleavage save that between the loyal and disloyal. He often spoke of "balancing matters," and no man ever knew better than he how to strike the prudent average. If any man in this world ever understood that capricious thing called "public opinion" that man was Abraham Lincoln. He watched the current of public thought and prejudice as intently as a cau- tious pilot watches the face of a river for evidence of bars and snags. He possessed a wonderful sixth sense for the feeling of the average American. His ear was always to the ground. He caught the faintest sound which presaged a storm of popular passion, and the sagacity and skill with which he avoided the numberless eddies and whirlpools of the slavery question, while steering on to the great end of na- tional preservation, have, in my judgment, never been equaled in the field of statesmanship. The great proclamation was wisely withheld un- til the extreme anti-slavery element in New England was ready to break from the vanguard of the Union column, and thus it came late enough in the evolu- tion of public opinion to barely save to the cause 33 the still more important rearguard in the border and western States. Thus we see it was a main feature of Lincoln's statesmanship that he distinctly comprehended his problem; and not only his one great problem, but all its minor related problems. Such was the clear- ness of bis vision, such the breadth of his views, such the grasp and sanity of his judgment, that within his policy all things found their proper place and relation, and all the din and smoke of terrific conflict could not confuse him or put him from his purpose. To use an illustration of his own kind, he never went snipe-shooting when there were bear in sight. He succeeded in holding the border slave States in line upon the paramount Union issue even while the institution of slavery, which they wished to save, was being trampled to death beneath the feet of the Union army. He played the eager Union sentiment of the west against the institution of slavery, which had caused the war, until the west finally came to agree with New England that slav- ery must be struck down. In other words, Lincoln bridged with his policy the vast stretch of opinion which Lay between the rabid abolitionism of the cast and the pro-slavery Unionism of the western and border Stales, and thus he was at Last able to hurl the whole force of Union sentiment on this side of the battle line against the armies of the Confederacy. A task so complex called for a statesman of broad views, great self-poise, iron endurance and sublime courage — courage to act, and, even in a greater de- gree, courage to forbear. Struggling, like Laocoon, in the serpent-coils of the slavery complication, stung by the wasps of incontinent radicalism, hec- tored by swarms of northern men who set the letter of the constitution above the nation's life, Lincoln yet had the monumental patience and foresight to nearly always do and say the wise thing. "The oc- casion is piled high with difficulty," said he, "and we must rise with the occasion." Lincoln's search for a general was long and pain- ful and at first quite as fruitless as that of Diogenes for an honest man, — and he carried a better lantern than Diogenes ever saw. A few military victories would have cleared the atmosphere, but when Lin- coln asked his generals for victories they tried to swap jobs with him, and gave him advice on the slavery question. Gen. McClellan, just after fleeing in panic from the Chickahominy with a magnificent army, which under a commander of enterprise and courage would have bivouacked in the Confederate capital, found time to write Lincoln a lengthy and impudent letter of general advice, in which, among many other impertinences, he said "the abolition of slavery must not be thought of." On the other hand, two or three little upstarts in the field, never for- 35 midable except to their own friends, sought the cheap applause of the unthinking' by issuing" procla- mations of emancipation in their military districts, thus adding to the embarrassments of the one great, patient man who saw all the phases of the Union problem. Whittier's ode to one of these Lilliputians makes very sad reading in the light of history. It is quite the fashion to say that previous to 1860 Lincoln had not shown the qualities of politi- cal leadership, and that his nomination for President was merely a happy accident of politics. Professor VonHolst, in his Constitutional History, has refuted this error. Lincoln's nomination was no accidental honor, won by superior management over the real leaders of the party. In the great revolt of 1854 against the conspiracy to open up new territory to slaver}-, though less officially conspicuous than Sew- ard, Lincoln soon proved himself the most sagacious leader of the new party. Lincoln's action in one conspicuous party crisis refutes, once for all, the notion that he drifted helplessly with the tide and was not a party leader. When Senator Douglas, at the winter session of L857-8, broke with Buchanan and made his brilliant light in the Senate against the admission of Kansas as a slave State under the fraudulent Lecompton constitution, many prominent anti-slavery men were dazzled by the political pyrotechnics of the "Little Giant." Douglas actually hypnotized his former an- tagonists into the belief that he was fighting their battles for them. Horace Greeley accepted him as a new Moses, and advised the Illinois republicans to support him for re-election to the Senate. Seward prudently said nothing, but he was well known to be ready to acquiesce in the leadership of Douglas and in his re-election. He, indeed, made a speech in the Senate virtually waiving the vital republican principle, "No more slave territory." Politics never made more strange bed-fellows than when the free- soilers of New England were found sympathizing with Douglas in his contest for re-election. It was Lincoln alone who saw clearly that for the repub- licans to support Douglas for the Senate would be a practical surrender upon the slavery question. He declared the issue was deeper than "the mere question of fact" whether a particular constitution for Kansas had been legally adopted by the voters. He showed the republicans that the man who had repeatedly declared he did not care "whether slav- ery was voted up or voted down" in Kansas, just so the vote was fair, could not be safely entrusted with the ark of the republican covenant; and when Douglas returned to Illinois in triumph to receive the plaudits of his admirers, Lincoln promptly chal- lenged him to mortal political combat. In the great debate which followed, Lincoln exhumed from 37 out the clap-trap and rubbish in which sophistry sought to envelop it, the essential moral question of that great controversy. It was Lincoln, alone, who did this. In his speech at Springfield, June 16, 185 s , — the greatest political speech ever delivered in this countr3 T , — he boldl3 T proclaimed the startling truth that we had come to the crisis where the country must choose, once for all, between freedom and slavery as a permanent national policy or else see the "divided house" topple down. This was more than four months before Seward proclaimed the "irrepressible conflict" in his Rochester speech. The master feats of political jugglery by which the "Lit- tle Giant" hoped to save his popularity in the north without quite ruining his political prospects in the south came to a speedy end before the keen and searching logic of his antagonist. When Lincoln was defeated for the Senate, as his friends warned him would be the case upon so radical a platform as he had made for himself, he accepted the result with the complacency of a true philosopher. He knew that while he had lost his battle he had not lost his principles. Nay. he knew he had laid the founda- tions of ultimate success for the cause of freedom. He had done more than this: he had proved him- self the most sagacious, self-sacrificing and fearless leader of the new party, by true merit and service raised to that great eminence. Equally absurd is it to say that after this great debate with Doug-las, iu 1858, Lincoln was an "un- known man." His antagonist was the most noted man in the politics of that day. It was not without reason that he was called a "giant," for a giant, in- deed, he was in point of political shrewdness, force and audacity. The newspapers took note of every move of the great Illinois Senator, and Lincoln's temerity in challenging him excited wonder. The debate was, of course, followed intentl} T by every man who paid any attention whatever to political affairs. However obscure Lincoln may previously have been, his conflict with Douglas brought him into the very focus of public attention. His great plainness and simplicity of speech and argument won upon all who heard or read what he said. He never talked over the heads of his hearers. His were the arguments against slavery which found lodg- ment in the minds and hearts of the common people. His speech at Peoria, October 16, 1854; his speech at Springfield, June 16, 1858; his debates with Doug- las, and his speech at Cooper Institute, New York, February 27, 1860, are easily the masterpieces of all the anti- slavery literature preceding the war. In them are the body and the blood of the republican- ism of that day. In them Lincoln made the platform whereon he won the battle for slavery restriction.* *For some remarks upon Lincoln's "lost speech" as repro- duced by Whitney, see Appendix. 39 Furthermore, Lincoln was not, at any period of his career, of that easy-going temper which runs with the tide. While he was President some thought he drifted aimlessly, but he in fact sailed the ship. His strong - hand was always upon the helm, but he had sense enough to know the ship could not be sailed against wind and tide. When he met baffling weather he knew how to tack. He could even seek a temporary haven and wait for fair winds, but he never turned back or abandoned the journey. He knew there was time for all things, and he never acted under the influence of panic. He abode his time, and with a patience as deep as nature, as unfailing as destin}', he waited for events. The most conspicuous personal quality of Lin- coln, as I see him, is manly strength — a self-confi- dence heroic but unexpressed. To me, Lincoln seems on great occasions a solitary man, communing with himself; never, indeed, arrogant; not by any means always seeing his way through to the end, but be- lieving, with much confidence, he saw as far as any, and yet prudently concealing, in large degree, the confidence he felt in the correctness of his own views. I am aware few took this view of Lincoln in his lifetime. The extreme good-fellowship of his lighter hours seems to disprove it; and so many in- cidents are current showing his tenderness of heart. - such as his strangely intense and emotional Let- 4(> ters to Joshua Speed, and the alacrity with which he pardoned condemned soldiers against the pro- tests of his generals, — that the world is in danger of concluding that Lincoln's chief side was his emo- tional side and that there was in him no iron. That he was gentle, merciful, kind and tolerant, that he was above petty resentments and always ready to cover the faults of his fellows with the mantle of charity, no one will deny. But these qualities were not incompatible with strength of character. To be firm and enforce one's purpose it is not necessary to be a tyrant, and what seemed weakness in some of Lincoln's public acts was often the result of pru- dence and sound judgment. For instance, I doubt whether Lincoln ever set aside a death sentence when it was not good policy to do it. We have, I hope, gotten far past the barbarism of shooting a soldier boy to death for sleeping at his post, and Lincoln had too much sense to approve such a sentence though his heart had been harder than stone. He once re- marked, on taking up his pen to pardon a condemned soldier: "I think this boy can do us more good above ground than under it." This is evidence that his view of such matters was practical as well as hu- mane. But convictions for offenses which involved a betrayal of the cause he could approve without a qualm, and he did approve many of them, the convic- tion of Fitz John Porter being the most conspicuous. 41 I now go a step further, and say Lincoln was a great ruler of men; and the man who has learned to rule others must have begun by learning to rule him- self. Lincoln, contrary to current belief, was capa- ble of terrific ang'er, but his wonderful self-control ordinarily enabled him to conceal the storms of pas- sion that must often have rent his soul throughout the trying days of the war. He never blustered; bis method of ruling was not so crude. Nor was he one of Gratiano's men, whose visages, we are told, "Do cream and mantle like a standing pond, And do a willful stillness entertain With purpose to be dressed in an opinion Of wisdom, gravity, profound conceit, As who should say, 'I am Sir Oracle. And when I ope my lips let no dog bark.'" On the contrary, Lincoln was always simple, nat- ural, — almost boyish. He disdained all owlish shows of superior wisdom. He was perfectly willing the men he ruled should believe they were ruling him. He did not fear that some upstart would cheat his- tory and wear his laurels. Referring to the capita] way in which he got along with Senator Sumner, he said, with a sly twinkle in his eye, "He thinks he manages me." 1 think' Lincoln knew he was build- in-' tor eternity, but with a serene confidence he com- mitte 1 to titn<' the keeping of his matchless fame. Secretary Stanton, according to one account, raised his band above the President's body a moment after he bad breathed his last, and said, '•There Lies the 12 greatest ruler of men that has ever lived." Great testimony is this, coming" from Stanton. A very great man is elemental. He is, so to speak, a grand division of nature. We now see that Lincoln's purpose and policy moved through the war with all the steadiness and certainty of a cosmic force. His patience under vast discouragements as- sumes the character of the patience of nature itself. His spirit was never ruined by enmity or elated by vanity. When a little man is permitted to step sud- denly from a puncheon floor to velvet he is apt to become giddy. The political "beggar-on-horseback," often met with under a popular government, gener- ally thinks, with Jack Cade, that all the sewers are going to run red with claret because he is king. Though coming from a lowly estate, Lincoln seemed unconscious of his position as the first man of the nation. True to the class which produced him, he left no degrading apology for his breeding or the meagerness of his early conditions. His manliness was in his blood, and we now see that there was never taken to the White House a truer dignity of character, a more firmly-poised intellect or a more intelligent self-reliance than went there from the prairies of Illinois with Abraham Lincoln. We have seen that Lincoln stands in American history first for national unity. We have seen that he stands also for liberty and the rights of man in 43 subordination to established law. We have seen him, strong - as the "unwedgeable and knarled oak,*' bend- ing" others to his purpose. We have also seen him exercising a wisdom and tact rarely found among the endowments of man. To all this I now add that he was the greatest popular leader who has appeared in our country. Out of the jungles of practical poli- tics have grown but few oaks of statesmanship, but Lincoln was one of these oaks; and it is proper, I think, to call him a practical politician in the high- est and best sense of that term. In this field, with the sole exception of Thomas Jefferson, he finds in our history no rival. He was pre-eminently the "man of the people" — not the demagogue who used the peo- ple for his purpose, but the statesman who served them and whom they recognized as their own. He led the people for the people's good, and not for his own personal aggrandizement. In Abraham Lincoln the spirit of democracy was incarnate. What he called "the plain people" loved him in life and have canonized him in death, for it is only the common people who can confer enduring fame. So com- plete was his belief in the intelligence and honesty of the American people that lie never found it ex- pedient to flatter them, but gave them always his honest thoughts. Be did not reach the people sec- ondarily, through the medium of Local politicians, but established his political relations directly with ii every citizen of the republic. He had no use for the political "machine" of later days. The standard of his judgment and feeling was level with every con- dition of American life. His communion with the masses was no condescending - patronage but a gen- uine fellowship. He was at home everywhere; he perfectly understood ignorance and prejudice; he had charity for them, but he never played the dema- gogue by appealing to them. The coarseness of the vulgar and ignorant did not shock him as it does many good men who have not had Lincoln's experience. The truth is, the life of this wonderful man measures the whole vast distance between the top and the bottom layers of American society. He grew through all the strata, and at last flowered and bore fruit at the top. It has been well said that he lived all there was of American life, felt all there was of American experience, and therefore in his character and life and work he fairly represented and expressed the American people. Lincoln was great enough to sink himself com- pletely in his cause. The fact that Stanton had once treated him with professional discourtesy and had then lately criticised him in his own bitter fashion was to Lincoln's mind no reason why Stanton should not be made Secretary of War when it was deemed his appointment would most aid the cause. The friends of Chase were surprised to learn, in that 45 eminent man's appointment as chief justice, that his resignation of the Treasury, though petulent and ill-judged, had left no iron in the soul of the great President. It is now known that Lincoln said, with the resignation of Chase then in his hands unac- cepted, that Chase should be chief justice if a va- cancy arose. A little earlier, when, through the publication of the "Pomeroy Circular," the fact came to light that Chase was scheming against his chief for the presidential nomination in 1864, and Chase, in some confusion at the disclosure, offered his resig- nation, Lincoln wrote him these wonderful words: "Whether you shall remain at the head of the Treas- ury department is a question which I will not per- mit myself to consider from any standpoint other than my judgment of the public service, and in that view I do not perceive occasion for a change." "Was this the letter of a mere politician? Only a President of great breadth could have writ- ten to Grant after the fall of Vieksburg, "I now wish to make a personal acknowledgment that you were right and I was wrong;" and it was Lincoln alone who. in the face of much bitter detraction, saved ( ien- eral ( hrant to the cause and gave him the opportunity to finally crush the rebellion. Be expressed the matter tersely: "I can't spare that man; he fights." Lincoln's magnanimous treatment of Seward after that gentleman, with great impertinence and folly, 46 had suggested a practical abdication in his favor, is now well known; and a still better illustration of the same spirit has come to light since the volumi- nous biography by Nicolay and Hay was published. Just after the battle of Gettysburg, Lincoln thought that prompt pursuit and battle by Meade would de- stroy Lee's army before it could re-cross the swollen Potomac. Meade's delay and failure to seize his great opportunity deeply grieved and annoyed the President, who finally sent a peremptory order to forthwith attack Lee, which order was accompanied by perhaps the most remarkable note ever sent by a commander to his subordinate. It ran about thus: "This order is not of record. If you are successful you may destroy it, together with this note; if you fail, publish the order, and I will take the responsi- bility." But even this stimulant did not move Meade.* *An autograph letter of the late Hon. James Harlan, of Mt. Pleasant, Iowa, ex-Secretary of the Interior under Lin- coln, written to the author April 17, 1897, is conclusive author- ity for the statement in the text. He writes: "The President sent an order, privately, directing- Gen. Meade to follow up his victory by an immediate attack on Lee's retreating army, and thus, if possible, prevent the re-crossing of the Potomac by the Confederate forces, accompanied by a confidential letter authorizing him to make the order public in case of disaster and in case of success to destroy both the order and confidential letter. This much you may rely upon as historic- ally true. Wbether or not these papers ever reached Gen. Meade I am not able to say. I had supposed, prior to the re- ceipt of your letter, that this incident had remained unknown for twenty years after the close of the war of the rebellion to everybody except Gen. Meade, Robert T. Lincoln and myself." 47 But why re-count such minor incidents to prove Lincoln's unselfish spirit, when it is well known he refused to take to himself the least credit for the act of emancipation? He knew the entire colored race, living and to come, grateful for the boon of freedom at his hands, were ready to place his name among the immortals. He knew the civilized world stood ready with a laurel crown for the emancipator of a race, and yet he could put that crown aside and say: "I have not controlled events; events have controlled me; God alone can claim it." Lincoln had read in all charity the secrets of the wonderful book of human nature, and had there learned to allow for the shortcomings of even ene- mies. He had too much breadth for bitterness. Passion never blew out the lamp of his reason, and from no lips ever came more gracefully the soft an- swer which turneth away wrath. He had the char- ity to say, "The southern people are just what we should be in their situation." Though this man of mercy and gentleness was called by destiny to con- duct a gigantic and cruel civil war; though he stood for years at the very storm-center of an era of pas- sion and hate; though all the pent-up fury ami rage of fifty years of bitt< r contention beat upon bim, he left behind not a single bitter memory, ami malice itself was disarmed before his great heart was cold. Bis Utterances will !><■ searched in vain for one harsh word against any of the southern people, and it is as appropriate as it is touching that a Confederate soldier now comes forward as one of his most elo- quent and appreciative eulogists. Lincoln was not schooled or learned, but he was educated. He had endured all the agonies of com- plete mental discipline. The process of his educa- tion never ceased, but he spent no time learning the wrong things. His mind was not clogged with use- less lumber. His knowledge was all correlated, and his intellectual weapons were as keen as blades of Damascus. His facts were not numerous, but they were always ready for use. He had read men more than books, and it was with men— not books— he had to deal. He studied other men and he also studied himself. He cross-examined his own soul. His growth was evolution rather than acquisition Botanists tell of a class of plants called the ex- ogenous, which grow by taking on layers from the outside, and of another class called the endogenous, which grow from within— from the heart. Lincoln, like the endogenous plant, grew from within. He expanded by the action of subjective moral and in- tellectual forces. His mind literally worked itself clear. In all classifications of humankind Lincoln will stand as an individual, akin to all classes but belonging exclusively to none. 49 Lincoln had the best of legal minds, but fortu- nately he never degenerated into a mere lawyer. He took the kernel and rejected the husk. Those who would appreciate his great grasp of constitutional questions must read his State papers and his letters wherein he discusses the war power of the executive over slavery and over the right of habeas corpus. This man had no extensive acquaintance with general literature. He told Carpenter, who spent six months at the White House painting a charac- terless picture, that he never read a novel clear through. Scott, Thackeray and Hawthorne wrote all their novels within the limits of Lincoln's life- time, and in the same period Dickens wrote all but two of his; yet Lincoln appears to have known no more of these authors than he did of xEschylus or Homer. To a mind like his, that which has actually happened in this world is far more interesting and far more dramatic than the mere dreams of fiction. In poetry he is known to have read Burns and By- ron, and Shakespeare in part, and of the plays he rightly judged that Macbeth was greatest. Mourn- ful verses seemed to strike a chord in his heart, and be was not over-critical as to literary quality. He had read and studied the Bible in the translation of King James, and the inlluence of its pure and sim- ple style is everywhere apparent in what be wrote. Doubtless Lincoln knew, in outline at least, the his- 50 tory of other countries besides his own, but evidence of the fact is not preserved in his writing's. In all the writings of Lincoln there are not to be found more than two or three allusions to the classic myths. In an early sophomoric production he barely mentioned the names of Caesar and Alex- ander. Once in a letter he referred to Procrustes and his fabled bedstead, and sometimes he jocularly spoke of Stanton, his Secretary of War, as "Mars." Between his nomination and election he read Plu- tarch 's Lives, in order to justify a statement made by Scripps in a campaign biography. If he ever read the rich mythology of Greece and Rome it made little impression upon him. Mercury, with winged feet, seems to have brought him no message from the gods of old. He heard not the thunders of Jove, the sobs of Niobe, nor the entracing strains of Orpheus' harp; and yet this man, unschooled and unlearned, grasped and solved the political problem of his country and his time.* But if Lincoln did not read widely, neither did he read anything lightly. He never contracted men- *Mr. Joseph Jefferson, in his autobiography, (page 30,) makes Lincoln, in what he terms a "harangue" to the city- council of Springfield, Illinois, made in 1839, "trace the his- tory of the drama from the time when Thespis acted in a cart, to the stage of to-day." Those who have studied the style of Lincoln and know the range of his illustrations will be somewhat surprised to know that in 1839 he took Athens, B. C. 600, as his starting point in persuading the city fathers of an obscure western town to repeal an unjust tax against 51 tal indigestion by gorging - his mind with literary sweetmeats. His mental grasp was something won- derful. He never stopped until he had bounded a subject on all sides. He took nothing upon faith but would know the real truth, though he must, like doubting Thomas, thrust his own hand into the wound. The political history of the United States he knew in its minutest details, particular^ those portions relating to slavery, and his ability to in- terpret historic facts and events in a philosophic way has never been surpassed. His logic was the joint product of honesty and common sense. He had the courage to know and face the truth. He was willing to go whithersoever his best thought led him. He shared with all great and noble minds that high, unfaltering faith that the right must in the end tri- umph. The closing sentence of his speech at Cooper Institute is the key to his whole life: "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." In point of literary merit Lincoln's writings will bear comparison with the best in the English lan- guage. His literary style was as unique as his per- players. Mr. Jefferson probably introduced Thespis and his cart Into this interesting- account through some accidenl or substitution of the memory. He seems not to have known that Lincoln w;is himself then (lS.'iit) a member of the board of trustees of the town of Springfield. Whatever he did, therefore, must have been done in pursuance of his duties as a member of the hoard and not as the attorney of the elder Jefferson. sonality — as characteristic of him as the great nose on his face. He wrote Saxon, and demonstrated that a large vocabulary and an ornate style are not necessary to the forceful expression of thought. He addressed himself first to the understanding and next to the heart. He was one of the greatest mas- ters of the art of statement that has ever written the English tongue. He knew the sources of preju- dice and the springs of action. Pathos and humor are judiciously mingled in whatever he said and wrote. He it was who, with the hand of a master, at last lovingly touched the chords which again swelled "the chorus of the Union." He could put a chapter of argument into ten words of speech. No illustration was too homely to be used provided it fit the case. To Hooker, who had proposed to cross the Rappahannock at an inopportune time, Lincoln wrote : "I would not take any risk of being entangled upon the river like an ox jumped half over a fence, and liable to be torn by dogs front and rear, without a fair chance to gore one way or kick the other." Again, discussing a plan of campaign, with an apt but inimitable homeliness he said if a certain general could not "skin" he could "hold a leg" for somebody else; and his pithy saying that "you can fool all of the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you can't fool all the people all the time, "has become an aphorism of American politics. 53 In denying the broad charge made 03^ Douglas that he was in favor of negro equalit}', Lincoln pronounced, and on several occasions repeated, his great definition of the negro's rights. "In the right," said he, "to eat the bread, without leave of anybody, which his own hand earns, the negro is the equal of myself, of Judge Douglas, or of any other man." Again, speaking upon the same subject, he said: "I protest against the counterfeit logic which con- cludes because I do not want a black woman for a slave I must necessarily want her for a wife." When Douglas proposed to settle the vexed ques- tion of slavery extension by "popular sovereignty." Lincoln quaintly said this meant that "if any man chooses to enslave another no third man shall be allowed to object;" and the effort to maintain both the Dred Scott decision and "popular sovereignty" at the same time he said meant "that a thing may be lawfully driven away from a place where it has a lawful right to go." To a number of persons who called to remonstrate against his method of conducting the war, he said: "Suppose all you are worth was in gold and you bad put it into the hands of Blondin to carry across Ni- agara; would you shake the cable, or keep shouting to him. 'Blondin! stand up a little straighter! Blon- din! stoop a little more! Go a Little Easter! Lean a little more to the north! Lean a little more to the .M south?' No; you would hold your breath as well as your tongue, and keep your hands off until he was safe over." To another faultfinder, who thought Lin- coln's measures too severe, he wrote: "Would you drop the war where it is, or would you prosecute it with elder-stock squirts charged with rose water?" In reprimanding a young officer for quarreling, he said: "Quarrel not at all. * * * Yield larger things to which you can show no more than equal right, and yield lesser ones though clearly your own. Better give your path to a dog than be bitten by him in contesting for the right. Even killing the dog would not cure the bite." To his friend, Joshua Speed, he once said: "Speed, die when I may, I want it said of me by those who knew me best, that I always plucked a thistle and planted a flower when I thought a flower would grow." He could be terribly severe without descending to scurrility. Alluding to Douglas' "don't care" pol- icy on slavery he said: "I suppose the institution of slavery really looks small to him. He is so put up by nature that a lash upon his back would hurt him but a lash on anybody else's back does not hurt him." Replying to a committee of laboring men who waited upon him with an address in 1864, he closed with these words, than which I know of nothing wiser or better in the English language : "That some should be rich shows that others may become rich, 55 and hence is just encouragement to industr}^ and en- terprise. Let not him who is houseless pull down the house of another, but let him labor diligently and build one for himself, thus by example assuring that his own shall be safe from violence when built." Would to God the vote-hucksters of to-day would speak to labor committees in so manly and so true a tone as that! A respectable volume could be filled with pass- ages illustrating the strong, quaint style, apt illus- tration, rare iEsopian wisdom, and, upon proper occasion, the pathos and eloquence, which abound throughout the sayings and writings of Lincoln. Lincoln was certainly not without personal am- bition, and yet with only his own advancement as an object he would have lived and died in compara- tive obscurity. Had he been called to the bench he would have made a great and just judge, like John Marshall. It praises him to say that he could never have made himself famous except in a noble cause. Some have indulged in fruitless speculations as to what Lincoln would have been had he been differ- ently educated, and as to whether or not, in later years, he would have added to or taken from his fame had not the cruel assassin struck him down. Putting aside SUCh idle thoughts, we may well bow in devout thankfulness that in the tide of time Lin- coln came as a boon to OUT country, and our hearts 66 may swell with a just pride that his career, from birth to final martyrdom, is the supremest attesta- tion of history to the value of our free institutions. What Washington had once been to the Ameri- can colonies Lincoln proved himself to the Ameri- can nation. It has been said the tears a good man staunches are shed upon his grave, and on Lincoln's was certainly poured out a flood of the keenest popular grief which political history has known. Even as one revered as the savior of a lost world was born in a stable and cradled in a manger, so this liberator of a race, — this savior of organized democracy in the western world, — first heard the lullaby of love in a rude frontier cabin, and with the earth of a common humanity still clinging upon him went forth to the agonies of martyrdom and fame. And there upon the sacred mount of service and suf- fering, behold! he, too, was transfigured before the nations. All the dross and contaminations of early environment at length fell away and left this lowly man of the people standing lofty and serene and spotless in the white light of history; and when that murderous pistol-shot at last stilled his tired heart and sped his weary soul to its reward, the sounds of bitter lamentation, coming in commingled strains alike from the palace and from the hovel, proclaimed but too truly that "our common manhood had lost a kinsman." 57 APPENDIX. Lincoln's lost speech. I do not include among Lincoln's masterpieces the celebrated "lost speech" of Lincoln, delivered before the anti-Nebraska convention at Bloomington, 111., May 29, 1856, because I am convinced that Whitney's pretended reproduction of the speech is inadequate, and, in fact, spurious. The evidence to prove this fact is of several different kinds : First — The direct evidence of those who heard the speech. Notwithstanding the great authority of the late Joseph Medill, who gave the Whitney version his partial sanction, the overwhelming weight of the testimony of those who heard the speech is that Whitney's reproduc- tion gives no adequate notion of the speech. The McLean County Historical Society on May 29, 1900, commemorated the anniversary of the convention of 1856, and secured the attendance at its meeting of a large number of the surviving delegates. The matter of the "lost speech" was, of course, canvassed among the survivors, and the con- clusion of the society, after full investigation, is thus stated in the published report of the meeting: "Lately there has been published a 'lost speech' made up from alleged notes. The McLean County Historical Society does not think it proper to send out a report of this reunion with- out stating that in this community, where many now living heard the great speech, and where Mr. Lincoln was so well known and loved, all of his friends consider the speech 59 still lost. The society had hoped to recover from the memory of the still living hearers some portions of that speech, but found their efforts in vain." The direct testimony fully sustains this conclusion. The late John M. Scott, ex-judge of the Illinois Supreme Court, who heard the speech of 1856 and often graphic- ally described its effect, once told the writer of this that Whitney's version was no more Lincoln's speech than it was his own. The late Gen. John M. Palmer, who pre- sided at the convention of 1856 and lived to attend the reunion of last year, said the Whitney version was "more Whitney's than Lincoln's." Gen. Thomas J. Henderson, of Princeton, 111., made a speech at the reunion, in which he said: "I am forced to say that I rather regret the publication, for I do not think it does justice to the speech that Mr. Lincoln delivered. In fact, I am strongly im- pressed with the belief that no report could have been made or published then or since." To the same effect is the testimony of ITon. Isaac L. Morrison, of Jacksonville, 111. (lately deceased), George Schneider, of Chicago, Ben- jamin F. Shaw, of Dixon, 111., Gen. James M. Kuggles, of Havana III. (now also deceased), and ex-Judge Owen T. Keeves, of Bloomington, 111. All these men heard the "lost speech."' Second — The internal evidence of the speech itself. Lincoln's utterance is agreed upon all hands to have pro- duced a tremendous effect upon his auditors. All agree that his Btirring words put the convention into a perfeel frenzy of enthusiasm. One now reading the Whitney ver- -"■" "iih the theory that it is genuine would certainly wonder what all the excitemenl was aboul and wb v men embraced each other and wept when Mr. Lincoln sat down. The Whitney speech, in style, matter and manner, is no more Lincoln'e than sweei currani wine is champagne. Third Hut there is other evidence thai would be con- clusive if it -t I alone. Pour or live years before the co "lost speech" was published in McClure's Magazine ■ this same Whitney issued a book entitled "Life on the Circuit with Lincoln,*' the principal purpose of which seems to have been to exploit a remarkable intimacy — a sort of Damon and Pythias relationship — between Mr. Lincoln and Mr. Whitney, which no one of the old Illinois friends of Lincoln ever heard tell of. On nearly every page of his book Mr. Whitney relates what "Lincoln and I" did. He is careful to make himself out a much better lawyer than Lincoln, and the unsophisticated might gather from his book that Lincoln, throughout the anti-slavery struggle in Illinois, absolutely leaned for support upon Mr. Whit- ney. "Now, the point I would make about Whitney's book is, that in it he reproduces another alleged speech, ver- batim, which he says Lincoln delivered at the court house in Urbana, 111., on October 24, 1854, — just eight days after Lincoln had agreed with Senator Douglas, at Peoria, that they should both go home and make no more speeches in that campaign. It was known that Douglas violated this compact, but Mr. Whitney is perhaps the only authority for the fact that Lincoln did the like. Whitney says the Urbana speech was "made without preparation," that it was delivered in the court room by the light of a few can- dles; nor does he claim that Lincoln wrote it out or that any stenographer took it down, yet he reproduces the Ur- bana speech in his book under quotation marls, even to the interruptions of the auditors and Lincoln's replies to them. He calls the Urbana speech "the first independent, un- trammeled speech he (Lincoln) ever made on the slavery question." In subsequent pages of his book he refers to Lincoln's "great speech at Urbana," but says little about the truly great speech delivered by Lincoln eight days before at Peoria, which latter speech Lincoln took the trouble to write out in full after its delivery and publish in the Springfield Journal. Perhaps Whitney thought the Urbana speech was greatest of all because he wrote it 61 himself, for the internal evidence supplied by the speech itself is most conclusive that Lincoln neither wrote it nor uttered i! as a wholi . Some paragraphs of the Peoria speech are used here and there, and man}- phrases and sentences gathered from Lincoln's later speeches abound throughout the alleged reproduction; but wherever the speech departs from the phraseology known from other e\iih'nce to be that of Lincoln it drops into the very dish- water of sheer mediocrity. It will thus be seen that Mr. Whitney had tried his hand a I reproducing lost Lincoln speeches before he de- ceived the managers of McClure's Magazine; and the ques- tion comes irresistibly. Why was it, if Mr. Whitney were going to reproduce a lost Lincoln speech in his book, and had then in his hands the materials which would have en- abled him to reproduce the greal Bloomington speech, that he did not reproduce the latter speech, which every- body had been talking about and regretting the loss of for a half century, rather than this alleged Urbana speech, which nobody had ever heard of? lie did not forget the Bloomington speech when writing his book, for he says of it (p. ; -.sag*. So" "> % . ••••%%< «* S "' > '. >vv .v *. r /-0 x VV VV . Q, *°*' ^V^'V' .. ^ • %^ SMti* \/ •*** + • • » .V* ^%. /.v^L-X .c°*..^t.% ../.g^A. / bV 0-, v*o^ ■: r oy